Quinn Quote Saturday

“Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

A Poem From One of My Heroes

A poem from one of my heros:

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
... They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

One Of My Favorite Articles For 2012

One of my favorite articles of the year. And here is my favorite line:

"You and I," he finally said, "are very different, but we have the same enemy: monotheism."

I would've loved to have been on a bar stool near by to listen to the conversation that happened after that statement.

Guns and Penises

Quote from article: "A gun does not signify power, but the lack of power. Always.

"So, a gun is a symptom. But what is the cure for a gun? What would replace the gun and be real, have power? Why not a penis? Not the symbol of neurotic power but the means for being erotic, expressing love, incarnating desire, creating children, and offering pleasure. Maybe these qualities could be therapeutic for the gun. If everyone got serious about them, maybe they’d forget their guns.

"In these times when women are rightfully correcting an excess of the power-penis, it isn’t always easy to appreciate this aspect of the male body. Our imagination of its mythic properties has become too narrow, partly because of Freud himself. He was too narrow in his vision of myth and of Medusa, and he limited far too much the imaginal implications of the penis."--Thomas Moore

Quinn Quote Saturday

"During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day."--Daniel Quinn out of the New Renaissance

Masculinity Quote

A quote that I pulled off from Wikipedia:

“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men."--Camille Paglia

A Demonic Child Killer in our Culture

The last 15 minutes of this interview with Michael Ventura and James Hillman gives us insight as to why children and adults are shooting up schools. From interview:

Michael Ventura: "Freddie Krueger is a contemporary myth of a demon that many, many, many children are feeling."

James Hillman: "So we are back at the beginning of what we're talking about. There is a demonic child abuser, a child killer, in our culture killing children."

Quinn Quote Saturday

"For some men--perhaps all men--it's almost a necessity to do insane things from time to time: to confront the wild boar alone, spear in hand, to see the world from the top of an unscalable mountain, to risk one's entire fortune on the turn of a card. I thinks it's true of all men, personally, though nowadays most try to get along on risks taken my deputies--deputies in the boxing ring and on the football field."

"You mean...they have to test their manhood."

"Oh, it's not as simple as that, Mrs. Kennesey. When a man sets out to do something like this, he's not testing his manhood. He's testing the universe itself--he's testing the gods, if you will. He's finding out where he stands in the order of things. To best the rabbit or the deer means nothing, tells him nothing. But while he stalks the boar, he puts his fate to the test: he lives in the hands of the gods."

"I don't understand."

"To die falling off a ladder or being run over by a drunk means nothing, But for the man who lives and dies at risk, who puts his fate in the hands of the gods, death is never meaningless."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 161, The Holy

Zen is American

"Zen is not Japanese and it's not Chinese. It is American. It didn't come from Asia; it has always been here. It is a way of using your mind and living your life and doing it with other people."--Gary Snyder

Concentration Camp Existence

"Concentration-camp existence...taught us that the whole world is really like a concentration camp...There is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality, crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power."--Otto Friedrich, quoting the poet Tadeusz Borowski in The End of the World

Not so Fast

This thought sets the mind at ease to some degree:

"For a predominantly Eurocentric culture, the Greek/Roman patterns are the most relevant and most differentiated, and thus the most powerful. By powerful, I mean influential, authoratative, prestigious, controlling, and tyrannical. Even if these patterns of imagination that govern our thought and action are utterly patriarchal and therewith condemned as dangerously death-dealing, like a toxic dump of the spent fuel on which civilization has live for millenia, they are the roots. Inescapable. Multiculturalism cannot jump out of the melting pot that was cast in bronze in Greece centuries ago. So long as this culture is traditionally and officially committed to Indo-European languages and institutions of government and education, of family structures, and modes of thought that define the arts, sciences, religions, and human nature, we cannot change our minds, though we may beautifully extend them, revise them and reimagine them.--James Hillman, pg. 245, Kinds of Power

Reimagining the Boss

I ran across this quote in James Hillman's Kinds of Power. It gives us something to think about when it comes to our expectations of a boss, and also when we are bossing others.

"Enjoy, says the waitress; why not also the boss when you sit down to work? Not only to take pleasure in the work but to give pleasure, like a lover. Isn't this a capacity of power, as much as control, leadership or influence?"

My god, I'm 38 years old, and I don't think I've ever had a boss consider this.

Quinn Related Quote Saturday

"By disembedding humans from The Community of Life -- the basis of Takerism and civilization -- the only way to reconcile this condition of estrangement is through a God who gives freedom with one hand and offers salvation with another."-- Doug Brown, Pg. 123, Roadmap to Sustainability

Blake On Her Body

"The naked woman's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man."--William Blake

Depth and Mystery

"Why do we crave the sight of the human body? Why do men especially need to look at breasts and that part of the woman's body that not only has to do with intercourse but also with birth? It's a great mystery that probably shouldn't be expl
ained, but I think we can say this much: Men have identified with the hero. We have to be adventurous, fight and conquer. We have no time for the mysteries of nature.

"Fully occupied with their heroic quests, men haven't had an opportunity to consider the great deep mysteries of sex, life and death. But a woman's body forces us to consider them. We try to turn our eyes away from it, but we can't. Over and over again we want to see those objects that say so much about our sheer existence: breasts and vaginas, nurturance and continuing existence.

"Beneath all the display of nipples and crotches lies a desperate search for self-understanding. Where do I really come from and where am I headed? Men devote their lives to achieving a position at work, a decent bank account and the reputation of responsibility, and yet, as we have seen so many times, they risk it all on the sight of a woman's body or an hour of foreplay."-- Thomas Moore

Santayana on Fanaticism

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."-- George Santayana

I got the idea for this post HERE.

Diakrisis

Picking up old ideas out of Kinds of Power. This is one reason why I like James Hillman's writing. He is always bringing ideas that are thousands of years old to the table.

"The old theologians called this filtering diakrisis, discerning the spirits. Without discernment, they thought you could become a dupe of the devil. Discernment allows you to be more sophisticated about the forces, hearing them metaphorically and not yet literally, so that you do not become a mouthpiece of your mentor or a channel of visionary wisdom masking as genius."--Pg.143, Kinds of Power

Our Secret Companion

"What I am calling the 'angel' that was born with us and is our secret companion, Socrates called his daimon, who guarded him from wrong moves. The same figure appears in German thought as the Doppelganger and in ancient thought as the genius. Our birthday celebrations with cake and candles originate in a ritual honoring, not you, but your genius who was born with you. You are never a genius, can never be a genius, but you are guided and protected by a genius, and your life must be led so that the genius is not damaged. Damage to it through wounded reputation (and Cassio uses the language of wounding as Gaunt uses the language of shame) reflects especially on the family, for one's genius derives partly from the family and is generated in the family marriage bed (lectus genialis). Your genius or angel is concieved with you, descends into you through your generators and like an invisible twin at birth, part of your psychic inheritance."--James Hillman, pg.138, Kinds of Power

Quinn Quote Saturday

"Nature is a figment of the Romantic imagination, and a very insidious figment one at that. There simply is no such thing as nature--in the sense of a realm of being from which humans can distinguish themselves. It just doesn't exist."--Daniel Quinn, pg.53, Providence

The Psyche in Crisis

"The psyche in crisis has, of course, other fantasies. Hellenism's many and Hebrewism's one are not the only ways out of the psyche's pathological dilemna. There is flight into futurism and its technologies, turning East and inward, going primitive and natural, moving upward and out altogether in transcendence. But these alternatives are less authentic. They are simplistic; they neglect our history and the claims of its images upon us; and they urge escaping from the plight rather than deepening it by providing it with cultural background and differentiated structure.

"Science fictions and the fictions of science, instruction from American Indians or Oriental counselors--brilliant and wise as they all may be--fail to remind us of our Western imaginal history, of the actual images at work in our souls. By circumventing our imgaginal tradition, they cut us off even further from it."--[Pg.28, Re-Visioning Psychology]

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Cactus Chronicles

Long-lost letters from the buzzard in the dead tree

by Edward Abbey


Published in the July/August 2006 issue of Orion magazine




Photograph | Jay Dusard


Family, Home, Pennsylvania
8 November 1949

Friends—
I was wondering—could you lend me three or four hundred dollars? I have not yet bought either a horse or a motorcycle and am thinking of buying a car; not any car, but a ‘47 Ford one of my fellow students is trying to sell. It would really be a good buy; the thing is practically new. The money would not have to be in a lump—fifty a month would be enough.

