CONSOLING THE WINDIGO

Brace yourself.  This is a Sunday sermon.

When I listen to the email and listserv issues and blogs and e-articles, etc., I hear inconsolability -- the belief that there is no comfort or relief for loss and suffering.  The only palliative seems to be domesticity but it is never enough.  Life is acquisition, remodeling, fortification.  Dominated by prescriptive advertising.  This is pretty understandable when people are raising children, which is much of the point of domesticity. -- making a nest for ducklings.  I remember a hippie friend who wasn’t afraid of anyone until she had a baby and shocked herself with her sudden fear of street people rooting in dumpsters.

But I don’t understand the constant seeking out of trouble to watch, the active compiling of disasters around the world (some human and others geological), the hunger for photos of explosions and dead bodies, the greed for the details of rape and torture -- all of it replicated as realistically as possible in CGI movies about Zombies or CSI shows about murder.  It’s like the old Calvinist fascination with hell, which still continues in some quarters.  I think it comes from a denial of the dark side, an effort to encapsulate it as the Devil or Evil or objects of disgust so as to get it named, confined and excluded -- esp. from inside ourselves.

Timothy Morton’s thoughts about “dark ecology” seems to be partly focused on mystery -- the impossibility of a human mind big enough to encompass the universe, with the markers being black holes and “dark matter” -- and partly on the idea that the muck, infection, slime, excretion, rot and death we so reject and label (in Martha Nussbaum’s word) “disgusting” is the source of raw material and reciprocity.  That is, one bug’s rejected excretion is the next creature’s wine.  So part of the darkness is fearing the unknown and part of it is believing we are shit.

No wonder we’re inconsolable.  No wonder we think someone might try to murder us.  It’s as though we felt existence must be held open around us by our constant effort and achievement or it will close on us as though we were three dimensional figures in a two dimensional world.  Constant vigilance seems necessary but it wears us out, so we invent burglar alarms but they get triggered all the time which defeats the feeling of safety we want.  We feel ourselves in opposition to this world, superstitiously trying to be “good enough” to get to the next world which is imagined as effortless.

I think the remedy for our inconsolability is in participation and acceptance.  Easier said than done, esp. when one’s culture designates one for exclusion and stigma.  Stupid.  Gay.  Old.  Foreign.  Criminal.  Poor.  Sick.  Crippled.  Indigenous.  The trouble with religions based on books (Bible, Torah, Koran) is that there’s too much reading and not enough cultivating the gardens.  (Of course, this is my personal shortcoming so I take it seriously.)  I’m not saying we need the vegetables from the garden.  I’m saying it will do us good to get out there and dig around in the worms and compost,  Darwin’s tangled bank all mucky and weedy.  The word “HUMan” comes from humus, fertile soil.

“Dark ecology” is actually far darker than dirt.  I’ve rejected the common idea of evil for a long time, not because I don’t think there is any but because I think it is a human construct, a concept created by humans that only applies to humans both in terms of motives and in terms of consequent suffering and destruction.  The Japanese earthquake and consequent tsunami were not evil.  The nuclear reactors were the result of human evil -- failure to recognize, over-optimism, denial, false statistics and engineering.  The Japanese as a category are not evil.  The suffering is human.

The real darkness is that every creation is also destruction and it doesn’t care.  Jesus doesn’t love you.  Jesus is imaginary, only a concept.  (A good and useful one, but human-invented.)  The same with God.  We only have each other and sometimes not even that much.   But personal existence, attached to the world and each other as we get, doesn’t matter.  One winks out, another is conceived.

The curse and blessing of being human, the key inconsolability, is that we know this.  When we give up our denial and fear, we know very well that everyone dies.  All living things die.  Animal or vegetable, we go into each other as fuel and emerge as shit.  Once a person accepts that, dealing with the facts and hallucinations of our lives becomes much easier.  We only have to do as well as we can.  It will take some testing to see what that is, so we must tolerate our mistakes or it won't be a real test of boundaries, which are found by exceeding them.

We cannot comprehend the cosmos, but we can try.  We can imagine that there might be a color greener than green, but we can’t SEE it.  We can invent the premises of eternity or infinity, but we cannot perceive them.  So maybe this is the source of our fascination with evil and suffering:  trying to perceive the imperceptible.  What is the tortured person really feeling?  What is the torturer is feeling?  What makes a person able to do such things?  I would say it’s not the evil itself but the denial that such an act is evil and the refusal of the empathy that would force them to share the suffering.  

The same denial and refusal are what prevent consolation.  In our vigilance against what might kill us, we also wall out what might renew us.  This is not a new idea.  It’s in stories over and over and over from every culture.  I’ll tell you one I heard from Joseph Bruchac, a wise and generous Native American writer.  I heard it from him personally when he told it in an assembly in Browning, where most people are Blackfeet.  It was about a horrible Iroquois monster, a windigo which is a starvation cannibal embodying the struggle with winter hunger.  It was wailing and staggering across a frozen lake, looking for people to eat.  A young woman, unafraid, went to him, took his hand, and said, “Come with me, grandfather.”  She took him to her lodge and fed him hot soup.  Shrieking with the pain of it, he shrank down from his monstrous form and did indeed become just an old man again.

She was able to do this because of her confidence in what was right (feed the hungry) and her willingness to die in the effort.  People like her are doing this right now all over the world.  They are living consolation.