A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [130]
I spent most of my time those days living in the front of my Toyota pickup, sharing space with my clothes, tools, notebook, baseball mitt, pillow, and two cocker spaniels. We slept together most nights in the front, or sometimes they slept in the front while I threw my sleeping bag on the ground. One of the dogs, a female, was going blind, and the other, a male, was nearly deaf. The male, especially, never seemed to slow down. He ran this way and that, ears flying and tongue flapping. He was an eternal child on an everlasting Christmas morning, wearing PJs and running from gift to gift saying, "Oh, Mom. A basketball! I've always wanted a basketb——Ah, man! You got me a book! I love books!" Had I told him to sit in a corner, and had he heard me, I'm sure he would have run to the spot, tail wagging as if to say, "Oh, man. I've always wanted to sit in this corner. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." That's not to say he didn't have a mind of his own. Even when he heard me, he still disobeyed more often than not—one of his mottoes seemed to be "Rules are meant to be acknowledged and then ignored." Even, or especially, in ignoring my wishes he acted as he always did, exuberantly, joyously, with an abundance of life.
I can't imagine a better teacher.
Interconnection
"Our goal should be not the emulation of the ancients and their ways, but to experience for ourselves the aspects of human existence out of which arose those ancient forms which when we see them elicit such a feeling of . . . longing. Otherwise the modern will remain forever superficial while the real will remain ancient, far away, and therefore, outside of ourselves." Mr. Aoki
A FEW YEARS AGO I had the opportunity to ask Grey Reynolds, second-in-command of the Forest Service, "If we discover that industrial forestry is incompatible with biodiversity, what then?" The question was of course absurd: I mentioned it that day to a high school jumper I was coaching, who said: "What a stupid question! Everyone knows they're incompatible." Reynolds' non-answer that evening unintentionally validated the teen's response: "What do you want us to do, live in mud huts?"
Pointing out that the needs of mass production are counter to the requirements of a good culture and incompatible with long-term survival doesn't mean I don't like hot showers, baseball, good books, or Beethoven. I wish that the items we produce—the good ones, at least—were separable from the larger processes: I wish we could have hot showers without building dams and nuclear power plants.
On some level of course that is possible. It wouldn't take long to rig up a system to heat water on my woodstove, then pour it into a reservoir that releases water over my head when I pull a cord. But where do I get the metal and glass for the woodstove? Where do I get the cord, or the reservoir? Where do I get the wood? We seem to have painted ourselves into a corner.
As Lewis Mumford observed, our choices have been grossly limited: "On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by going with its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man's vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine's meaningless existence." All is not lost, though, as he also remarked: "But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out."
I think he's a bit optimistic. Although it's as possible as it is imperative to throw off the myth of the machine, it's not quite so simple to throw off the machine itself. The modern economy is a complicated web, sticky in every thread, and to disentangle oneself personally is difficult, requiring knowledge (much of it long lost), forethought, effort, vigilance,