Of wilderness and warriors

Belyaev’s experiments on Russian silver foxes showed that when the foxes were selected for “tameness” they lost their wild type coat with their rich sheen and complex color (check out the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t74B6S1kzc). The foxes became mottled, ugly shadows of their flourishing wild type ancestors. They lost their adrenaline – the wildness hormone that fueled their beauty and vigor. And we humans may be in a similar situation. We have domesticated ourselves through our own ingenuity and our own institutions, and we have become ugly, overweight, tamed animals. And now we pine for lack of wilderness, the old growth forests and the expansive skies dotted with buffalo shadows. But perhaps we pine for lack of our own wildness. This is the power of movies like “Fight Club”. This is why many prefer the World of Warcraft to their own humdrum lives. We need more adrenaline, more danger and more excitement in our world. We want to be beautiful warriors once again. We environmentalists and wilderness activists might do well to understand that the outer world is just a reflection of our inner world. We humans are creators in so many ways. We dream our own world into existence- individually and at the community and cultural levels. Sure, we have gained so much by our own self-domestication. Before we dreamed agriculture into existence, villages, communities, laws and universities- before all of this where were we? But if there is no wilderness left within us, there will be no place for wilderness outside of us. We must preserve wilderness, but we must also preserve some of the wilderness within ourselves. We can dream wilderness back into existence. Not that we should join some sort of environmentalist fight club, but maybe we need to walk out into the fire more often, engage ourselves in a frontier where we must fight to protect ourselves and the people and places we love.

Re-creation

Each of us is in some way trying to retrieve something that was lost- either from childhood or maybe from our deeper evolutionary past. Art, poetry, and song are means of losing one's rational self so we may (re)experience a sense of pure emotion, perfection. The artist and the bird-watcher- even the alcoholic- seek a return to the wilderness- a return to a time when there was no scarcity of food or drink- only orgasmic pleasure, adrenaline rushes, burning hunger, exhaustion.  When humans were wild things, when our emotional, animal nature was all there was. A time when time itself was beyond perception, when pure pleasure - perfection - existed in each moment and each moment reached to infinity. In the real world, we don’t thrive in “wilderness”- “wilderness” can't meet all of our real needs. Wilderness is an abstraction, an esthetic, a figment of our deep subconscious. If it ever really existed. And we didn’t destroy it with our technologies, through wanton exploitation and persecution.  And it wasn't our exploding population that killed the wilderness. We destroyed it with our own emergence into human consciousness. Wilderness was destroyed by our own evolution, by our own coming-out as human. But we continue to try to re-gain our wilderness- sometimes successfully and sometimes less so. Sometimes we fall into drug addiction. Sometimes we put ourselves in mortal peril, recognizing that wilderness lies deep beyond our own humanness, our own physical bodies. But these are the misfits- even the well-adjusted man seeks his wilderness. We all need passion and mystery- we need wilderness, and all men will be led astray. We are all sinners.

This is a poem I wrote down a couple days ago, based on conversations with other members of the Syracuse area underground philosophy society, "Fugue".  Recreation (re-creation) is, in a sense, a form of returning to our primal origins, re-enacting the creation of ourselves, the earth, the universe.

Re-creation.

Prepare to disrobe, pupa-like, from your human trap-pings.
And ask: Where am I? Where are we?
What does the One look like? You know,
The universal hum that we heard over the mountain.
The giver-of-life,
The first invitation, the yawning womb
Long before the earth smelled of love and mushrooms

I try… we try… we are trying…
To stretch our telescopic eyes
To the end, maybe catch the big bang or something.
Or, turning our fiber-optic eyes inward toward some dark bodily interstice, in hopes of
Re-enacting our own gastrulation.

Better late than never!
Everything, every little thing was upside-down, mis-placed, mis-taken
And now we return, shell-less,
Our bones inter-coursing with the rocks, wet with the mist. Or maybe tears.
We are brothers and sisters to Australopithecus! Saber-toothed cats! Trilobites!
Pre-cellular protoplasm!
Extruded, one from the other, like sea-foam.

Lost for words. What words?
We fall down, back in time, blindly, willingly,
Hoping for… 

Some kind of recreation