The Paradoxes of Post-Industrial Individualism

What follows is a hopefully minimally disjointed series of thoughts about capitalism, American society, and the irony of the (high fructose corn syrup) fruits it has yielded. Indeed, such fruits are a mixed blessings… and to what exact extent, the jury is still out…

One of the most remarkable observations about post-industrial America is alluded to in the amazing essay "Capitalism and Gay Identity" by John D'Emilio. It is essentially this: Industrial and post-industrial capitalism have weakened the utility of the nuclear family while at the same time idealizing it, targeting it as primary unit of consumption. As a result, heterosexuality and its relationship to the "family" has become ideological, another commodity to be bought and sold. Ancillary to this is the scapegoating of gay, lesbian, transgender and gender-nonconforming people by popular discourse—framing them as emblematizing the dark side of modern society, i.e. what happens when family values fail or when people have too much freedom (?!) This is nothing less than the pot calling the kettle black, because we are indeed all victims of capitalism—in its historic, psychological, and physical/architectural forms—whether we are gay or straight, and whether we are monogamous or not. What this is is the policing of freedom; only one kind of freedom is "okay" and acceptable in America: political and economic freedom, the kind of freedom that allows the little guy to get a nice healthy piece of the pie through a ruthless and often bordering on sociopathic discourse of individualism. But what about the kind of freedom that might allow him, because of historical changes in ways of living and working and socializing that our culture has undergone in the last 200 years, to love another man? No, that kind of freedom is not allowed. This is of course, the epitome of hypocrisy, made more sinister by the fact that those who fight for "traditional family values" are sucking on the teat of corrupt capitalism just as much if not more than anyone else, without any awareness that they are doing so.

As Jonathan Katz (essay: The Invention of Heterosexuality, I don't agree with all of it) and John D'Emilio show in his aforementioned essay, the historical transition of the nuclear family from self-sufficient producing unit (in a colonial economy) to consuming unit (in a capitalist free labor market) caused many changes in daily life that in turn reshaped sexual behavior and consciousness, and more precisely created new spaces and possibilities for those things that were not there before. As Katz notes, this economic shift to increased consumerism changed ideological notions of what one's body was for (is it for producing or consuming?), and in a more concrete sense created new possibilities for social and sexual activity, through the dislocation of workers from their homes as well as the sex segregation potentiated by the wartime economy for both men and women (during World War 2). In D'Emilio's essay we see that urbanization (and its relationship to the growth of industry) also played an important part in the creation of sexual identities and urban subcultures in America. This touches on the trans-historical phenomenon of city-building and its associated social ramifications, to which we should be careful not to ascribe a certain historicism. In other words: city-states have risen and fallen cyclically for thousands of years and there have been indeed "mini globalizations" that have similarly created ecologies of identity and social revolution. For example, the urban centers of the Late Roman Republic fomented liberationist ideologies (Christianity and other mystery cults) that ultimately reframed then-contemporary notions about identity and family. It is not just capitalism, but the urban environment that contributes to a different attitude toward the self and creates new possibilities for identity (of all sorts, not just sexual). Capital is then a new and efficient imperial medium. The relationship between sexual identity and capitalist urbanism indeed seems culturally and historically specific in America, but interestingly the phenomenon of urban culture serving to ideologically undermine or change notions of kinship and/or ideas about the self is not… it is as old as civilization.

In the epilogue of her book "The Way We Never Were", family historian Stephanie Coontz notes that sociobiologists and psychologists have offered theories to justify the social isolation felt by many in the wake of the "Second Gilded Age" (her term for the conservative and market-oriented 1980's) with its effects on socio-economic macro and micro structures, world view and individual morale. In her survey of the shifting political climates of the 60's, 70's and 80's, she describes the rising of a conservative religious right in the late 70's and early 80's, reacting to the achievements and zeitgeist of the civil rights and gay liberation movements. The new conservative movement championed the rhetoric of a return to traditional family values and, especially in the wake of the perceived "materialism" of the later 80's, the merits of a return to a simple, private family life. The notion arose in popular culture that private was better, and activism and public involvement futile, mis-guided, but also dangerously undermined the sanctity and integrity (and obviously, identity) of the heterosexual nuclear family. In the early 90's (preceding the publication of Coontz' book) certain sociobiologists offered the argument that humans only have limited energy for altruistic behavior, so the scope of collectivity and cooperation is (and must be) necessarily constrained to our family. Similarly, one Freudian psychologist claimed that humans are "instinctually" antisocial, and the family is the means by which the antisocial condition is kept in check. However, Coontz has demonstrated that the concept "family" (along with the connected concepts of "ideal" and non-ideal family), seemingly one of our most concrete ontological categories, is not irreducible, but a social construct that has fluctuated greatly in the last two hundred years. The views expressed by these particular "scientific" camps are capitalist apologies as well as "crap psychology", and poorly represent the illuminative potential of those fields. The cultural contributions of such sciences as evolutionary psych & sociobiology occupy contested space. This is because science (theoretically anyways) is a tool, and therefore neutral, but this is never usually the case because a tool is always held in someone's hand. In other words, the research questions, and moreover the ways that experiments are designed and the results framed, are always in danger of—and never completely immune to—the effects of the cultural narratives and social fabric which constrain the epistemologies of actual scientists. The theories that Coontz cites in the beginning of her epilogue are perfect examples of "science" justifying "how things are", as if they are "supposed" to be that way, which is part of the very pattern of tautological justification that Coontz has been demonstrating in her book! Politically questionable science often talks about the brain in terms of it being "hardwired", when really it is more like "soft-wired".

