RANT: WE'RE ALL NEIGHBOURS

I DROVE TO THE GYM THE OTHER DAY, across the county line into another town. Our own gym closed, and I’m grateful for having one nearby that’s still open. It’s only about a twenty-minute or so drive and a surprisingly pleasant one once you’re outside the city, past all the strip malls and suburban developments. Driving in the country, I’d forgotten what a horizon looks like. In town, the skyline is crimped and clipped by the buildings and structures of the cityscape and the surrounding hills in the background—we’re in a kind of half-bowl affair that embraces the long reach of the bay like an elongated “C”. And as pleasant as our town’s lakefront is with its bracing winds, racing clouds and distant, watery horizon, in the end I like my distance to come from the land, from across fields and farms and forests, stretching (it seems) out to where the sun and moon abide. It's where most of us live, after all. We may have grown up in the trees, but we first walked on the plains—those flat lands with their forever vistas and waves of encroaching mysteries. We learned to talk and think there. I’d like to imagine it’s also where we learned to love.

In the forests of our beginnings, our “monkey fears” had us leaping from branch to branch, scurrying for safety under cover of the great tree canopies where we hid from creatures of the earth and sky. Some were our equals, our passive neighbours, but there were others whom we feared, who were stronger and quicker than us. When danger approached in the form of tooth and claw, we could flee into the trees, staring out from behind the shielding foliage, screaming our fears for all our kind to hear. And huddling at night in the deep forest’s high branches, safe in the dark, perhaps out of our fears, perhaps with them, we learned to hate those forest dwellers who threatened us. And as the long ages passed and forests gave way to grasslands, and we no longer had the option of fleeing up tree trunks to hide whenever danger or strangeness came our way, we were forced to learn another way of being in the world.

Robert DeNiro in "The Deer Hunter"

On the land, the savannas and plains of our youth, we were forced to meet and learn to exist with creatures who were not our kind: insects, birds, other terrestrial animals with which we arrived at some sort of accommodation—an armistice with some, a playful friendship with others. Some would kill us, others we would kill. Some shared our lives. Others we would only catch glimpses of. My point is that we had no choice in the matter—we had to deal with those creatures great and small; we couldn’t hide from them. We had to establish some sort of relationship. And in establishing relationships with them, perhaps we learned or developed, or honed, our ability to love. Perhaps love is a universal trait. Perhaps it is something so deeply engrained in our psyches as to be coded in our genes. Possibly. But love doesn’t flourish everywhere and all the time. For example, in the human activity we call war, where we kill members of our own kind, love seems to be in short supply. (Among mammals, humans are among the most violent, though it seems among our primate cousins we’re about average in intraspecies killing.) Soldiers have the choice of kill or be killed, or else ducking and staying out of the way until the fighting is over. Feelings of love for our fellow humans might come after. But during? Not so much. My point being, is that this thing we call ‘love’ is not a default mode or attribute we fall back on automatically in our dealings with one another and with species not our own (and that should include the ecologies we encounter, as well).

Our primate heritage has given us two distinctive traits: First, we are social beings in that we live in groups, creating an ‘us versus them’ mentality when we interact with others outside our immediate circle. Secondly, we are territorial—my space is my place! These two engrained traits, part of our genetic makeup, continue to dictate in us a greater propensity towards violence. *

Love may be innate, a universal force in principle but we still must learn about it. We must nurture and grow it, and grow with it. Hatred and violence are much easier for us to express.

Chris Hedges wrote about the struggle between these two forces, between good versus evil, to put it another way:

 

“The good draws to it the good, and this good is incomparable. It is part of the eternal battle against evil, and it has the power to transform the world. It is not the human that is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against humankind. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid the more senseless and helpless it may seem the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The profits, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb blind love is humankind's meaning. Human history is not about the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fraught by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness and if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now then evil will never conquer.” (From his keynote speech given at 2020 Allard Prize ceremony, Nov. 3/20.)

 

On these flat, terrestrial plains, where so much ‘otherness’ confronts us constantly, and where our territorial imperatives, clan laws and tribal customs guide us in our dealings with the world, how will we respond? With love? Or with fear and hatred?

IIRC, in the post-script to his fantasy novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie’s narrator, a speaker from the distant future, tells the reader how his world came about in the aftermath of the conflict, in our time, between the spirit realm of the “gennies” (of Arabian myth) and the human. In the cataclysm that resulted, humanity was nearly destroyed. But, thanks to “Dunni”, the powerful jinni princess who came to love humanity, the door between the spirit world and our own was sealed forever. This meant there would be no more ‘magic’, no more “genies” in bottles granting wishes, but it also meant there would be no more eruptions of impossible to resolve conflicts between the spirit world and our own. In a sense, the earth would be a place where the divine was no longer present.

And here, I thought of the concept of “immanence”**, which states that the divine is imbued in everything throughout the material world, and that, in Rushdie’s novel, the divine is now gone from the world by Dunni’s closing the gate to the jinni realm. The jinni’s magical realm—call it the divine—will no longer manifest in the human world. Instead, it will be transcendent, existing beyond the reach of humanity. (The Christian concept of God in heaven separate from the world is an example of a transcendent divinity. Christ on earth is an example of an immanent one.) His narrator goes on to say that humanity survived by learning to live rationally, logically, through science and to renounce their unconscious dreams and irrational desires. He says that the humanity of his time lives in peace and prosperity, and in harmony with the world, but they lost something in the process: they no longer dreamed when they slept. That was the price they paid. Dreams were a vestige of the magical, the immanent, and were thus potentially dangerous and destabilizing to their calm and orderly world. Still, the speaker ends his narration wondering, wistfully, what it would be like to dream.

 

I’m not sure how all this fits with my driving to the gym through the flat farmlands of Southwest Ontario, but it has something to do with the imagination and how these wide, open spaces allow it to flourish and suggest future possibilities, and even magical encounters. And maybe these spaces encourage us, whether we like it or not, to greet others, whom we are bound to meet in our journeys across the land, less with fear and hatred, and more with love and compassion.

Something like that, anyway. It’s a pleasant dream.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

 

* Interestingly enough, studies have suggested humans are particularly skilful at adult-to-adult killing and violence.

* Immanent—adj. Existing or operating within: inherent.

                     —(of God) Permanently pervading and sustaining the universe. Often contrasted with Transcendent (O.E.D.)