Society

Fall 2018 Part 2: Deep Time Traveling

Friday, November 2nd, 2018: 2018 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Society.

 

After my adventure in the blizzard, I was kind of shaken up, and more than a little frustrated. My fall camping trip had started out with a big dose of stressful driving, and no camping. But there were supposed to be a few more prehistoric rock art sites that I hadn’t seen yet, in pretty wild country, far to the north. I hoped there’d be plenty of camping up there. I could even return to a site I’d used a couple of years ago, in the same general area.

First, and it would be a long drive, I’d check out one famous site at the eastern edge of the territory of the people they call the Fremont, the ancient culture I’ve recently become obsessed with. It was supposed to feature the famous “Barrier Canyon” style of painting, the most beautiful and mysterious style of prehistoric art in North America. It was just a few miles off the interstate, so not a place to camp, but it’d be an easy in-and-out from which I could proceed on back to the truly wild country.

As it turned out, the art was amazing, but the easy access meant there had been severe, tragic vandalism by Americans, both historic and modern. No different than the bullies I’d grown up with back east, kids who’d never been taught to respect beauty, kids so insecure they could only respond to mystery with violence.

Heading west on the interstate, I saw stacks of bundled firewood outside a gas station and, learning my lesson about fall camping in the high country, picked up a couple bundles. It was poor quality and way overpriced, but it was something.

I kept checking my maps, and determined that all the rock art sites near the interstate were on “high clearance only” roads. It was already mid-afternoon and I was still a couple hours away from the next accessible sites, and I didn’t want to be looking for a campsite after sunset. So I left the interstate and drove north up a long gravel road through sagebrush-and-mesa country toward where I’d camped two years ago.

I crossed the old bridge over the San Rafael River, there at the massive sandstone wall, and entered the big canyon with an hour or more of daylight to spare. My old campsite turned out to be taken by another solo man in a compact truck with funky camper shell, but I found an even better one, hidden in a grove of pinyon and juniper out of sight of the road. I suited up for a freezing night, got a fire going, and cracked a IPA. I set up camp at a leisurely pace, and cooked a fairly ambitious plate of food. Only one other vehicle passed, and then it was full dark down there in the big canyon.

Camping is a lot less fun with chronic pain. I’m still trying to sort that out. I can be athletic as ever, to a point, but then something happens and I’m a cripple for a while. My night in the canyon started out pretty uncomfortable, but I eventually found a position my body didn’t hate too much. Thin clouds kept drifting over, then clearing off. Cygnus was in view early, her wings spanning the dusty trail of the galaxy, then later Casseiopeia, Pegasus, and finally Orion and the Moon herself. Somewhere in there I managed to get a decent night’s sleep.

Campsites in this canyon all seem to be sunset camps, benefiting from late afternoon light but sunk in the shade of those thousand-foot walls for most of the morning. Bedding doesn’t air out, and your ground cloth is caked with red clay mud until late morning when you can finally lay it out in the sun. I had no plan for the day, but it’d been over a week since I’d been able to hike. So after everything was dry, I packed the truck, loaded my pack with warm clothes, water, and snacks, and crossed the dry creekbed to hike up into a shallow side canyon. I knew it’d likely be a short, steep hike unless I could find a way up the rimrock to the plateau on top. But at least I’d get a workout.

Of course, with my slow-healing injured foot, I’m not even really supposed to be hiking off-trail. But the only “trail” in this canyon is the 4wd road up the major side canyon, probably a 6-mile branch, and that was a ranch road, through an area that might be heavily grazed. I wanted more of a wilderness experience. When I made it up into my side canyon, I spotted a possible route to the top, and started climbing.

It was such a beautiful day, and such a beautiful place, I threw caution to the wind. I ignored my injured foot and scrambled up slopes of clay and loose sandstone that would’ve been dangerous even when I was in my best shape. I did some technical rock-climbing moves that, if unsuccessful, could’ve killed me. And of course, the most dangerous climb on these slopes is the down climb. But I made it halfway up the thousand-foot cliff, got to see an eagle and some crazy lichen, and returned safely to the valley floor by early afternoon.

Back at the truck, I debated staying another night in this idyllic place. But the weather made my mind up for me. Storm precursor clouds were blowing over, and a strong wind was moving down the canyon. I realized it’d been totally still since I’d arrived, but no more.

I drove on up the canyon and spotted a sign for another rock art site that I’d missed previously. When I opened the door to get out, the wind almost tore it off. It was gusting well over 50 mph. But the prehistoric art made it well worth the stop, and I encountered a big flock of some of the coolest birds I’ve ever seen.

There I was, in the middle of a vast wild area, with storm clouds filling the sky, a howling wind, and little more than two hours till sunset. I was near the head of the canyon, about to emerge onto the rolling plateau where there was little cover. I decided to drive to town, more than an hour away, and spend some time researching my next move.

But along the way, I got distracted by some intriguing signs. And I discovered one of the most amazing, and little-known, canyons in North America – the “Little Grand Canyon” of the San Rafael River.

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Fall 2018 Part 3: The Rocks Begin to Speak

Friday, November 16th, 2018: 2018 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.

High Prehistoric Tech

Five days and nights of my trip were already gone, most of them spent driving, zigzagging north across the emptiest parts of three big Western states. Four nights in widely-separated cheap motels, a hair-raising escape from an alpine blizzard, a detour to check out spectacular prehistoric rock paintings, and finally a cold night camping in a breathtaking canyon. The weather was getting still colder and windier and I was running out of clean clothes. I drove to the nearest town, farther north, where on an earlier trip I’d discovered a cheap but fairly luxurious motel with a laundry room. There I edited my photos and prepared the first couple of Dispatches. I’ve never found a decent restaurant in that town, so I’d eat in my room, from the simple stash of groceries I’d picked up at the first town I’d driven to, and leftovers from my night camping and cooking out.

