Desolation Acres

Last week I had a long chat, while strolling along the Willamette, with an American woman who resides in Europe.  She adores being in wild nature, and Europeans have done an impressive job of reducing wild nature to a few tiny dots.  Most Europeans have never experienced healthy wildness.  This is sad.  She wants to come home.

Yesterday, the good pastor Clark dropped by my tent in Facebookland with a bottle of gin and a George Monbiot essay, Ghost Psyche.  The essay was an excerpt from his new book, Feral, which explores the notion of rewilding.  Monbiot lives in Wales, a land where most of wild nature has been erased.  In the essay, he described having strange sensations whilst carrying the warm corpse of a Chinese deer — powerful feelings from the ancient spirit of wildness that is buried somewhere in his psyche.

Most modern folks seem to be disconnected from nature, a great tragedy.  Do wordsmiths have the power to break this curse?  I sense that nature is a far better spell breaker than books.  Anyway, reading Monbiot triggered a flashback.  In the autumn of 1982, I was living in an old farmhouse about eight miles west of Kalamazoo.  The following are the words of a 30-year-old man, having an exciting experience — a sweet memory.

 

Desolation Acres

Intense, intense, intense!  These are wild times.  Desolation Acres is about to lift off and fly into a new and strange reality.  Christ!  I've barely slept in the last two days.  The powers that roam the land have come here for a gathering.  Wizards fill the sky.  Magic is everywhere.  The moon is as full as my heart.  Almost.

The leaves are just going mad in a visual hurricane of color.  The sumac is turning red, the sassafras is bright orange and yellow, as are the maples.  The apple trees are turning golden, as is the giant hickory tree, which has been here since the beginning of time.

The day is a spectral explosion, and the night is a precious moon land.  The hunter's moon.  In pagan times, it was the “blot monat” — the blood moon.  A time for slaughtering animals for winter food.

The sun has set on another day.  I sit in its afterglow.  Feathery clouds swirl on the horizon.  They alone still breathing in the sunbeams, flushed hot and pink.  Vivid gashes against a soft pale blue-purple background.  The owls are coming out for the nightly hunt.

The air is moving slowly now.  Resting.  Who?  It has the smell of cider.  The orchard behind the house was not picked this year.  Nor last.  Tons of apples lie on the ground, brown and split.  It's the death season.  All the summer's fruit rotting in the weeds.  Who?  The wisp clouds are turning purple.  Daylight makes its last stand.  It's losing too.  Dying.  Who?

Beyond the orchard is a vineyard.  It was not picked this year.  Nor last.  Its fruit is rotting.  Dying on the vine.  Who?  The leaves will soon be dropping to the ground.  Why must summer end?  Why does the fruit lie untouched?  Why am I alone tonight?  Who?  “Who?” — me, you noisy owl!

It's the death season.  Life retreats in fear.  A piercing visual scream.  It's over.  The sun grows ever weaker.  The cold nights rip and tear with sharp teeth.  Green is just a memory now.  A ghost.  Summer is dead and rotting.  King Frost blows over the land with his sharp crystal spear and his cold snowy breath.

A bug is stiffly walking across the sidewalk.  He can't outrun the winter.  He may get a hundred yards, but he'll never make it to Miami.  He'll die here.  Like everything else.  Will I?  Will death take me too?  Will I turn yellow and orange and fall to the ground?  Will I lie in the weeds, brown, split, and rotting?  Eventually.

It's an old farm.  The ground is soaked with blood and sweat, and the air is full of spirits.  The new mother with the hot babe at her breast, wheezing old ladies, plump-handed farmers.  These walls have seen many lives come and go.  Passionate love-making, the screams of childbirth, infants growing into young men and women, and by the warm hearth rests the faithful dog, Death.

It's my turn now to sit here and contemplate life.  To gaze at the stars, along with unseen thousands of other dreamers.  It's my turn to dream.  To paint the blank future with vivid fantasies.  It's my turn to be lonely tonight.  It's been my turn for loneliness for far too long.  Loners write the great painful poems, the wet-eyed ballads, they paint the wild strange pictures that you never forget.

Yesterday, I was walking through the fields looking at the leaves.  There was a rustle in the weeds and out burst a good-sized doe.  She sprinted into the woods.  As I was watching her, I heard another rustle to my right.  It was a big buck.  I'm sure he was taller than I am.  His antlers were three feet across.

I was spell bound.  My mind went into slow motion as I watched him gracefully hurdle the vine rows.  He moved in high powerful arcs with the grace and precision of a ballet dancer.  His white tail had long hair.  As he flew through the brush, it waved good-bye to me.  I watched him, entranced.  It was magic.  All that power and wildness in such flowing motion.

