Esta publicación va escrita por el poeta americano Mike Mahoney, poeta que lleva palante el legado espiritual del gran Walt Whitman, y amigo de algunos de los artistas que pululan nuestro taller. Se presenta como una contestación a The Blue Spark, o La chispa azul, por J.P. Kruse, libro escrito de un socio nuestro y publicado con la colaboración especial de nuestros artistas y pensadores.
The following piece, written by poet Mike Mahoney, is part of a ten piece series of posts in response to The Blue Spark by J.P. Kruse. We will be posting one per week for the next ten weeks. The Blue Spark can be ordered here: www.swamplanternbooks.com
A painting from artist Wild Grace's 'Loosened Pane Series'
inspired by T.S. Eliot's line:
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane.
On the northeast coast of America i sit with coffee and Erik Satie playing, fully entrenched in the times, in the waves of turbulence and echoes of history on both sides of the present. With windows open to the crisp early November air, i sniff the sky for incoming scents from the future floating all around us. Whether from the esoteric folds and hidden dimensions of the winds or up from the murky recesses of my mind, (you decide), after a moment of silent & amplified presence, the words bubble up from somewhere:
“There is no going back...”
Perhaps, perhaps…
Among our many contradictions and perceptual problems contributing to the static we must sift through to pick up reality's signals is our issue with time – time as objective and time as subjective. Time as our creation and time as our master. Time as our inheritance. Our linear mask slung over the non-linear face of reality. Time as the product or perceived creation of the metabolic systems embedded within the sense-luscious surroundings of the geology, biology, imagination & life surrounding us that we call earth. That we call home. Time as the seasons and time as cycles of moon. Time as circles and stars. Time as money. Time as deadlines. As debt. Time as a motivator, as dread, as celebration, as mystery. The mystery of impermanence. Of flow. Change and transformation. Of life, sex and death.
As one of the standard measurements we use for telling time, a ’year' is our word for each complete circle the earth makes around the sun. Today, we in the West recognize & name the year as 2016. Without ever being fully aware of it, by using this date we’re literally saying we live in the 2016throtation the Earth has made around the sun. Whether it’s meant literally, which we know not to be true, or as the number of years since “God’s Son” walked on Earth, which as a secular nation shouldn‘t matter to us, it‘s a silly date picked at random we all use and never really think about. This only encourages our dim collective misunderstanding of our time and place, of who and what we are, and where and when we are. We know the planet is somewhere around four and a half billion years old, but we say it’s 2016. We know people just as intelligent, tender and alive were walking the Earth 400,000 years ago, and probably for at least a million years before that, and yet we say the year is 2016. (On Dec. 4th, 2013, the NY Times even published an article on this, stating: “In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 year, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.”) We know our ancestors have been taming fire for over a million years, (there's evidence for 1.9 million); we know our ancestors have been sailing the seas for hundreds of thousands of years, (there’s evidence for 800,000) – humans just as creative, smart and conscious as us. Humans that probably survived their own cultural & mythical end times just as surely as we survived ours: the infamous Y2K, the various dates of catholic fire-&-brimstoners, and of course the much heralded Winter Solstice of 2012, as well as all of the other dates and transcendence points put forward by various religious zealots, cracked fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists, starry-eyed New Agers and crystal-dolphin channelers scattered throughout the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries.
12,000 years ago, at the close of the high Paleolithic, the human species tore a rip in the fabric of time with the invention of agriculture & domestication. Around 5,000 yrs ago, the gradual domestication of symbols & signs into the divine creation/gift/curse of the origins of our alphabet proved another rupture in time. Then again around 2,000 years ago, there seemed to be yet another rupture in time based around the thoughts and actions of one counter-cultural mystic from Bethlehem, 500 years or so after which a monk named Dionysius in Rome claimed to have calculated the exact number of years which had passed since "The Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ", and thus began the upward-counting Anno Dominicalendar, the linear-clock narrative of history’s time, with speech, writing, farming, mythology, spirituality, science, politics, the arts, technology and warfare already in full swing. Interestingly, there are also signs which imply Dionysius created his revised version to dissuade people from a popular idea of the times that the end of the world was just over the horizon, and according to his new calendar its predicted date had already passed, thus proving it false. In his time and place, it was a commonly held belief, it seems, that the earth would reach its end 500 years after the birth of Jesus, which according to the older calendar in place, was coming up. (In our human world, the past can always be changed.)
A sidebar here, why don't we at least use one of those dates, those high-watermark years of massive novelty, as the beginning of our calendar instead? If we have to count our years upwards, why not make the date of our “year 1" one of what are now roughly 3,500B.C. (the beginning of our written language), 12,000 B.C. (the beginning of the rise of domestication & agriculture), or even 40,000 B.C, (what we think we know as the beginning of human cave art)? Wouldn't one of those at least be a bit more rational? And while we're at it, maybe we should add another million or so years to that calendar to account for the controlled use of fire, such a human behavior.