It was the northernmost point I wanted to reach: the northern edge of the territory of the prehistoric Fremont people I’m trying to better understand on these trips. From here, I’d gradually make my way south and west, stopping whenever I saw something interesting, making side trips to check out rock art, hoping to find good campsites in late afternoon. I still had a week before I was due to meet my friends on our land in the Mojave.

Two days later I hit the road south. But I’d barely driven a half hour when I noticed a sign for a museum in this tiny village. It turned out to have quite a bit of thematic overlap with the much larger museum in the town to the north, but its more homespun curation raised intriguing questions that would haunt the rest of my trip. It was chock full of prehistoric artifacts donated by the ranching families who’d found them on their land.

What’s our responsibility – not the responsibility of citizens of a nation or a “civilized” culture, but the responsibility of invading ranching families who find the artifacts of the native people their society has dispossessed, stashed all over their newly-acquired ranchland?

What happened to the people archaeologists call Fremont – did they evolve into the Southern Paiutes, or were they replaced by them? On past trips I’d observed that the core Fremont lifestyle had to be eminently peaceful, and I knew from historical and anthropological accounts that the more recent Southern Paiutes were a peaceful, pedestrian people who were victimized by the warlike, equestrian Utes.

Who made the rock art in the Fremont area? The government archaeologist for the Mojave National Preserve had assured me, with photographic examples, that the only rock markings Paiutes were capable of were random scratches used to efface the work of other tribes. He’d repeatedly confirmed the archaeological consensus that Paiutes were warlike newcomers who’d spread out of eastern California across the Great Basin within the past millennium, killing off other tribes and appropriating their land.

And finally, how much more advanced are we modern people than those “primitive, superstitious savages?” With all our power, speed, and convenience, do we really live better lives?

Needle in the Haystack

Gratefully leaving the little museum, I drove a half hour farther south to a turnoff where I expected to find a rock art site. What got me interested in prehistoric rock art in the first place? Thirty-seven years ago, when I was at a turning point in my growth as a visual artist, a friend sent me a postcard of a site called “Newspaper Rock.” It was the first time I remember seeing prehistoric rock art. Dense with symbols, some representational, some abstract, it resonated with the new work I was creating. My graphical work – drawings, paintings, prints and collages – had always encompassed both “pictures” and “messages,” but I hadn’t been fully aware of that distinction. In recent years I’d expanded my pictorial work from simple rendering to narrative composition, and that had led me to the use of images as symbols.

At the same time, I was beginning to explore the Southwestern deserts, and as I kept developing and focusing my work, it evolved into compositions made of stylized natural imagery inspired by what I’d seen on camping trips. And eventually, in 1987, my girlfriend and I were shown real prehistoric rock art, outdoors, tucked away in remote corners of the Mojave Desert. We were hooked! As artists, we had heard of so-called “Land Art” by people like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who used bulldozers and other heavy equipment to mimic the creations of ancient civilizations. But rock art was humble, uncivilized, intimate in scale, much better integrated into its natural environment. It seemed like it would’ve been part of the daily and seasonal life ways of the people who created and used it – people who lived lightly on the land, hunting and gathering, not building cities and temples like the inspirations of the “Land Artists” of the 70s.

During the postwar economic/science/tech boom of the 1950s, when the authorities wanted us to get out and burn gas on those fancy new highways – just like they want us to burn electricity now – AAA maps flagged prehistoric sites, including rock art. But those sites, all found in lonely places, were totally unprotected, and they were rapidly being destroyed by the vandals that are continually produced by our violent, narcissistic society. So by the time my girlfriend and I started studying rock art in the mid-80s, none of the sites were identified on commercially available maps, and on the ground, virtually none of them were marked by signs or had any sort of informative infrastructure. They were like the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Long before the internet, cell phones, or apps, we were shown rock art by friends, we picked up books at remote gift shops, we did research in libraries, we contacted experts by mail. We made our own lists and annotated paper maps. On road trip after road trip, camping and backpacking into remote canyons, we discovered work that blew our minds.

The Road Less Traveled

Stopping at museums, sidetracking for rock art, the short day was being chipped away at. I was approaching an interstate highway; if I took it west, there’d be many hours of driving through country I’d already seen, with little or no opportunity to camp, and I’d probably end up in a motel again. Alternatively, I could keep going on this rural highway, into a part of Utah I’d never seen. I spotted a grove of golden cottonwoods beside the road and pulled over to make a sandwich on the tailgate of my truck.

Mormon McMansions

I loved all the mountainous country I drove through that afternoon, but I never found a sheltered or private place to camp along the road. Every time I turned off to explore a promising dirt road, it ended almost immediately at a large, bleak parking area for RVs, in full view of the highway.

And I further confirmed some earlier observations about Mormon culture and society. I try not to be too critical of religions, because the secular alternative – capitalism – is what’s destroying our planet. But the Mormons strike me as more than a bit too materialistic and fond of ostentation. There seem to be plenty of poor Mormons, but that doesn’t stop the rich ones from throwing up a mansion next door. And their rural architecture is plain weird. From my perspective, raised on colonial, southern, and midcentury house styles, Mormon rural homes seem to have no clear historical reference point. They’re not post-modern, they’re just awkward and tacky. Mormon wealth doesn’t seem to be invested in quality, and even the oldest and simplest rural homes seem to be designed by aliens trying and failing to imitate earthlings.

