Winertia: Where February Does Not Love You

February in the northern hemisphere is a very difficult place for humans, a species that has been displaced there, displaced to the temperate regions where our bodies, brains and all, are not adapted to thrive. But here we are, placed in a February that does not love us.

The February utterance “the days are getting longer” is true enough, though these lengthening days haven’t done much to warm the oceans and lakes. In fact these large thermal modulators that determine a huge plurality of the climate, including our own bodily climate, reach their lowest temperatures in February. We are also especially connected with them since a resonance of sorts exists between we liquids (we are bodies of water primarily). The state of the larger liquid bodies around us is a good indication of where we should ideally dwell and where we shouldn’t. It seems pretty clear to me that frozen lakes are not for skating—they are for escaping. But we are not there… because we are all to heavily invested there. And these northern lands are very invested in us in their seasonal flows. The land is lethargic and so are we, after several months of cooling down any warm vital flows. Months of eyes that evolved to see colors, seeing nothing but colorless landscapes. What does this reinforce in us? What does it drive us to do to escape that madness? Sigh.

So people are not wrong for desiring a balanced amount of light, and believing that it is very important. It is very important, in fact so important that we should’ve as a species continued being in a closer relationship with the equator (365 days of balance), as opposed to the equinox (a handful of days of balance). But again here we are, we northerners, we whose ancestors turned their backs on the sun, perhaps with spears and whips at those backs, as territoriality became a reality for the once nomadic species.

The diversity of climates humans now live in is directly correlated with the destruction of ecosystem diversity we inflicted. The human animal’s consistent needs for survival have us homogenizing the most climatically diverse areas, making them uninhabitable for a majority of the species living there as we make them habitable for us and our narrow range of parallelly domesticated species. We now so easily, habitually, destroy an entire ecosystem—ecocide—to make it habitable. What was it that provoked this and allowed this of a species that used to depend on the ecosystem?

What we gained in fire, we lost in forest

Our altered relationship with the forest, our original caretaker, is indicative of the answer. Deciduosity was our first widescale trauma, that contained the catalyst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction. The harsh teachings of abandonment would be leveled on the astray hominids. The forest, our enduring mother and protective womb, every winter hibernates below ground and becomes “the woods” to those of us non-hibernating types above ground. We entered a seasonal land, but given our limitations as non-seasonal beings we continued our perpetuality through our fire-technology. We abandoned relationships with the forests and we abandoned our perceived need of the sun, and grew our relationship with fire. Forests became merely a means to fuel fire, to shelter our marriage of us and fire, an indoors love story. Humans and fire then gave birth to forged metals. Now we have forests of metals, we call them cities. Dystopia was prefigured in these long-ago missteps. We became alienated from our ecosystems, and failed (and were perhaps prevented) to return to the sun. Fire was what we had, and we forsook the other elements of our being along the way. We are the fire people, and after many many generations we are dry as fuck…

Our straying from our home near the equator had forced us to become part-time humans. Winter is inhumane, and so have we become. We hate the cold, but given the vast difference of scale it’s really more accurate to say the cold hates us. We need a vacation, one that has us actually vacate.

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malas semillas

Found this email to myself, buried in an inbox. Not let’s see where it grows…

Essentially, you might say there are three options: planting good seeds, planting bad seeds, or planting no seeds

we can choose to plant no seeds as we go through our lives—relying completely on good fortune to always befall us

Humans were not agriculturally structured, this is one of the several intermingling reasons why we’ve needed to technologize ourselves so heavily. We’ve had to develop methods to keep track of loads of data that we can’t possibly store effectively in our brains. This leads me to my next point, which is that if we are to sow seeds that are negative, that are meant to harm other organic life forms, particularly humans but all others would be included, well there’s a very good chance we will forget we even sowed that seed. Whether it’s a physical seeding or some idea or plot line we’ve put forth as an act of subterfuge, unless we are highly trained in managing and data tracking our negative efforts, they are likely to end up numbering we ourselves as the victims. Our proximity to them because of their initiation already puts us in danger, and our primitive (as a compliment) brains are not meant for such nonsense besides.

