A short story...
On Permeability
The woman had never liked sounds. As a child, she would put wads of blu-tack in each ear, pull a beanie down over her face, and crawl hampster-like onto the top shelf of the airing cupboard, where she could enjoy the blissful absence of the everyday noise that made life so exhausting. As she grew older, she found herself more and more repelled by the constant physical menace of sound, its encroachment, its impatience. The rustle of shopping bags seemed to scrunch the skin of her inner ear. The chink of teaspoon against china cup struck against her temples and brow. A neighbour practicing saxophone seemed to smear notes across her face with a disgusting mustard stickiness. It was unbearable.
She began to look for solutions.
The eastern suburbs were problematic, plagued as they were with the constantly descending blades of aeroplane noise. The western hills were cursed with rusty kaka cries and the intolerable death gurgles of tui. The inner city was completely out of the question. The south coast was promising for a few blissful days, until a southerly storm sent long rollers explosively up onto the rocks in terrible liquid exhalations, receding with a deep sucking undertow that she felt was trying to pull her insides out through her pores.
She found refuge in a brand new soulless hill suburb, far from the shops and schools, a dark-glassed McMansion large enough to facilitate her retreat into the innermost rooms of the house. She paid cautious men to come with thick armfuls of purple-grey wool and fill the walls and windows and ceiling and front rooms while she sat in the basement wearing BOSE noise cancelling headphones turned up to max negation.
You could order your shopping online, she found, and have it delivered in reassuringly silent cardboard boxes. She ate from floppy silicone bakewear with gentle plastic spoons and disconnected the sound output of the TV so it became a soothing bath of colour and shape.
When the sound of the kettle accelerating into violent white noise became intolerable she turned to slow trickling mouthfuls of tap water, and when the infernal glopping of her stews and curries began to slime across her skin like a rash she undertook a diet of soft silent fruits, avocados, and rice pudding from Meals on Wheels, who tactfully left it on the back step.
She eased herself into silent lukewarm baths that had dribbled from the tap over many hours, and wiped her teeth with a carefully non abrasive sponge.
On Guy Fawkes night she put her headphones on and wrapped expensive shawls around her head in the manner of a Kenyan woman; and when hardy Trick or Treaters ignored her articulate and discouraging signage she crept down to the basement through long tendrils of mint green carpet and waited for them to leave.
The silence spread around her like a blissful picnic blanket.
Many years passed.
One day the woman was sitting in her headphones constructing a pastoral scene from Fuzzy Felt, when suddenly the silence became too much.
It was ravenous, it had no bottom, it yawned and gaped and tried to swallow her face. And there she was in the middle of it, a rock in a swirl of dark ocean, the hole at the bottom of the whirlpool, a guttering candle about to be swallowed! It was a vacuum, it would suck her brain out through her ears, it would turn her inside out!
She ran for the door, shedding headphones, mohair rugs, blankets of finest lambswool and small knitted items, and opened it wide on hinges of silent oil. The unfamiliar daylight stopped her short upon the front step. A wild tangle of convulvulus and dock, snail infested fennel and raggedy agapanthus had obscured her narrow front path. She took a deep breath, a lungful of late morning air, the gasp of a surfaced swimmer.
The sounds came at her. Roadworks gnawed at the distant air, cars shifted gear up hills, invisible building site men shouted at one another to fuck off, snails slimed their ways up the fennel stalks, cicadas and blackbirds and the cluCLUNK of a loose manhole as the tires went over it all swarmed in the air. They washed over her, they went straight through her and around her and up her nostrils and inside her molars. Her jaw unclenched. Her bones breathed a sigh of relief and shuffled imperceptibly away from one another. It was ok.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
"I hate humans, I love trees", and other problematic statements...
What I'm feeling an urge to write about at the moment is the tendency for environmental agendas to slide into misanthropy. Misanthropy: a hatred for humanity! Woah! There's a danger when we're talking about respecting the natural world to fall into a construct of humans as harmful and insane at an essential level, and to start either insinuating or saying straight out that the world would be better off without us. I want to unpack this idea...