As full dark fell and the temperature dropped toward freezing, I found myself in a very small town at close to 7,000′ elevation. There was a string of cheap motels, none of them appealing, so I picked one, checked in, and headed for a lit-up restaurant on the single historic block of the Main Street business district.

It was Saturday night, and Main street was empty. But the diner was packed. A distracted hostess greeted me, holding a baby by the belly, face-outward like a doll. I grinned and the kid beamed back. I was seated at the front facing the door, and while waiting to be served I realized the extremely loud music coming from behind me had to be live. I turned in my seat, glancing past tables of families and couples, to see a tiny cave-like stage at the back, reminiscent of the cage in the Blues Brothers movie, and a cute, stylish singer with short hair who’d been staring at me, waiting to catch my eye. I guessed I was the only single guy who’d shown up so far.

She flashed me a big smile. While I ordered, got served, and dug into my platter of pulled pork, she rendered a predictable series of country, folk, and pop standards, from Leonard’s “Hallelujah” to Dolly’s “Coat of Many Colors”, yelping and screeching with histrionic soul through the brittle sound system, accompanied by a full synth track. Between numbers she asked diners where they were from. All the families were local, but the couples, post-season tourists to nearby Bryce Canyon, were from Washingon state, Maine, and France. Exhausted after a long day, my ears battered by the singer’s piercing notes, I rushed through my just-okay meal. I left a generous tip, gave the singer a final optimistic thumbs up, and returned to my cheap, shabby motel room.

Native Explanations

29 degrees outside when I woke up Sunday morning. I’d taken many fall trips in the Southwest, running as late as early December, and the weather had generally been mild. My itinerary west would now carry me inexorably onto the dreaded interstate, with just one more side trip for rock art before leaving the Mormon state. I was beginning to realize it was almost impossible to both look for rock art and camp out on the same day. Looking for rock art just required too much driving, and too many hours stuck in a location where you generally weren’t allowed to camp.

But that one last site had more surprises. Not only had the local authorities provided signs to the site, they’d provided a large parking lot with a permanent restroom and shaded picnic area, paved paths to the rock art, institutional fencing around the rocks, and very detailed information panels below the art.

And they’d asked two tribes to contribute explanations: the Southern Paiutes and the Hopi. The Paiutes’ explanation was displayed as given, with no Anglo academic patronizing. Very refreshing, and something my archaeologist friends would probably never tolerate. After all, science was invented by Europeans, so we claim the ultimate authority on everything.

Prehistoric Literacy

With all the development around this site, I resigned myself to being accompanied by an evolving crowd of tourists, who mostly snapped a few pictures and hopped back in their new SUVs. But the petroglyphs were spectacular, and the message from the Southern Paiutes eye-opening. The information panels below the rock writings said that the Paiutes remember the so-called Fremont people – they know them as Nungwu. I hadn’t read this in any museum or book or on any web page – I had to come to this remote place to get the message. What more did the Paiutes know that the Anglo authorities didn’t?

The Indians made it quite clear that this is NOT ART – a paradigm shift I should’ve been prepared for. A Native American friend had given me LaVan Martineau’s book The Rocks Begin to Speak thirty years ago. Martineau, who learned from Paiutes, claimed that rock markings represented a universal sign language, a medium of communication, not an art form. But I’d either forgotten about that, or allowed my thinking to get lazy in the intervening years. Poor LaVan doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, which makes me feel better about not having one.

That distinction between what we educated Anglos call ART, and what we both precisely and generally define as COMMUNICATION, is a very important theme for me. After developing my visual art, at an early age, from figurative representation to the composition of enigmatic “messages” made up of naturalistic symbols, I reinvented myself in mid-life as a “creative professional” in the internet industry, and found myself using symbolic compositions – flowcharts and storyboards – as my primary communications tool, to develop screen designs and facilitate collaboration in multi-disciplinary teams. And eventually, when I resumed making art, I was explicitly composing symbols inspired by nature. Both art and communication, but perhaps more on the art side, since the communication was suggestive rather than didactic.

In any event, I thought the Paiutes’ interpretation of this famous site was brilliant. It didn’t make much sense to me, but that’s to be expected. I realized more clearly than ever that to understand “rock writing,” you had to be living in and using this landscape the way the Indians did. We Anglos with our technological, alienated lifestyle couldn’t experience the habitat the way they did.

According to archaeologists and anthropologists, Indians used to claim that they hadn’t made rock art – it had been made by “spirits” in the distant past. Native “informants” claimed that they didn’t know what it meant – they even sometimes claimed it was evil. Now here they were saying that not only did they understand it, but that it represented a universal language. So much for the culturally-specific rock art “styles” identified by archaeologists, like Barrier Canyon and Great Basin Abstract Curvilinear.

I actually hope the Paiutes are bullshitting us, providing an intentionally meaningless explanation to put the honkies on the wrong track yet again. I would rather not believe they’re calling “rock art” a written language to make them seem less culturally inferior to us literate, scientific Europeans, but that’s a possibility too.

I snapped my own pictures, realizing that the only way to begin to understand this work would be to camp out here, and go about my daily chores, with the “rock messages” as my backdrop. Only then would I begin to see it more like the people who made and used it.

But the day was still young, and the next sites were hours away, and I needed to keep moving west if I wanted to meet my friends in the desert. So I got back in the little truck and drove to the nearest city, where I had lunch in a big-city-style bistro, knowing from experience that local-style food would be dismal.