Coontz rightly insists though, that "we are social animals" (p. 284). Yet our propensity for solidarity and coalition building, because of the individualistic economic and civic environments we find ourselves in (where functional moral connections to the encompassing community and public are lacking) are recruited towards a detrimental sort of tribalism. To paraphrase one of my favorite scientists, the primatologist Frans de Waal, the definitive dilemma of our time is the globalization of a tribal species (us). "Tribalism" is not automatically negative, although the word is often used in a derogatory sense. "The tribe" is a method, and the important question that will truly allow us to appraise the success or failure of this method is: what is our sociality in service of? We are unequivocally social animals; we must next accept that such a nature is deeply plastic and our environments are its ultimate sculptors. A political problem that Coontz' work seems to suggest to me is that if coalitional behavior and needs for solidarity are met predominantly in an environment of mutual disenchantment and pessimism, then xenophobia and suspicion will come to be the dominant hermeneutics. As Coontz' work implies to me, (and as current sociobiological and evolutionary theory would corroborate), the desire to get politically and socially involved is connected to the intrinsic desire for working and problem-solving toward a common goal with a non-kin group of manageable cognitive size, and attaining the pleasure and meaning and motivation that one derives from that experience. The ability to effect change in one's proximal environment through the activity of coalitions and groups seems to be a critical way we form positive meanings about ourselves (for one thing). A powerful critique of the relationship between post-industrial capitalism and personal ethics comes from a statement by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation:

"In capitalism, it is difficult to construct a relationship of respect, even between two individuals, and that much more difficult in collectivity."

Indeed. They continue, asserting

"the only real guarantee of individuality, of subjectivity, is the collective."

In other words, maximally coherent identity is formed through the interaction within a collective and between an individual and that collective… when the subject is isolated from frames of references, paradoxically individual identity can fragment and disintegrate.

Lately I've been feeding my obsession with Constantinople/Istanbul by reading 1453, an amazingly woven together account of the fateful Ottoman capture of a Christian city that was seen as unconquerable, its walls unbreached by foreign armies for over a thousand years. From a geological and human ecological analysis, one finds that one primary reason for the longevity of Byzantium, if one could be located, is its location and proximity to various key natural resources. Eight out of twelve miles of perimeter were comprised by shoreline, an ideal combination of swift-moving deep waters plus the respite of a natural harbor afforded by the Great Horn. Then there was the formidable four mile land wall, built in the early 5th century under Theodosios, which was 100 feet high from moat to inner wall and 200 feet thick (including empty space), and represented the apotheosis of military defense in the age of medieval siege technology. Among other things this wonderfully written book, both meditative homily, historical analysis and adventure story, has just made me marvel at the specific architectural, political and economic strategies necessary to maintain the integrity of a fortified city, much less one that embodies the ultimate strategic position at the nexus of three continents, two seas, and crossroads of countless cultures. And it is not just the structural and political integrity that must be ensured, but at the same there must be enabled swift and safe flow of goods into and out this vast creature of stone, marble and smoke. The flesh of the Late Antique and Medieval city must be both permeable and impermeable, able to hermetically seal itself at a moment's notice. The management of such an organism is quite something to ponder, and if this seems formidable, how in the world can we hope to understand the ways in which nations are managed today? We can't, which is why so much of it takes place in the ethereal world of the semio-sphere, in transactions of data, distributed across hot server farms, running on oil and rare earth metals. We cannot see how anything works, and yes, I'm not afraid to admit, it's scary.

I live in Los Angeles right now, which itself represents a pinnacle, or at least a particular apogee of a civilization. But one big different between LA and Constantinople is that there are no city walls here. Everything is just open… or at least it looks that way to the eye. But where are the walls? Where did they go? They must have gone somewhere. I suppose the easy answer is that they are the U.S. borders, the one to the north and the one to the south, and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But that can't be all. Today each person, in a way, has become a fortified city. In our urban studio apartments, little cross stitches on a sprawling carpet of concrete that drapes the landscape, we recapitulate the architecture of the city-state in our domestic lives. Not that it's our fault—it's not. No one is at fault. It's more complicated than that, and I won't take the easy way out and "blame the victim". (That would be a misunderstanding of Marxism.) But again, just like in ancient Rome, the household is a microcosm of empire, and could it ever be any other way? Has it ever, truly, since the dawn of civilization, or does the appearance merely change? As above so below… is that the rule, true no matter what is "above" or "below"? Should we actually live in a fortified city, or embody one? Which is safer? Which will prolong death longer? And if it does, will it do so at the expense of purpose?

Because of the expectations pressing on us in today's world as both worker and consumer, sociality has come to be associated with leisure, which is deeply problematic, one effect of the commodification and division of time. But if the social is integral to human attitudes, and more specifically to human optimism, then sociality must have multiple functions, including ones fundamental to municipal citizenship and local community. Sociality must have pragmatic and utilitarian benefits that firmly anchor it into a coupled relationship with local economic and political activity. This is indeed just the sort of politics that Murray Bookchin (author of "The Ecology of Freedom") proposes. As the feminist battle cry goes, "the personal is political"… that may be true, but until we live in environments whose invisible and physical structures are actually built with that in mind, we will be fighting a frustrating uphill battle.

I think there's an important distinction to make when critiquing this particular socio-economic/political system. I do not see the problem as being within the jurisdiction nor responsibility of the "end-user" (consumer) to solve. I.e. the premise that "we" (you and I) continually create the problem of capitalism by consuming is false, and I'm not one of those people who's like "the problem is us! Look how much we consume, it's disgusting!". Maybe that claim has its place somewhere, but I'm certain that we cannot "consume" our way out of the problem (i.e. through a mere shift to a 'greener' or green-washed economy). Therefore agency as consumer is actually, against all appearances, severely limited, and resembles nothing I would describe using the words "freedom" or "liberty", which I try not to use anyways. The consumer is neither sinner not savior. The problem is systemic and it outsources its symptoms onto the consumer. The consumer is one half of a coupled phenomenon, that of the producer-consumer relation. Therefore the consumer can not be at sole fault, nor can it be implicated as an isolated or autonomous node or step on a causal chain without considering that which forms its ecological (dare I use that word?) habitat. Truly, the ecological is everywhere, even where you don't see "nature". Ecology is the true matrix of reality. That said, I'm not afraid to admit that I don't know exactly how to "solve" these systemic problems. But I think that open-ended discourse about it, keeping an ethic of humility and cooperation and more emphasis on questions than answers, is the way forward.