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“Naming the things that are absent breaks the spell of things that are”
-Paul Valery

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Most individuals have a plurality of sides to them that are deeply flawed—missing qualities paired alongside with grand over-compensations that would have others in “the normal range” feeling vacant and flawed by comparison. These flaws are constantly revealed to the therapist and personality analyst types among us because an individual is rarely whole on their own; a conclusion these professionals are usually blind to is that an individual is an idiosyncratic puzzle piece that must have vulnerabilities and additional capacities to fit in with a more complete picture, albeit a large family or tribe. Lacking this tribe to fit in with is the great flaw, for tribe-lessness is the great disease and a puzzle that we seem farthest from solving, for truly we need others to complete us.

Flavorful Fruit For Free Flinging Fast Food Frugivores

The wonders of a sustaining frugivorian lifestyle cannot be overstated as far as I am concerned. To have perfect food ready-made that nature intended for us as we meandered through different lands, is quite a utopia.

Fast Forward to Fast Food. However, we are no where in sight of such a place, yet I think a proof that the frugivorian lifestyle is what was ecosystemically intended for us is in the human inclination given the choice towards ready-packaged foods or fast food restaurants. We are instinctively built to grab something and go, a situation long predating the current rush of modernity where we may feel forced to get the quickest source of digestible energy and go. After the long millennia of toil over a stove, which some have come to enjoy with a passion myself not withstanding (blood type difference between this group and myself, an O-Negative?), others like myself were more than ready to have someone else make their food (until my digestive system broke and I had to rebuild it with a ketogenic-GAPS diet). Packaged food doesn’t carry the same liberation nor the same nutritional benefits (nor the seed spreading service to the food provider) that it would have in primal times, but it still is the going through a motion that connects us with a deep genealogy.

Littering. Whether it be the waste products from the food or our own waste, there is also a human inclination towards littering then and now (¿and possession-less-ness?) that would be on the back end of the equation. Now there is a real problem with litter because of its non-organic or anti-organic nature, but in the times when fast food was a fruit, whatever wasn’t eaten, or whatever wasn’t digested, would be readily reabsorbed and digested by the rest of the ecosystem along our trails. We would’ve been happily free from the burden of minding useless possessions, quite a turn of affairs from where we are now. Well distributed compostables by the human vector and activator would have been quite stewardly.

It’s a long way back (forward), but the fruit of our labor will taste unlike anything that the package of civilization can now offer us!

notes 4 today: 2016-12-07 (Wandermust; Working Towards Extinction; In Defense Of Hypocrisy; Passing On Guns)

title: Wandermust (draft)

subtitle: Boredom to Motivate Human Migration
[MEME to be associated “Nomads, because we were happy”]

Boredom, it is assumed, is a fairly universal, recognizable, and linguified term across all modern cultures. If we inspect it as an emotion that has arisen because it offered some survival advantage, what is it’s utility? It tells us to leave a particularly nice area where we may have settled and to keep moving on. This may be way off the true reasons, but perhaps not. A hypothesis relating to boredom through depression, which is quite similar in many of its manifestions, is remedied in some people after ECT, which is well known to cause memory loss. ECT destroys the normalizations imposed by a repetitive landscape. Instead of moving the body and brain to a new location, ECT removes connections within the brain to the stagnant life. Everyday life can become more interesting, albeit a lot more challenging where normalizations and a good memory are requisite; this is why ECT is usually not a true solution but a misguided transferrence that treats a symptom.

Dogs, sedentary man’s best friend, offer an illuminating contrast. Though we cannot ask dogs directly, presumably they do not experience boredom in the flavor or intensity that we do. This relative lack of their ability to feel it would be bound up with their territorial nature. Boredom tells us we have worn out our welcome, and because our loyalties would all lie with our fellow band of humans rather than with a specific place, we could move without any feelings of betrayal to counter balance against boredom. Dogs on the other hand are very loyal to their specific land, and boredom of that land would compete within them and not be adaptive.