That beautiful creature belongs to this land much more than I do.  His descendants were here long before this farm.  Before the British.  Before the French.  Before the Indians.  Back when this land was a virgin forest.  Roving packs of hungry wolves filled the night air with loud and frightening songs.  Bears and big cats were here too.  The deer will be here after man is gone.  I admire their endurance.

The deer have been blessed with strong legs and sharp minds.  They've never been tamed.  They don't graze on chemical feeds in the farmyard.  Absolutely wild.  They live on apples, grapes, grass, moss, and whatever else they can find.  They're pure.  They live totally off the land.  This is their land.  They have always been here.  I admire their purity, I admire their beauty, I admire their strength.

As I watched this huge beauty dance through the vineyard, I had a spiritual experience.  I felt the warm holiness of this animal.  I felt as though I was sort of a half brother to him.  His wildness called to my wildness.  The deer-spirit sang to me.  My wild man heard him.  Come run with me through the fields wild man.  Chase me with sharp sticks you slow-footed furless troll.  You'll never catch me, but let's dance the dance of the hunt.

For a few moments, as I stood there watching eternal wildness, so free, so alive, so pure — my civilized man completely disappeared.  I was totally free and wild.  Sizzling emotions boiled through my body cleansing and purifying me.  I was at one with the spirit and energy of the planet.  I was the life force, and the life force was me.  The deer and I were one.  Fury and wildness.  Wotan.

Wires were crossed in my mind, and I ceased being civilized.  The wild man has an intense life energy.  Survive!  Eat or die.  Make fire or die.  Build shelter or die.  Kill or die.  Life is a tightrope walk over the gaping jaws of death.  Forever on the brink.  No beer bellies or flabby asses.  Sharp eyes, sharp ears, sharp noses, and strong.

And then I heard gunshots.  I walked to the field where the sounds had come from.  I looked around and noticed a very red bush on the north side of the opening.  I walked toward it and stopped.  I looked down in horror to see a patch of blood-smeared grass and a pile of shiny red organs and grey intestines.  Nearby was the furry white tail.

My stomach dropped.  I was furious.  What sacrilege.  Some damned idiot geek had in a moment destroyed something very sacred.  One less wild and free energy on the planet.  It wasn't even hunting season yet.  I carried the heart back to the farm.  I couldn't let it rot in the weeds.  I couldn't let it be wasted.

What a wild smell!  It filled the kitchen, it exploded in my head, it soaked into my skin like a tattoo, indelible, permanent.  I washed the heart and the sink turned bright red.  It was a big heart, bigger than my own.  I was awed.  I felt small.  A weakling.  I waited for it to cook.

The oven did not tame the smell of the wild.  I cut off a piece and put it in my mouth.  Wild.  His odor permeates my essence, his flavor fills my mouth, and his heart and I are one.  I was off again to the wilderness.  Howling, yelping, wide-eyed, fierce, and strong.  One with the wild.  One with the free.  I've eaten the heart of the Forest King.

My civilization has received a serious wound.  It was the dominant force in me, and there it sits bleeding in the corner, confused.  It doesn't understand wildness.  It never has.  Society will no longer be my home.  I can't go back.  I've been broken.  My wildness has been ripped free from deep inside.  I've felt it surging through my veins.  Electrifying me.  I've broken the mystery.  I now know the truth.  I ride on the night winds with my ancestors.  They're so happy I've returned.

Join us.

A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy

The Industrial Revolution blew the lid off Pandora’s Box, releasing a poisonous whirlwind of evils into the world.  Millions of rural people were herded into vast, filthy, disease-ridden cities to live among hordes of strangers, perform miserable work, and die young.  It was pure hell, and many people snapped.  Insane asylums began popping up like mushrooms, and the psychotherapy industry was born. 

In Vienna, Freud kept busy treating hysterical Austrians, and Jung worked with “schizy” inmates at a Zürich asylum.  They launched an insurgency against European Puritanism, a mindset that drove many out of their minds — desire was bad, and punctual, robotic conformity to a system of pleasure-free maximum productivity was the compulsory objective.

So, the first wave of psychotherapy was radical and rebellious, but a second wave that emerged in the ‘50s has been regressive.  The new mode purported that newborns were pure, innocent, blank slates.  Once born, the beautiful, helpless “inner child” was vulnerable to abuse from others that could knock it off balance, sometimes permanently. 

In the therapy room, attention was focused on the patient’s past — a hunt for abuse that may have happened decades ago.  Mental illness was usually the result of a screwed up childhood, and it was believed to reside within the patient.  The endless bombardment of dark influences from the surrounding insane society was off the radar.  The goal of mainstream therapy was helping wounded patients adapt to living in an insane society.  Mainstream therapists now practice everywhere in America.