I did the hours of driving, into the sunset, and eventually left the highway again to enter a vast area, the eastern corner of the Mojave desert, which I’d entered only once before as a passenger with a biologist friend. There I discovered the worst road I’ve ever driven, and drove it, stressfully and painfully, to where, after sunset, I finally found a bleak but spectacular campsite – a huge area cleared for RVs at the foot of rock formations, surrounded at a distance by other huge RVs. Because in this day and age  – as I discovered on this trip – most campsites are developed for giant RVs rather than us traditional folk who sleep on the ground.

After that city lunch, I just had a beer and snacks before hitting the sack. No sooner had I settled in than I discovered that I was directly under a low-altitude approach path for McCarran International Airport, with jets coming in every 90 seconds or so. Our society can industrialize even the remotest natural areas without even touching the ground.

Since there was no place to lay my ground cloth in this extremely remote place without potentially being run over by newcomers during the night, I emptied the truck bed and slept inside it, as I sometimes have to do when there are high winds. The eighth night of my trip, and only my second night of camping. But the night sky was my ceiling, the wheeling galaxy and constellations my constant companions through the night, and yes, as always, there were falling stars, although not as many as there were passenger jets. Little did I know what I was in for the next day…

Infinite Wonderland

In preparation for this trip, I’d copied a map off the internet that showed the next “rock writing” site to be just a few miles from my campsite. And there it was – again, with a large parking lot, informational signage, and fencing.

I followed a broad trail toward what appeared to be modest rock outcrops. I rounded a bend, and saw a house-sized boulder standing alone. I raised my field glasses, glimpsed familiar markings, and felt my heart swelling in my chest, the way it does whenever I stumble upon traces of the Old Ones. How do our bodies do this? How did the heart come to be the locus of love?

Refuge in the North

I’d never seen a place like this – a seemingly infinite wonderland of rock writing. I climbed up, and down, and around. I scanned with field glasses. I found more the farther I went. I spent hours there. No way did I see it all. I have no idea how much farther it went. There were numerous tinajas or natural water pockets, which go a long way toward explaining what native people were doing there to begin with. The brief notes I saw on the internet didn’t prepare me for this, and thank God! Fuck technology, fuck remote sensing, fuck satellites, fuck drones. The map is not the territory – the territory is far, far more interesting and enlightening. You had to be there, to hear it, to smell it, to feel it with your skin, your hands and feet.

But now I had another big decision to make. Damn it, that’s the problem with an unplanned trip! You start out thinking it’s going to be free and easy, just following your nose across the landscape, going wherever you want, but no! You have to find a place to sleep every night, and as the day goes on, the pressure mounts! And I still had to factor in a shopping stop in Las Vegas before I met my friends in the desert! Vegas, where the traffic would be a nightmare, coming from the north and slogging through the entire length of the city’s knotted freeway system. No way to avoid the stress of going directly from peaceful nature to mechanical mayhem, thousands of other stressed-out humans fighting each other like rats for space in the maze.

I didn’t have the heart for that yet, and I still had a few days left. So I decided to drive far out of my way, to the north again, to a little town in a canyon where I’d stayed several times before. It was a beautiful refuge where I could do laundry again, and edit my growing galleries of photos. And yes, there were more rock writings up there, sites I hadn’t visited yet.

The “mid-term” election occurred on my second day in the little town. A media event held elsewhere and broadcast in from the outside world – an event in which we function as mere statistics, pretending that we’re somehow “participating” in a “democracy.” I’d voted before leaving home, and the results were available when I woke up to do my laundry before hitting the road again. Everyone I voted for had won, but this “historic” event that others had worked so passionately for was of no real interest to me, since I dream of the collapse of the state that has caused so much harm from its beginning.

I packed up and drove back down the road, where I found another prehistoric site that added to the already profound revelations of this trip. It would be the last until next time around…

Honest Vegas

Going beyond even what I’d found at previous sites, this county publishes both online and paper brochures guiding visitors to and through its prominent rock art sites. I had one of these with me, but like my Grandpa, I reflexively avoid the instructions, and I regretted it halfway into my visit. In this case, the county’s wonderful brochure took the place of an all-day campout at the site – it enabled me to see, at a glance, the deep context around the rock writings: the ash deposits from old campfires, the scatter of stone tool-making flakes, evidence of both prehistoric residential and work areas. I would’ve found all that myself during a longer stay, but not during a short picture-taking visit.

Unlike the previous site, this was right off the highway. But like the previous site, it seemed endless – a maze of boulders down in a canyon, with panels near the head, but an unknown number hidden below, waiting for more time to be discovered. Frankly, during my early rock art explorations I never imagined sites so vast, rock writing so ubiquitous across the Native landscape, even as backdrops for everyday living. And this is just what’s accessible by vehicle. When you think about all the mountains and canyons that can only be reached on foot, it boggles the mind. These people created a pervasive mediascape that rivals ours – our smart phone screens, computer screens, TVs, movies, newpapers and magazines, billboards, bus ads, and graffiti – but unlike ours, theirs was made to be a permanent part of their habitat, to communicate between generations, and thus was strictly curated by tradition and by the community. And as a result of that and the way they lived, it’s more organic than ours could ever be.

When I first arrived, I took a wrong turn – again, the map is not the territory, and the brochure misled me – and spent an hour or so clambering down a tributary gulch that had a smattering of rock writings but wasn’t the main site. A Jeepful of Canadians followed me, and continued down the “wrong way” as I returned to find the official trailhead. Later, I heard and spotted them down there wandering through the maze, and we waved at each other.