*One observation that adds a twist to a discussion about the radical overhaul of society and public and private space that is the legacy of industrial capitalism is the possibility that social media and telecommunication technology are shifting the domain of public space. What IS public space today, and how does this crisis of definition effect the 'dichotomy' of public vs private agency?

The Gospel of Goa - A Homily to a Technoshamanism

And now, a brief interlude from the "classical learning" and austere monasticism of the academy to meditate on its opposite: ecstasy, collectivity, and the profane fusion of fiction and reality.

Often I find myself in dire need of psytrance, a favorite spiritual aid, to empty the brain of thoughts…. much needed in the business of sense-making.

As many know, there is no worthwhile productivity and sustainable creativity without contemplation of and within a realm beyond words, things and meanings… where there is only form, and pattern…

Perhaps I could call psy-trancing a yogic practice -- a process by which mind, body and cosmos are harmonized, if even for an instant, before being plunged back into a more logical existence. Psychedelic trance, or Goa trance is the eternally underground music of the cybernetic heir to the drum circle, representing a strange, always-peripheral cultural project where technology’s highest purpose is shamanic divination and the re-invention of the vision quest.

The word “rave” enters naught into the culture of psychedelic trance. These are not raves, they are more political than that. But they are also less political than that. Raves are urban phenomena, constructed by the city… Psytrance festivals ARE cities, alternative, ephemeral cities in the proverbial desert or in the wilderness. They are socio-political spiritual experiments, training grounds for post-modern magicians, experimental technophilic liturgies, bionic passion plays, meditations on creation and destruction, parodies of culture, functional engines of art in which people are the fuel, the means is the end, combustion is the point. They are mappa mundi, navels of the world that pop up like mushrooms; the fleeting fruiting bodies of a whimsical subterranean intelligence…thus they also subvert the idea of a center, of a temple, of Mecca. They are the sacred grove of the Druids, existing in both the Edenic past and the apocalyptic future. They are open source mythology, allowing users to create their own content. (Garden of Eden Creation Kit anyone?) They both renounce the world and embrace it. They connect Atman to Brahman… they continually comment upon themselves, giving you no room to complete a thought. They wink and urge you to forget what they’ve just said. There is no performer, even the DJ is just the mediator of the divine word: the beat. And the word is pure form, Pythagorean mysteries inscribed with ink drawn from the entire palette of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the scribe’s medium is flesh—not vellum, but your living flesh, the interpreter of the signal, your body is an integral part of biological semiosis: Nature’s ongoing contemplation of itself, it’s offering of itself to itself, which began long ago with the first Sign… some say that the most fundamental recognition of a sign involves the perception of pattern, and concomitantly the ability to perceive the space between, the Nothing. And so is not the beat of the drum, our choral response to the mystery of our own heartbeat, the primal mimicry of the punctuation of life with oxygen, blood, semen… is that not the most elemental form of worship of all? Baptism, sacrifice, consumption, ordination all become one. Darshan, both seeing and being seen by the deity simultaneously, is the rule of the dancefloor, where hundreds of animated statues apprehend each other, and speak in a kinetic language of libations, but there is no center, no most holy icon. Mundane objects become icons. There is a theophany of the everyday, the quotidean, and this vision will never leave you, it will dart out occasionally into your unsuspecting surroundings, and out of the corner of your eye the concrete world will dance, as the trees do, as worlds are supposed to. You will meet Pan on the dancefloor and he will have now the face of a demon, now the face of an angel. He’s almost too intense for you—you get the sense watching him that if it’s possible for him to die he will die on the dancefloor, slain by the Word, burst apart at the atomic seams, because having a body obstructs the perfect dance, which is unity, immolation. How to possibly appease such a God? But your terror wanes into the realization that he is a veritable monk of the dance: he is merely carrying out his cosmic function, his duty to all creation. Time passes and he continues to keep the vigil, somehow, guarding his people from demons and evil spirits.

You turn towards the same altar, for the thousandth time.

(By the way… He felt the same way about you, too.)

Who would have guessed that the sound of the angelic choir is so machine-like? But this machine is a sub-woofing Ark, a weapon of mass instruction, a praying-mantis midwife with metal hands that gives birth to the world anew at the flip of a switch, it breaks down the dichotomy of good and evil, human and machine, organic and inorganic for a living, and it takes you along with it.

"There is no such thing as fiction"

-Alex Grey

Memetics, Religion & the Ancient Greco-Roman World

This semester (the first semester of a Master's program) I'm taking two classes in the early (first millennium) history of Christianity and a class on New Testament Greek - so thus far my brain has essentially been bathing in a vat of history, anthropology and semiotics of the late Roman Empire. The environment on which this intellectual activity rests is characterized by my recent relocation from rural Vermont to Los Angeles county, home to one of the strangest urban 'empires' in the modern world. As some may know, studying ancient cities, especially the ones in the area of the Mediterranean and Near East where three continents meet, is an amazing way to sort of study 'everything at once' (with respect to human ecology), or to at least train yourself how to think critically about urban civilization—Indeed, the city is one of the defining creatures of the Holocene period, for better or worse...

I've been realizing that study of the ancient Greco-Roman world is also an amazing arena in which to think about and test theories of memetics - or the transmission of ideas. At the height of Roman rule, trade and travel throughout the empire were easy and safe, and also were possible over a more expansive geographical area than ever before. Travel from Britain to Jerusalem (approximately 2,500 miles) among wealthier pilgrims was well documented, if not routine. You have to remember that this was highly anomalous in the course of settled civilization (or before for that matter), and indeed European people would never enjoy such ease of travel again until the 19th century. The Empire at its fullest extent (1st and 2nd centuries C.E.) completely enclosed both the coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea to the Northeast. Port cities were central urban nodes in the network, travel was be quick by ancient standards.