Firstly, I've been there. I've been that person. Environmental concerns first engaged my interest in a pretty sudden way, reading David Suzuki's 'The Sacred Balance'. It's scientific, it's passionate, it's heartfelt. I lay on my bed and read this book with tears rolling nonstop down my face as I realised the extent and depth of human abuse of the natural world. This, and other books and websites, profoundly changed my orientation to life. I wanted to be involved in this cause. But what I didn't realise at the time is that I was taking my grief and using it to blame other humans. I was using it to feel a profound dislike for my own race! This can only arise from being not only everyone else's enemy, but also your own. Disliking humans means disliking yourself. It's a desire to take the habits of others and say 'look, look what these people have done. They have done evil things. I would not do those things, oh no, for I am one of The Good Guys, and I know not to do those things'. It's using caring for the environment as a way of feeling superior to others, to bolster up our own constantly-terrified ego. The book that moved me had a subtle message that told me that 'the masses' were harming the earth while 'the enlightened ones' fought against them. What bullshit. We are all complicit in the harm we are causing. Our culture is constructed and maintained with the assistance of every single one of us, just as a future is something that we can all construct together, rather than something inevitably descending like the blade of the guillotine.
You meet people like the person I was then all the time. We say things like 'the best cure for humanity is a giant plague', or 'the earth will be better off once all the people have killed each other'. We need to stop and recognise that this is a horrifying, nihilistic vision! David Attenborough has described us as a "plague on the earth". David Suzuki, that early hero of mine, said in 2009 that "humanity is humanity...I just wish they'd stop being so human". What's wrong with these visions?
For a start, they assume that humans are inherently and unavoidably harmful in their presence on Earth. They share this view with fans of population control as the ideal method to minimise environmental damage. Advocating population control in the way Malthus did, and demographer Paul Ehrlich does, is inherently misanthropic. It's the force behind statements like the Japanese finance minister stating in January that the elderly should "hurry up and die"(1). It's saying that humans are intrinsically a negative force, that takes away from natural systems in a linear, non cyclical way. I'm not arguing that we don't currently act in such ways. But it's not inherent to our nature. It's not a built in feature, it's an app. Time for an upgrade! Malthusian enthusiasts love bandying around figures as to the 'ideal number' of humans that can live on spaceship earth. But surely this is wholly dependent on how those humans choose to live? There's a popular 'did you know' that says ants have a greater biomass than humans. As in, all the species of ant, weighed, would have greater mass than all the humans. (Looking into this, it seems unlikely that each ant has been weighed individually, but we'll roll with it.) There's a lot of ants, put it that way. And there's even more termites (little cuties), and potentially an even greater mass of krill — estimates range between 117-379 billion kilograms. Woah. That's a lot of krill. Why aren't we advocating mass culling of krill? Compulsory krill abortions! (Let's ignore for a moment the fact that we kind of are, by selling them en masse to omega-3 enthusiasts in gelatine capsules). Because their way of existing in the world isn't harmful. Every time a new krill comes along, it's not going to burn more fossil fuels and buy more clothes from Supré (although they do have some sizes suitable for krill). It's not the number of humans existing in the world, it's our habits. Population, like technology, just magnifies the impact of what we do. And since when are our habits our intrinsic character? Over the course of history we have changed and adapted our way of living countless times. Mass environmental destruction is just a loud and obvious message that it's time to do so again, in a really exciting way. This goes beyond better technologies – we require a different set of priorities wielding those technologies. Time to evolve!
We are aware of how badly adjusted our practices are to the rhythms and rules of the natural world. We are just that archetypal lonely kid in the corner of the classroom, burning with painful awareness that he or she doesn't fit in. We don't feel like we belong in the world. That's a tragedy. What that kid needs to know is how beautiful and awesome they are. We need some more faith in just how gorgeous human beings are, some belief in how special a part of the world we are, and can be. I do believe that climate change and environmentally shitty practices are, without major action, going to create conditions in which it will be very difficult for humans to flourish, if not survive. But what's the point in survival for survival's sake? These days, the only environmental movement I'm interested in being involved in is one that whole-heartedly celebrates humans as a divine part of nature, and a beautiful expression of the same life that makes the natural world so ravishing, and worth respecting.
