Sunday, November 05, 2006

If there's one issue that currently defines our identity, it's our treatment of the environment. Our conscience is crippled by it. The guilt touches every one of us, because we've been brought up to hate ourselves for our implicit cooperation. I say to hell with all of that. Whatever is happening may be happening for a reason and it is the height of arrogance to impose an aesthetic (it's little more) on the consciousness of entire generations with all the dogma of an inquisition. It's the lack of ambivalence that offends me.

There is a better way; my father promotes it. There is compromise. The spooky graphs and statistics we summon are not nearly as important as the questions we ask about our purpose; whether we continue to nurse our sense of loss or make something useful out of the experience. I just wish everyone would stop walking around thinking they knew exactly what is right for the world. We will never have that answer.


The Frightened Earth

You are all afraid and guilty,
I can see it in your talking,
endless talking
and alarms in the
night,

as a baby screams because
death is still fresh in its soul.

You are a part of it,
maybe,
smokestacks and dead penguins.
But why feed betrayal to your children,
why this endless lament
when you don’t know,
when no one can ever know
where it ends
or
why?

I say you have invented this evil,
there are no monsters under the bed,
Al Gore is not your messiah,
it is all foolishness,
this terror,
this guilt.

So who are you to scream your
conjecture into the void and
call it law,
to make our spirit cower
and hide its poor head in the
acrid soil?

YOU MADE ME CRY
BECAUSE I THOUGHT I
WAS KILLING MY WORLD
SO FUCK OFF WITH YOUR
PRECIOUS CRUSADE.

No one knows.
No one.


This is the 500th Phobitopia post. 500 is because I wanted you to feel part of what I am, and because that part is the important one.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Normally, I despise ambivalence far more than a subtle, nagging sense of guilt. At least the guilty might channel their feeling into some kind of action to abate the guilt.. the ambivalent know and choose not to care one way or the other. But the guilty masses you speak of simply suffer from a guilt complex: they walk around feeling horrible yet powerless to take action and abate their guilt. And if guilt doesn't lead to action, then why bother? Why would you cower with your head under the blankets if that's your only response to an earth consumed? At least flaunt your ambivalence; guilt without action is nothing more than that.

I recognize the value of my existence and the existence of everything around me and as a human being I take responsibility for my aware, perceptive role in this world: if anyone is to change the world, it must be me, and I choose not to stand idly by watching my world fall around me, imagining the billions of species and billions of future human lives and consciousnesses eliminated by waste want and ambivalence. How can you recognize the value of your own existence and simultaneously devalidify the existence of everyone who might live after you by acting in semi-guilty ambivalence? How dare you?
I don't mourn the dead penguins. I don't mourn dead trees, dead whales, dead ecosystems. I mourn the loss of purpose in human life. I mourn for people who see death all around them and blame their guilt on others, unable to recognize their own cry to fight death and validify the value of life.

Take the bus once in a while, at least.. what's the worst that could happen? Non-ambivalence?

Anonymous said...

Normally, I despise ambivalence far more than a subtle, nagging sense of guilt. At least the guilty might channel their feeling into some kind of action to abate the guilt.. the ambivalent know and choose not to care one way or the other. But the guilty masses you speak of simply suffer from a guilt complex: they walk around feeling horrible yet powerless to take action and abate their guilt. And if guilt doesn't lead to action, then why bother? Why would you cower with your head under the blankets if that's your only response to an earth consumed? At least flaunt your ambivalence; guilt without action is nothing more than that.

I recognize the value of my existence and the existence of everything around me and as a human being I take responsibility for my aware, perceptive role in this world: if anyone is to change the world, it must be me, and I choose not to stand idly by watching my world fall around me, imagining the billions of species and billions of future human lives and consciousnesses eliminated by waste want and ambivalence. How can you recognize the value of your own existence and simultaneously devalidify the existence of everyone who might live after you by acting in semi-guilty ambivalence? How dare you?
I don't mourn the dead penguins. I don't mourn dead trees, dead whales, dead ecosystems. I mourn the loss of purpose in human life. I mourn for people who see death all around them and blame their guilt on others, unable to recognize their own cry to fight death and validify the value of life.

Take the bus once in a while, at least.. what's the worst that could happen? Non-ambivalence?

Matthew Louv said...

Be careful what you despise, anyone who denies their own ambivalence is dangerous. I remain unconvinced that the world is, indeed, falling around me.

At some point, mass consciousness decided that we humankind had become divorced from the forces of nature. We have a massive identity crisis on our hands. However arrogant you may think it is not to carry myself around like a holy warrior just because people tell me to, it is far more arrogant to think of oneself as something other than an agent of nature.

The main idea is this: there is nothing to deliniate pollution and environmental degradation from the ordinary mechanations of the natural world, because they are a direct result of those mechanations. So, how reckless is it to presuppose that our race is inherently more valuable than whatever it may be that we were put here to pave the way for, to sow guilt and self-loathing in the minds of children just for being born into the modern world?

Who am I talking to?