I get the feeling that we’re in a very strange transition period, don’t you?
For my part, I’m just not reading all the cool lefty blogs I used to. One goes back and forth on these things, but now I mostly just scan headlines and don’t read the posts. I do read Balloon Juice, because of the human element I find lacking most places, Talking Points Memo (for the same reason, really), and I follow a few financial blogs. Even with a brand-new government, the corporatist tools still run the show, making the understandable frothing and fuming even more irrelevant. We’re still killing wetlands and planting the wrong crops, still deferring to murderers and thieves in our national discourse, while politicians wave self-severed gonads in front of cameras and proclaim their impotence. If anything sensible gets accomplished, it’s obvious that individuals will do it.
That’s the lesson here, I think.
Example:
My brother in Austin lives in a completely different world of bicycle culture — kudos to him and everyone else like him using simple tools and muscle power to change the way our cities look and feel. When he was forced to quit by a stupid boss, he took to driving a pedicab to make a living. Not only has he done that, but he’s lost 30 pounds and made a zillion friends to boot! PEOPLE, in other words, are living wonderful creative, innovative lives and positively impacting their neighbors, here and there and all over the world, while the elites generally work on shitting the bed and reading about themselves. I am so sick to death of everything that passes for accepted practice and conventional wisdom. I think the only thing to do is simply walk (or pedal) away. Just walk away and leave the old world sputtering in the dust.
I wrote not long ago that the biggest fraud in my own experience (and maybe yours) was believing that I can’t be happy now… and I’m happy to report great strides in abandoning that as well. Just being less insane is the greatest gift I can give my wife — I still can’t understand why she didn’t leave me years ago — and it has to be the best thing I can do for the world. Along the way I’m discovering things, intimations of long-neglected love and inner joy from sources that our culture has attempted to obliterate, but which never went away.
Nature is the key. But then you knew I’d say that.
The way I get to this point is by loosening the stare, pulling my head up out of the logical soup, and waiting for an inspiration. Here’s one that hit me yesterday: did you know that “Lusitania” is the pre-Roman name for Portugal? A small thing, okay, a footnote maybe, something for your crossword puzzles. But it stirs something deep that I can’t see: Lusitania… PRE-Roman… LUSITANIA rolls off the tongue and lights up something in my heart. I can’t tell you what, because I just don’t know. But I’ve touched that intuition before, in other ways. I RECOGNIZE it, dammit! But what is it?
At least I’m a happier boy.
UPDATE: Prodigal son archetype? The return of the marginalized to the source of All That Is?? The thing that’s “left” when all else falls away?!? Anyway, it works.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Indeed, John, I quite agree with you. At least one person in a relationship just has to stop being insane. My hubby still seems mostly capable of dealing with the current insanity, so I let him, but I just can’t do it any longer. I work in my own small political and social circles to improve things, and try to pass along the best ideals I can to my kids, but — it’s really difficult to face the stupidity day after day.
I’m reading a book right now called “Totem Salmon” and learning how badly the white culture fucked the Pacifc Northwest in the late 1800s, destroying salmon populations that had thrived for tens of thousands of years.
We are an awful, awful species.
Oh, and the good and hopeful part of the book is all these brave individuals STILL working to save them in various rivers and streams — amazing people, of course. But as you say, individual efforts.
Between the fucking Romans and the Anglo Saxons, sometimes I’m amazed we have anything left at all, really.
I pretty much agree with the “awful, awful species” characterization, though I think we could still evolve. But you know what it is, it’s the “kill the goddess!” thing, the patriarchal bullshit notion (Greeks, Romans, Anglo Saxons) that we are little godlings who can do no wrong in chopping Nature into bits and pieces… preachers quoting ignorant dead “prophets” in defense of our self-destructive, evil stupidity…
I have nothing against politics, far from it. But it isn’t a solution in itself.
As for being less insane, that doesn’t reference political preoccupation. I mean that I’m less possessed by what was done to me, less driven by the negative aspect of certain complexes. Less projection! And I can see my wife for what she is, not for what I used to pin on her, and boy is she lots happier.
Lastly, the Anglo-Saxon axis of idiocy is one reason I was drawn to northern New Mexico. Here I am, tall, pink, and handsome [snort], as Western European as they come, but I’m a MINORITY! For the first time in my life, I live where my kind doesn’t run the show, and frankly, I love that to pieces. Not that the Spanish tradition is any less ignorant when it comes to being separated from Nature, but they’re friendlier, have better food, and aren’t so goddamn arrogant and blind as the establishment in the East.
Um, generally speaking…
Great post today, John. In a nutshell….simplicity. Individuals are CHOOSING simpler lives, like your brother. Individuals are CHOOSING community. Let the government keep trying to fix the broken machine and let’s just go on with our daily lives being the best we can be with what we have….contentment. Stopping the insanity has to be done on a personal level.