As a side note, the Roman Empire's size, along with the economy that it enabled, was certainly comparable to the contemporaneous Han Dynasty in China (206 BCE - 220 CE). Both empires spanned an area that enabled them access to (and trade of) a vast range of natural resources due to the diversity of constituent biomes and unique ecological niches that lay within the empire's borders. Although the Roman Empire is unique because of its enclosure of a sizable sea (two, actually), which as I mentioned completely accounted for the way trade routes were established and on which the [quickest] lines of communication (idea pipelines) were hence based. The land area of the Roman Empire at its height and the Han Dynasty at its height are remarkably comparable: 6,500,000 square kilometers for the Roman Empire (c. 117 CE) and 6,000,000 for the Han (c. 50 BCE). However, I unfortunately know very little about Chinese history, other than having the general sense that it is a really badass culture that had little direct contact with the Hellenistic world B.C.E with the notable exception of the trade of silk. Btw, if anyone is interested I found this cool gif on Wikipedia that shows the morphing geographic map of the Chinese Dynasties over the last couple of thousand years! Very helpful indeed.

I don't think it would be silly to say that the Roman Empire represented one of the first instances of globalization of the culture of the dear great ape.

A tribal species, mind you. As such we still remain. And the inoculation of this social animal, this creature of the tribe and the clan, into an ancient Greco-Roman city was perhaps even more antithetical to our evolutionary programming than is habitation of the urban built environment today. The population density of Antioch in Syria, for example, is estimated to have been over 150 inhabitants per acre. That is within a fortified city a few square miles in size, with not much vertical development (20 meters at the very highest). Moreover, much of the area of ancient cities (as much as 30%) was taken up by civic buildings and structures, like stadiums, amphitheaters and temples, that were not inhabited. Shit was crowded!

It was in this ecology - that of the Greco-Roman city, that Christianity—that curious, viral compendium of ideas, the "religion" that would come to define all religions—was born. It was a cult of the urban underground.

Christianity was a new beast in the ecology of the ancient Mediterranean world because it was a sacred cosmology that quickly became based on, and fully comprised of, ideas and philosophy, not ritual, ethnicity, nationality, tribal identity or ecology (many have compared it to Buddhism in this regard, which began on the Indian subcontinent around the 5th century BCE). Indeed there were cosmological, philosophy-based religions preceding it in the ancient Near East like Zoroastrianism, but what I'm trying to get at here is the semiotic ecology from which Christianity directly emerged. There was no similar idea-based religion or philosophy of salvation seeking to universalize itself that characterized the landscape of the ancient G.R. world. Christianity quickly became "disembedded" from the Jewish cultural topography from which it had sprung—philosopher of religion Daniel Boyarin explains that it was the polemical need to distinguish the Jesus movement from encompassing traditional Rabbinical/Temple religion that constructed the idea of the "Jewish religion" in the modern sense, and even the conceptual category of "religion" itself! An interesting reference point: The word "Judaism" or Iudaismos was almost never used before the 1st century (per the historical record and all that it implies of course). In any case, it becomes very clear when studying the development of the Christian religion that as with all identity, collective or individual, the construction of Christian identity involved the concomitant construction of what it was not. And thus in the act of naming the other, the opponent, the not-us, we actually inaugurate a new phase in the evolution of that identity... a project which in many cases quickly leaves the hands of the namer and is undertaken by the group that is named (Judith Butler articulates the "violence of naming" quite well). Daniel Boyarin mentions that the followers of Jesus themselves were first called Christians in Antioch by non-Christians, and it is implied that the term was objectifying and derogatory.

The history of the initial spread of Christianity, through its legalization by Constantine in 313 for essentially imperial and military purposes, its later adoption as the official religion of the republic by Theodosius in 380, to the fascinating ways in which it fused with Germanic and Saxon culture is a very thought provoking meditation on the nature of cultural transmission. The mingling of Roman and Germanic cultures in particular, despite the common conception of Christianity "winning" over "barbarian" or "pagan" religion, subjected Christianity it to a dynamic, reciprocal morphology which trickled back to have top-down effects on the development of Catholic liturgy in particular. It made Roman Catholicism and for that matter all Protestant developments what they are today.

Part of what makes the fusion of Roman and Germanic culture so interesting (and the attempts by the ruling classes to reconcile the differing world-views) is that 4th and 5th century Germanic world could not be more different from the Roman world. Just a disclaimer, I'm going to engage in gross generalizations here, but luckily the point will still remain, as there is no question about the vast differences in values and cosmology between these "two" cultures. The very fabric of society was woven differently: the peoples living north of the Danube River were a largely clan-based, rural, often land-locked society, totally decentralized compared to Rome. They were a boreal forest-dwelling warrior-culture, to whom warfare (raiding) was a routine part of their economy and self-protection. Additionally in-group and family solidarity was high — unlike in the increasingly specialized world of the Roman city, where the symbolic systems of writing and money colonized and organized life, there existed a veritable marketplace of religious ideas and philosophies that naturally were divisive, and also Roman girls were often married as young as 12. Group solidarity in Germanic society was maintained through multiple social structures and mechanisms—the family or kin group, the local warrior-group or "company", and the relationship between each man and their Chieftain. The patronage system provided comparable (but much weaker, or not as empowering to smaller groups of people, in my opinion) social glue in Roman society, as it only operated in a vertical fashion, tying one person to a wealthier one who was in turn indebted to an aristocrat of even higher status, all the way up to the Emperor (theoretically). Although, this system was built on the proto-globalized financial structure of the empire - that is, it was concerned with the vertical flow or "trickle down" of symbolic prestige and did not incorporate mechanisms for "horizontal" group cohesion. Of course, much of this simply represents the natural differences in the valuation paradigms of "city-dwellers" that live within a very large system that naturally necessitates widely-deployed complex symbolic framework in order to function, and pastoral people who occupy loosely connected islands or pockets that are much smaller, more easily "closed" systems.