We speak of domesticating dogs, as with other animals, but the contrary is probably closer to the truth: dogs domesticated us, or were a greater influence than many would like to think in our own domestication.

2016 Add ins – The need to keep moving (must wander) would logically be linked to our predisposition as a hunted species, and boredom would be an instinctual way of deep rooting this need were we not to have intellectually arrived at it. The guerilla mentality runs deep in us, and it explain to me another lifelong personal trend: I’ve had lots and lots of chase dreams in my sleep—it’s the majoritarian theme of the dreams I can recall, and they’ve always been quite adventurous and usually more fun and thrilling than actually scary. There was always a comfort in the chase dreams that I was always at least one step ahead of my pursuer(s), which were only sometimes of human type. However, it is noteworthy that fear would also be an emotion that would run deep in us, which would give explanation to how fear is so often used to manipulate us. It is a evolutionary vulnerability to say the least.

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title: Working Towards Extinction (meme)

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title: In Defense Of Hypocrisy: May We Should On Ourselves

“It’s better to should all over other people as you do on to yourself”

“A world without hypocrites is a world without ideas”

Succumbing to the rebukes of a society that would attack an incomplete but evolving praxilogical action when it is vulnerable and in its infancy, is precisely the vast conundrum facing us that stifles and has us stifling our own liberation from many an oppression. Whether we are the “hypocrite” or the one shouting out “hey hypocrite!”, we are choosing to intervene in a process to which we were previously outside of and now deciding to attempt to stop. Sadly for us all, the process in to which we are choosing to add toil to by calling the purveyor “hypocritical”, is often a process which has as part of it something we would want to see realized. The part that follows the normative “should” that the hypocritical speaker was articulating is quite often a beautiful and imaginative idea for a better path to go down. However, too too quickly and too often we fall in to the trap of frustration with our situations and attack and belittle one of our own who shares a common dream. Let’s take an example before any more general ruminations on this matter:

“There should be more farmers” is said by someone who is not a farmer, and it can obviously be attacked as a hypocritical statement. “Actions speak louder than words” might be a reply of someone in the audience, but I would counter that in a society so deeply invested in the symbolic realm as ours that speaking certain words (especially ones that shine light on an uncomfortable reality) is the loudest of actions. The backstory to this farmer advocate and speaker is that s/he might have severe economic or health restrictions, or are time-bound elsewhere. I would urge us to admire that the person even goes out in to the public sphere and braves to speak such a prescription, and tries to influence the minds of their fellow humans (rather than yield and be quiet, giving the corporate media even more uninterrupted time to shout their propaganda that will instead fill all of our minds). Perhaps by saying it out loud and prescribing such an ideal, the person will naturally move closer to realizing it themselves as well. If one always waited to be the perfect example of such-and-such a thing, we would all always be waiting.

Hypocrisy is a necessary stage in the growth process. Unrealized ideals, which are a great part of the human condition, should and could all be labeled as hypocritical, but I don’t think they should have attached to them the negative, pejorative label of hypocrite. Ideas often need to be voiced in their ideal state before they are immediately rushed in to. The human evolutionary adaptation of a grand capacity for ideas will come to include (depending on the person) many ideas that are unthinkably horrific that fortunately we never go on to realize. One might even say out loud “should kill all…”, but then are reprimanded for speaking of violent things; but this is a good thing, for now the person can see a perspective from their audience that shows them that their idea is a faulty one, and at this point no one has yet been hurt or killed by its realization. Calling them a hypocrite in this manner would only serve to cajole them forward—it is more important to be wary and cautious but also firmly replying that their ideas are bad ones. So, too, when someone presents good ideas that they have done little to realize, the ideas should be praised as good ones. Perhaps later on if there is some stagnancy in this “idea stage”, one can try to move the person along towards realization, but a space and time for the evolution of a theory to find its grounding in practice is necessary if any complex and meaningful ideas are given a chance to root in to our world.