"There is no going back…"
There are many ideas of what going back would mean or entail. It has different points of destination on the linear timeline of our history to different people. To some, it means going back to the "good ole days” of segregation & slavery. To others, it's going back to an era before some technologies, but not others – before the Internet and iPhones but not cars & electricity, before the combustible & steam engines but not the printing press. To some, it would involve returning back to a mind-space before written language took root around 5,000 years ago. (Or more accurately, forward to a post-historical & future primitive mind-space without written language, but probably altered by the species' recent 5,000 year obsession with it.) And to others still it means traveling back/forward even further, 12,000 years into a past-future human existence pre-agriculture nomadic tribalism.
Among these viewpoints, of course, are various exceptions of what scraps & rare gems we should keep of any of the trashed technologies & ideologies, habits & practices we're leaving behind us with the cracked eggshell of human history.
To me, part of "going back", it seems, if we have to use that label, would involve going back more to a different perception of time than any actual date or place. A different consciousness – more the mental space of our ancestors who lived without clocks and wrist watches, laptops, cell phones and tablets. Who lived without careers, jobs and deadlines, without the four-year election cycle and a 30-second attention span. Who lived with a lunar & cyclical calendar, not the 365 & 1/4 day, linear calendar as we know it, & with minds and spirits not reigned in and tamed by technologies and by childhoods 12 years full of “chair-time” and forced “education.“ Part of it would involve going back from the time of tax & election seasons to the deeper measure and rhythm of earth's seasons. From the seasons of TV shows & sports to the seasons of our uninhibited desires and bodily energies. From the virtualized spacetime of social media & finance to the immediate voice & flesh of relationship and direct experience. Part of it would definitely involve going back to a perception of time unchained from the "vicious circle of work for wages and imposed leisure, to escape symbolic dominance and cultural entrainment, the "reality" of everyday life and the flatlands of binary logic." (Becker, Tactical Reality Dictionary).
It would be going back to an immediate experience of life stripped of all the debts & abstractions the techno-linguistic algorithms which run our global economy & psyche have programmed into it; from the suppressed and shizoidal PTSD fear-symptoms of living in a shattered double of the world – it's doppelganger & our multi-cultural cognitive cocoon of myth & history, of linear narrative & deep, deep subconscious guilt of what we've done to the place – to the calm & confident, jubilant self-knowledge and acceptance of mystery that comes with human life lived in the perpetual rhythm of balance with each other & with the earth & the trillion shapes of life we share the planet with. It would involve our transformation from the steel-&-oil hypercomplex awareness-manipulated landscape of coercive sense-oversaturation & disinformation, half-truths and small print, back into the poetically immediate & aesthetic sense-surround-system of body-rooted Eros splendor, of diversity of ecosystemic climax of every kind, of grass beneath our feet & ears full of night music cricket rhythms, eyes gorging on the infinity of pastpresentfuture constellated above day's end in astral complexity, in galactic epiphany, erotically spread from horizon to horizon, stripped of the usual smog-cloud of culture's light & pollution. It would be based around or built upon a shift from our consumer-fear culture of direction-following competitors, to a community of creative-thinking, love and collaboration.
"There is no going back…"
We should be careful about using these words “going back.” Any mobilization of the concept of “going back” would most likely have to include the worldwide implementation of martial law to enforce it, as there is probably no way to convince every single human on earth to either A) agree on how far back we’re going, or B) give up the toys and conveniences our modern technologies and private riches have provided a few of us in lavish & godly ways, and all of us in not so wonderful ways
We must accept as a species there is no going back, and as Dave Abram writes about renewing oral culture in his book Becoming Animal, “It is not a matter of 'going back' to an earlier way of life, but of aligning ourselves with the full depth of the present, expanding awareness beyond the gleaming veneer of our mass-produced artifacts, dropping our attention beneath the recently sedimented strata of commercialized civilization (beneath the inert, plastic layers of tossed-out toys and discarded water bottles) to make conscious contact with the darker humus in which our humanity is still rooted. The soil at that depth is made of dances, and songs, and the hushed cadence of spoken stories. By remembering ourselves at that depth, by tapping the nutrients in that timeless soil, we draw fresh water up into the stems and leaves of the open present. We re-create civilization by tapping the primordial wellsprings of culture, replenishing the practice of wonder that lies at the indigenous heart of all culture.”
Perhaps by re-planting ourselves into the magic soil and earth under our feet, by re-vegetable-ing the astral play-thing of our minds and bodies, we can slip back down & deeper into our planet’s local rhythms and rediscover our voice in the music of it all: the playful one, the harmonic one.
Perhaps through a proper & psychedelic sinking back into the melodious present all around us, the past and future will resolve themselves in their own mysterious way in the Ouroboric dream curves of our smiles, in the rhythmantric songs of our hearts and in the twinkle of our wet-star eyes.
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