People love to give advice in lieu of support.
I realized a while back how powerfully this manifests in people. I don’t wonder if people give advice exactly when they cannot support you, most likely because you scare them, or they have projected their personal fears and history onto you.
Which may mean that they give advice so that you will behave in a way that will help them not to feel scared or inadequate anymore. LAME!
Thank you Emily. I pushed buttons and I’m glad you responded. Let me add my own reason - sorrow. Ceaseless dehabilitating despair.
what high five?
what party?
didn’t see the hand. didn’t hear the invite.
much easier this way.
understood?
& I’d welcome advice. I’d view it as support and I’d mull it over with incisive and heavy scrutiny. Only a fool completely ignores rumorsand advice.
understood.
well, it’s a few days late, but, yeah, emily, you nailed it. i’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to put into words why i don’t think it’s such bad thing that i’m a self-proclaimed “anti-social bastard”, so thanks for doing it for me! 
Sigh…
Tonight, mainly out of boredom, I developed a recipe for mango chutney. It was great fun, wonderful to smell it bubbling on the stove, and I was more than happy with the end result. But now, in retrospect, I’m sad because I know that mangoes don’t grow in Cascadia and … well … some of my very favorite things in life wouldn’t be known to me if not for civilization.
I feel the same way about art. I LOVE Baroque painting, but it just oozes civilization, and how can I reconcile that? Can I love Baroque art and hate the ground from which it sprang? I’m very emotionally attached to civilized art (99% of the art I’ve been exposed to has been part of a civilized culture). It’s hard, maybe even impossible, for me to claim that I want to reject a civilized mentality when I take into account the art and other beautiful phenomena that civilization has brought about.
Perhaps I love mangoes and Caravaggio in lieu of real, sustained/self-sustaining happiness in my lived experience? Perhaps I’m making a substitution or trade-off (my soul for shiny trinkets)? Or perhaps these things merely temper civilized misery, and so I need them to stay emotionally afloat, attaching great importance to them?
Hmm.
art is a concept of civilization, is it not?
isn’t it dependent on the separation of beauty from the lived experience (the rest of life)?
i was in a class once (which is the separation of learning from the lived experience) and it was a class about native americans and a person attending the class said ( in such smugness):
" i went to the smithsonian and saw a ‘native art exhibit’. i don’t know why they call it art, it was just a bunch of rocks"
the ‘professor’, with a knowing look of ‘wow, what an idiot’ on his face, calmly and politely explained that natives didn’t generally paint pictures like our culture do. ‘art’ was not yet separated from the rest of life. the things we now call art, of theirs, were things used in everyday life (like there is an other life!). they surrounded themselves and were immersed in beauty.
walk in beauty.
the lens is not the reality. we need to wipe civ from our eyes.
I don’t know. What about beadwork? Rock paintings? Jewelry from feathers and quills? These are all expressions of beauty and imagination. I find it hard to imagine that the people who express them wouldn’t have a name/concept for them.
Anyway, whether or not it’s concept of civ, I’m still attached to it.
perhaps we should look at art as, not something that is, but as something done?
hmm, holy shit! i can’t believe i just played the e-prime card!
that brings these guys to mind–Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison. they call themselves artists, but they kind of act more like ambassadors for ideas about reconnecting humans and land, and trying to heal some of the damage from civilization’s more fucked-up notions about our relationship to land.
i heard about them in college–older work. i recently uncovered an old notebook from college with some notes i wrote myself about thinking about the mangrove and the pine, while studying landscape architecture. mangrove & pine really affected me, made me think, who the hell do i think i am when i say i design the landscape?
more recent work . . .i wonder what ever came of serpentine lattice?
what better reason exists to make art, than to reach into a young mind as civilization’s gears begin to chew into her soul, and pull her back out a bit?
i think art as a thing that stands alone from the rest of life arose due to civilization. i would bet that most indigenous “art” served more purpose than just the aesthetic. also, i would bet that you would have a hard time finding any item of purpose that didn’t have a lot of artistic craftsmanship applied to it.
You’d win that bet, Rix.