But no doubt you are looking forward to the payday when your paycheck is all yours—and certainly I don’t have to buy a car. But I should buy something; otherwise I’ll continue to fritter my money away on records and books and wild parties. It’s painful to remember that a mere six months ago I had twice as much money as now—where did it all go? I can’t imagine. Of course, that money should have been saved for my Oxford tuition, but the truth is that I can’t save money—certainly not for the sake of saving. If I have money I feel compelled to spend it on something. (The future be damned. Tomorrow I may be dead.) Typical hedonistic epicureanism.

I intend to make some money next summer—if I can find a job. Either here or back east. Why not wait until then to buy a car? By that time I’ll be broke.

If you can’t lend me several hundred dollars, you are quite welcome to reduce or cut off the monthly stipend as much and whenever you please. I don’t need the money—I’ll just waste it.

I’m doing some writing but it’s all of a highly technical nature—“the planes of reality,” “Pythagorean philharmonica,” “the polarities of experience,” “Principia Aesthetica,” “the isolation of data,” “Democritian atomism,” “Attic Romanticism,” and such-like pretentious frivolity.

How am I doing, scholastically? Fairly well, I think, but the competition in these advanced philosophy courses is rather good. My days of coasting to distinction with my innate brilliance are over; from now on I’m afraid I’ll have to study like everyone else.

The situation is difficult for me because my nearly universal range of interests continues—riding, girls, mountain climbing, exploring, machines, mysticism, music, vodka, politics, astronautics, poker—all of which interferes considerably with my half-hearted attempt to become a scholar. (Really not possible, I think, for me—the scholarly life, I mean. I’m too fond, much too fond, of fresh air and mundane pleasures.)

Of course, you’ll congratulate me on this—saying that the general, the whole, the universal, is much better than narrow specialization, with its consequent dehumanization, isolation, blindness, and turtle-shell spectacles.

And so I persuade myself. But is it true? Entirely true?

I think the matter falls definitely in an area of controversy, necessitating suspension of decision.

So Billy killed two squirrels and a rabbit?

According to Aristotelian metaphysics the rodents possess souls of sort, certainly inferior to human souls, but souls nevertheless and deserving of love and pity. Forgot about that, didn’t you?

Reminds me—Bud and I went antelope hunting last weekend with one other fellow. Bud’s friend got one. Having neither license nor rifle I drove the jeep while the others did the shooting. Quite exciting—driving off the road into the sagebrush over hills and down arroyos, rounding up the antelope like cattle. My but they’re fast—we clocked one bunch at 40 miles an hour.

Merci beacoup for the $150. No, I don’t know how much you still owe me.

Sorry to hear about the Oldsmobile’s further sufferings.

It is now the hour of one and twenty in the morning, mountain time. The radio is on and I’m hearing a song called “Mule Train” for about the seventh time this evening. Quite a fad, this pseudo-Western culture. First “Riders in the Sky” and now this. But I must not let my aesthetic snobbery blind me to the fact that these two songs are immensely superior to the usual run of popular music.

Mid-term exams this week. That’s why we’re home so early and not in bed. Cramming. Debauchery will be resumed this coming Saturday night and will reach a high point next week for the annual Homecoming festival.

Love (platonic) to all and sundered.
Ned



Tucson Daily Citizen
20 September 1972

Dear Sir:
The police helicopter is an unnecessary evil. The money being wasted on that infernal and idiotic machine would be sufficient to add another fifteen or twenty men to the force. The helicopter cannot be justified as a crime preventive; noise pollution is a crime and should be recognized as such, and in all the stink and smog and clatter of downtown Tucson, no individual machine is more obnoxious than that helicopter.

Even if the helicopter could glide about quiet as an owl, it remains still objectionable on even more serious grounds: aerial surveillance of a supposedly free citizenry is an affront to us all, and one more significant step toward an authoritarian police state. There are far better ways to prevent crime than by sending Big Brother aloft to keep his beady 450-watt eye on us dues-paying citizens.

I would suggest, for example, that a few good men on bicycles (a la francaise), properly uniformed and equipped, patrolling swiftly and silently through their own neighborhoods, friends not enemies of the people they work among, could do far more to prevent crime than two official Peeping Toms roaring over our rooftops in their fifty-dollar-an-hour plastic bubble.

Let’s think about this, people. You too, City Officials.

Yours sincerely,
Edward Abbey—Tucson



Senator Frank E. Moss, Washington, D.C.
26 March 1973

Dear Senator Moss:
Thank you for your letter of March 21st in response to my letter regarding the Lake Powell-Rainbow Bridge issue. I am writing again on this same matter because you did not reply to the specific points which I raised in my letter.

E.g., you say that if Judge Ritter’s order is allowed to stand, the four upper-basin states will lose 4 million acre-feet of water immediately and one million acre-feet of water annually thereafter. Anticipating this argument I asked you why the water cannot be stored just as well in “Lake” Mead (now about 60 percent full) and credited to the upper basin states. Why should Bridge Creek below Rainbow Bridge, as well as a hundred other lovely and world-unique side canyons in the Glen Canyon system, why should they all be flooded, destroyed, generally mucked-up when a simple change in book-keeping procedure could avoid the whole mess?

I also raised the larger question, which you also failed to answer, as to what difference it makes anyway, to 99.9 percent of us Americans, whether the limited and badly abused and over-used Colorado River is exploited in the upper basin states or the lower basin states? Really, what difference does it make, when there is not nearly enough water in that poor old river to satisfy all the millionaire agri-businessmen of the Southwest? As you well know, not a drop is allowed to run its natural course to the sea anymore, and as you also know, Mexico is not receiving its agreed-upon share.

Furthermore, from the strictly economic-production point of view, the waters of the Colorado will return more in the way of agricultural produce down in the Imperial Valley of California than they will in the shorter growing seasons of the upper basin states.

You describe correctly the muddy mess which a barrier dam would create below Rainbow Bridge, when the water level is low. But you fail to mention that the same effect will follow the rise and fall of Lake Powell’s waters, if the reservoir is allowed to intrude within the boundaries of the Monument. In other words, if the reservoir is filled to full capacity at any time, the inevitable draw-down later will leave behind the usual “bathtub rings” on the canyon walls and stinking mud flats in the canyon bottoms. Of course this is already happening throughout Glen Canyon NRA every time the water level is lowered.

This letter is already too long but I cannot resist commenting on one other thing: You state that forty thousand people saw Rainbow Bridge last year whereas only a “handful” saw it before the inundation of Glen Canyon, when it was necessary to walk 6 1/2 miles up from the river. You regard this as a clear-cut improvement in the nature of things. That is a form of quantitative logic, all too sadly typical of the growth-is-progress syndrome, which more and more Americans are coming to question these days.

Why, Senator Moss, why, I ask you, do you believe that “more” is the same as “better”? The 6 1/2-mile walk to the Bridge was not difficult; as one who actually did it, I can say that it was quite an easy walk, on a perfectly adequate trail, with water—clear beautiful drinkable running water, available most of the way—and shade enough to make even the June heat tolerable. The walk to the Bridge and back could easily be made in a single day, by anyone in average health, of any age from eight to eighty. And it was a beautiful canyon, and getting to the Bridge and back was a mild but beautiful adventure, the kind of experience one treasures for a lifetime afterwards.

Rainbow Bridge is much more than a geological oddity: its whole setting, its comparative remoteness, its character as part of a greater whole, is what made it and getting there such a wonderful and unforgettable pleasure. Those six miles were all too short; I now envy those who first saw the Bridge by the fourteen-mile approach from Rainbow Lodge, around the mountain.

How can that experience be equated with forty thousand annual quick visits by people roaring in and out on motorboats who generally see nothing but the wake of the boat ahead, hear nothing but the roar of motors, feel nothing but the impatience characteristic of motorized travel to get on to the next “sight”? The fact that all these multitudes never bothered to go see Rainbow Bridge before access was made easy proves only one thing: they simply were not interested.

And ease of access does not create interest. Quite the contrary: it has reduced interest. That “blue finger” of Lake Powell has transformed what was once a delightful adventure into what is now merely a routine motorized sight-seeing excursion. The loss is great, and immeasurable, and cannot be compensated for by any amount of industrialized mass tourism. You cannot creep from quantity to quality. The two are not commensurable. I have also made the visit to Rainbow Bridge by motorboat and can personally testify that it is a meager, shallow and trivial experience when compared to the hike up the canyon. In fact, as they say, there is “no comparison.”

Something priceless was destroyed by the flooding of Glen Canyon, which no amount of motorized “visitor use” can ever equal in human values. Our duty now is to save what still remains of that great canyon system—especially Rainbow Bridge—and to begin the long and arduous effort to restore it all, eventually, to its original and natural condition.

It would be nice if you would help, Senator. Forget Art Greene and his tour-boat business; to hell with those sugar-beet growers up around Vernal. There are far better things to do and be and save in the glorious and absolutely unmatched state of Utah.