One fascinating reference point for the syncretism between Germanic and Roman cultures, and the task at hand therein, is the Heliand, an amalgamation of the four Christian gospels into a 6,000 line epic poem. It was written in Old Saxon in the 9th century and to the modern reader would perhaps be redolent of Beowulf, the famous Germanic saga from around the same time period. The Heliand is a tacit (though not overt) re-interpretation of the gospel story since the author took great care to present the story in a meta-language familiar to the cosmography and cosmology of his audience. Like Beowulf the Heliand (Old Saxon for "Savior") is the story of a great warrior, although in this case it is a warrior of peace: Christ. He is repeatedly referred to in the Heliand as "Chieftain" and has many epithets including the Champion of mankind, the Ruler's Child, the Guardian of the Land, The Land's herdsman, the Healer, and the Rescuer.
The twelve apostles are pictured as Christ's loyal band of warriors ("fighting men"), temples are referred to as shrines, the last supper and wedding at Cana take place at great mead-halls, and Christ is hanged on a tree (a "criminal tree"), to name just some of the amazing native imagery evoked by the Heliand poet. After Christ's 40 days in the desert, it is out of the "deep woods" from which he emerges - echoing the sacred ecology of the Germanic people. It is an important comment on the way environment, especially ecology, become small-scale maps of the entire cosmos, particularly in the "pre-modern" world (although the cognitive vestiges of this world-mapping I believe are very much still with us).

Runic magic also exerts its presence in the text; the author of the Heliand begins the first "song" (or verse) by explaining that sacred knowledge of "God's spells" was exclusively passed on to the four evangelists - thus it was them who were able to write and "chant" the true gospel. Here the word of God, or Christ's deeds, is also described as the "secret runes". A footnote by translator and commentator G. Ronald Murphy elucidates:

giruni. The word not only implies that the gospel is a secret mystery, but that it is of the power of the magic spells and charms written in the Runes of the Northern world. This same rich expression, giruni, will be used by the author to introduce the 'secret runes' of the Lord's Prayer.

Also alluding to runic power, the song which retells the story of the last supper is titled "The words of Christ give great powers to the bread and wine".

The Heliand is haunting and enchanting thing to read, especially I think for those with Anglo-Saxon heritage or who have grown up in a similar bioregion to that which was the setting for the Heliand. It may be one of the most beautiful texts in the Christian West.

I'm going somewhere with all this, I promise! I suppose what fascinates me in the study of the "epidemiology" of a belief system is the continual reminder that in the mechanics of idea transmission within and between cultures and the "world-view revolutions" that sometimes result, no one ever creates a new ontological category. Ever. An ontological category is a cognitive designation into which a thing or object falls, and coupled with each ontological category (I speculate) is the subject-object relation that category of thing implies (in other words: its functional relationship to the one perceiving).

If a brand new concept is created that does not "fit", even awkwardly, into a pre-existing ontological category, that idea or meme rarely survives. In the same way, nature doesn't ever create a brand new kind of organism with no evolutionary antecedent, and perhaps the closest nature comes to doing that is in the case of extreme mutations, most of which are crippling to the organism and result in its death. Ideas, too, must evolve -- and I am talking specifically about epistemological ideas—ideas constitutive of one's world-view. The question is, how much can an ontological category be stretched—or have its rules bent—before it ceases to be that category? It seems to me that concepts can be re-shaped to surprising degrees but must retain their essential categorical functionality. This is related to the idea in the cognitive science of religion of minimally-counterintuitive concepts.

"Conversion" is an illusory concept that in its more abrupt and propaganda-friendly form is merely an incredibly sped up (and also retroactively understood) paradigm shift. Even such conversion does not constitute the creation of new ontological categories, it merely fills to the brim categories that were almost so withered or atrophied as to be unknown, or replaces almost everything within an ontological category with new parts (still not creating something ex nihilo). "Conversion" never happens en masse on a phenomenological level, but rather it takes on the same pattern as scientific revolution as outlined by Thomas Kuhn (although some tellers of history with theological agendas would have us believe the former). As one of my classmates said of colonial religions that often spread initially forcibly throughout new cultures, Christianity is often "as wide as the sea but only an inch deep".

Christian ideas, particularly with regard to the persons of Christ and Mary, have been re-made century after century— their nature and character at any given time, in any given "text", simply the current manifestation of the cognitive history of an entire ontological category. Their relationships with or relations to human devotees are re-conceptualized and I am convinced are as numerous as are ecological niches throughout the world. This is no coincidence, as sacred presence (if not "religion") is an ecological category - even in the urban landscape where the "ecology" is a concrete, geometric, mostly inorganic one. That environment too creates its own God, creates its own unique definition of the sacred. The Christianization of the warrior-God Odin or Woden (and also to a lesser extent the Saxonization of Christ) merely represents one of the first most monumental acheivements in the history of globalization: the fusion of two very different concepts that shared an ontological category—or if you like the mutation of the Christ meme, resulting in it emerging more 'virulent' and successful. This is why its important to study religion, and why it can't just be ignored or deemed a 'cognitive delusion'. That charge misses the mark. The history and morphology of the idea of what is sacred form a snaking path through the complicated, messy story of the homo sapien: and every link in the chain is like a crystal ball at each vertex of Indra's net: simultaneously reflecting the entire encompassing world at that instant and also condensing that same world into a shimmering semiotic amulet, a sigil whose footnote is a view of the entire universe from a very specific place within it.

Was at Occupy Los Angeles today, in solidarity.

Today was a historic day. I can't even quite comprehend the magnitude of what is going on right now in the world. If nothing else, people are realizing their power.... they are realizing the truth that power comes from everywhere, and it can never be given, only taken.

I come home tonight with a renewed resolve to persevere on the mission to walk the line between scholarship and activism - to be an ambiguous mystic, straddling those two words, refusing to be confined by either one. Unfortunately I'm learning the system is configured to prevent exactly that. Fellow academics: Postmodern thought is a tool to be wielded very carefully, for as John Zerzan warns, after the human subject is completely obliterated and designated as a product of history, “who or what is left to achieve a liberation, or is that just one more pipe dream?” No, it’s not a pipe dream.

