Conventionally, the way ideas spread is by the status quo being challenged by opposition. The result can be binary lockdown of ideas — one for and one against — in the same dimension. Soon emotion rises in an effort to break the deadlock and two extreme positions are taken in the same effort. Neither works, mostly because both prevent any truly new thought or evidence.
Historically in Europe, a new distinction has quickly frozen into an assumption of fact, so that inventing the concept of the secular to keep “religion” from interfering with science, soon seems real as well as forcing religion to define itself as being against science.
The same happens with personal ideas like marriage, so that it gets frozen into narrow definition — one man and one woman reacting to a supernatural force endorsed by religion — and ignores the obvious fact that people of all sexes, ages and origins form partnerships that may include more than a pair and may or may not involve children. Then as religion weakens, the state takes over some of the record-keeping and order making. More religious weakening and the supernatural part falls away from the practical and the wedding commitment is just a good chance for a party. The ethical and emotional commitment get hardened into criminal law.
We are very much in this position in the world right now, slightly different in different countries as the pandemic plays out in a new and terrifying way, especially in the US political deadlock between very rich and immoral people and the rest of us. Our thinking is deformed, our emotions are inchoate, our lives are destroyed.
How do we get out of this? We are like antlered males who get locked together by their own horns. Where is the inspiration for new ways when this kind of head-butting goes back thousands of years?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s0LTDhqe5A
Unexpectedly, a film offers a leap of imagination. “My Octopus Teacher” is streaming on Netflix, the story of a middle-aged South African man, Craig Foster, who had returned to a seaside place where he grew up and who free dives in a small protected kelp forest, where “trees” of seaweed create a small clearing in the turbulent sea. He does this small, repetitive, observant, nearby thing daily with no wet suit or oxygen tanks — just a snorkel and a mind.
In time he becomes fascinated by a small octopus, nothing special, but a being that developed from the branch that historically evolved as a circle rather than a binary divided by a backbone. With eight tentacles rather than arms and legs but two eyes like a human, it is described as a “liquid animal.” Its complex and risky environment is haunted by “pajama sharks,” a small but voracious kind that is striped as pajamas were and some convict suits still are.
Though the life of an octopus is only about a year which ends in physical surrender in the creation of a storm of tiny replicas, the little beast — with a brain contained in its tentacles as much as its “head” — the octo knows a lot of evasions but forms something like affection for the safe and familiar — like this diver.
So what do we learn? First of all, I assure you with this movie as evidence, that there is a strong and near-universal community of people relating to nature in order to rethink humans. Bioneers is one example. Nautilus is another. They are whole categories on film streaming sites, including those who only offer short films and long essays, like Aeon.
In the Eighties I used to visit the professional group of wildlife scientists who studied bears, wolves and cougars near Glacier Park. They were secretive, vigorous, and innovative — willing to risk their lives but needing secrecy to keep out the madmen. I’m saying these groups are often quietly present without anyone knowing, in particular the media. Politicians don’t recognize them when they’re looking right at them. They only know their offices and town cars. They have become predators themselves.
Our overestimation of math and hard science has kept us from “free diving” in the actual world quite apart from the sea. Human thought is based on metaphors manipulating sensory information from the world as well as monitoring what is in our body as it reacts. Though we don’t have tentacles, we have “thinking” in our guts and limbs, both memories and impulses, conscious and unconscious. How to ride a bike, how to sneeze, how to trust people, how to pretend to be an octopus and see the world the way they see it.
It’s an ancient definition of the obligation of a human being that we should “praise God and enjoy creation.” God, of course, is a metonymy, a metaphor for whatever it is that pushes Time and Fate into new patterns. Creation is always limited by our sensory lives plus what technology we devise, even something as simple as a snorkel, but art in the form of edited video lets us exceed our limits to love a liquid animal in a kelp forest. (Pippa Erlich and James Reed helped form this final footage.)
Foster is particularly interested in “tracking” which he learned about in quite a different African environment. He did indeed learn to “track” the impressions of the many small creatures in the sea. In the past he had learned when he had “made an acclaimed documentary about the Kalahari bushmen’s tracking abilities and their intrinsic connection to the world around them called The Great Dance.”
https://www.distractify.com/p/craig-foster-my-octopus-teacher
Maybe when people ask us what religion or political party we belong to, we should say that we are “great dancers” to different musics. Our bodies are dictated by our skeletons, but our minds are as liquid as an octopus and can travel through all seas on the internet, free diving in the possibilities.
No comments:
Post a Comment