It was now the moment of truth – or falsehood? Maya, the Veil of Illusion. I needed to get to Vegas to do my shopping for the desert meetup. And yes, the drive and traffic were as bad as expected, as bad as always, even though I beat “rush hour” by at least an hour. Our society, and what it has done to this planet, is obscene. Literally and completely obscene. And I’m not talking about separating immigrant families at the border, or appointing a sexual predator to the Supreme Court. Those are bad, but the nation’s current leadership is not the fundamental problem – that’s yet another reason why the recent election didn’t interest me. Our way of life, our way of using nature and each other, are catastrophic, apocalyptic – and Las Vegas is the epitome of all of that. In that sense, at least it’s honest.

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Treasure the Relationships That Don’t Last

Wednesday, September 11th, 2019: Relationships, Society.

(Note: None of the couples shown in these photos are still together…but their relationships made all of our lives richer)

The Problem of Marriage

Can you be single and happy? Our society doesn’t seem to think so.

A recent article in The Atlantic Monthly is subtitled: “A course at Northwestern University teaches students about what makes a healthy relationship.”

The first sentence of the article begins: “Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage….”

The article never questions the institution of marriage in our society – the author takes it for granted that young adults are going to get married. The primary focus of the Northwestern course is to enable students to marry successfully. What they teach is, in a nutshell: figure out who you are first, then find someone who shares your worldview.

It’s good to see someone in national media talking about worldviews, after I worked for years to clarify what they are, and to convince people of their importance. But how accurate are the worldviews of 18-year-olds? Wouldn’t it be better to partner with someone whose worldview is radically different, someone you could learn from?

And what about happiness? What do we mean by that? If we mean contentment and self-satisfaction, isn’t it more important to learn, to grow, to change, to see the world clearly for what it is – which can result in discomfort, even pain?

Statistics show that roughly half of adult Americans are unmarried, and 40-50% of marriages end in divorce. These statistics are mirrored among my own friends and family. Should we conclude that up to 75% of Americans are unhappy, mainly because they failed to achieve a lasting marriage? As someone who is single late in life, has never been married, and has no ambition to be married, should I consider myself a miserable failure, or just totally irrelevant?

Actually, I suspect that many of my married friends might consider me a failure for those very reasons. As a young adult, I spent years single and celibate, and felt little peer pressure to find a partner, but when I reached my 40s and found myself between relationships, I came under more and more criticism of my choices and behavior. Friends pressured me to “put myself out there,” to find a compatible partner and avoid the tragic fate of being “old and alone.”

In our society, young adults are expected to find a partner, make a long-term commitment, live together, get married, and form a nuclear family. Everything from our legal and economic systems to our architecture are based on that. Our housing industry creates privacy for isolated units of consumers, with locked apartments for single people and childless couples, and the holy grail, the fortress of the single-family home, designed for the nuclear family.

The social norm of marriage is part of our culture’s overall plan for our lives: establish a career, get married, make a home, and have children. A failure in any of those is a failure in life, condemning us to unhappiness. Conversely, those who succeed in all four are encouraged to look down on the rest of us. And they often do, like smug children who are rewarded for following the rules.

Marriage is considered so essential to happiness and fulfillment in our society that biracial couples, gays, and lesbians have fought for decades for the legal right to marry. To those who’ve been denied this right, marriage is a precious accomplishment.

Each time I came to the end of a relationship, friends called it a failure and blamed it on some personal inadequacy I needed to overcome via soul-searching, therapy, or some other form of “personal growth.” The assumption, shared by the instructors of the Northwestern course, was that these short-term relationships were just the trial runs, preliminary to the real thing. If I could overcome my own problems, I would ultimately find and keep a life partner, and that partnership would become the foundation for my happiness.

The Atlantic article is yet another example of how national media encourage conformity to social norms that few of us question. And it highlights our society’s bias against aging without a partner. As we age, the pressure gets worse, and self-satisfied conformists smugly condemn us single elders as miserable failures.

Is this fair?

Seeing Only Failure

I began life in a nuclear family, but my parents separated and divorced while I was still a child. Then my mom moved my brother and me in with her parents, and the rest of my childhood and youth were spent in a traditional, multi-generational extended family.

But my grandparents and most of the families in our neighborhood had stable marriages, and the overwhelming message from media and the society around me was that you met your personal needs by finding a partner and pairing off. Marriage would be the ultimate result of that, and it would in turn satisfy your duty to society when you and your spouse produced offspring. Unmarried adults were oddballs, objects of suspicion.

My personal needs were abundant. I was turned on by girls from my earliest memories, but I was undersize and sickly as a child, so I was harassed and bullied by other kids. I needed companionship and comfort as much or more than most.

I became an adolescent as our country entered the Vietnam War, and my generation was inspired by what has come to be known as “the Counterculture.” Many friends in my peer group agreed that marriage was an obsolete institution of a failed society. Only conformists got married. Freed from society’s shackles, we nonconformists would love honestly, equally, and respectfully, and if we fell out of love, we’d simply part ways, hopefully as friends. Liberated by “The Pill,” we also resisted having kids, partly because we didn’t feel mature or stable enough, and partly because we believed our parents’ generation had screwed things up so badly that we didn’t want to take the chance of bringing kids into such a damaged world.

Although I’ve seen much more of life since then, and have acquired much deeper insights, my adolescent introduction to relationships via the Counterculture bore abundant fruit. Beginning in high school, I’ve had a long series of intimate relationships, most of which were monogamous and lasted from two to six years. Several involved living together, either in a private apartment or group home.

As the Northwestern University course recommends, my first long-term girlfriend and I did share worldviews. But as the instructors of the course should know, our 18-year-old worldviews could form no stable basis for a long-term relationship, especially in the volatile world we found ourselves in. We were unformed adults, wildly romantic, naive and ignorant. We thought we were Aragorn and Arwen from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The best that could happen was that our worldviews would change radically as we explored the world, exercising critical thinking, gaining experience, knowledge, and wisdom for decades to come. The chances of our relationship lasting through those changes was minimal. It would certainly be unfair to both of us to try to “work it out” as we both turned into different people, and it would seem unfair to society as well, especially if we’d had kids, only to separate and divorce like my parents.

