My Earth Day celebration was at the Winter Sun Dance Studio where friends
of the earth gathered to celebrate her wonders and to forget for a moment
her inevitable demise. But more of that later. The Museletter touted this
evening as a celebration with some “Big Mama” music. At 7:30, there was
a warm up, then an opening circle at 8:00, next continual dance until 9:30,
and finally a closing circle, which I missed. But it was all about circles,
about maternity, about life energy. At first, I was a bit leery about the
holding hands in a circle business and I also had had to work late so I
was tired and would rather, I said then, have collapsed on the sofa and
vegged in front of the tube, like the rest of America. More of that later.
But I was glad I went.
As it turned out, the circle was a rather intimate one: there were only
about fifteen Floyd people there to love the mother. The room was set up
with a semicircle of chairs, a garden arch with miniature lights strung
up, and on the walls the permanent tapestries that identify this place
as one that encourages a greater consciousness and an appreciation of the
artistic. On the stage, the DJ performed her magic; she was the maestress,
the mistress of ceremonies, the priestess who represented the voice of
the mother speaking to us that evening. Also, for a while, the windows
provided a remarkable vision of the setting sun against the mountains.
All seemed well. In the center and highlighted was a shrine of the mother
represented by statues of naked women, of the Minoan squat sort, surrounded
by bunches of pansies, unlit candles, and eye-popping potatoes.
Earth Day has been around for a while, the brainchild of a senator,
believe it or not. And the movement has grown and has made a difference,
legislatively even. Millions of people worldwide celebrate the day; there
is no dearth of people who care. It’s just that one becomes leery of these
national days, which seem to pay mere lip service, but what else is there
that one can do, except run to the woods. One kid, sort of a lost sort
did that once. I read an article about him in Rolling Stone Magazine, and
then I made my students read it. The boy found a purpose for his life in
the movement to stop logging in the Northwest. He and his girl who roped
him in and other odd, wandering souls began to chain themselves to trees
and to dynamite machinery used to log. This boy achieved a sort of fame
when a logger, really not much older, purposely felled a log on the protester’s
head, well, I guess you can say there really was nothing left. The article
provided insights into the two actors in the drama, neither achieving either
the heroic or the villainous, just human beings sloshing sadly along trying
to makes sense of things and ends meet, victims of themselves and their
upbringings and their fears and inadequacies and their hopes. The whole
event was a miserable and sad business that offered no clear answer about
who is right and who is wrong and what is to be done.
The Earth Day celebration I attended in Floyd on its thirty-fifth anniversary
seemed an appropriate way of honoring the earth, smacking, as it did, of
pagan celebrations to thank the god, the goddess, the gods, the Pan spirit,
the whatever for the blessings of this precious and precarious life. There
was an air of the frenzy of the fanatic worshipper as we all gyrated, whirled,
and soared on the wings of some wickedly wonderful music. The dance was
a releasing of the week’s pent-up frustrations, and it was a celebration
of nature’s beauty and bounty. But beneath the excited rhythmic adoration
was the latent fear that it, she, that is, the earth, would not last forever,
and the forever of which I speak is not the one expected when the sun burns
out some billion years hence; rather, it is the one brought on by the steady
wearing down and indecorous dressing up of the old girl. There was a certain
irony that a young man and woman camping out on a local campus the night
before an Earth Day celebration were run over by a truck setting up for
the planned festivities. They suffered only bruises and cuts and were not
upset; no charges were filed.
But maybe charges should be brought somewhere against someone. Such
is the thesis of Daniel Quinn’s novels. The one I know is Ishmael, which I taught for
a number of years in my English classes and one of the consistent favorites among my
students. Young people know the earth is sick: they have grown up listening to liberal
programming that reminded them that pollution is a reality, that clean water will
not last forever, that litter is bad. Many as children saw the horrific images of birds awash
in Valdez oil. But they have also been well schooled in the joys and advantages of mass
consumerism.
Daniel Quinn believes mankind turned the wrong corner at the beginning
of civilization, the disastrous decision best represented by the story
of Cain and Abel. In that story, God prefers Abel’s offering of the slain
animal he has hunted to Cain’s of grains and fruits that he has cultivated.