New York Review, New York City
30 March 1973

Editors:
In his review of the book Retreat From Riches [Affluence and Its Enemies, by Peter Passell] Jason Epstein mentions the Earth Day slogan “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” He dismisses the analogy as an argument against ever-expanding industrialism. Nature as a whole, he asserts, operates on the same principle as cancer. All living things, he seems to believe, subscribe to the “ideology” of growth for growth’s sake. Therefore, he implies, we have nothing to fear from expansionist industrialism.

Not so. Most species within nature aim not at unlimited growth but rather at optimum growth; that is, a condition of stability, fulfilling but not destroying the species’ appropriate niche within the larger life-system. Likewise, the individual organism, if it is healthy, seeks not endless growth—which is monstrous and suicidal—but rather maturation and reproduction, which also coincides with the “ideal” of the species. Both tend to serve and sustain the ends—whatever those may be—of evolutionary change as a whole.

Cancer is distinctive and pathological precisely because it does not conform to this pattern, or recognize any limitations; the disease with—as well as of—hubris. Delighting in nothing but multiplication, cancer ends by destroying both its host and itself. The analogy to our modern planetary growth-devoted techno-industrial society (whether capitalist or socialist makes no difference) is complete and exact. Like cancer, expansionist industrialism believes in nothing but more expansionism. Growth equals power: power equals growth. Again like cancer, the process will self-destruct. Not, however, without human suffering, which will be great until a different kind of society based on a more stable adaptation to the earth’s thin skin is somewhat achieved.

Unlike Jason Epstein, I find the idea of placing a limit on industrial growth quite thinkable. Not only thinkable, not only desirable, but essential. Affluence consists of far more than the endless production of junk, under the ever-growing mountain of which many good things (like healthy human-type people) are benignly suffocated.

For example, many of us would gladly forego La Tache (whatever that is) served in Baccarat glasses (who needs them?) in exchange for breathable air and edible bread. That, and freedom from more and more technological tyranny—police helicopters, for example—is part of my notion of what affluence really means.

A sound argument could be made for the case that growing industrialism not only does not eliminate poverty (there are as many poor people today as there were in the depths of the New Deal—40 million), it increases poverty. Industrialism, beyond the optimum point, which we passed about seventy years ago, tends to impoverish, not enrich, our lives. Ask any Indian. Ask any Appalachian.



Victoria McCabe
19 May 1973

Dear Victoria,
Herewith my bit for your cookbook. This recipe is not original but a variation on an old (perhaps ancient) Southwestern dish. It has also been a favorite of mine and was for many years the staple, the sole staple, of my personal nutritional program. (I am six feet three and weigh 190 pounds, sober.)

I call it Hardcase Survival Pinto Bean Sludge.

1. Take one fifty-pound sack Colorado pinto beans. Remove stones, cockleburs, horseshit, ants, lizards, etc. Wash in clear cold crick water. Soak for twenty-four hours in iron kettle or earthenware cooking pot. (DO NOT USE TEFLON, ALUMINUM OR PYREX CONTAINER. THIS WARNING CANNOT BE OVERSTRESSED.)

2. Place kettle or pot with entire fifty lbs. of pinto beans on low fire and simmer for twenty-four hours. (DO NOT POUR OFF WATER IN WHICH BEANS HAVE BEEN IMMERSED. THIS IS IMPORTANT.) Fire must be of juniper, pinyon pine, mesquite or ironwood; other fuels tend to modify the subtle flavor and delicate aroma of Pinto Bean Sludge.

3. DO NOT BOIL.

4. STIR VIGOROUSLY FROM TIME TO TIME WITH WOODEN SPOON OR IRON LADLE. (Do not disregard these instructions.)

5. After simmering on low fire for twenty-four hours, add one gallon green chile peppers. Stir vigorously. Add one quart natural (non-iodized) pure sea salt. Add black pepper. Stir some more and throw in additional flavoring materials, as desired, such as old bacon rinds, corncobs, salt pork, hog jowls, kidney stones, ham hocks, sowbelly, saddle blankets, jungle boots, worn-out tennis shoes, cinch straps, whatnot, use your own judgment. Simmer an additional twenty-four hours.

6. Now ladle as many servings as desired from pot but do not remove pot from fire. Allow to simmer continuously for hours, days or weeks if necessary, until all contents have been thoroughly consumed. Continue to stir vigorously, whenever in vicinity or whenever you think of it.

7. Serve Pinto Bean Sludge on large flat stones or on any convenient fairly level surface. Garnish liberally with parsley flakes. Slather generously with raw ketchup. Sprinkle with endive, anchovy crumbs and boiled cruets and eat hearty.

8. One potful Pinto Bean Sludge, as above specified, will feed one poet for two full weeks at a cost of about $11.45 at current prices. Annual costs less than $300.

9. The philosopher Pythagoras found flatulence incompatible with meditation and therefore urged his followers not to eat beans. I have found, however, that custom and thorough cooking will alleviate this problem.

Yrs, Edward Abbey—Tucson



George Sessions, Philosophy Professor,
Sierra College, California
30 August 1979

Dear George,
Sorry your friend [Bill] Devall and you couldn’t come. Since you didn’t, I shall pass on a few remarks via typewriter.

As I said, I think the new Eco-Philosophy contains many interesting, important and daring ideas. But I have three quibbles:

1. I dislike the pejorative term “shallow environmentalism,” and the pretentious term “deep ecology.” It is vital that we avoid any hint of moral superiority in our dealings with one another in the environmental movement; if it developed into factionalism it would destroy us, as factionalism has destroyed so many other progressive movements in America. E.g., I was quite disappointed by Stewart Brand’s silly attack on the Sierra Club (promptly publicized by Esquire Magazine and other Shithead publications) because some Sierra Clubber in San Francisco obstructed his plans for a Co-Evolution fund-raising picnic on public parklands.

If we must have labels, why not something like “eco-activists” and “eco-philosophers.” Each implies the other anyway, and most of us are, or try to be, something of both. While I grant the intellectual value of providing environmentalism with a sound philosophical basis, the people that I actually most admire are those who put their bodies where their minds are—i.e., Mark Dubois, and patient tireless organizers like David Brower, and the field reps of the various conservation organizations, the people who confront and deal directly with politicians, industrialists, the media. I think it far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject.

I am weary of the old and tiresome and banal question “Why save the wilderness?” The important and difficult question is “How? How save the wilderness?” I am not much concerned with the state of the world a thousand years from now, for in that long-range view I am an optimist: I think that the greed and stupidity of industrial culture will save us from ourselves by self-destruction. What I am concerned about is the world my children will have to live in, and maybe, if my children ever get around to it, the world of my grandchildren.

2. One of these days the Orientalizers will have to face the question of why the homelands of Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism and Zen—namely, India, China, Japan—are also the most abused, ravaged, insulted, overpopulated and desperate lands on planet earth.

Why? I have my theories about it, of course, implied by things I’ve written elsewhere; but how do you and Devall and Gary Snyder explain it? If you’re going to make your theories cohere with fact, you’ve got to do some thinking about the real role of any large-scale, institutional religion in human life and the life of the planet.

In my view, the Oriental religions are no better than Christianity (itself of Oriental origin, of course) or Islam; all of them tend to divorce men and women from the earth, from other forms of life, by their mystical emphasis upon the general, the abstract, the invisible, and by their psychological tendency, in prayer and meditation, to turn the mind inward, toward self-love, self-importance, self-obsession. Salvation. Satori. Union with God, union with the All-Source, union with The One. (Which one? my daughter Suzi, age eleven, says—bless her native common sense.) Of course, the devotees of these mystical rites claim the opposite—that they are engaged in self-transcendence. I think they delude themselves; rather than escaping the self, they are wallowing, luxuriating, in a most enormous vanity. The same is true of all the many lesser cults now flourishing, like fungi in a bog, among us bored and idle Americans—EST, for example, and Esalen, and TM, and psychoanalysis, and anal-analysis, and good God! all the many other sickly little superstitions that pollute the psychic atmosphere.

(However, I tell myself . . . it’s all part of the carnival. All part of the human comedy. These things have always been with us and always will. Each to his fate, predetermined (perhaps) by his character. I must confess that I often tire of my own role as the sneering buzzard on the dead tree. There are times when I envy those with the freedom to hurl themselves into the mob, to lose themselves in the flood of life. Ideally, I suppose, we should be able to enjoy every form of experience. Including suffering? even torture? even slavery?)

Paralyzing philosophy. But always entertaining.

Action, there’s the thing. Action! When I grow sick with the buzzing of the brain, I like to go climb a rock. Cut down a billboard. Disable a bulldozer. (Eine kleine Nachtwerke) Climb a mountain. Run a rapid. Pursue a woman. Etc.

