Beautifully Broken Issue #27: Animal Identity Destroys The World
Beautifully Broken Issue #27: Animal Identity Destroys The World
IDEAS, ART & WISDOM TO REPAIR OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD
Happy Saturday! Welcome to Beautifully Broken Issue 27: Animal Identity
IDEAS: Animal Identity Destroys The World
We are animals: organs, senses, survival instinct, mating instinct, fight or flight. What kind of animals? As much as we like to use words like “freedom” and “individuality”, we are not the solitary and noble snow leopard who only interacts with others of its species when mating or raising their young. We are pack animals.
Few of us are happy in total isolation, cut off from the group and the environment of convenience that we’ve created for ourselves (“No man is an island,” said Elizabethan poet and preacher John Donne in 1624).
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
We put the bower bird, who builds an intricate nest to entice his mate to shame—we’ll collectively destroy the whole world over time in order to build an environment of perfect convenience right now.
Because we are pack animals, human problems are group problems, the problems of our tribe. As members of a tribe we have a responsibility to that tribe. It starts with a tribe of two, a couple. If they raise children the tribe expands to a family who then rely on the structure and systems of a community to help them survive and raise their children. Now we are part of a village tribe. That village belongs to a state or nation who provide services and defense in exchange for a share in our productivity (taxes). We are now part of a large collective, a national tribe. We think of ourselves in this context as American, French, British, Turkish, etc…At every point along the road of expanding tribal identity there are people looking to take advantage and profit from the way we think about ourselves (look at how expensive it is just to exist as an individual worker and pay for rent and food, let alone the cost of a wedding is, how expensive it is to raise children, healthcare costs, taxation, etc…this is what we give up in exchange for living a more simple life closer to nature without so many conveniences and one way to encourage us to not think about whether this is a good deal or not is to encourage us to focus instead on the different areas of identity: who are you within the crazy nesting game that we’ve made for ourselves? Are you part of this tribe or that tribe? Choose please and we can tell you how to think, what to feel, who your enemies are, so that you never think about why you’re playing the game at all.
We are animals, but animals with one difference (two if you count the opposable thumb): we have a self-reflecting consciousness, we can talk to ourselves in our head (thought). This is our greatest super power (because we can invent great things, have great ideas, and our greatest weakness because those ideas can be charged with emotional energy and used to target our tribal identity. Then our animal instincts kick in, our survival instincts. If we feel one of our tribal identities is under threat we want to come together to survive and defend ourselves from our enemy. It’s hard to reason with emotional instinct wrapped in tribal thinking. This is not to say that when we are in danger we shouldn’t seek a path to survival, but only that in the animal world, territorial danger is short lived and seldom fatal. Boundaries in the animal world are flexible and change. It takes humans and the self reflecting consciousness to build a thinking framework where we can hang emotional ideas up like a flag that will define identity for thousands of years. We are the only species whose greatest threat to ourselves is one another. I’ve written recently about who in our culture is interested in making use of our tribal identity for their own benefit but in this article I want to concentrate on how the way out of this kind of thinking-the only path to peace.
Animal tribal identify is limited by the immediate senses -these people I see, this ground I stand on, this water I bathe in. But the positive power of our human mind is that we can expand beyond immediate sensual identity.
Now I am not French, I can see myself as European, and all the members of those nations as my friends and family (whereas two generations ago tribal thinking led Europe into a terrible war that set the world on fire). And then, expanding my tribe again, I can now see myself as belonging to a hemisphere.
It just takes expanding imagination, and a commitment to live, not just for your immediate tribe, but for a global tribe. Does that sound foolish? It’s the only way we are going to survive the crazy nest building game before we destroy ourselves. Think global, act local was a catch phrase of the environmental movement in the 1970s and it’s just as relevant to our perception of ourselves and our relationship to the world. Effect positive change in your small world but with a global consciousness if you want to play a part in saving the big world. Be a leader sending out a global message of peace and environmental survival, to counteract the voices that seek to trap us into smaller spirals of conflict for their own ends. Peace now!
HEADLINE FICTION #12: Destruction & Shared Creation
Here's a new format for short fiction that I've invented. It's a 70-word story in three panels with a pattern of 7-16-47 words, where the first 7 words form a headline style title, the 16 serve to fill out the headline information a little more and the final 47 contain the meat of the story and resolution. I think I'll call it "headline fiction". These micro stories of mine are based on dreams (and nightmares!).
ART TO MEDITATE UPON
Self-Portrait with Monkeys by Frida Kahlo, 1943.
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (6 July 1907 – 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.
Aztec mythology features heavily in Kahlo's paintings in symbols including monkeys, skeletons, skulls, blood, and hearts; often, these symbols referred to the myths of Coatlicue, Quetzalcoatl, and Xolotl. Other central elements that Kahlo derived from Aztec mythology were hybridity and dualism. Many of her paintings depict opposites: life and death, pre-modernity and modernity, Mexican and European, male and female.
Meditation: Ironically, although we chastise our children and one another for behaving like animals, non-human animals do far less harm to the world. Animals fight for territory and mating purposes but seldom kill one another. They exist in harmony with their environment and don't destroy that environment to meet their immediate desires. So perhaps we should humble ourselves and see ourselves more as animals among animals.
WISDOM OF OTHERS
The Tyger, a poem by William Blake
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself".
Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he came to be highly regarded by later critics and readers for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work.
PHOTO HAIKU
Here, the end of time:
I might not see you again-
I'm always with you.
Photo: Sunset, Mount Eliza
Ideas To Live By In The Coming Week
Think global, act local. Small changes in your life made with a global consciousness can initiate great change. Embrace the whole world with your thoughts and actions.
Try to make a small space when you're overcome with emotion to ask: why am I feeling this way? What is the source of conflict? What is the quickest way it came be resolved with a peaceful outcome with the least harm to all parties?
You have no enemies, only members of the same global tribe that need to find common ground free from fear and desire. How can one animal species (us) cause so much trouble to one another and our environment? Start to mend what's broken.
Peace Now,
21st September, 2024
I tell people that we are not polar bears we are herd animals. The distinction I stress is that if person and member. We belong to groups and have an identity within the group as a member and at the same time a separate individual person. Keeping these clear is the challenge that defines the level of maturity any group can attain.