We must evolve the new out of the old, which means that despite what newness we hope to usher in with great haste, we will still be mired in much oldness that is stuck on us like clothes, making us appear to be dressed differently than we speak: voices of hypocrisy. For those who are just paying lip service to ideas that they make no clear pathway to ever realize, the word “hypocrite” is reserved. So not all hypocrisies ought to be glossed over all of the time, but hypocrisy enforcement should not be a reactive principle of action which is used in a knee-jerk fashion. It is a concept that should be flexibly understood and applied with a full understanding of the evolving context in which words and ideas unfold alongside—but often before—the things with which they are about, unfold too.

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title: Passing On Guns

notes 4 today: 2016-12-05 (Contrarian Thoughts On The Origins Of Our Domestication; Awake By Nightmare; The Naked Capitalist Poem; Lpha Male)

title: Contrarian Thoughts On The Origins Of Our Domestication (rough outline and collection of notes)
Working Title: Conquering Civilization

Mostly in reaction to those who rely for their theories of the past purpotedly on the ideas from Chalice and the Blade, a work I will probably never make the time to read (but perhaps have read to me on audiobook?)

Responses to the presentations of the arguments unloaded on me after declaring that I thought humans were best suited for nomadic lifestyle:

Home is where the people are no longer. Home is now a house, as fulfillment of the sedentary.

the idealistic idea that out of sitting comes sharing (a sharing circle), forgets that for a land to be presumed to be shared, beforehand it must be claimed. Rousseau was mostly right when he said “this is mine” is the origin of inequality, but it wasn’t spoken with the mouth, it was spoken with the body that ceased to migrate in favor of the sedentary.

the empiric (empire-ing?) people, the conquers, were the vector to spread the disease of civilization, but were not the disease itself. Sedentary people were the disease, the adaptation to a climate in which required them to overuse natural resources outside of themselves without fully returning the surplus, but hoarding it. Hoarding it, possibly, was not out of greed, but out of the lack they had by in so being sedentary created in their ecological surroundings. They created a structure (an infrustructure, if you will)

the stagnant living arrangement that lacked a constant source of food required that these people HAD to develop new sources of foods. Sitting around made them impoverished both in body/mind and in food store. They had to develop new enzymes (that correlate roughly with blood type indicators), whether they were in a moderately seasoned river valley or a harsher climate with winter die-backs and deciduous dominated plant life.
It wasn’t that they wanted to cultivate crops…

standing in great contrast to the notion that civilization is called the beginning of great surplus, these original settlers didn’t expand their palette to attain new foods and expand the omnivoric repetoir through blood adaptation that enhanced their ability to eat food. They HAD to adapt or die because their lack of a sustainable diet, one that could not be provided were they to not continue moving and following herds and frequenting diverse food spots

agriculture and empires are about innate land not being sufficient for the human animal.

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title: Awake By Nightmare (meme)

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title: The Naked Capitalist (poem)

Remove the consumer
leave the capitalist naked
without us self-enslaving
the capitalist can’t make it

Buy wisely
don’t buy wiser
wisdom as commodity
profit to the miser

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title: Lpha Male

The lpha male(s) is the one that will come to lead a people out of a trapped territory. He makes the hard but real choice to not consolidate power (both power within himself and power over his group) but to spread it across a trajectory that is directionally tending to the place and future that needs to be bridged to. This is sacrificial stance is in stark contrast to an alpha male, who is a conservative force that rules through violence and tradition and the passivity of others; the lpha male is a dominant but not dominating figure who is a natural leader, not a throne room whore.

Such figures are what the embattled and trapped human need, not for a taste of a quasi-fascism, but precisely as an escape route where fascism has already compromised the minds and bodies of many.

And the lpha male need not be a male, either—in any new or traditional sense—and is just as likely of another gender, or a spirit shared across many persons.