Enough of these trivial asides. On to Quibble #3:

3. Animal egalitarianism. If all animals are equal, then we humans, obviously, are no better than any other animals. Being no better, we cannot be expected to behave any better. Therefore, it is perfectly logical, as well as natural, that we do as others do—expand to the limits of our range, exterminate competitors, multiply our numbers well beyond the carrying capacity of our territory, submit to mass die-offs periodically, and so on. On the other hand, if we demand of ourselves that we behave rationally, display tolerance and even love for all other forms of life, then it would seem to follow that we are asking of humans a moral sensitivity unknown to lesser—excuse me!—other animals.

Having raised the question, I think I see the answer. In demanding that humans behave with justice, tolerance, reason, love toward other forms of life, we are doing no more than demanding that humans be human—that is, be true to the best aspects of human nature.

Humans being human, therefore, cannot consider themselves morally superior to, say, bears being bear-like, eagles being eagle-like, etc. No doubt Spinoza had much to say about this. Despite his disdain for nonhuman forms of life.

Let beings be, says Heidegger. Very good. Be true to the earth, says Nietzsche. I like that. Death is the most exciting form of life! said General George Patton. Well no, that doesn’t fit here. Give your heart to the hawks, said my favorite American poet—after Whitman. How about a similar nifty slogan from Spinoza? Can you offer us one, George?

I liked Devall’s review of Planet/Person. Very much to the point. But [I] think, in his letter to NMA [Not Man Apart], that he must have missed a few chapters in my own book. In “Science w/a Human Face” and “Conscience of the Conqueror,” he will find that I attempt to deal directly with some of the questions that he is most concerned with.

And yes, I do distrust mysticism. I regard it as too easy a way out. Whenever I find myself sliding into mysticism in my writing—I never do it in my feeling and seeing—I know that my mind is relaxing, taking the easy way around a hard pitch of thought. Just as those who casually throw in the word “God” think that they are answering questions which may very well have no answer. Not all questions can be answered. I think that Carl Sagan is a bit naive in his scientific optimism, just as those who call themselves mystics are naive in identifying their personal inner visions with universal reality.

Random thoughts. No more for the time being. Please continue to send me the Eco-Philosophy newsletter. And you are welcome, if you wish, to print parts of my letters, or parts of my books, in that newsletter. I would be honored, and most interested in reading the reaction of others to the words of an anti-metaphysical metaphysician. Among metaphysicians, I would prefer to be a G.P.—a general practitioner.

Best regards—Oracle



Eugene C. Hargrove, Editor,
Environmental Ethics, University of Georgia
3 November 1982

Dear Mr. Hargrove:
Thank you for inviting me to respond to your editorial re Earth First! and The Monkey Wrench Gang:

So far as I know, Earth First! as an organization—though it’s more a spontaneous grouping than an organization, having neither officers nor by-laws—is not “pledged to ecological sabotage.” If Newsweek said that, Newsweek is hallucinating (again). We are considering acts of civil disobedience, in the usual sense of that term, when and where they might be useful. For example, when and if the Getty Oil Co attempts to invade the Gros Ventre wilderness (Wyoming) with bulldozers, we intend to peaceably assemble and block the invasion with guitars, American flags, live human bodies and maybe an opposing D-9 tractor. If arrested, we shall go to jail, pay the fines and try again. We invite your readers to join us. A good time will be had by all.

As for that book, please note that The Monkey Wrench Gang is a novel, a work of fiction and—I like to think—a work of art. It would be naive to read it as a tract, a program for action or a manifesto. The book is a comedy, with a happy ending. It was written to entertain, to inspire tears and laughter, to amuse my friends and to aggravate our enemies. (Aggravate their ulcers.) So far, about a half million readers seem to have found that approach appealing.

The book does not condone terrorism in any form. Let’s have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence—for a political and/or economic purpose—carried out against people and other living things, and is usually conducted by governments against their own citizens (as at Kent State, or in Vietnam, or in Poland, or in most of Latin America right now), or by corporate entities such as J. Paul Getty, Exxon, Mobil Oil, etc etc., against the land and all creatures that depend upon the land for life and livelihood. A bulldozer ripping up a hillside to strip mine for coal is committing terrorism; the damnation of a flowing river followed by the drowning of Cherokee graves, of forest and farmland, is an act of terrorism.

Sabotage, on the other hand, means the use of force against inanimate property, such as machinery, which is being used (e.g.) to deprive human beings of their rightful work (as in the case of Ned Ludd and his mates); sabotage (le sabot dropped in a spinning jenny)—for whatever purpose—has never meant and has never implied the use of violence against living creatures. The characters in Monkey Wrench engage in industrial sabotage in order to defend a land they love against industrial terrorism.

They do this only when it appears that in certain cases and places all other means of defense of land and life have failed and that force—the final resort—becomes morally justified. Not only justified but a moral obligation, as in the defense of one’s own life, one’s own family, one’s own home, one’s own nature, against a violent assault.

Such is the basis of my characters’ rationale in The Monkey Wrench Gang. How the reader chooses to interpret all this is the reader’s business. And if the reader is impelled to act out in real life the exploits of Doc, Bonnie, Slim & Hayduke, that too is a matter for decision by the individual conscience. But first and last, it should be remembered that the book is fiction, make-believe, a story and no more than a story.

As for my own views on environmental ethics, I have tried to state them explicitly in the essay form: see The Journey Home (1977), Abbey’s Road (1979), and Down the River (1982).

Sincerely, Edward Abbey—Oracle



Karen Evans
18 June 1984

Dear Karen,
Okay, I’ll give it a go. If you have further questions call me, mornings or evenings—before 9 a.m. or after 6 p.m. Or come for a day or two in Tucson if you can; it’s not likely I’ll get out of here this summer.

1) Yes.

2) Yes.

3) The same only more so.

4) With DS [Desert Solitaire] (1968) I was only getting started. In later books, such as Monkey Wrench, Abbey’s Road, Down the River, Black Sun, Good News and Beyond the Wall, I’ve attempted to make explicit what was only implied in that early work. I have also ranged across a much wider field of subject matter, going beyond strictly environmental concerns toward more general social, political and philosophical matters, or what I like to call the comedy of human relationships.

What I am really writing about, what I have always written about, is the idea of human freedom, human community, the real world which makes both possible, and the new technocratic industrial state which threatens the existence of all three. Life and death, that’s my subject, and always has been—if the reader will look beyond the assumptions of lazy critics and actually read what I have written. Which also means, quite often, reading between the lines: I am a comic writer and the generation of laughter is my aim.

5) Well, I’m against some establishments and for others.

I regard the human family, the human community, as basic and fundamental. I regard the modern nation-state as a grotesque distortion of human community. The same goes for most other big social institutions, such as organized religion, science, the military and—that vague beehive (like a geodetic dome) which looms a hundred stories high above our future.

6) I am a pessimist in the short run, by which I mean the next fifty or maybe a hundred years. In that brief interval it seems quite probable that too many of us humans, crawling over one another for living space and sustenance, will make the earth an extremely unpleasant planet on which to live. And this quite aside from the possibility of a nuclear war.

In the long run, I am an optimist. Within a century, I believe and hope, there will be a drastic reduction in the human population (as has happened before), and that will make possible a free and open society for our surviving descendants, a return to a more intimate and tolerant relationship to the natural world, and an advance (not a repetition) toward a truly humane, liberal and civilized form of human society, politically and economically decentralized but unified, perhaps on a planetary scale, by slow and easy-going travel, unrestricted wandering for all and face-to-face (not electronic) communication between the more adventurous elements of human tribes, clans, races. Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of clichés, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.

7) See above.

8) I no longer have much interest in the supernatural, or what is mistakenly referred to as “mystical” events and experience. That kind of search belongs to the youthful stage of life, both in the individual and in the race. I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

For example: one cloud floating over one mountain. Or a trickle of water seeping from stone after a twenty-mile walk through the desert. Or the smile of recognition on the face of your own child when she hasn’t seen you around for several hours. These are the deepest joys, as we learn to understand when we go into the middle age of life.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience. Those who waste their whole lives hungering for fantastic and occult sensations are suffering from retarded emotional development and stunted imaginations. One world and one life at a time, please. I have no desire to be reborn until I have exhausted every possibility of this life in this time on these few hundred square miles of earth I call my home.

9) I’ve suffered from my share of personal disasters: the loss of love, the death of a wife, the failure to realize in my writing the high aspiration of my intentions. But these misfortunes can be borne. There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief—but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave. So, I’ve been lucky, as most people are lucky; the animal in each of us has a lot more sense than our brains.

10) Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together, and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good. Heroes do not want power over others. There are more heroic people in the public school system than there are in the world of politics, military, big business, the arts and the sciences combined. My mother is a heroine—has been all her life. And if you take a good look, you may see that your brother is a hero.

11) I have no blueprints to offer anybody. Most human societies, especially the so-called primitive or traditional societies, have been organized (spontaneously, voluntarily, democratically and instinctively) on natural and therefore decent principles. It is only in modern times, as I see it, that is, in the last five thousand years, that the drive to dominate nature and human nature has perverted and now threatens to destroy the sound, conservative, sustaining relationships of men and women.

Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power, we gain freedom from personal responsibility for what we do and are forced to do—that is the seduction of it—but we lose the dignity of being real men and women. Power corrupts; attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

So what should we do, here and now, as individuals? Well, see above, item 10. Refuse to participate in evil; insist on taking part in what is healthy, generous, and responsible. Stand up, speak out, and when necessary fight back. Get down off the fence and lend a hand, grab a-hold, be a citizen—not a subject.

12) Nothing worth mentioning. I’ve led mostly a furtive, cowardly, reclusive life, preaching loudly from the sidelines and avoiding danger. If I regret anything, it is my good behavior.

13) I see that we’ve skipped #13. I despise superstition—but why take foolish chances?

14) The worst thing I’ve ever done? My best is none too good.

15) Beer cans are beautiful.

16) Spiritual people like myself do not fret over diet. I eat whatever’s handy, if it looks good.

17) The Glen Canyon Dam makes a handy symbol of what is most evil and destructive in modern man’s attack on the natural world. But it is only one small example among thousands.

18) No.

19) My friends and my family share with me a whole constellation of similar and encouraging desires. They are the basis of my life, essential and indispensable. We don’t clash with one another, we clash with our enemies, of whom we always seem to have enough. And we enjoy the clash. Goethe put it nicely (in this amateur translation): Only they deserve liberty and life / Who earn it in the daily strife.

20) My personal life is an ordinary life, of no particular interest to others.

21) I don’t know what McGuane means by calling someone a “cult hero.” Maybe he knows. Most writers give public readings now and then—what of it? But of course you have to be invited.

22) I’m not interested in the technique of art or the art of technique. When I want to write something I just sit down (or stand up) and do it. Scribble, scribble, nothing could be easier. It helps, naturally, to have something to say.

23) Fiction is my primary interest. I’ve published six novels so far, have written a couple of others not yet published, and am presently halfway through a novel about life and death. Most of my effort has gone into fiction. Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

24) Publisher’s hype and reviewer’s cant. By sticking a writer in a convenient mental box, the reviewers and critics save themselves the trouble of actually reading, understanding and thinking about the writer’s work. But there are too many writers, too many books, too much glut and gluttony.

25) See above.

26) I’ve enjoyed the love of some pretty good women, the friendship of a few good men, and made my home in the part of this world I like best. What’s left? I desire nothing but more of the same.

27) I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I’ve encountered some unnecessary resistance that’s because most of the traffic is going the other way.

28) About two years ago a herd of doctors gave me six months to live, because they believed what the C.A.T. scanner told them. As usual, the machine was wrong. My first thought, when they brought me the news, was that I wouldn’t have to floss my teeth anymore. Then I wrote out a will and made a large deposit in a bank (a sperm bank) for my wife, who wanted a baby, just in case the six months remaining might not be sufficient to insure the success of the usual procedures. Then I wondered if I might have time to write one more book—a short one. I’m afraid I forgot all about Glen Canyon Dam.

Those were interesting times, but now it appears that, barring accidents, I’m in for the long haul: my father, at age eighty-three, is or should be flossing a few teeth of his own. And he still spends several hours every day out in the woods cutting down perfectly normal, healthy pine trees—he’s got a one-man logging business. But his eye is off a bit; a few months ago he was felling a tree, trying to lay it down as close as he could at the side of a flatbed truck; instead he dropped the tree into the front of the truck, smashed the bejesus out of both the cab and engine. He needed a new truck anyway.

Well Karen, this is fun but it’s much too easy. If you wish to revise and colloquialize the more formal and sententious parts of my response, please do so—if you can make it read like a real conversation please do so. And if there’s anything more you need, call me.

Regards, Ed Abbey—Oracle



Jon Krakauer
circa early 1987

Dear Mr Krakauer:
As requested, here is my list of the ten most significant events in the American West during the past decade:

1. Revolting Development: 487 literary exquisites, flycasters, coke sniffers, horse lovers, movie actors, hobby ranchers, Instant Rednecks and other jet-set androids from the world of Vanity Fair move into Santa Fe, Tucson and the Livingston, Montana area.

2. Hopeful Development: Congress finally passes an Immigration Control Act—but two hundred years too late.

3. Revolting Development: Beef ranchers murder 155 grizzly bears in Montana and Wyoming.

4. Hopeful Development: Grizzlies harvest twenty-two tourists.

5. Revolting Development: US Forest Service lays plans and obtains funds to bulldoze a road to within at least one/quarter mile of every pine tree in our national forests.

6. Hopeful Development: Teton Dam collapses in Idaho.

7. Revolting Development: Hemlines go down on park ranger skirts.

8. Hopeful Development: Earth First! founded in the Pinacate Desert by Dave Foreman, Howie Wolke, Mike Roselle and Bart Kohler.

9. Revolting Development: Howie Wolke arrested for pulling up survey stakes in Little Granite Creek, Wyoming.

10. Hopeful Development: Chief Engineer killed by lightning at dam construction site on Dolores River in Colorado.

11. Hopeful Development: Drunken shotgunner killed by falling gutshot saguaro cactus near Phoenix.

12. Hopeful Development: 565 range cattle killed in Utah by little green men in UFOs (Unidentified Fucking Objects).

13. Hopeful Development: Benjamin Cartwright Abbey born March 19, 1987, vows eternal resistance against every form of tyranny over the soul of man (and woman).

Edward Abbey—Tucson



Barry Lopez, Finn Rock, Oregon
14 June 1987

Dear Barry:
Enjoyed your article in the current Harper’s. Reinforces my intention to visit soon the beautiful, tragic, divided land of South Africa.

Amusing to find us both in Life Magazine this month, trying to say about the same thing in widely—and wildly—divergent ways. I ask people to stay home; you ask them to change their wicked attitude.

But it’s wrong of us both, I think, to adopt the lofty stance, the wise man’s tone, and do nothing more. Of course, in the long run, humans must regain a sense of community with nature. (If we ever really had it.) But in the meantime, the hard work, the important work, is that of saving what is left. I despise the role of guru, or leader, or remote philosopher, earning easy money writing the right thing while the “troops,” the hundreds and thousands who actually stand before the bulldozers, spike the trees, lobby the politicos, write the tedious letters, lick stamps, staple leaflets, organize committees, attend meetings, hire lawyers and sometimes go to jail, do what they do with no fame, no public credit, certainly little or no pay (except Sierra Club bureaucrats etc), and no reward but the sense of having opposed the rich and powerful in the name of something more ancient and beautiful than human greed and human increase. The writer’s job is to write, and write the truth—but he also has the moral obligation to get down in the dust and the sweat and lend not only his name but his voice and body to the tiresome contest. Part of the time, anyhow. I once asked Tom McGuane why he lets others fight his battles for him in Montana; “don’t want to get mixed up with those counterculture types,” he said. Asked Annie Dillard the same thing; “don’t want to be known as an environmentalist,” she said. Asked Edward Hoagland and Jim Harrison something similar; “Don’t try to bully me into doing what you do,” Hoagland replied; and Harrison never replied at all. And so on.

What these people are most concerned about, I guess, is their literary reputations, not the defense of the natural world or the integrity of their souls. But how far can you go in objectivity, in temporizing, in fence-straddling, before it becomes plain moral cowardice? I admire these writers as writers; lovely prose style, all of them; but I can’t fully respect them as citizens, that is, as men. As women.

A. B. Guthrie, Jr. on the other hand, doesn’t worry about his standing with Esquire or Vanity Fair. Neither does Wallace Stegner or Wendell Berry or Farley Mowat or Charles Bowden. Me, I do worry about it—but not much. That is, I gave up a long time ago and have resigned myself to my simple role as village crank. It pays good and it’s easy. In fact it’s genetic, bred in the bone: my old man, eighty-six now, talks pretty much like I write. He’s outlived all of his poker-playing whisky-drinking tree-cutting friends and should be lonely as that pine snag on yonder point of the mountain. But he’s not. Rich in memories and pride, and still cutting trees (selectively), he seems to enjoy h

An Auden Quote

Deer hunting is over, for the most part. I'm back with a quote I picked up out of James Hillman's Kinds of Power.