Us queers and freeqs within the academy shall not let postmodern rhetoric get out of hand. It shall not replicate like a virus, colonizing all of our thoughts, even our thoughts about ourSELVES. That’s what the corporate powers that fund university research are hoping will happen to the humanities — weakening them even more than they already have been. Rein it in. Postmodern thought has allowed many great insights to be established within the great Conversation: And yes, there are many truths, and yes, everything should be examined in context, and per its situadedness - but ecology and its related fields are just as good a framework for that ethic.

Just don’t take it to the point where YOU are the “subject” that is destroyed.

Don’t let universities work for the corporate state — recognize that many of them already are and consciously make the choice to resist — don’t be afraid of living in this world and advocating for social change.

To paraphrase part of Ghandi's philosophy: Knowledge without character, and science (including social science) without humanity... are some of the greatest dangers to human virtue.

A series on growing up as a queer mystic: Part one

This forthcoming content will be far more personal than is the norm for this blog, but I've realized I have to be open to this blog evolving as I do. The last two years have been rough personally for me, and I'm finally in a place where I feel like I can safely share some of the "stuff" that was really congesting my heart and soul during that time. I've lagged a bit with this blog during that time, and I deeply miss the celebration of life and ideas that this blog used to allow me on a more regular basis. So here goes attempting to integrate parts of myself that have been more compartmentalized in the past: I’m going to write a little series of stories about growing up/coming of age “queer”, which will help elucidate what “queer” means to me. A few weeks ago I journaled about this a lot and was able to see a lot of my history in a new way. Part of this clarity has come with moving across the country from where I grew up, cliche as that is. So I’m going to transcribe the story so far here and break it up into several posts. Enjoy, and thank you all for reading! Peace.
***
In high school and for much of college I lacked motivation, and also self respect. I had no vision of my future—particularly of my future self. Would I grow up to be a man or a woman? It was to me an obvious question (though not an obvious answer) because I really felt like neither girl nor boy. Perhaps boy more than girl, but my body (especially increasingly after puberty) certainly did not match that vision. So I felt ashamed because secretly I would entertain what I saw as a delusion… I saw my cross-gender identification as childish and fantastical. Thus at low points later in my life I felt a strange, unexplainable revulsion at daydreaming and unabashed use of the imagination. I think right before I found the language to describe how I felt, it was the worst. And I love imagination, it is the birthplace of magic and so central to our humanity… but I had developed a love/hate relationship with it, and something had to give…
I finally finished college. It barely seemed like a triumph, because although I’d had some amazingly formative experiences in the realm of the intellect, I did not have much to show for emotional development. During semesters I took off from school, it actually felt good to prolong the inevitable—that college would end and I would be thrust into the adult world, still feeling like a child—perhaps an intellectually intelligent one, but that hardly mattered, I realized. I don’t even know how much I subscribed to the idea that the end of college marks some kind of entry into a world more “real” than any other. But the residue from that myth, created like a cloud in the cultural ether, still weighed on me, and caused me to be afraid.
It ended up that I took to academia. Other than being fulfilling and stimulating mentally and thus (for me) socially, I took great comfort in the almost monastic, disembodied ritual of it. At my best, I thrive there, and at worst, perhaps hide from the world of people, consumerism, popular media and thus… gender roles.
Also there was a strange solidarity to be found in the scholarly realm. Not queer or transgender per se (for, I admit with some regret that befriending people who I shared that with was “not my thing” at the time—I was confused about where I belonged, to say the least). Rather, the solidarity I found there was one that tacitly implied some sort of outcast or “freak” self-identification on the part of us scholars. I repeat those epithets of course in their empowered, liberatory forms. Us queers-of-the-mind… we studied human culture, the human body and the human condition, and somehow this discipline seemed to help many of us cope with our own feelings of alienation from that mysterious subject… that confusing and messy text: humanity.
Academia is a sort of ascetic discipline. Especially grad school and especially the humanities… because it’s text, text, text all the time, that we ingest, and digest, and excrete. We bleed text, like the ancient desert father of Christianity did with respect to scripture. Athletes of the mind… or the soul, or your disembodied self of choice.
To be clear, this is no criticism of academia—far from it! Indeed I think that some semblance of these feelings are what drives scholarship and research forward. Maybe its simply “nerd solidarity”, but whatever it was, it helped me feel like I fit in somewhere.
Gradually I’ve learned how people leverage that positionality in as healthy a way as they can, and use that focus on “anything but the self” to help solve some of the world’s greatest mysteries and problems.
These people are scholars, professors, teachers, and doctors, to name some. High-level nerds, geeks and warlocks-of-the-word (and also not to forget the lifelong scholars—the "freelance gnostics" (term coined by Erik Davis) who work outside of the institution of academia, and these people are often the most graceful hackers and scientists-artists of all). Anyhow, I welcomed the opportunity to lose myself in the annals of history and anthropology, as if I was an alien from another planet, studying homo sapiens and their semiotic legacy.
If I didn’t have this academic rubric that concentrated my focus and took it away from myself, it seemed I would slip away on a cloud of fantasy, obsessing about things I felt I couldn’t change.
Scholarship —more precisely Christian history and the history of asceticism— is my magic wand. Magical items are just things that concentrate the attention, like light through a prismatic crystal, and beam it toward something specific.
I guess what connects me to the humans who founded mystical and ascetic theology thousands of years ago is this: We develop armaments of the mind, and they keep demons away. Define demons however you wish, but the method is tried and true, and in a world where many say that “God is dead”, it’s still working for me.
How is my quest for knowledge so different from those of the ancient past, who lived before universities existed? The impulse is the same…it is the human semiotic drive, and no one can escape its allure, not atheists, nuclear physicists, computer programmers, naturalists, nor people of faith. The mystery of the symbol is far too powerful. As I like to say, in the beginning was the Sign…and the sign was…
(To be continued…)