James Hillman (1926-2011) was a student of Jung, and once served as the director of the C. G. Jung Institute.  Over the years, he became a vocal critic of modern psychotherapy.  In his opinion, newborns were not blank slates, and they were not born whole and perfect — they were unique acorns with a calling and a destiny, tuned into the voices of their ancestors.  

He thought that mainstream therapy was turning the educated middle class into docile plebes, trained to “cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel) to… make it work for you (rather than refuse the unacceptable).”  He strongly believed that the therapy room should become a cell of revolution.  Patients needed to become involved in the insane world, and transform it into a healthier place for all life.  Aim at the core of the problem, not the side effects.

Michael Ventura (born 1945) was a popular journalist for the trendy L.A. Weekly.  He had abundant experience as a consumer of therapy.  Mental illness was a significant theme in his family history.  Most of the people he knew were either in therapy, practicing therapists, or both.  At the same time, he saw that most marriages and relationships around him were dysfunctional to varying degrees.  How could this be, at the zenith of human progress?

In 1990, he interviewed Hillman, and the article generated abundant buzz.  This inspired them to do a book: We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse.  It’s a scrapbook of interviews, conversations, and written correspondence, an informal jam session of passionate ideas.  Their two minds soar and play, and the result is a stimulating duet.  The book was published prior to the Prozac Revolution.

According to Jung, “individuation” was the ideal destination — the lifelong process of becoming more and more who you are.  (He also said: “The most terrifying thing is to know yourself.”)  Individuation involved throwing overboard the stuff that was not who you are.  This shifted us from a realm of comfortable habits to unfamiliar territory, where growth was more likely to happen.  When we strayed onto a path where we didn’t belong, our inner life force sent us clear warning messages, “symptoms” (anxiety, depression, etc.).  Hillman said, “Only the unconscious can save us: in your pathology is your salvation.” 

It’s wacky to help people adjust to living in an insane society, to stifle their healthy resistance, and encourage their submission.  Hillman denounced “therapeutic Puritanism,” with its psychic numbing and sensual numbing.  America had been anaesthetized by the Puritan mindset.  “Just look at our land — this continent’s astonishing beauty — and then look at what we immigrants, Bibles in hand, priests and preachers in tow, have done to it.”

The authors linked the rise of mental illness to the rise of individualism and its shadows, alienation and oppression.  For them, the psyche did not live inside the individual, the individual dwelled within the vast timeless collective psyche, like a fish in the ocean.  In the good old days, life was tribal and communal.  Spirituality embraced all sacred beings, animate and inanimate.  Both feet were firmly planted in a stable sense of time and place.  Life was rich with meaning, power, and beauty.  Ventura suspected that “the quality of wholeness is not located in the individual but in a community that includes the environment.”

Christianism blindsided the ancient balance with its new concept of individual salvation.  Suddenly, the creator of the entire universe was paying around-the-clock attention to ME — watching everything I did, continuously reading my mind, and remembering all of my errors.

Following Columbus, the disintegration of ancient balance went into warp drive.  Europeans, their slaves, and the people they conquered were uprooted and scattered across the planet.  The social glue of ancient cultures dissolved.  “Nothing needed to be permanent anymore.”

In the last hundred years, life has gone totally crazy.  Our sense of time and place has vaporized.  Ventura called it “the avalanche.”  We lived in an era of “simultaneous, massive changes on every level of life everywhere, that have built up unstoppable momentum as they speed us toward God knows where.”  Obviously, we’re heading for disaster.  “You can’t negotiate with an avalanche.  Nothing, nothing, nothing is going to stop the shipwreck of this civilization.”

Understand that the world is not ending, just this pathological civilization.  We should not regret its passing, but honor its death with song.  The good news here is that “I” am not sick, my society is.  The good news is that the sick society is busy dying, setting the stage for rebirth and renewal.  Hillman: “Any major change requires a breakdown.”  The next century or two may be rough, but it won’t last forever.  “The only solution can come when the world is reanimated, when we recognize how alive everything is, and how desirable.”

What should we do?  In a nutshell, two things are essential.  (1) We cannot move toward healing without the power of imagination.  Imagination allows us to break out of ruts, overcome barriers, and see farther, with greater clarity.  It strengthens our ability to envision a healthier future.  (2) Individualism is a toxic ball and chain, and we need to leave it behind, in the rubble of the past.  We must remember community living and rejoin the family of life.

Ventura said it like this: “You don’t %@&# around.  You don’t waste your life trying to find a secure place in the avalanche, ‘cause there ain’t no such animal.  You do the work of the soul.”  He told his son, “If you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for — trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.”

Hillman, James and Ventura, Michael, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse, Harper Collins, New York, 1992.  http://www.michaelventura.org/