"We are lived by powers we pretend to understand."--W.H. Auden

What is Soul?

Yesterday I mentioned that I was interested in what the soul is. Here is how James Hillman sees it:

"The term psyche and soul can be used interchangeably, although there is a tendency to escape the ambiguity of the word soul by recourse to the more biological, more modern psyche. Psyche is used more as a natural concomitant to physical life, perhaps reducible to it. Soul, on the other hand, has metaphysical and romantic overtones. It shares frontiers with religion.--James Hillman, pg. 44-45,77, Suicide

He then goes on to say:

"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment--and soul--making means differentiating this middle ground.

"It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate--an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence--that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into a eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it by itself apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the sense of having or being a soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.

"In another attempt upon the idea of soul, I suggested that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. Those four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche,(from Greek) and anima,(from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religous concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginitive possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy--that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic and metaphorical.--James Hillman, x, Re-Visioning

Seeing Through My Practice

"I remember a student of religion telling me about his T.M., his meditation. Somebody in the seminar said, 'What about the political world?' He said, 'That doesn't matter. Computers can run the political world, the whole country, much more efficiently, and that frees us to pursue enlightenment with meditation.' Do you see the complete harmony between central dictatorship, fascism, political callousness, and the self-centeredness of the spiritual point of view? It opened my eyes: I saw the present cults of meditation not so gentle, no so harmless as they like to be, but a vicious bunch of totalitarians. They can't see the individual--which you see only if you look for soul, look with soul. They can't see an individual person, let alone an individual thing."--James Hillman, pg.187, A Blue Fire

I'm going to go after Hillman's definition of soul next. I remember in one of Brad Warner's podcasts he talked about in Buddhist philosophy there is no such thing as a soul. So if I'm understanding it right the soul is a Western idea.

The Wild Man and Zen Priest

This quote is one reason I decided to start sitting zazen over a year ago now.

"We could distinguish between the wild man and the savage man by looking at several details: the wild man's possession of spontaneity, the presence of the female side in him, and his embodiment of positive male sexuality. None of these implies violence toward or domination of others. I feel that the man under the water resembles a Zen priest more than a so-called primitive who in our view would only grunt. The image of the wild man describes a state of soul that allows shadow material to return slowly in such a way that it doesn't damage the ego. Apparently what we're hearing in 'Iron John' is a narrative reminder of old initiation rituals in northern Europe. The older males would teach the younger males how to deal with shadow material in such a way that it doesn't overwhelm the ego or the personality. They taught the encounter more as a kind of play than as a fight.

"When the shadow becomes absorbed the human being loses much of his darkness and becomes light and playful in a new way. The unabsorbed shadow can darken the air all around a human being. Pablo Casals is an example of the first type, and Cotton Mather of the second."--Robert Bly, pg.53, A Little Book on The Human Shadow

Zen Quote

"In Zen we have no goals. We may have a general aim for our practice. But we understand that things won’t come out the way we imagine them."--Brad Warner

No Quinn Quote This Week

There will be no Quinn Quote Saturday this week. It's the first day of the nine-day Wisconsin whitetail rifle hunt.

Dear Doctor

An imaginitive exchange in a therapeautic setting.

Me: Why do you think reading Ishmael in the library that day had such an impact on me? I mean it brought tears to my eyes.

Pscychologist: Perhaps it's because: "The Psyche can no longer be held by its old containers of Christian culture."--[James Hillman Pg.218, Revisioning Psychology]

Carrying Mail Today

I'm off to carry mail today. Last night loaded up four podcasts from over at Hardcore Zen to listen to in the car today. While they were downloading I spent a good half-hour reading posts at Natural Awareness Blog. This post stuck with me through the night and has been on my mind this morning.

It's title: "Final Words of D.T. Suzuki"

His final words were: "Don't worry. Thank you! Thank you!"

Deer Hunting Starts In a Few Days

Wisconsin's traditional nine-day gun deer hunt starts Saturday. In years past I've always experienced strong emotions during the season. One of the emotions has been a deeper sense of grief than usual. Of course, that is usually followed by a nervous tension that I'll find myself standing in a depression and my whole life will fall apart. It's complicated, and I'm sure there are many reasons why the grief's presence is more present than usual. But this excerpt out of Robert Bly's Iron John has always stuck with me when I start to ask what is going on here? Or to put it like the archetypal psychologist James Hillman has: What is Psyche doing now?

"So many roles that men have depended on for hundreds of years have dissolved or vanished. Certain activities, such as hunting or pirating, no one want him to do anymore. The Industrial Revolution has separated man from from nature and from his family. The only jobs he can get are liable to harm the earth and the atmosphere; in general he doesn't know whether to be ashamed of being a man or not.

"And yet the structure at the bottom of the male psyche is still as firm as it was twent thousand years ago. A contemporary man simply has very little help in getting down to it."[Pg.230]

I'm learning there are different levels of hunting.

Rogue Homeschooling Parent

One of the reasons why I'm so attracted to Daniel Quinn's method of helping us see through The Myth of Schooling is that it's not steeped in Christian mythology. What I'm trying to say is that as a homeschooling parent my wife and I don't keep our kids from going to school because the schools don't represent Christian values. Whatever the hell that is. Our kids are not going to school because they don't work. You see, I'm trying to see this from the perspective of 38 year old father of three children living in a hunter gatherer primitive tribe. It's an imaginitive act. And making that imaginitive move has me standing in the shoes of a rogue homeschooling parent without many like minded people around me.

It's been well over a decade since I ran across this passage in Daniel Quinn's Providence:

"Nothing magical happens at the age of five to render this [learning] process obsolete or invalid. You would know this if you observed what happens in cultures that we in our arrogant stupidity call primitive. In primitive cultures, parents simply go on keeping the children around, paying attention to them, talking to them, giving them access to everything, letting them try out things for themselves, and that's it. They don't herd them together for courses in tracking, pottery making, plant cultivation, hunting and so on. That's totally unnecessary. They don't give them history lessons or craft lessons or art lessons or music lessons, but--magically--all the kids grow up knowing their history, knowing their crafts, knowing their arts, knowing their music. Every kid grows up knowing everything--without a single minute spent in anything remotely like a school. No tests, no grades, no report cards. Every kid learns everything there is to learn in that culture because sooner or later every kid feels within himself or herself the need to learn it--just the way some kids in our culture get to a point where they feel the need to learn how to compute batting averages....

"Yes, I understand--believe me, I do. What you're saying is exactly what our educators would say: 'That system might work in primitive cultures, but it won't work in ours, because we just have too much to learn.' This is just ethnocentric balderdash; you might not like to hear this, but any anthropologist will confirm it: What children learn in other cultures isn't less, it's different. And in fact nothing is too much to learn if kids want to learn it. Take the case of teenage computer hackers. These kids, because they want to, manage--unaided!--to achieve a degree of computer sophistication that matches or surpasses that of whole teams of people with advanced degrees and decades of experience. Give kids access and they'll learn. Restrict their access to what you think they should learn, and they won't--and this is the function of our schools, to restrict kids' access to learning, to give them what educators think they should know, when they think they should know it, one drop at a time."


After reading that passage and many others I had a better understanding as to why I hated school and why my kids (If I had them) would not attend school.

Seeing The Light

Yesterday I mentioned enlightenment. And the reason why I'm bringing it up again this morning is that I'm thinking about a quote. Again it comes from James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology:

"Finally, psychological learning or psychologizing seems to represent the soul's desire for light, like the moth for the flame. The psyche wants to find itself by seeing through; even more, it loves to be enlightened by seeing through itself, as if the very act of seeing-through clarified and made the soul transparent--as if psychologizing with ideas were itself an archetypal therapy, enlightening, illuminating. The soul seems to suffer when its inward eye is occluded, a victim of overwhelming events. This suggests that all ways of enlightening soul--mystical and meditative, Socratic and dialectic, Oriental and disciplined, psychotherapeutic, and even the Cartesian longing for clear and distinct ideas--arise from the psyche's need for vision."[Pg.123]

There is a few reasons why I'm interested in this quote. First of all, I use to think enlightenment was an escapist fantasy to some degree. We are facing all of these problems in the real physical world(global warming, child abuse, poverty, wars)and there is a part of me that fantasizes about enlightenment. But what I'm hearing Hillman say is that the soul desires it. Secondly, most teachers of eastern disciplines talk about how thinking will not get us out of this mess were in as a culture. I'm hearing Hillman say again and again that clear thinking is essential. He's going against eastern philosophy and following our western tradition. Like he mentioned at the beginning of his book, were in the western psyche whether we like it or not. Why look to the east to solve our western problems? He says look to the south of our western tradition and think about the Renaissance that started in Italy. Lastly, he mentions in the quote the psyche needs vision. If you've read any of Daniel Quinn's work he talks a lot about vision. Not laws, not moralities, not meditation, not programs, but vision. This is probably one of the reasons why I'm starting to see DQ's work as a psychological text to some degree.