My high school sweetheart and I rejected marriage, in keeping with the Counterculture, believing our bond was deeper and more sacred because we respected each other as distinct individuals. But we grew apart, and eventually broke up. And a decade later, as I turned 30, both I and society had changed in many ways. The Counterculture was seen to have failed – its critique of the Establishment may have been valid, but it hadn’t offered any viable alternatives. The world had gotten scarier – with everything from economic recessions to serial killers and nuclear meltdowns – and the future looked a lot less hopeful. And I had gone from a timid, uptight, naive, and ignorant small-town prodigy to the ambitious, aggressive leader of a big-city bohemian post-punk enclave.

My fourth girlfriend was a young professional woman from an elite college, who proudly considered herself a feminist. By the standards of the Northwestern course we appeared misfits from the start. I was immersed in my bohemian milieu, living in a communal loft in the midst of an industrial slum, experimenting with art, music, and drugs, while she was part of the newly-minted yuppie class, a compulsive shopper, living in a luxurious, frilly apartment in an upscale neighborhood. And she made it clear on our first date that she had a life plan, and getting married and having children were her primary goals. I was honest in my rejection of both, yet we fell in love and spent two rewarding years together, learning from each other, after which she married, had kids, divorced, and eventually remarried after her kids were grown up.

A decade later, when I met my seventh girlfriend, the world and I had continued to change. Some of my friends were getting married and buying houses. My long-secure day job was imploding. I’d achieved national recognition as a musician and bandleader, but I’d also become a serious outdoorsman, falling in love with the desert wilderness, studying aboriginal survival skills, dreaming of going “back to nature.” My new lover was much younger, nearly as unformed as I was two decades earlier, and I was her first really “mature” and caring partner. But whereas she wasn’t much interested in marriage, she did announce on our first date that she planned to have at least one kid.

Despite our differences, we also had a fulfilling relationship for almost two years, and I ended up loving her so deeply that she changed my whole vision of life. Toward the end of our time together I told her I wanted to work toward marriage, and if that happened, would like to have children with her. It was a momentous, scary prospect that put butterflies in my stomach. A few months later, she left me for a man her own age.

Three of my long-term relationships, including that one, have ended in anger and pain, resulting in lasting grief and disillusionment and the criticism of my peers. There were long periods of celibacy between some of them. And ultimately, after the tenth relationship ended traumatically, years went by without one, until I found myself “old and alone.” Was there really something terribly wrong with me, as some friends had suggested?

I always paid close attention to my friends’ relationships. A few of them were never alone – they were always either dating, with ever-changing partners, or in some kind of relationship. Some were more like me – holding onto a relationship for a while, going through a more or less difficult breakup, then being single for a while before finding someone new. A few of my friends achieved stable long-term relationships. Some got married, often for economic reasons. Some of those had kids, while others stayed childless.

Some of my girlfriends left me for abusive men, which turned out to be a pattern for them. I suspect there’s an unconscious belief, on a biological level, that strong, aggressive men will be better protectors, although it’s actually more likely that they’ll be abusive. And both friends and girlfriends sometimes fell into “co-dependence” on alcoholics or addicts. I had a couple of girlfriends – artists both – who turned out to be addicts and were occasionally violent, and one – highly educated and creative – who inherited mental illness from her mother. After being burned enough times, I developed zero tolerance for the addiction or instability of others.

But from earliest adulthood, I always had a few peers who were perennially celibate and frustrated, apparently due to low self-esteem. Some of them self-medicated with drugs or alcohol. Some of them had an occasional one-night stand that left them even more miserable. Those of us who regularly got laid, and those of us who were mostly in relationships, always pitied them, and if we couldn’t sustain a relationship very long ourselves, we always feared we’d end up like them. The Counterculture slogans of free love and open relationships had long been forgotten. Instead of being liberated, we were paranoid of being left alone in a world that made relationships ever harder to form and sustain.

It got worse as we got older, and more of my peers got married and had kids. The older I got, the more I saw how the solitary among us were pitied, and the more difficult it became to be single, because I felt inferior, and I was afraid it was finally all over for me – I’d never have another girlfriend, never find a life partner, let alone my mythical soulmate.

When I made perhaps the most radical move of my life – the move from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’d spent thirty years, to a remote small town in the least populous corner of New Mexico – I’d been single, celibate, lonely, and depressed, for five years. Frankly, one thing that encouraged me to settle here is that on my first visit, I met more attractive single women than I’d met in all those years of loneliness in the crowded megalopolis.

I spent the first few years flirting with and getting to know all of those women, and the more I got to know them, the more red flags appeared. Eventually, I found myself lonely and depressed again in my new home.

Finding Myself

Before moving to New Mexico, during a long period of unemployment, I’d started a project to finally figure out who I was and what I was supposed to be doing here on Earth. I studied ecology and anthropology, and tried to make sense of powerful visions that I’d had throughout life, visions that seemed “spiritual” for want of a better word.

Venturing into the past, and into the spiritual realm, and trying to envision the future, made me aware of alternate interpretations of time – the diverse phenomena of motion and change. Our technocentric culture is ruled by the linear time defined by our machines – the strictly ordered forward progression from past to present to future, in standard increments of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Alienated from nature, our way of life perpetually creates problems, so we envision the forward march of time representing “progress” from the problems we created in the past to the imagined solutions of the future, and we want each generation’s life to be better than the previous.