The consequence, of course, is that Cain kills Abel, jealousy, we think.
Quinn concludes, however, that the story shows that God prefers the hunter-gatherer
way of life, a scheme of existence that maintains a balance in nature,
with man being one of the creatures that hunts and is hunted. When agriculture
took over (the Cain people eventually and systematically killed off all
the Abel people, the hunters and gatherers), man became the dominant creature
and began to believe that life was made for him to master and manage. Without
nature’s control over the balance, human population spiraled out of control
resulting in starvation, urban sprawl and overcrowding, pollution, and
extinction of other species. Quinn also promulgates the ideas that caring
and canning are great evils. When we care for the tsunami victims half
way round the world, we interfere with nature’s attempt to control the
surplus population (I use Ebenezer Scrooge’s words intentionally because
this sentimental story, which I love very much, convinces us to cherish
people, every last one of them, rather than reacting to circumstances coldly
and realistically as nature does). Also, when we can a yam rather than
eating what is available or storable naturally at a particular moment,
Quinn says, we once again interfere with nature’s process. We become hoarders,
and excess becomes our most insidious disease.
In the book Ishmael, the gorilla who teaches the narrator telepathically
such ideas, is eventually destroyed, so we are left with the sense that
Quinn believes it may be too late to do anything about a system that has
become so firmly entrenched—how would we go about living life more simply
and closer to nature? And as Quinn points out, human beings are so clever
at disguising the shocking reality of things. I was distressed when I read
recently an article that stated that future gas cars will become more and
more efficient. I was hoping when people realized that gas was not a sensible
fuel, they would then buy electric cars and also rely more heavily on mass
transportation. And the Senate’s attempt to make us less dependent on foreign
oil by drilling for more oil in Alaska only further delays our need to
find alternative types of energy. I state the obvious.
The writing is on the wall, but few are paying attention, just like
Nebuchadnezzar who ironically for our purposes ended up eating grass. Nor
do they know that the writing is on the paper too. Poets, like Richard
Wilbur in his “Advice to the Prophet,” warn us that what we are doing is
more than destroying nature; we are also destroying our humanity because
without nature we have no way to understand or to express who we are. In
the first half of this poem, the speaker explains that the prophet who
warns of the end of the world will not have any success warning of nuclear
disaster because neither can we understand the size and strength of such
a thing as a nuclear weapon and its destructive power, nor can we imagine
the world without us, arrogant bastards that we are, the sun become only
fire rather than the sustainer of our lives and stone just a lump of raw
material without a face we can see in it as conscious perceivers of beauty.
But, he says, we can imagine us without the world around us because
every year the winter comes and kills the vegetation and because we have
seen creatures like deer disappear into thin air. That is exactly what
they do. We can imagine with a nuclear holocaust the burning up of rivers
and the fish in them, like the ancient story of the burning of Xanthus
at the hands of Hephaestus during the Trojan War that the poet refers to.
It would, therefore, not require such a leap to imagine those things forever
gone. He goes on to advise the prophet to remind us that the entire symbolism
and value system of our lives are understood in terms of nature; nature
is our live tongue. If we destroy it, he wonders not only how will we express
our feelings, but also how will we even have those most profound human
feelings: without the symbols of our feelings, how will we feel: without
roses, how can there be love, without horses, how can we imagine courage,
without locusts, how can we understand the concept of resurrection, and
so on. He questions and advises the following:
What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
He asks at the end how without nature (he specifically uses the oak
tree) can there be such things as loftiness or the concept of permanence,
which human beings need to survive. During this week alone, I heard that
because of the melting Arctic ice cap caribou are dwindling and the future
of the polar bear is in question, and when I heard those things, I felt
myself falling through empty space, the ground removed beneath my feet,
beneath mankind’s future. No tigers? No elephants? No giraffe? Eventually,
no cardinals? No wetlands? No trees, except in a tree museum?