Well, that's it for this morning. It's not much. All I'm attempting to do is lay out why some of these quotes resonate with me. I consider these authors my mentors.

Moving Towards Mythology

I've mentioned before that I have an interest in Zen and I practice sitting zazen. I've also mentioned that I'm a substitute rural letter carrier. So on days when I have to work I end up sitting in the car for atleast five hours a day. That gives me a lot of time to listen to podcasts. I've had to work the last couple of days so I ended up listening to some of Brad Warner's from over at Hardcore Zen. Close to ten hours worth, actually.

I enjoyed the podcasts. They taught me a lot about Buddhism, Zen, and meditation. But ever since I've started sitting zazen and taking zen more seriously I often think of this quote by Robert Bly:

"So, for us, mythology is more helpful than enlightenment or to put it chronologically, years of mythology need to come, accustoming the soul to darkness, before the soul is ready for enlightenment."--Robert Bly in the November issue of The Sun Magazine back in 1983

I know almost nothing about the mythology in the Zen tradition, or Greek mythology for that matter. So I'm finding myself moving in the direction of learning mythology and understanding the psyche from a depth psychology perspective.

Quinn Quote of The Week

“The people of your culture are in the process of rendering this planet uninhabitable to yourselves and millions of other species. If you succeed in doing this, life will certainly continue, but at levels you (in your lofty way) would undoubtedly consider more primitive.”

“When you and I speak of saving the world, we mean saving the world roughly as we know it now- a world populated by elephants, gorillas, kangaroos, bison, elk, eagles, seals, whales, and so on…”

“There are only two ways to save the world in this sense. One of them is to destroy you immediately- not to wait for you to render the world uninhabitable for yourselves…”

“The only other way to save the world is to save you. Is to show you how to get the things you so desperately need- instead of destroying the world.”

“…the people of your culture are destroying the world not because they’re vicious or stupid, as Mother Culture teaches, but because they’re terribly, terribly deprived- of things that humans absolutely must have, simply cannot go on living without year after year and generation after generation…”

“…given a choice between destroying the world and having the things they really, deeply want, they’ll choose the latter. But before they can make that choice, they must see that choice.”

-Ishmael, from My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

The Hades Perspective

"The richness of Hades-Pluto psychologically refers to the wealth that is discovered through recognizing the interior deeps of the imgagination. For the underworld was mythologically conceived as a place where there are only psychic images. From the Hades perspective we are our images. The imaginal perspective assumes priority over the natural organic perspective." [Pg. 207, Revisioning Psychology]

Speech, Dignity, and Soul

"Speech can have no dignity unless the soul has dignity."--Petrarch

A Therapist Serves the Gods

While reading Re-Visioning Psychology this morning it occured to me that one of the reasons Daniel Quinn's work had such a profound affect on me when I first read it was that it was therapeutic in the Greek sense of the word. It was speaking to other elements of my psyche besides the ego. He was and is serving the gods that are always present. And when not acknowledged they will drive us out of our minds. The excerpt below out of Re-Visioning, I think, explains what I'm getting at.

"Greek humanism always 'remained to some degree inhuman, not in the sense of barbarian, but in the sense of the Gods.' They provide the inhuman perspective, so that the acute insights of the Greeks derive from a psyche, and a psychology, in which divine inhumanity has its place. A study of man can never give a sufficient perspective, for man is fundamentally limited; he is a frail, brotos, thnetos, a poor mortal thing, not fully real. Gods are real. And these Gods are everywhere, in all aspects of existence, all aspects of human life. In this Greek view--and 'Greece,' as we have seen, refers to the polytheistic imagination--there is no place, no act, no moment where they are not. The Gods could not absent themselves from existence in a Protestant theological manner; they were existence. There could not be two worlds--one sacred, one profane; one Christ's, one Caesar's--for the mundane was precisely the scene for divine enactment.

"Today we can put this psychologically, saying we are always in one or another archetypal perspective, always governed by one or another psychic dominant. The profane also carries soul, since the profane too has its archetypal background.

"This perspective begins in a polythestic consciousness, whether that of Greek religion or of archetypal psychology. Our difficulty with grasping the Greek world view is that while we begin always with an ego, the Greeks always began with the Gods. When the Delphic oracle or Socrates or a modern analysis exhorts one to 'know thyself,' this knowledge is of human limits, a humanity limited by the powers is the call of the therapeutes.

"The term means originally 'one who serves the Gods. (It refers also to 'one who attends to anything' and to 'one who attends to the sick.') The therapist is the one who pays attention to and cares for 'the God in the disease,'...." [Pg.191-192]

DQ Quote Saturday

"We've got to find our way back into the community [The community of life]. We've got to stop living like outlaws. When we begin to do that--when we begin to acknowledge that the world needs us and that we belong to it, not it to us--I think our feelings of desperate loneliness and neediness will begin to evaporate, all by themselves."--Daniel Quinn, Providence

I'm coming to realize that James Hillman's work falls under the same tree as Daniel Quinn's work. Thats why I think quotes like this nourish my soul: "Myths that shape human lives become in humanism instruments which the mind invents to explain itself to itself. The inherent otherness of myth in an imaginal other realm, the creative spontaneity of these stories and the fact that they are tales of Gods and their doings with humans--all become something a man makes up. We lose the experience of their primary reality and of ourselves as passing through them, of being lived by them, and that 'myths communicate with each other through men without their being aware of this fact.' As the perceptive philosopher Charles Hartshorne has noted, the rise of humanism correlates with 'the downfall of primitive animism, which is the mythological form of man's fellowhip with nature.'"[Pg.190, Re-Visioning Psychology]

The Moralistic Fallacy

Kathleen Raine talking about William Blake's view on right and wrong:

"Satans first step is to invent a moral code based upon the false belief that individuals can of themselves be good or evil. This is in direct contradiction to the real nature of things, by which proprium is merely the recipient of the divine influx. The morally 'good' specter is as satanic in every way as the morally 'evil,' since what is alike in both is their negation of the Imagination."Pg. 178, Re-Visioning Psychology

Daniel Quinn helping us pull back and look at right and wrong from a different perspective:

"For example, it's received wisdom that everyone knows the difference between right and wrong. We imagine that this knowledge arises from the structure of the human mind itself. In fact, we use this as a measure of sanity in our courts. And by this measure, I would be considered insane."--Pg.69, If The Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways

Stunned...

This excerpt about knocked me off my chair this morning: "Philosophy, from Plato and his Neoplatonic followers (especially Plotinus) and from Hegel and his neo-Hegelians, also supports this idea. Its tradition is that even if psyche refers to an individual soul here and now lived by a human being, it always refers equally to a universal principle, a world soul or objective psyche distinct from its individuality in humans. However, of these notions, psyche and human, psyche is the more embracing, for there is nothing of man that soul does not contain, affect, influence, or define. Soul enters into all of man and is in everything human. Human existence is psychological before it is anything else--economic, social, religious, physical. In terms of logical priority, all realities (physical, social, religious) are inferred from psychic images or fantasy presentations to a psyche. In terms of empirical priority, before we are born into a physical body or a social world, the fantasy of child-to-come is a psychic reality, influencing the 'nature' of the subsequent events. But the statement that soul enters into everything human cannot be reversed. Human does not enter into all of soul, nor is everything psycholgical human. Man exists in the midst of psyche; it is not the other way around. Therefore, soul is not confined by man. The soul has inhuman reaches. That the soul is experienced as my 'own' and 'within' refers to the privacy and interiority of psychic life. It does not imply a literal ownership or interiority. The sense of 'in-ness' refers neither to location nor to physical containment. It is not a spatial idea, but an imaginal metaphor for the soul's nonvisible and nonliteral inherence, the imaginal psychic quality within all events. Man can never be large enough to possess his psychic organs; he can be reflect their activities." [Pg. 173, Re-Visioning Psychology]

Fictions

This explains while I'll get a "handle" on what Ishmael had to say: "Fictions are not suppose to have great explanatory power, so they do not settle things for a mind searching for fixity. But they do provide a resting place for a mind searching for ambiguity and depth. In other words, fictions satisfy the aesthetic, religious, and speculative imagination more than they do the intellect."--Pg. 151, Revisioning Psychology

Literalism is a Sin

"The thing to be abolished is literalism;...the worship of false images; idolatry....Truth is always in poetic form; not literal but symbolic; hiding, or veiled; light in darkness...the alternative to literalism is mystery."--Norman Brown

Quinn Quote Saturday

"The most dangerous idea in existence.... Humans belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community."--Daniel Quinn, If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways

More Quotes From RP

A few quotes that I wrote down out of James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology this morning. "Where problems call for will power, fantasies evoke the power of imagination."[James Hillman, Pg.135] "Ritual brings together action and idea into an enactment."[James Hillman, Pg.137] "He [The poet] sees events through and through even when the participants see only the surface. And often when the participants sense only that a divine had is touching them the poet is able to name the god concerned and knows the secret of his purpose." [W.F. Otto, The Homeric Gods] "....the essence of consciousness is fantasy images."[James Hillman, Pg.140]

The Commanding Nafs

"The commanding nafs is that which has not passed through the crucible of aesthetic discipline, or shed the tough hide of existence. It actively resists all of God's creation. This nafs is of a bestial character that harasses other created beings and consistently sings its own praises. It always follows its own desires and grazes on the field of material nature; it drinks from the spring of the passions and knows only how to sleep, eat, and gratify itself."[Years back I ran across this quote on page 21 of Robert Bly's Sibling Society. He got the quote from Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh of Iran.]