Traditional societies, which depend more directly on nature for their sustenance, tend to seek stability and sustainability rather than change and progress, because to thrive, they must stay within the finite limits of resources in their local habitats. Thus they experience time in the repeating cycles of nature: the solar day and night, phases of the moon, seasons and harvests, and the longer cycles of drought, fire, flood, and human generations. Instead of associating their past with problems and their future with solutions, they honor their past and work to make sure the future will be just as good. This may be called cyclical time.

With their deep communal memories of cyclical time, oral cultures move through a landscape teeming with potential phenomena from both past and future, so unlike us, they’re prepared to adapt to surprises. Thus they may also visualize time as a lake, in which the surface is our present consciousness, and the depths represent the continuum of experience, past and future. I experienced a powerful vision of that simultaneous time once, with loved ones from my past, as well as strangers from my future, rising briefly from the depths, only to plunge back down into the darkness again.

To make up for the lack of attractive single women in my life, I had added a few images of past girlfriends to the walls of my house, and I’d put together “scrapbooks” to memorialize our relationships. Unconsciously, I was manifesting simultaneous time. One of the unexpected consequences of aging, and my new phase of life, was that I could truly live in the past, present, and future simultaneously.

As I observed my family, friends, and acquaintances in this new light, reflecting on their experiences and relationships and comparing them to mine, I suddenly realized that despite coming of age in the Counterculture, I’d been made to feel inferior as a celibate single person, and when a relationship ended, society had made me feel worse about the breakup.

But now, reflecting on the long series of romantic relationships I’d experienced, which felt just as present and real as anything in my current life, I felt like I’d achieved more, in some ways, than people who’d married young and maintained stable lifelong marriages.

I began to see the pain and trauma I’d experienced in a few of my relationships, and in some of our breakups, as priceless inspiration for some of my best art, music, and writing. All of those relationships, from first to last, were physically and emotionally rewarding. In all of them we professed profound love for each other and shared countless moments of warm caring and tenderness. None of my relationships were abusive. I’ve loved deeply and intensely and have been loved deeply back, year after year.

By spending at least a year – a full round of the seasons – in each of those relationships, we’d gotten to know each other in the context of natural cycles, in cyclical time. And now, all of those partners are still with me every day, in my growing awareness of simultaneous time. Most of them are still friends, though we may never see each other again – and I still feel the love we shared as a daily part of my life, every bit as real as the pain and frustration of chronic injuries and disabilities that come with aging.

I compare this new awareness with the previous belief, reinforced by my closest friends, that as each relationship ended, it became a failure, proving there was something wrong with me that had to be fixed, either through soul-searching, therapy, or some other form of “personal growth.”

The revelation of this past year is that contrary to the assumptions of the Atlantic article and many of my friends, happiness can result from a long life of “failed” relationships. Far from failing in my ultimate state of singlehood, I’ve achieved deeply loving relationships with not just one, but many diverse partners, in which we lived adventurous and fulfilling lives together. Sure, there was plenty of discomfort, distrust, anger, pain, and trauma. But as an artist, rather than seeing these as evidence of an inadequacy that needed to be “fixed,” I now see them as precious raw material for my creative work.

It turns out that being an artist has determined the course of all my relationships. I’ve always had personal passions, goals, and projects that have either competed with, deferred, or replaced relationships. Some of those things I could do with a partner around, but many took me places where my partner couldn’t follow. I’ve used long periods of solitude to take chances, explore dangerous places, and get a lot of work done. Some have called me selfish. It looks like I’ve been unable to let go of my ego, unable to lose myself in something bigger, whether a one-on-one relationship or a community where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

That’s partly true, but hardly anything in life is ever that simple. Like most artists, I’ve had to have a “day job,” conscientiously giving decades of my life to other people’s projects and the collaborative work of teams. I started a harvest festival as a gift to a community I wasn’t even part of, and have spent 13 years volunteering to make it happen.

And while in relationships, I’ve sincerely tried, and sometimes succeeded, in giving selflessly to those I loved. You can ask any of my ex-girlfriends about that.

My newfound contentment and appreciation of my past relationships doesn’t mean that I want to restart any of them! On the contrary – our paths diverged for good reason. We are all different people now, and what brought us together originally is no longer there.

Not the Only Way

Is marriage really essential to happiness?

What about the broader notion of “partners for life?”

The nuclear family?

Are any and all of those valid goals for young adults?

Are married people successes, and single people failures? And should solitary elders regret their failure to maintain permanent relationships?

The Northwestern University course maintains that a marriage can be successful if you first figure out who you are, then find someone who shares your worldview. But in a society as patently dysfunctional as ours, and as I certainly learned, finding out who you are is a lifelong project. If you’re really diligent about examining both the world and yourself, your worldview is guaranteed to change. What are the chances of your partner making the same changes, and continuing to share your changing worldview along the way?

We should never forget that we’re animals. The survival of our communities depends on at least some of us reproducing, and reproduction requires partnership. Many of us are clearly driven by biology to find partners we can reproduce with, without even thinking about it. Most of my peers did think about it, though, at the time when we were becoming adults, and we put off having kids until very late, if ever.

Anthropologists like a teacher of the course at Northwestern should be aware that marriage in our sense is the exception, not the rule, across the incredible diversity of human societies. In many, if not most indigenous societies, men and women pair up opportunistically, stay together as long as it works, then drift apart. They may have children together, but those children are raised by the community, not by a stable “nuclear family” in a private fortress home. The lives of both parents and children take place in the context of a small, intimate confederation of people of all ages and genders who work together to take care of each other, rather than in the context of atomized families that live isolated from each other in private homes like ours. Traditional societies tend to lack the stigmatization of single people that our society perpetuates.