The Desynchronization & Disenchantment Of The Human Relationship To Trees

Trees fruiting and providing hominids with their needs in ephemeral fashion would have been one of the many wondrous dimensions that existed in the backdrop of our ancestor’s primal experience in the forests. If edible fruit were on the tree or on the ground, they were eaten, and if there were no immediate availability, the group moved on, probably forgetting all but the vaguest ideas of that particular time and locale. The intervening time when the hominids were off exploring other realms, keeping their migration and eating rhythm constant but with alterations in food flavors and colors, trees would continue on through the other portions of their seasonal cycles, fulfilling their own oscillations of generation and reproduction. Because this relationship had to be sustainable—just like with any ecosystemic relationship—the efficiency of hominid migratory trajectories had to coincide with the harvestable time ranges for a given locale and they would usually land on a place that had some food to keep them going. In this way, hominids were the spatially moving targeteers aiming at a stationary but temporally dynamic target. Symbiosis could be maintained as long as hominids had a broad enough range to spread out their needs for immediate and ephemeral food sources, or if they were in small enough groups to not need too wide of a range (perhaps the latter possibility is where some original conceptual dissonance between trees and humans could have emerged).

Why Did This Relationship Sour?

Above is painted a crude but sufficient description of millions of years when hominids and protohominids migrated in seasonal sync with an adequately large territory to produce a sustainable pattern and enduring ecosystem; they wouldn’t have had a ripe possibility to conceptually analyze a single tree down to a banal object. It must be supposed that changes happened to disrupt or alter hominid migration rhythms to where they were now stranded on a new island formed by natural disaster, or a drought or year of great plenty concentrated them in a smaller or restricted area; or, another supposition is that the proto-humans chose to stay in a particular area (because of cultural developments?). Whatever the reason(s), and whether they be listed here or not, occurring alone or in concert, there eventually emerged enduring changes in how humans came to regard trees in quite a different light, which at base was resultant from new rhythms in the interactions between the humans and the forests.

Specific individual trees, as well as specific tree species, would have been normalized in the human experience like never before. With a more localized (less nomadic) living situation, we would have been in proximity to the trees for a longer part of their seasonal cycle, and would now come to behold uninteresting (or too interesting, to be explained later) slow changes in trees when they weren’t providing us with fruit. Those parts of the human mind that ask “what more can I get out of this?” would be activated, wondering what other uses a tree has since they are frustratingly slow in offering their fruits again. Normalization would allow trees to become deleveraged, banal objects, offering themselves to creative manipulation. A tree becomes its wood, its bark, and its possibilities as dead wood to grow fruiting mushroom bodies; a tree also becomes magical, seeming to have some spirit that causes something seemingly unchanging to change. A tree caste system might have emerged, where privileged trees (those seemingly more productive for human ends) would be favored, fostered, even worshiped and bestowed with qualities that weren’t actual. This unbalancing comes to show the twofold danger with this new unsustainable relationship to trees: trees would not only be analytically regarded sometimes as the sum of their parts, they also might have parts added on to their whole, imposing a foggy dogmatism and cultural evolution that would retard and stray humans further from an appropriate ecosystemic relationship to trees.

Summarization of the Problem

By a higher dose of interaction with specific trees that allowed their normalization/banalization by the concept-heavy humans, humans would come to add mediations to the observably slower plants around them that would come to blockade an accurate relationship. Trees would have both an elevated and diminished role in the minds of the humans who would dwell for long times in their presence, ranging from deities to mere timber resources. Forests could not be left to their own devices, as we see now with either preservation (including the non-passive interaction of burn suppression and “pest” removal) management, or with deforestation in to timber and building sites.

