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Civil blood
Oct. 30th, 2021 06:26 pmThe world I live in doesn't have a thing/person binary.
It has only a functional boundary around entities, depending on the scale on which I'm working at the time. Biological definitions are ruled by their exceptions and I find no truths in common wisdom or social definitions of seperateness.
As such my experience of life is like passing through a school of flowing fish and seaweed: it's contact upon contact, sensation upon sensation, with what might be conceived of as environment, individual, and superindividual all at once.
When I sink into this feeling I can report on it only from the very edge of language. My counselor asked, what would it look like to not always be translating for people? She doesn't understand that _people_ is literal. In order to interact with humans I need to translate into words, into behaviours, into expressions. When I have true space I become what I've never seen elsewhere and cannot explain.
Untranslated, I feel everything as having a real existence. When I sat down to write this, before I made it though the preamble, I was going to say: I feel everything as alive. I can't access a meaningful societal definition of alive right now, though, I can't access the culture where "people are not things" is supposed to have meaning. Instead things are all imbued with meaning, with capacity to both give and recieve relationship. Things have an innate concept of self which is mediated through our relationship to them, through their relationship with humans which are meaning-making machines and through their relationship to actual reality, which humans access only as the barest flicker in a dark cave.
I am in relationship to a bucket or a car or a landscape as much as I am to humans. They are all deserving of respect and acknowledgement and care from me. What I understand of my society feels flickers of this around the edges but is mostly silent on this web of connection, relationship, gift, and obligation.
Those relationships get neglected when I live too much in the human world. Whether or not I fulfill my physical obligations I forget the attitude of respect and acknowledgement, the internal emotional nod of greeting and recognition towards what I interact with. It's a loss and an impoverishment of my life to forget these connections. When I don't take the time to make my meanings then things are left meaningless.
The human world seems in many ways to engage in an assault on meaning. Consumerism is the encouragement of fungibility and momentary functionality. The minimalist fashion of the day tells us never to love any object for relationships we have to it: if it's not immediately useful we should discard it. When we look for relaxation or joy we're told to go to a new location, one with which we have no relationship, to always be seeking out the new rather than deepening our relationship to our current space. Novelty is privileged over meaning. Scarcity of relationship is privileged over abundance. Monogamy and the nuclear family is only this pattern writ into other humans: few and prescribed relationships that must be discarded if we want different or more, and characterized as less meaningful if abundance is grasped for.
I met someone who relates to landscape how I do: as entities. They live far away and let me language through concepts I've never tried to express. I think it's good for me. There's a meme that talks about how to rewild yourself: don't wear clothes and do move your body how it wants to be moved, it says. That's novice level. The next step is to move out of human exceptionalism and take a place in the community of everything around. We move so far away from that, we declare war on the idea of meaningful relating to anything except humans even to the extent that we're willing to extinguish species rather than navigate relationship with them.
Meanwhile I'm here in relationship tonight. It's a lot of intense sensation I've been away from for awhile. Time to turn off the laptop and experience it, possibly while watching for the northern lights.
It has only a functional boundary around entities, depending on the scale on which I'm working at the time. Biological definitions are ruled by their exceptions and I find no truths in common wisdom or social definitions of seperateness.
As such my experience of life is like passing through a school of flowing fish and seaweed: it's contact upon contact, sensation upon sensation, with what might be conceived of as environment, individual, and superindividual all at once.
When I sink into this feeling I can report on it only from the very edge of language. My counselor asked, what would it look like to not always be translating for people? She doesn't understand that _people_ is literal. In order to interact with humans I need to translate into words, into behaviours, into expressions. When I have true space I become what I've never seen elsewhere and cannot explain.
Untranslated, I feel everything as having a real existence. When I sat down to write this, before I made it though the preamble, I was going to say: I feel everything as alive. I can't access a meaningful societal definition of alive right now, though, I can't access the culture where "people are not things" is supposed to have meaning. Instead things are all imbued with meaning, with capacity to both give and recieve relationship. Things have an innate concept of self which is mediated through our relationship to them, through their relationship with humans which are meaning-making machines and through their relationship to actual reality, which humans access only as the barest flicker in a dark cave.
I am in relationship to a bucket or a car or a landscape as much as I am to humans. They are all deserving of respect and acknowledgement and care from me. What I understand of my society feels flickers of this around the edges but is mostly silent on this web of connection, relationship, gift, and obligation.
Those relationships get neglected when I live too much in the human world. Whether or not I fulfill my physical obligations I forget the attitude of respect and acknowledgement, the internal emotional nod of greeting and recognition towards what I interact with. It's a loss and an impoverishment of my life to forget these connections. When I don't take the time to make my meanings then things are left meaningless.
The human world seems in many ways to engage in an assault on meaning. Consumerism is the encouragement of fungibility and momentary functionality. The minimalist fashion of the day tells us never to love any object for relationships we have to it: if it's not immediately useful we should discard it. When we look for relaxation or joy we're told to go to a new location, one with which we have no relationship, to always be seeking out the new rather than deepening our relationship to our current space. Novelty is privileged over meaning. Scarcity of relationship is privileged over abundance. Monogamy and the nuclear family is only this pattern writ into other humans: few and prescribed relationships that must be discarded if we want different or more, and characterized as less meaningful if abundance is grasped for.
I met someone who relates to landscape how I do: as entities. They live far away and let me language through concepts I've never tried to express. I think it's good for me. There's a meme that talks about how to rewild yourself: don't wear clothes and do move your body how it wants to be moved, it says. That's novice level. The next step is to move out of human exceptionalism and take a place in the community of everything around. We move so far away from that, we declare war on the idea of meaningful relating to anything except humans even to the extent that we're willing to extinguish species rather than navigate relationship with them.
Meanwhile I'm here in relationship tonight. It's a lot of intense sensation I've been away from for awhile. Time to turn off the laptop and experience it, possibly while watching for the northern lights.
