November, Chapter 2
An arrival…
Chapter 2
“How’d’ you manage to come to be here? You know, on a boat like this?” Accustomed to facing unsolicited questions from what in the old days had been known as the General Public Arthur rests on the rim of the cargo-hatch, facing the quay-side. Expect the attention on such a nice evening. It often comes like this. No introductions. No small talk. As though his presence – their presence – arriving in such a theatrical manner…. Arthur feels right at home. Grins, “Glad you asked!”
Their first days in port are often like this, Hang a banner and generate a crowd.
The whole thing’s rather… complicated.
They made port in the quiet hours before dawn. The town awoke and here they were.
Local officials, They always know. Keen to find a way to horn-in. First on the scene as they had tossed across their dock-lines. A swarthy gent, all business, in a worn, grimy uniform, Seen better days. Better days. A lot of that going around! Brought along his checklists, “Carrying any salts?” An almost forgotten question, centuries old. Now once again at the top of every port inspector’s list.
Cara handled him, “Yes Sir!” Passed him our Bill-of-Lading: Salts, an inventory of our hemp and hemp extracts, alcohol, and that other perennial of official scrutiny, firearms and ammunition.
I have a physical need. To answer that need I make something. To make something I require matter. I require a manner in which to interact with matter. I require a way of making judgements concerning the suitability of what I make.
I, I, I!
Ai, Ai, Ai!
It sounds like a Portuguese lament!
Who is this I?
Is this the only way to think about needs and their fulfillment?
Let’s not get into placing a collective in place of the individual….
Let’s not call it a soul, and expect to pack it safely away!
Who has needs?
This physical organism has needs to maintain its integrity. It is quite capable of meeting those needs without the interjection of an I….
We could say it probably does a better job….
Can we even talk about this? Or anything? Without being trapped by the distancing forced on us by language?
It may be that what is required is a way to experience what happens to us without getting mired in the mediation.
Maybe this can be done not by consuming mediation, but witnessing it?
If I am afraid of an image of death, gruesome, horrible death. The agony of its struggle. An imagined void. Or the terrors brought on by an expectation of torments beyond its edge? At this point I am consuming an image. I am taking it at face value. A value Ego insists on to meet its need to maintain our attention on it. And, therefore, bolster Ego’s erstwhile existence. In this situation fear can only escalate and this escalation feeds a sense of urgency which only makes it more difficult to do anything but continue to react to fear as a thing itself. A thing consumed.
As with anything consumed, the process is mutual, the consumer is consumed.
What other option is available?
We could attempt to suppress fear, forget the image, repress our reaction?
“And how has that worked out in the past?”
There is another possibility. We may witness our fear.
As we witness what happens, whenever and however existence is occurring and entering our perception at a given moment, we are immersed. This immersion is life. The fact of existence trumps any mediation. If we can disarm urgency and the illusions supplied by Ego. We cannot witness an image, a fragment of thought – which includes all our memories and reactions to the past and projections into a future – and at the same time consume an image and be consumed by it.
There is no room while we are present to be mediated. It is only in the gaps in our attention to what-is that mediation grabs us.
Now, all this begs a question. Is it possible to have a culture that is not simply a reactive set of conditioned responses pulling us constantly back into the realm of Ego and mediation?
This may be possible. If we look at other creatures who do not enter into the kind or level of disintegration found in our culture; we do not see their arrangements as dangerously dysfunctional. But it is possible to see the way, say crows or parrots or cuttlefish or dolphins – just to stay with creatures of obvious intelligence. – To see the way they interact with the world as something that could be called a culture?
If such cultures exist. If in the great percentage of the human past there were also cultures of lasting adaptation to changing and extremely challenging conditions; then, it might be safe to assume that the existence of a culture itself may not be the source of our dysfunction. If not culture, then it could be that the key is to be found in our particular approach to culture.
We have great difficulty in seeing outside the limits of our conditioning. Our incentive/punishment systems reward this blindness and castigate anyone who breaks its rules. It is no wonder that our greatest successes have been destructive and the accumulation of them all have brought us to this point.
But, just as our habits, conditioning, and instincts have been appropriated by the demands of Ego, is it not possible that another kind of culture could be formed which does not?
Is such a culture simply an accumulation of “enlightened souls?” Does such a culture put an end to habit, to conditioning itself? Do we transcend our organic selves? This smacks of the Utopian images Ego uses in its carrot and stick approach to maintaining hegemony.
My hunch, for what it’s worth, is that witnessing the incoherence brought on by our dysfunctional attitude to Ego’s demands can lessen stereotypical responses; but that such a life will continue to be lived within the limitations of our organic selves just as it must – if it, or anything, is to continue to live. We must attend to the limitations of physical and living systems in a finite world.
We have access to the infinite, via creativity, but this is not the infinite of our imagery. Not the grand dissolution of all limits we pine after. The infinite expresses itself through adaptation. Life evolves to meet, and shape, our limits.
And, what is it that we do when we are evolving in this way? What if we used an existing set of terms to grasp this possibility?
Art and Craft. Not “Arts & Crafts.” Not any of the particulars we may uncritically include under these rubrics, but what if we use these existing terms and the practices; the entire fields of endeavor they cover; as a starting point?
Bluntly stated, Art is the arena in which we grapple with questions of meaning.
Craft is how we express our values within the limits imposed by our environments and our natures as we work to discover and then meet our needs.
These primal activities have had a tenuous existence throughout the era of Ego. Segregated off within sub-cultures often treated as ghettos, or manipulated as tools to wrest profits from our innate needs for value and meaning. They have been the pets and playthings of the wealthy and powerful. Even as they have been reservoirs for critiques; not only of particular formulations of wealth and power; but of the entire concept of domination. Artists and craftspeople have carried on this fraught compromise with great difficulty and with much sacrifice and much has been lost. Many lives damaged by the incoherence of attempting to maintain this position within a hostile framework. Still, this has left us with the only reservoirs of wisdom available to us today.
As with everything else with an intrinsic value beyond the illusions of this culture’s judgement; these reservoirs are being emptied at a terrific rate. The fragments left are loosing their ability to continue to function as they have during this onslaught lasting millennia and now reaching a climax.
Difficulty spawns creativity. The increasing lack of viability of these old arrangements helps us to leave them behind and strike out after new possibilities. Nothing clarifies like necessity!
So, how can we envision the task of Craft in light of all this?
I return again and again to this point. Making anything…, when we expect to make contact with what we have available…. I see myself approaching a wood-pile, out in the snow, pattern in hand. The task is to discover which individual piece, each with its own history and contingency behind it, will suit. There is also an awareness that the pattern must not be seen as inviolate. Necessity, or the grace of insight at the moment of contact with what-is, may present some other possibility.
My experience of this leads me – well within the limitations of thought as outlined above! – To recognize this primal situation as a dialogue with matter. At this point limits are not a limitation, but the parameters of freedom.
The act of choosing a fragment of matter to meet a portion of need is not a question of choice at this point. What occurs is an act of recognition. A recognition of necessity transcended through creative dialogue with matter.
We focus on evolution as working through the forces of destruction. We see it as a winnowing of the “unfit.” This fits the competitive nature of Ego-land. But there is another way evolution works. Grace and serendipity, and acts of compassion interact to evolve new circumstances and generate new pathways for growth. This is how a culture independent of the illusions of Ego might be embodied.
There are so many seeds embedded in this prototypical moment. Each needs to be recognized and given room to prosper. The essentials are all here….