So what does it mean if I get a lot of meaning out of a “civilized” painting? Is that indicative of a warped perspective or damaged soul? … 'Cuz I would describe paintings, architecture, etc as doing just the opposite.
No more than any other way civilization has warped or damaged our souls. Actually, I think architecture makes a great example of how in civilization we still do have some forms of art that also serve a practical purpose.
Think about the artistic value we place in clothing vs. the artistic value that an indigenous person imbues into their clothing. We may have vintage Tees that proclaim our affiliation with kitch from years gone by (and finding resurgence because of it: ala transformers and strawberry shortcake). But the aboriginal will use the artistic value in their clothing to proclaim other things like affiliation to a tribe or totem, or to a spirit whose relationship they wish to maintain. Either way, you see a nexus between aesthetic and practical (like with architecture) but the reason for the nexus differs greatly. Unless, of course, we start actually creating a sense of animistic culture around our current icons (see Afterculture for examples).
Also, I don’t find warpedness in seeing meaning in civilized aesthetic pieces. The warpedness comes from the fact that we have divorced the aesthetic from mundane. If we put as much art into our shoes and our spoons and our doorknobs as we put into our paintings, then the situation would look a lot less warped.
Ah, if only I had doubled down.
Well, that makes me feel a lot calmer about the whole issue. I have had a nagging fear of being a hypocrite for feeling really attached to some things that wouldn’t have come about if not for civilized technology.
And, I think that there are some artists who use technology to express sentiments that aren’t in conflict with rewilding. A lot of self-expression (particularly in the recent past) takes the form of commentary on society from an outsider’s point of view. Take the painter Francis Bacon for example, who used oil paint (and trust me, if you were to talk with a Renaissance alchemist, you would find out just how technical oil paint is!) to express very clearly how he felt about the staus quo. I’m attached to the work of this painter and I defintely wouldn’t call it pro-civ…
To bring an element from another thread into this,; how does “the medium is the message” fit into what ya’ll are talking about?
I think a lot of problems arise from how we choose to measure things.
Speaking from my own life -
When I want to measure the joy something brings me in terms of how much of a hypocrite it makes me, then a lot of anguish will come up. And I feel paralyzed.
When I measure the joy something brings me in terms of ‘how much life’ it creates, then possibilities seem to open.
For example, SilverArrow, when I look at the paintings you’ve shared I gain inspiration from them. I see someone using the tools they have at hand to share their own experience of meaning and beauty, and it moves me.
At the same time, I know I can experience an even deeper connection by further rewildling - by not dividing ‘art’ from ‘function’. But this doesn’t contradict at all the experience of beauty that started us out on this path.
Just hop down to the ‘must see media’ topic - movies themselves rely on civilization more than any other method of storytelling in the history of hominid culture. However, after watching ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’ one time, a few years ago, I had an irrevocable inner change that I wouldn’t give up for any amount of ‘official non-hypocrite’ seals of approval.
I don’t care what it takes for my own rewilding - I’ll use any tool available. In fact, I’ve noticed that blindly copying the traditions of original rewilders (indigenous folks) has caused much damage. Have you ever sat in a talking circle with a bunch of white folks? I rest my case. I know one indigenous mentor who didn’t see most modern folks as ‘ready’ for talking circles. So I’ve concluded that neither blind copying of ‘old ways’, nor reflexive abandoning of new ways, will necessarily help my rewilding.
In fact, I embrace my own hypocrisy. I embrace the paradox that has me typing about rewilding on a keyboard, reading about rewilding on the internet. I love writing about my anti-literacy crusade. It really doesn’t make a lick of sense. Some day I’ll write a 12 volume series on the evils of the written word. It’ll look as big as the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Yes, yes, yes, Willem!
Folks have said it before on these boards: we can’t undo and revert to a pre-civilized state. But we can move forward into something new. And whatever helps us move forward benefits us and our future.
When i think about the term “rewild,” i appreciate that it doesn’t mean the same thing as “uncivilize”. To me, it doesn’t mean “go back to the old wild” it means “go forward into the new wild”. Our history will come with us into the new wild, for better and for worse. So embrace the new in any way that you can.