Wandering Where To Go

There are no forests unmapped, left to vague enchantment, as distinctly different from the interaction of our deep ancestors. There are options to not look at the maps, and not be entwined with all the forays of human industry and knowledge and to allow the original and unmediated enchantment enter when going on an adventure. I think we all still have the capacity to feel this as evidenced by the distinctly different feelings of being in a whole new place. To reclaim our minds from the doldrums of banalization, we ought to keep travelling before normalization sets in—movement is its own end… endlessness is its own end! If we step back, and keep stepping back, we can allow the rest of life on Earth to heal itself and then we will find simultaneously many of our wounds—physical and psychological—to be healing themselves too. A sedentary lifestyle for such a powerful, non-sedentary animal as humans, puts in peril the whole project of life on Earth.

 

River Sleepiness

Mammals are the most dehydrated when they wake from a long sleep and are thus the most in need of liquids to be their tonic. Could it be that the white noise from running water calms us in to a restful sleep not just because it might remind us of our deeply nurturing time spent in our mother’s womb—as is commonly suggested—but also as a primary survival trait that encourages us to rest when we are in earshot of a life-replenishing water source. The vibrations of the moving water grounds and relaxes us after a long day of adventuring abroad to places that might not have had drinking water possibilities; it’s lacking in an environment keeps us more on edge to truly rest as our bodies sense that they need to be in proximity to a water source. In the quiet of the early night when we are still alert and on the move, we are hunting not for the sounds of prey, but for the sounds of tomorrow’s water.

Just wanted to point out what I thought was another example of the tremendous foresight built in to our instincts, which is in contrast to the notion that has instincts painted as lowly and banal “animal” reflexes and reactions.

Humans Hunted by Herbivores

As with many of my flighty or subterranean ideas ruminating in and out of consciousness, this is one narrative of deep anthropogenical “predicting of the past” that has heretofore not had a landing space on the surface for which it could clearly be elaborated and connected. Now a clear and propelling catalyst has emerged—thanks to the awesome possibilities ¿unEarthed? by a recent post by Ria Montana—so that this anthropogenic chapter in the human story can emerge without a stark aloofness. This narrative (for lack of a better word) is in answer to the direct and perhaps simplified question:

Why did the proto-human primate-types leave the trees and become the upright humans that we see today?

In rough terms my answer is the following:

→ Our ancestors as forest animals were deeply embedded in the fungal dominated forest eco-system and were quite connected to the needs of the forests, and were acutely aware of encroaching grassland herd species of animals (large ruminants, mostly) that were chipping away at the forest edges over the generations and quickly bringing the land to a succession towards bacterial dominated grass lands. Frugivorian humans turned hunters were the forests’ answer to these “herbivore” predators displacing the forest ecosystem at a cancerous rate (in an Eon-ic time scale) in to a new bacterial dominated savannah and grassland. Humans were the paleo (but not pale) white blood cells of the forest’s immune system, the animals most fit to restore a balanced relationship between the fungal soils and the bacteria soils. Up to this point the Earth had not yet evolved an effective ecological control on the indomitable marauding masses of unsizably large ruminants, but that was to change with the ascent of humans in to this new “grand-stewardship” role.

→ Possible origins of our nearer-side nomadic patterns and our shift to an omnivorous diet (away from a more strictly frugivorian one) can now be offered, as these humans leaving the full ecosystem of the forest would now be exposed to the lands of two annual seasons: wet and dry. During the peak dry and peak wet seasons humans would preferably migrate to forest ecologies where a water and fruit supply could be attained, and their sensitive bodies could better thermally modulate and keep from being too hot and burning or two wet and shivering; during the intermediary times when faring in the less protected grassland ecology was more plausible and the rivers and springs ran with fresh strong water, humans would do a greater deal of hunting and carrying out of their forest immuno-responsibilities. This bi-modality of shifting nomadically from open grasslands to the retreat of a protective forest could be looked at as humanity’s first engagement in geographically and climatologically determined guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately, this lifestyle, given that it eventually unbalanced to bring surplus rather than sustenance, might have planted the seeds that saw human vigilance begin to wane, and the human championing of life’s cause be replaced by human’s championing themselves, from the species on down now to the individual, against the world.

