Monthly Archives: September 2013
Uncivilization
Try this on for size (found and slightly edited from the internet):
From dark-mountain.net
“The beauty of modern man is not in the persons, but in the disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the dream-led masses down the dark mountain.” Robinson Jeffers, 1935
As any historian could confirm, human civilization is an intensely fragile construction, built on little more than belief – in the rightness of its values, the strength of its system of law and order, its currency, and, above all perhaps, belief in its future. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the coming world with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.
Uncivilized writing, for example, sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own – a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare – might recognize as something approaching a truth. It sets out to pull our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards, putting civilization into perspective. It’s writing that comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centers of civilization, but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing. Writing which unflinchingly stares us down, however uncomfortable this may prove.
It’s not environmental writing, for there is much of that about already, and most of it fails to jump the barrier which marks the limit of our collective human ego; much of it, indeed, ends up shoring up that ego, and helping us persist in our civilizational delusions. It’s not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people, and to suggest otherwise is to perpetuate the attitude that’s brought us here. Neither is it political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within.
Uncivilized writing is more rooted than any of these. Above all, it’s determined to shift our worldview, not feed into it. It’s writing for outsiders, with the aim of shifting the emphasis from man to not-man – to un-humanize our views a little, and become “confident as the rock and ocean that we were made from.” This isn’t a rejection of our humanity – it’s an affirmation of the wonder of what it means to be truly human: accepting the world for what it is and to making our home here rather than dreaming of relocating to the stars or existing in a man-forged bubble and pretending to ourselves that there is nothing outside it to which we have any connection at all.
Think of Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, and others whose writings approach the shores of the uncivilized. They know their place in the physical sense and remain wary of the siren cries of metrovincial fashion and civilized excitement. We name particular writers whose work embodies what we’re arguing for not to place them more prominently on the existing map of literary reputations, but rather, taking their work seriously and redrawing the maps altogether – not only the map of literary reputations, but those by which we navigate all areas of life.
Even here, we go carefully, for cartography itself is not a neutral activity. The civilized eye seeks to view the world from above, as something we can stand over and survey. The uncivilized writer knows the world is, rather, something we’re enmeshed in – a patchwork and a framework of places, experiences, sights, smells, sounds. Maps can lead, but can also mislead. Our maps must be the kind sketched in the dust with a stick, washed away by the next rain. They can be read only by those who ask to see them, and they cannot be bought.
THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILIZATION
We live in a time of social, economic, and ecological unraveling. All around us are signs that our way of living is passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions.’
We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we’ve been telling ourselves. We challenge the stories underpinning our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’ and from each other. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we’ve forgotten they’re myths. We reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment, since it’s through stories that we weave our version of reality.
Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. Carefully attentive, we’ll reengage with the non-human world.
We celebrate writing and art grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels. We won’t lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world. Together, we’ll find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
Russia takes the moral high ground
In the next days and weeks, as we wait to see whether diplomatic negotiations begun at the behest of Russia can help to moderate the crisis in Syria, we should remember a couple of things:
(1) The use of force, as well as the threat of the use of force, is forbidden by international law. But we don’t even think of that when Obama talks about his “red lines,” because, as Noam Chomsky said on “Democracy Now” yesterday, the United States is a rogue state that doesn’t think it has to follow international law. We can become inured to that, given the media’s acceptance of it, but we shouldn’t. The only other state that behaves this way, with impunity at least, is US ally Israel. Notice that our government isn’t calling for Israel to give up or allow inspections of its chemical and/or nuclear weapons or offering to do the same itself.
(2) Bashar Assad is by no means my hero, but I had to agree with him when he said recently that Obama can draw all the red lines he wants, but he doesn’t have the authority to draw them for other countries. Nor have any other Syrians asked for missiles to be lobbed their way.
(3) The United States is historically the biggest user of chemical weapons (Agent Orange in Vietnam and white phosphorus and depleted uranium in Iraq, all of which are still causing illness and birth defects). Not to mention nuclear weapons — which the US is the only country ever to have used. We have neither the moral high ground, nor the right to dictate to and threaten force against other countries. Only the UN has that right.
P.S. Don’t believe Kerry and Obama when they deny that the US is seeking regime change in Syria. The CIA has been sending arms to Syrian rebel troops, which include al Qaeda fighters, for weeks. Hawks in the US government (and Obama is one, just as much as Bush ever was) has been plotting the downfall of Syria and Iran since the year 2000. Iraq, still torn by sectarian conflict thanks to its destabilization by the US invasion and occupation, was on that list, too, of course. And its sectarian battles — Sunni vs Shia — have intensified the same in Syria (that’s largely what the civil war is all about), Lebanon, and elsewhere. It’s not about morality or saving little children from harm — it’s strictly geopolitics, a game of big power interests that’s tearing the Middle East apart.
Five Broken Cameras
If you haven’t already seen the 2011 documentary film “Five Broken Cameras,” please go to Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, or the PBS/POV website asap and do so! This is an amazing film about a small village in the Occupied West Bank and a courageous Palestinian farmer who filmed demonstrations there against illegal Israeli settlements and the building of a so-called security wall that cut villagers off from their land. The story is interwoven with the story of the filmmaker’s family, especially that of his youngest son, who watches the death of a friend at Israeli hands.
Films like this can be watched for free for a limited time at pbs.org/pov, so hurry if you don’t have the other services. You can also go to the filmmaker’s website, emadburnat.com to offer your support.
As Americans, we need to do whatever we can to oppose our country’s support of illegal Israeli policies against Palestinians. Not satisfied with having taken most of their land, the Israeli government is determined to take the rest by making life untenable in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Not only does this take a devastating toll on the Palestinian people (who’ve suffered this way for over 65 years), but it’s tearing up a beautiful, ancient land of hills planted with olive trees. We see beautiful, probably very old olive trees being uprooted with bulldozers and burned by Israeli settlers in this film, as well as a little Palestinian boy (the filmmaker’s son, Gibreel) offering an olive branch to an Israeli soldier.
Watch it, and see for yourself.
I have a long list of other films and books on the subject that I’ll post about in the future.
We got the numbers 