ref:
(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/22/elderly-hurry-up-die-japanese
Firstly, I've been there. I've been that person. Environmental concerns first engaged my interest in a pretty sudden way, reading David Suzuki's 'The Sacred Balance'. It's scientific, it's passionate, it's heartfelt. I lay on my bed and read this book with tears rolling nonstop down my face as I realised the extent and depth of human abuse of the natural world. This, and other books and websites, profoundly changed my orientation to life. I wanted to be involved in this cause. But what I didn't realise at the time is that I was taking my grief and using it to blame other humans. I was using it to feel a profound dislike for my own race! This can only arise from being not only everyone else's enemy, but also your own. Disliking humans means disliking yourself. It's a desire to take the habits of others and say 'look, look what these people have done. They have done evil things. I would not do those things, oh no, for I am one of The Good Guys, and I know not to do those things'. It's using caring for the environment as a way of feeling superior to others, to bolster up our own constantly-terrified ego. The book that moved me had a subtle message that told me that 'the masses' were harming the earth while 'the enlightened ones' fought against them. What bullshit. We are all complicit in the harm we are causing. Our culture is constructed and maintained with the assistance of every single one of us, just as a future is something that we can all construct together, rather than something inevitably descending like the blade of the guillotine.
You meet people like the person I was then all the time. We say things like 'the best cure for humanity is a giant plague', or 'the earth will be better off once all the people have killed each other'. We need to stop and recognise that this is a horrifying, nihilistic vision! David Attenborough has described us as a "plague on the earth". David Suzuki, that early hero of mine, said in 2009 that "humanity is humanity...I just wish they'd stop being so human". What's wrong with these visions?
For a start, they assume that humans are inherently and unavoidably harmful in their presence on Earth. They share this view with fans of population control as the ideal method to minimise environmental damage. Advocating population control in the way Malthus did, and demographer Paul Ehrlich does, is inherently misanthropic. It's the force behind statements like the Japanese finance minister stating in January that the elderly should "hurry up and die"(1). It's saying that humans are intrinsically a negative force, that takes away from natural systems in a linear, non cyclical way. I'm not arguing that we don't currently act in such ways. But it's not inherent to our nature. It's not a built in feature, it's an app. Time for an upgrade! Malthusian enthusiasts love bandying around figures as to the 'ideal number' of humans that can live on spaceship earth. But surely this is wholly dependent on how those humans choose to live? There's a popular 'did you know' that says ants have a greater biomass than humans. As in, all the species of ant, weighed, would have greater mass than all the humans. (Looking into this, it seems unlikely that each ant has been weighed individually, but we'll roll with it.) There's a lot of ants, put it that way. And there's even more termites (little cuties), and potentially an even greater mass of krill — estimates range between 117-379 billion kilograms. Woah. That's a lot of krill. Why aren't we advocating mass culling of krill? Compulsory krill abortions! (Let's ignore for a moment the fact that we kind of are, by selling them en masse to omega-3 enthusiasts in gelatine capsules). Because their way of existing in the world isn't harmful. Every time a new krill comes along, it's not going to burn more fossil fuels and buy more clothes from Supré (although they do have some sizes suitable for krill). It's not the number of humans existing in the world, it's our habits. Population, like technology, just magnifies the impact of what we do. And since when are our habits our intrinsic character? Over the course of history we have changed and adapted our way of living countless times. Mass environmental destruction is just a loud and obvious message that it's time to do so again, in a really exciting way. This goes beyond better technologies – we require a different set of priorities wielding those technologies. Time to evolve!
We are aware of how badly adjusted our practices are to the rhythms and rules of the natural world. We are just that archetypal lonely kid in the corner of the classroom, burning with painful awareness that he or she doesn't fit in. We don't feel like we belong in the world. That's a tragedy. What that kid needs to know is how beautiful and awesome they are. We need some more faith in just how gorgeous human beings are, some belief in how special a part of the world we are, and can be. I do believe that climate change and environmentally shitty practices are, without major action, going to create conditions in which it will be very difficult for humans to flourish, if not survive. But what's the point in survival for survival's sake? These days, the only environmental movement I'm interested in being involved in is one that whole-heartedly celebrates humans as a divine part of nature, and a beautiful expression of the same life that makes the natural world so ravishing, and worth respecting.
ref:
(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/22/elderly-hurry-up-die-japanese
Friday, April 19, 2013
What is this...? An outlet? A cry for attention? A ranting-platform? An exhibitionist form of narcissistic journal dependence? I'm not really sure. I hope it's none of those. I just feel like there are lots of ideas floating in my brain that I would like to write about, and like to start conversations about, and my facebook page is a bit impossibly verbose. What are my interests through this blog? Issues surrounding radical change-making, imagination and creativity, social justice and inequality, human relationships with each other, ourselves, and the natural world, and the intersection between words and action. Woah, how exciting!
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