Survival Trip (Part 1) and a foreword about environmentalism

The first day of our wilderness survival trip (Saturday the 11th of June), we were to meet at the parking lot of the school at 7 AM, whereupon our three instructors would take us by car to an undisclosed location. This would be the location of our 4-night/5 day survival trip, for which we’d undergo “pocket checks” to make sure we weren’t bringing anything but the clothes we were wearing. Yes, this is actually what we signed up for!
Of course, having known “the rules” in advance, we were able to strategize a little bit by wearing several layers, top and bottom, including (hopefully) rain gear. Rain gear—along with the synthetic clothes some of us were wearing—are not admittedly neolithic, but this was at the same time quite a bit closer to that reality than many of us had ever gotten. We were all very, very pumped.
We ended up experiencing one of the wettest and coldest trips that our instructors had sent out (although we were only the third such group) — but in the end, the rewards only multiplied in the face of such adversity. Over the next few posts I’ll try to recount the highlights of the trip — which will tie in to the class of which it was a part, and in turn the larger social movement of re-skilling and stewarding ancient living skills of which that class is a part…
We were incredibly lucky to be a group of 7 very independent, upbeat people who were all really motivated to learn these skills. Together we took a 9 month course in which we learned the foundations of wilderness survival—including but not limited to what was needed for a “successful” 4 night survival trip in June in Vermont (a time of year where Mother Earth would be predictably generous—within a certain range of possibility, of course). Successful here means (true to the genre), simply surviving, not necessarily thriving (but trying to!) We met approximately one weekend a month, with a longer meeting in the beginning, and lots of homework in between, on everything from primitive hunting weapons (throwing mostly) to plant identification, to martial-artist-like perception and awareness training. It was hard to keep up with the homework, especially because of the contrast between the group solidarity and isolation from the civilized world we enjoyed during our weekends—very conducive to focused study and practice—and the clock-and-work driven life that we inevitably led plugged into the grid of the modern world. The latter, I came to realize, introduced its own brand of loneliness and isolation. In the living forest, with a few present and good-hearted people, or even no other humans at all, one can somehow never feel lonely or bored… especially when you have a task at hand, for which out of necessity you must in some way or other merge with your environment.
Over the year we studied, constructed and slept in several different forms of primitive shelter for short-term (or emergency) use, including tight little burrow-like debris huts that slept one person, quincys (snow shelters), and the teepee-style group shelter that would most likely be our home on the survival trip (unless unforeseen circumstances forced us to go with a quicker, less optimal structure). One of the core relationships we cultivated as a group and as individuals was with fire—preparing the way for it, making it, stewarding it and keeping it alive to cook for us and boil us water. In some ways primitive fire seemed to be the backbone of our training, as it is quite literally the hearth that makes a home, however temporary that home may be…
We mainly focused on two methods of firemaking: Bow drill and hand drill. Bow drill consists of five parts, hand drill of only two, but bow drill is significantly easier to get a coal if all the parts are tweaked right; the success of hand drill is more contingent on individual skill. Thus emphasis was placed on the former (although by myself I have been stoked to get a lot of great practice in with hand drill — and there is nothing like starting a fire that will spit roast an animal for your whole family just using your hands and two sticks!), and as a group we graduated through many challenges throughout the class whereupon we would be asked to procure a bow drill kit and make a fire using less and less modern amenities (like a knife or a modern string for the bow), and with more and more parts for the kit sourced on-demand from the woods, where you have to work more with what the forest gives you and things might be wet or partially rotten. Finally, in a few hours we could make an entire kit, get a coal and turn it into a fire using no modern technology at all — just local stone that we knapped into something approximating a blade.
We also learned water-skills — finding springs, making primitive filters with charcoal, moss and sand to eradicate chemical contaminants as well as of course boiling, which for us was done by carefully skinning the bark of young white pines to make origami-like watertight vessels. In these vessels we would boil water by transporting glowing-hot rocks from our fire, using a green branch as tongs (on the survival trip I found a cow or moose scapula that worked like a dream!) If you get enough large rocks that are hot enough, you can boil almost a quart of water in like three minutes. Neolithic technology can literally can beat my MSR backpacking stove!
10,000 years ago getting water would have been as simple as finding a clear-looking stream. Now, because of pollution and animal agriculture, very little surface water is safe to drink, and in a true survival situation the last thing you want is diarrhea. Like, really. Springs that bring water to the surface from deep aquifers are the only reliable sources of clean water, where in some cases the water bubbling up has not seen the sun in a thousand years. That there is one of the most valuable things I know of - ancient water.
Just an aside that is worth mentioning: You won’t see me demonize “civilization” or the like in these pages, or anywhere where I express my experiences as an earthling discovering the possibilities and limits of what it is to be human. I may be an anarcho-primitivist of sorts, but I don’t hate modernity or modern technology, and I don’t blame individual people—historical or living—for “not being connected to nature” or whatever, and I don’t think very highly of deep ecology or any environmentalist philosophy where humans are considered a “cancer” on this planet. I think we are all connected to something and it is our intense propensity for connection—through many modalities both sensuous and subtle—that makes us both experience suffering and joy, separation and oneness. When I’m at school working on a big term paper, my human nature allows me to be almost completely connected within a very tightly-wound ecology consisting of my computer, desk, a stack of books and a word document… so much that for a time my whole world is made up of those things; mantras of academic text flow through my mind at random, and what I sense and perceive is often filtered on some level through the creative work going on within me. The sensory “deprivation” of a white-walled room takes the experience to new, often unexamined heights of mental trance.
It is this same capacity for connection that can connect us to the earth and has evolved to sustain our life and allow us to survive. As humans in today’s world, our environments can be so radically different from one place or culture to another that it is hard to grasp that the manner in which we merge with our surroundings always has the same mechanism. The forest, unlike a classroom, is exceedingly multi-dimensional, extending in all directions; moreover almost everything you look at is alive! The forest sucks your consciousness into it, beckons your awareness to expand into its every crevice, whereas being isolated in a small, geometric man-made chamber can do the opposite: keep your awareness inside of you. This isn’t a bad thing, because sometimes it might be necessary to get a job done. But it behooves us to know about this way of the mind - this respiration of consciousness, so that we may navigate our way on this undulating sea, avoiding storms and making use of winds and waves. The type and quality of the connection merely shifts with our attention and focus — or lack thereof. We have an amazing ability to connect with and synergize with many different types of complex dynamical systems. Whether the yields of such symbioses are “good” or “bad” is not up to me to judge. What I see is evidence of potential.
Hate and cynicism (and most emotions) are not the ways in which I like to approach the world in which I live. Mostly the things I feel about the world are curiosity, and sometimes a kind of sadness that actually feels a lot like love… I’ve thought a lot about that ineffable feeling, in myself, in others and in history, and one way I understand it for myself is that it is the feeling of beauty and harmony imprinting itself on our neural and limbic systems. It is sad because it is very often fleeting, and even the feeling itself quickly becomes indistinguishable from its own shadow. I digress, but to return to my original point: As an anarcho-primitivist (but also a humanist and believer in social ecology) Love for natural ecologies, animals and wildness does not create inversely proportional hate for “civilization”… because “nature” and “culture” are not opposites (and neither are hate and love for that matter). I think that dichotomy, like many we create, is worth deconstructing.
Stay tuned … there’s so much more to tell, and although my wilderness survival class is now over, in the institutional sense, the warrior’s journey has really just begun.