→ The not innately-violent humans—used to being a link in the life cycle eating the freely given fruits of the forest—had now become the champions of the forest. They had to devise ways and methods to “dehumanize” the fellow mammals they were sent to slaughter, and such symbolic methods of separation became our downfall and the current downfall of the Earth, roughly stated.

→ Regardless of the low points we have come to now, understanding this part of the human story is very reassuring, for it is one of our most important embarkations as stewards of life on Earth, which I believe is a natural role to which humans are inclined and predisposed. We were very threatened and sensitive enough to realize we were threatened not by a direct predator, but by a predator that threatened the whole entire ecosystem of which we were a part. This awareness is astounding and reaffirming of much deeper connections of life than science has yet discovered via its dissective and anti-life methodology. In a very noble attempt to keep back these bacteriological grassland conquerors, our ancestors chose to stand up (literally) and fight back on part of a series of organisms which we held in community and in high regards. We died hunting and evolving ways to attack these animals and lessen their populations to save the forest eco-systems we held so dear. And I’d like to believe that for a time the transitioning middle was extended before we made our wrong turn, and we held both the forests and the grasslands in high regard; we let ourselves be a bridge, a common ground through our not favoring one ground over the other, and these two very different worlds of vital development were given a relationship through us and our migrations. They could peacefully co-exist for this epoch as long as humans were to fill in our new niche responsibly, not overdoing it or underperforming. Unfortunately we overperformed in our specific species successes and became conquering and predatory without keeping in mind the long view that we were to be eating away at our future selves; a disease is a blind act of suicide.

→ And lastly, I offer an allegorical way to put this transition in terms of “rock-paper-scissor”. Ruminant herbivores came along (the paper) ready to swallow up our friend the forest (the rock); in order to get back at the paper and defend our friend, we fashioned ourselves out of the rock minerals in to the scissors with which we could now cut back at the engulfing paper. We made the enemy of our friends our enemies and created ourselves as the scissors, the third length in an important cycle. Unfortunately, the scissor moniker has been taken to heart, and now we cut down everything, including rock! But the choice is ours, even at this seemingly late stage, to reemerge as the stewards the Earth borne us to be.

Fall of Colors

“You cant see the consequences of past bad decisions when you are the consequence...”

The same old song will keep playing whether or not I refrain from singing it, but perhaps consciousness of the acutely malevolent harmony can prove the needed watershed. The song of civilization—an insult to music and an assault on musicality—has degraded so much of our environment and our faculties that it persists with greater force concurrent with our deteriorating ability to resist. The losses taking place are across the entire range of experience, and happen in an overall holistic fashion despite the analytic mind’s tendency to dissociate phenomena to distinct spheres. I thought it would be best to focus in (while focusing is still an option!) on the visual losses incurred because of human civilization’s pushing recklessly onward to sterilize the land of vitality.  By the points of arrows, in fitting with the theme, I will list how both the colors in the environment and the visual perception of them are both dulling and atrophying.

→ Paradoxically, the more artificial light we shine on our surroundings, whether it be during the dark of night or the variable light of the day, reduces the rich range of color. When every elaboration of color is exposed to additional light, the degree of difference between the subtle shades of colors is all averaged down, reduced in degree of difference to a more common denominator of whitened (un-appreciable) light; there are fewer types of photons even as the intensity and quantity of those photons increases. Color suffers even greater dilution by light of a narrow spectrum which forces photons in to a narrower field.

→ By this increased light—whether it be a screen LED light, a CFL, a welding arc, or even a fire—our pupils are constricting and not exposed to as wide a spectrum, leaving our visual perception organs with less information to use to “view” reality. The visual apparatuses for detecting even more subtle sensations will be allowed to waste for want of use. The colors of the shadows that our ancestors used to appreciate are not even known to exist by us, for there is both a lack of eye opening exposure to the dark and a blunting of pupil training to open quickly and accurately given a variable dosing of light. The harsh visual environment even has our eyelids failing their nightly task, illuminated by the very fact that eye covers are now a common bedtime accessory.