And every time I hear of a triumph—the rising numbers of the eagle,
for example-- and want to take heart, I am cast down by the overwhelming
sense that our vision needs to be grander and more far-reaching if we have
any hope of survival. I’m just plain scared, and confused. For example,
is it not appropriate that if thousands of Africans are dying of AIDS they
should practice safe sex, that is, use condoms? But the Pope says they
should not because it is a means of contraception also and God wants as
many babies as possible to be born, all human life being sacred. (By the
way, animals don’t come under the heading of sacred life.) And if the Africans
in question do use contraception, there will be fewer people who will suffer;
there will be fewer people to draw upon the earth’s limited resources.
But what these rural Africans take from nature is minuscule compared to
the twenty-five per cent of the world’s energy that Americans use. I just
turned off a light I didn’t need and the television that I wasn’t watching.
I lowered the temperature of the furnace and instead put another log in
the wood stove. I feel guilty that my wife and I had four children, love
them though I do. And now I have five grandchildren, and I am beginning
to worry about the possibility that the system we have created and perpetuated
by teaching it to them will come crashing down about their ears and they
will suffer more than by simply having to pay a little more for gas for
their SUVs. I guess my question is also can anything be done about an ice
cap once it melts? Are we the dinosaurs of our biological age? I state
and question the obvious, the obviously entangled and perplexing obvious.
And I am compelled to say that there is no god that I would worship
who would countenance such violation of the beauty of his creation. Let’s
talk moral turpitude; let’s talk sin. This morning I glimpsed a frightened
rabbit at dawn scampering across the asphalt dodging oncoming trucks and
cars. That scene was followed by my vision of one of earth’s more obscenely
ugly sights, a car lot (by the way, next to a long-standing cemetery and
in my beloved Floyd). What I can’t abide, I think, is that one moment I
can round a corner and see cerulean skies and gently rising blindingly
green hills dotted with an enchanting (in the truest magical sense of the
word) herd of grazing black cows and around the next corner chuckle at
a brown and white colt prancing about its elders and then around the next
to be assaulted by the colossal crap of modern civilization: telephone
poles and wires, billboard signs, parking lots, and trash everywhere, especially
those familiar rusting school buses and cars, but also the wanton and indiscriminate
tossing of the unnatural remnants of our rampantly consumeristic society
in our faces.
I am startled daily at the place where I work, a hospital, a place of
healing, which is something I like about it. But also, it is only one speck
in our wastey world and yet it produces literally Alps, Himalayas, Rocky
Mountains of waste. Refuse flows like lava from its portals: boxes, needles,
blood, cloth, plastic. And some of it is hazardous, of course, and has
to be placed somewhere in our neighborhood or someone’s neighborhood in
OSHA-approved plastic containers, millions of OSHA-approved plastic containers.
When does this amount of shit rise up far enough to choke us to death?
Of course, some have already been affected.
On Friday, Earth Day, I witnessed an extraordinary sight that somehow
became a symbol of the day. My job requires that I provide medical supplies
to the various doctors and technicians of the hospital. The animals they
care for are primarily dogs and cats and horses and cows, with an occasional
pig or goat thrown in. Passing down the halls or in and out of the rooms
at any time might bring me in contact with an animal in the middle of a
surgical procedure or on the way to something related to it or being wheeled
out covered in a bloody sheet to necropsy for disposal where I once saw
a dead horse hanging by his heels. But as I say, on Friday, as I was delivering
materials to one such spot, I was told to move out of the way as quickly
as possible because an anesthetized horse was on his way through from surgery
to recovery. I stood in awe at a large horse lying prone—on his side—with
his huge tongue hanging out because of the anesthesia on a gurney the size
of a room, but in this particular case, also with a doctor whom I know
in passing sitting on the horse’s side and holding his hooves up so as
to facilitate the passing out and in of the various rooms and to make the
turn at the corner of the hall. The doctor was raised up above his peons,
those all around the gigantic gurney—no less than fifteen people—who were
helping to push. One declared that the doctor sitting upon the Brobdingnagian
belly of the grand but subdued creature was like a king, and at that moment,
he struck a regal pose raising his chin up nobly and lifting his arm triumphantly.
Everyone laughed at his good humor. I thought to myself how hard it is
to resist the beauty, the wit, and the charm of such creatures, of those
damned human beings.
"A
View From Floyd©"