Similar posts:

My Vision Quest and some Notes on the Nature of Anarcho-Primitivist [Trance]endence
Jedi Training in the Hundred-Acre Wood

My survival ceremony and some notes on the nature of anarcho-primitivist trancendence

Seems like the dog days of summer have come early this year, because the demons have been loosed on my psyche with a special force as of late.
In less than a month, I move across the country, and in the meantime (tomorrow, actually) is a 5 day survival trip that I’m embarking upon with 6 other people with whom I’ve been training in wilderness survival/primitive skills for 9 months at ROOTS School. On the trip, we will be “set loose” in an unknown (to us, not to the instructors) woodland (rich northern hardwood, I’m assuming) and bring nothing with us but the clothes we are wearing for 4 night and nearly 5 days. We will build a primitive shelter, collect and boil water, make fire, and make primitive traps and weapons using no metal knives, only local stone that we find on site. No matches either, only completely neolithic methods of starting fire. Nearly all of the aspects of our survival trip we’ve already had some sort of preliminary or prototypical run-through of, so all that remains are the meteorological variables of Mother Nature, and perhaps our attitudes, as those are where all this creation must come from.
I signed up for the course at ROOTS because I knew I needed a space this past year where I, alone, could galvanize my power as a human being, an earthling — in a space beyond gender. That space is the woods. This is my space where I get in touch with my sacred identity. It is different from my “social” gender identity, or what I present to the world of people, to culture. In the woods I can connect with something that represents the blending of the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine. Mother Earth is also a father, and this parent-of-all is the stage on which all masculine and feminine energy collides and interacts. But the dualism of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, while very fundamental, is still more superficial than the most primary coupling of all. This is the energy of “predator” and “prey”; the eater and that that is eaten. This relationship is fractal, scale-invariant— it exists on all levels where there is life. And it even exists beneath biotic life — in chemical interaction, where some atoms have electrical control over others, and beyond life — in the birth and death of stars.
My seeking to look this binary-star of BIRTH/DEATH in the eye is not new. I have sought this, in many forms, since almost the beginning of puberty. For it was when I started to evolve sexually, that I began to want to connect — not just with HUMANS, but with ALL OF LIFE, in the tantric sense. Although of course, I haven’t always been able to articulate it like that.
**Some notes to keep in mind on this voyage of mine**
Becoming animal doesn’t mean putting on a new set of clothes, it means letting the earth put you on as her clothes.
Every once in a while, accepting your duty as part of the living body of the earth and relinquishing ‘the game’ of civilized life is, ironically, the only way to feel completely free. Completely “independent”. I put that word in quotations because, as the Zapatistas say, the only way to truly find one’s identity is through the collective, NOT through the individual alone, wandering aimlessly through a jungle of free markets.
The collective where you find your sacred mirror—a sustainable and empowering way to see yourself—doesn’t have to be a collective of humans either… it can be a collective of plants and animals… an ecosystem. Because you are a human, but you are also an animal, and so you can find community anywhere on this earth where there is life. It can be any collective of things that live and breathe, and exist in synergistic interdependence. Find a place that has that, and hang there for a while. Go hunting — not to kill things, but just to see how deep your awareness can go into the natural world. Go hunting for things that can absorb your entire being within them.
The promise of ‘independence’ made to us by neoliberalism… that is an illusion.
There are big and little ways to do this—to “let the earth put you on as her clothes”… to let her pick you up, like a hunter picks up a bow and arrow, and draw you, make you ready. You don’t have to run away to Alaska with no experience like that kid in “Into the Wild”… although, props to him — that kid had heart.
It’s like permaculture. You can do it on any scale. On 200 acres, or in a few square feet in your kitchen. I’ve done it by volunteering on a farm or with a trail crew. Apprenticing on farms for a summer. Learning to work with animals, herd sheep and drive draft horses. Enduring all the pain of not being able to control mother nature. Finally accepting it. Hiking - for a day or for twelve days. Hiding in the woods. Sitting in the woods for an hour without moving. Blindfolding myself and finding my way back somewhere. Running or rock climbing until I feel like I have a new body, running on spiritual energy. And I want more — I want so much more. I have hardly done anything. Sometimes it feels like that.
I’m still trying to figure out how to do this, in little ways, each day.
Because I don’t want the lies and bullshit in this culture to build up so much that one day I just run away to the Tundra. I’ve got to be more emotionally responsible than that. We all do.
***
A mere two weeks after I come out of the backcountry, I’ll be driving across the country to Claremont, CA (Eastern LA) to tackle the next adventure: graduate school.
Let the Games Begin, and let the Dark Mother guide me... Peace.