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By Root 2297 0

be ashamed of the animality of the self, which to the fully civilized means the “filth” of the self. All of this destroys any possibil- ity of communication or entering into communion with any- one but other civilized humans. If we listen to the creatures and to the elements, and even to our bodies, we are then primi- tive, backwards. So we learn very early to put that away. We learn to despise ourselves and to feel ashamed of our bodies, to hate the dirt and to hate everything about us, because we’re human, which means we’re humus: they come from the same Latin root: earth and dirt. But self-loathing is a difficult thing to acknowledge—maybe the most difficult—so all those char- acteristics we must loathe if we are to be civilized, if we are to dominate, get dumped into others who bear the shame and who end up feeling dirty.

Jane Caputi 118

I THINK FOR THE MOST PART IT’S NOT ONLY ABUSERS WHO DON’T change. Most of us don’t. Sure, sometimes somebody or another may have an epiphany, like Saul of Tarsus did in the Bible. But let’s be honest about that one, too: after he saw the light of God and got knocked off his ass, he may have changed his name to Paul, but he was still a domineering asshole. It’s just that now instead of persecuting Christians he used Christianity as a vessel for his pre-existing rigidity, making certain the reasonably new religion mirrored his hierarchical perception of the world.

Most often, change, at least on a social level, occurs the way Max Planck described it: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”119 Years ago I read Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. It’s a long book, from which I really remember only one image. I think Spengler would be pleased at which one. A culture is like a plant growing in a particular soil. When the soil is exhausted—presuming a closed system (i.e., the soil isn’t being replenished)—the plant dies. Cultures—or at least historical (as opposed to cyclical) cultures—are the same. The Roman Empire exhausted its possibilities (both physical, in terms of resources, and psychic or spiritual), then hung on decadent—I mean this in its deeper sense of decaying, although the meaning having to do with debauchery works, too—for a thousand years. Other empires are the same. The British Empire. The American Empire. Civilization itself has continued to grow by expanding the zone from which it takes resources. The plant has gotten pretty big, but at the cost of a lot of dead soil.

I think the exhausted soil metaphor works for individuals, too: they don’t generally change until they’ve exhausted the possibilities of their previous way of being.

Last year I received an email from a woman who said that my work had saved her life. She had many times tried to kill herself, and was contemplating suicide again when she came across a passage in my work describing part of the reason this culture’s death urge manifests the way it does, in the widespread killing of humans and nonhumans, and in the killing of the planet. This death urge is partly a simple desire to die to this way of living that does not serve us well, but because we in this culture have forgotten that the spiritual exists, and have devalued the metaphorical, we do not understand that this death does not have to be physical, but could be transformative. Dying to one way of being so you can be reborn transformed is the oldest metaphor in the world, one the world is built on. But we forget, and so we build daisy-cutters and depleted-uranium shells, and we kill without ceasing. The woman said her own death urge might not have to manifest in the taking of her own life. Maybe she just wanted to transform. We corresponded a bit, she asked if we could take a walk when she was passing through town, and I agreed. It was a good walk, through meadows of thick sharp-edged grasses perfect for ground-nesting birds, into a sandy-soiled scrub pine forest near the ocean,