The real challenge to “Western” (Abramic) religion did not come through theology influenced by math or morality. It was the mountains that did it. That’s a metonymy (using a part to stand for a whole) a metonymy that is not just partial but also a shift in focus that led to an obsession with control and dominance, the prioritizing of logic and adversarial reasoning (legal), the use of written language rather than spoken language, and the drawing of boundaries superimposed on natural phenomena.
The bold raw confrontation with nature which is presented where I live on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains challenges all that. Unless it is screened by an aesthetic attitude (“Oh, how beautiful!”) or an itch to summit, it reduces human efforts like settlements and their crops down to dots on a landscape that includes vast sky.
The study of geology began the empowerment of sciences that previously had been reduced to Just-So stories. More even than human experience in awe of the mighty forces of what turned out to be plate tectonics, the evidence of fossils, sedimentation, and earthquakes told us the world was a totality of evolving, constantly displacing, interactional events that reduced us to incidental, even if we named an aeon after ourselves, the anthropocene that claims to have profoundly altered the planet. You think a huge algae bloom, a few degrees of warming, or even an asteroid impact is “profound”? It only is to ourselves and other life forms, and not to all of the latter. The planet has existed through far more challenges. But we won’t.
Survivors of the Twisp fire deaths.
At the moment we here are confronting not the burning bush of the Bible, but the burning mountain. It’s not the flames, it’s the smoke that brings the message. A fire whirl, a cyclone of flames, is very impressive, but not so ominous as smoke. At least last evening that’s the way it seemed. I parked at the western edge of town for a while to watch the progress of a great dark murk of a sky-wide cloud, mostly smoke, moving onto the prairie, an accumulation of what they tell us was the smoke from the Twisp fires that killed four firefighters, added to the Glacier-area fires.
Often at sundown whatever clouds there are will lift up over the mountain ridge line and let the setting sun shoot through. If I’m reading in my front room, it will suddenly be in my eyes, coming level through my west windows. Last night that strip of clear sky was pale blue satin with just a faint hint of the mountains. After dark that clarity would increase in a great curve we call a Chinook Arch and a cold wind would shake us hard for an hour or so. Since my house hunkers among trees, that means occasional smacking blows from dead limbs falling. There are a lot of them this year because of the harsh winter.
These are phenomena, experiences, which can then be explored and calibrated and compared by rationality, measurements, graphs and comparisons. We were having an “average” fire season: 2,364 fires burned 243,168 acres. (Starting June 1 and referring to a region that includes Idaho and Montana.) In 2012 those numbers were 3,433 burning 1.5 million acres — that’s the record. Now we appear to be approaching those numbers.
Undefined or addressed are things like mosaic fires, nothing to do with Moses, but wandering combustion that takes patterns through the forest according to local subtleties like dampness or density, reacting differently through old burns than through new growth.
Fires are named for their locations and as small fires kindle and then merge, the names capriciously make them seem like more or different when they are contiguous. Almost as capricious are the names of places, which might be indigenous or more likely some local nickname that got onto a map, often based on stigmatized people (because they stand out) or repetitions of nature (Willow Creek, Deer Creek, Sweetgrass Hills), but what the heck is a “twisp”?
Beetle-killed trees.
There are still beetle-killed stands. Depending on maturity and altitude, some of this mosaic burn will regrow easily because the seeds are there. The worst is fire so hot that it removes even duff and peat. Of course, the beetles die, too.
Australians know a lot, since their continent has been founded on cyclical sweeps of conflagration shaping vegetation and a climate that is largely dry heat. It does not rain often. In some places, never. Can you call it a drought if it’s always like that? For the displaced English, that rainy place, there was a lot to learn. It was hard to accept wild fire.
Science tells us that we are creatures of oxygen, which was only a feature of the planetary air after zillions of years of vegetation using up carbon dioxide, thus creating a poisonous (to some) atmosphere based on oxygen, a volatile element that became the basis of our cell-life, a quiet combustion supported by our red blood cells that carry it through our bodies once our lung alveoli have taken oxygen from the atmosphere to the core of our bodies so the blood system can carry it through the liquid vessels of our flesh.
Some say "The Thing" is an AIDS parable, but there are several versions.
Arness was the "Thing" in the first one, 1951.
Recently in films there have been a lot of images of fire, like people on fire. One of the early attempts to make this real-seeming was filmed in Cut Bank. James Arness in an asbestos suit was supposed to be “the Thing” from outer space. (Fire was supposedly the only thing that would kill it.) He was actually on fire. Now there is a computer program that makes things seem engulfed. The Cinematheque and Smash Street Boys love it and soon their vids showed flaming skateboards and bicycles.
What is this attraction? "The Burning Man, “a weeklong communal art installation event in which participants arrive with everything they need to survive for the duration” attracted nearly 66,000 people last year.
Spring-boarding off the Celtic “pagan” ceremony of scapegoating one person to protect the rest, this tangle of events is experience-based, pre-theological. This year it was Stinking Biting Bugs that plagued them. “Where did they come from?” asked everyone. Probably from THEM, the attenders. And the bugs, several species, would be impossible to confine to a wicker cage for burning. When humans get hypnotized by One Big Thing, they forget the power of a zillion little things. God is a swarm.
That is, one’s deity is always drawn from human experience, maybe one’s own and maybe that of a tribe. I was talking to a Methodist minister, casually, and said something about God as an abstract concept, maybe. You know, like "the Force." He was aghast and blurted, “If I thought God wasn’t a loving person, just like a human being, I would die.”
This morning in Glacier National Park
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