→ Being in closed and walled spaces has generally made us nearsighted. We are losing our abilities to see far for a host of reasons brewing together which can be described as genetic, epi-genetic, physiological, and cultural. We are homebodies with home-eyes, having every reason to leave our homes but having imagination to access none of them. Nearsightedness correlates with near living that is part and parcel of civilization’s sedentary “do nothing, see nothing” motif.

→ As humans spend greater and greater majorities of their time surrounded by artificial creations (possessions, the walls of their dwellings, cooled and dried air) rather than those derived by an eco-systemic community (a lush hillside, a mangrove, a balmy humid air), their understanding of subtlety will only come to be as deep as the creations they surround themselves with. As more and more of our possessions and the paints for our walls and appliances are mass produced, there is little room in the mechanized manufacturing process for intricate difference. It is the reduction of such physical objects to mere utility that would see them colored from end to end all in the same shade and same lacquer. The only thing redeeming about an indoor space is if there are other humans there; without a social gathering it is nothing more than an early tomb deceptively decorated.

→ The specific color schemes that are manufactured in large quantities are made out of a range of subtler and more variably colored raw materials that are combined and averaged together to make something specific: the plurality of forms are reduced to uniforms. Those raw colors cease to exist once they are turned in to a new “civilized” color, and they only can come again in force once nature finds the materials out of which to create them. However, being that those materials were just tied up in the industrial color, the degree of availability will not be present until the industrial color is decomposed and recycled. In this case it is true that there cannot be a new life of a color without a same quantity of color(s) elsewhere dying. A zero-sum game is correct in the quantity sense but not in the moral sense—the sum is far more negative. The goal of ethnic purity is condemned for the it’s anti-social outcome, why should not similar ills and impoverishments emerge in an ecosystem when purity is pursued to the loss of diversity? Purification is the goal of a lower order virus.

→ The depth and richness of colors cannot be produced by organisms when there are deficiencies in nutrients. Soil health is deteriorating for a variety of reasons: erosion, unbalanced and erratic hydration, antibiotic chemical attack on bacteria/fungi, lack of bioavailable nutrients due to soil ecology waning. Vibrant and subtle colors are associated with a higher level of vitality that is in sync with a reproductive desire, but reproduction concerns are being suffocated by the very need of survival. The belt is tightening and beautiful colors will become more and more an unfeasible luxury.

→ This last arrow, perhaps the most crucial but also the most abstract, is that civilization has been making the world gradient (in part through purification) where it was once more continuous. It is reification made visible, even if reification is usually done invisibly and the victimage remains veiled. Colors of all shapes and proclivities are subjected to a cookie cutter that removes the natural sweetness for artificial flavoring. The space in between the remaining colors is vacated, turned in to a void, which is the space now for a stark transition between grades; the fragile smoothness of human vision is now gradated (and degraded), reinforced by the surroundings for it to perceive, and it is devolving to adapt to. The inductive and conductive wholly middle is excluded for a reductive and deductive separateness. It is tautological in its feedback looping, and it is akin to calculus breaking a curve in to several discrete alternating horizontal and vertical directions of a line. We are losing grip of reality in part because there is less to grasp; expansive big-box stores replace more balanced sustenance “Mom and Pop” stores, and trucking to these stores and your doorstep keeps you from walking to stores not distant from your doorstep. This Lego → Duplo → Mega Blok image might make the case better than words:

“Lego don’t Let Go, though we are being Mega Blocked”

← ← Aiming Our Arrow In A New Direction ← ←

Hope you see where we need to go (back is forwards, adding fuel to the postulate that our age is one of contradiction). Color loss is a symptom that would be folly to try and treat directly. The root cause is the lack of rooting space for life to take hold and diversify. We need to both stop our industrial land (and water) destruction processes and regenerate what has been lost through targeted personal and communal micro-climate re-establishment. The best way to fight climate loss (the non-euphemistic term for climate change) is by adding back micro-climates, which are the foundations of climate stability and harmony.