Primary Caregivers

I often imagine teachers and psychologists as being the primary caregivers to the victims of our abusive economic system.

A Life After Ishmael Reflection

A life after Ishmael reflection. I ran across this quote while reading Re-Visioning Pschology early this morning.

"Ideas remain impractical when we have not grasped or been grasped by them. When we do not get an idea, we ask 'how' to put it in practice, thereby trying to turn insights of the soul into actions of the ego. But when an insight or idea has sunk in, practice invisibly changes. The idea has opened the eye of the soul. By seeing differently, we do differently. Then 'how' is implicitly taken care of. 'How?' disappears as the idea sinks in--as one reflects upon it rather than on how to do something with it. This movement of grasping ideas is vertical or inward rather than horizontal or outward into the realm of doing something. The only legitimate 'How?' in regard to these psychological insights is: 'How can I grasp an idea?'" Pg.122, Re-Visioning Psychology

This quote resonated with me because there are times when I get confused when trying to understand action and ideas. I often ask myself: Is my thirst for ideas an excuse not to act? Or to put it another way if I acted more would I be so interested in ideas? [Paragraph break. I have no idea why the paragraphs will not publish with a space. When I get some time I'll figure it out]Here is another idea that I got from Quinn's work: The primary function of schooling is to keep kids off from the job market. That's one of the reasons why we don't send our 13 yr. old son to school. He also tried to go to school when he was young and did not like it, and he doesn't have any interest in going back.

Who Am I?

This quote spoke to me this morning: "Whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same condition. I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another....all the contrarities are there to be found in one corner or another....I have nothing to say of myself entirely, simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion. Distinguo is the most universal member of my logic."--Montaigne

Daniel Quinn Quote Saturday

"During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then hum anity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day"-Daniel Quinn I pulled the above quote from The New Renaissance

A Brief Reflection on the Gods

After spending some time with James Hillman's work I'm starting to understand why I got hung up on Daniel Quinn's use of the term gods in Ishmael. I'm sure the hang up is because I was trying to think of them literally when I should have been thinking of them imaginatively. I was questioning their existence or nonexistence. Thinking of them imaginatively simply expands one vision.

Falling Apart

"Consciousness today is closer to it pathology. Psychopathology is no longer held behind asylum walls. The sickness fantasy is now so dominant that one sees disintegration, pollution, insanities, cancerous growth, and decay wherever on looks. Pathology has entered our speech and we judge our fellows and our society in terms once reserved for psychiatric diagnoses. And the ego falls apart."--James Hillman, Pg. 109, Re-Visioning Psychology

Quinn-O'-the-Week

"Our secret plan is this: We're going to go on consuming the world until there's no more to consume. This does not preclude consuming it "wisely" or consuming it as slowly as possibly. It doesn't preclude supporting every conceivable conser vation initiative. It doesn't preclude supporting every conceivable means of recycling. We're going to recycle, we're going to conserve-- but we're also going to go on consuming until there's no more to consume."--Daniel Quinn from On Investments

Quinn Quote Saturday

“We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.”― Daniel Quinn out of Ishmael

Quinn Quote Saturday

“Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.”--Daniel Quinn out of his novel Ishmael

Quinn Quote Saturday

"Surrounded by forces utterly beyond their control, children automatically take up magic. This is something that doesn't need to be explained or thought about; it's as instinctive in humans as nest-building in birds. In its simplest, truest form, magic is performed as a demonstration, to show the universe what's expected of it. If you want it to rain, for example, you go out and sprinkle things with water. If you want it to stop raining, on the other hand, you make a fire and start drying things out."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.25, Providence

Burning and Baseball Season

I haven't been posting much lately. I suppose if I would have been it would be quotes from either James Hillman's Blue Fire or Revisioning Psychology. I've spent my mornings the past couple of week reading those works. I had a big event in my life happen yesterday: I started my first fire of the burning season in the masonry stove. Two hundred and some odd days and close to four hundred fires until next baseball season. It's come down to burning season and baseball season.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"It's a sign of our cultural collapse that supporting our vision has come to be seen as wicked, while undermining that vision has come to be seen as noble."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.50, The Story of B

The Gods are Eternal

It's good to hear from a soul doctor that whatever happens with industrial civilization that the gods are eternal:

"For civilizations do eventually decline and perish. Cultures, by existing always in decay, in disorder, may continue beyond the civilizations that seem to hold them. In the shadows of the gods are the very gods themselves, their myths in the midst of what survives because it will not go away."--James Hillman, Pg. 165, A Blue Fire

And, as he says, we're created in their image:

"It may be surprising to associate the diseased with the divine and culture with deformity. We do so want the gods to be pristine, models in marble on Olympus, pure as driven snow. But they are not without their shadows, their afflictions and infirmities. As they are beyond time (athnetos, 'immortal'), so these shadows of disorder that they portray in their myths reappear in those human events that created in their images, we can only do in time what they do in eternity. Their eternal afflictions are our human infirmities."--James Hllman, Pg.164, A Blue Fire

Quinn Quote Saturday

"My frame of reference is that of a Martian anthropologist. I'm like someone who has traveled millions of miles to study a species of beings who, while supposedly bring rational, are destroying the very planet they live on."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.5, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways

The Importance of Psychology

Still reading and copying down some important quotes (Atleast to me anyway) out of James Hillman's Blue Fire.

"...the soul wants to learn psychology, wants thoughtful formulations of itself, and that this is a mode of its healing."-- James Hillman, Pg. 84, A Blue Fire

Now I have a better understanding of why I like to read psychology. It isn't a part of me that just wants to be and sound smart.

"Imagination and its development is perhaps a religious problem, because imagination becomes real only through belief. As theology tells us, belief is an act of faith, or its faith itself as a primary investment of energy in something which makes that something real."-- James Hillman, Pg.84, A Blue Fire

We have faith in our industrial civilization.

"Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depen perhaps the toehr cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first recieves attention."-- James Hillman, Pg. 85, A Blue Fire

Krishnamurti and Paul Rezendes would agree.

Finding Parallels

I knew I should've named this blog Understanding Ishmael. I'm reading A Blue Fire and of course I'm finding parallels between Hillman's psychology and Daniel Quinn's thinking.

"Where the daimones are alive polytheism, pantheism, animism, and even religion do not appear."--James Hillman, Pg. 42, A Blue Fire

"But to return to your original question, I have to say the faculty of belief has completely atrophied in me. It strikes me as foolish to believe in things that may not exist -- or to deny the existence of things that may exist. Nonetheless, I've peopled my own personal universe with gods who have a care for all living things. I don't pray to these gods or build shrines to them or expect favors from them or perform rituals for them. Nor do I expect other people to 'believe' in these gods or to people their own universes with them."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 51, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways

Perhaps the daimones are alive for anyone that can write something close to the above paragraph.

"As I have spelled out in several later writings, psychological polytheism is concerned less with worship than with attitudes, with the way we see things and place them. Gods, for psychology, are neither believed in nor addressed directly. They are rather adejectival than substantive; the polytheistic experience finds existence qualified with archetypal presence and recognizes faces of the gods in these qualifications. Only when these qualities are literalized, set apart as substances, that is, become theologized, do we have to imagine them through the category of belief."--James Hillman, Pg.42, A Blue Fire


"Being a Martian anthropologist, I have to pull back from your question, have to take off the blinders you're asking me to wear. Believing in things that may not exist--or disbelieving in things that MAY exist--is a peculiarity of your culture, not a universal human activity. Because it's universal among you, you assume it's universal among humans in general."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.49, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways

The daimones are not alive in our culture.