The evidence shows that marriage is no sure path to selflessness. Many or most marriages have a dominant partner and lead to oppression or divorce. From my point of view, it isn’t just biology that drives people to get married and/or form permanent partnerships – it’s also insecurity – the fear of being on their own and taking risks. They seek safety and security, whether real or an illusion.

My Quest

Whereas some of my girlfriends and peers started adulthood with a conventional life plan, like getting married and having kids, I left my family home in the midst of a cultural revolution in which all the rules were supposed to be broken. For years I’d been told I had great talent and potential, and college was supposed to be an opportunity for me to explore that potential, and forge a new life path. But my family wasn’t rich, so like most of us I was forced to set aside my dreams in favor of developing a practical career.

Years later, when my first serious relationship ended and my time in the ivory tower drew to a close, it was like waking up from a coma. I found a magical world around me, waiting to be explored, and I started on my lifelong quest for experience, knowledge, and wisdom. That ultimately made it impossible for me to sustain a relationship, and it’s still ongoing. Death will be just another phase of it.

My quest has taught me different senses of time, different interpretations of what we call past, present, and future: living and loving in both cyclical and simultaneous time.

It’s showed me how extended families, in cooperative communities, can provide better caring and child-rearing than the nuclear family. How parenting can be uncoupled from romantic partnerships. How group living situations can be more supportive than the private home.

It has taught me not to wish for or expect a life partnership. On my quest, I’ve experienced love and caring in dazzling richness and diversity, and feel better for it. I treasure the moments, and no longer regret that they couldn’t last.

By falling in love with women who were radically different from me – and clearly incompatible – I learned new things and discovered new worlds, I gained wisdom and had memorable experiences that made my life richer.

Unlike most married people, who are constrained by the jealousy of their spouses, I don’t have to dismiss, forget, or deny my past relationships – I can continue to celebrate them.

Healthy communities need parents and children. I feel for my friends who are parents, and for their children, who, like the rest of us, struggle to deal with the dysfunctional society they’ve been brought into. I also feel for my aging single friends, who should treasure the moments of real connection they’ve had, no matter how few or far between.

My quest can be seen as the height of selfishness, but I continue to share what I’ve learned with anyone who will listen. My art, and what I’ve learned from my quest, are my gift to my community. It’s who I am, like it or not.

I’m not your type, you’re not my kind,
and love that’s born of this encounter
surely won’t endure the future;
and we know that love is blind.

But that’s no reason not to try!
but if we tried a thousand years
we could never get it right,
we could never get it better.

And now these days that get us nowhere,
these days of stormy weather,
these are the good old days,
these are the times we will remember!

(From “Tiare’s Theme,” a song I wrote in my 20s, after a breakup)

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The Real Virus

Friday, March 27th, 2020: Problems & Solutions, Society.

Addiction and Misdirection

Throughout the day, every day, news media urgently demand our attention to the latest crisis, and like sheep, like puppets, many of us drop what we’re doing to breathlessly follow the unfolding narrative.

Statistics: thousands of cases, hundreds of deaths. Predictions in the millions. Authorities split into two sides: “We must take this seriously to avoid a catastrophe!” vs. “We must get people back to work to avoid economic collapse!”

Statistics are by their very nature stripped of their real-world context. What do they mean? People don’t stop dying from war, domestic violence, old age, car accidents, “normal” diseases – but we only get statistics on the crisis. Where did these statistics come from? What extenuating circumstances already existed? What else was going on at the same time? What assumptions were made by those collecting and processing the data?

But those questions would require us to think, and in the consumer model of the news media, just like in the world of the drug pusher, we’re not supposed to think about what we’re consuming. We’re supposed to react, because it’s the reaction that keeps us addicted. The news doesn’t inform us, it alienates us. In a crisis, statistics are used to manipulate us, to immobilize us in front of our screens. The important thing is to remain enslaved to your favorite device, consuming energy, in a state of helplessness.

The people – citizens of the state, consumers of the media, literally addicted to their screens and the hysterical media narrative – echo what their favorite authorities have said, face to face and through social media. “Millions will die! We must take this seriously!” But what can we do as individuals, as statistics? Very little. Like children dependent on their parents, we look to our remote, unaccountable leaders in the hierarchical organization of the state, and again, as with climate change, this new crisis becomes yet another opportunity to attack the other side, the side which is not doing the right thing. The other side’s leaders are causing this crisis! They’re not taking this seriously enough! Or, it’s a hoax, a plot, they’re taking it too seriously! Yet again, we are divided and outraged.

Meanwhile, away from the media’s misdirection – out of sight and mind of our media addiction – our economy, our lifestyle, our society, our culture continue to destroy nature and humanity. Our global infrastructure of mines, factories, and shipping consumes natural ecosystems and habitats wholesale. Our global exploitation of cheap labor, enforced by our worldwide military empire and our foreign proxies, destroys traditional communities. The devices we’re addicted to, on which we follow this hysterical narrative, are destroying people and nature in distant places, through their consumption of the earth’s energy, their consumption of nonrenewable raw materials, their consumption of exploited and sometimes enslaved labor.

Statistics, sheep, puppets. The emperor has no clothes. This is the real crisis. We are the real virus.

Closed System

From early childhood, our schools indoctrinate us in the propaganda of the state: the narrative of the freedom-loving Pilgrims, the wise Founding Fathers, the revolutionary Constitution, our precious Democracy and its heroes, from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Kennedy. And as we advance through the educational system, our cultural conditioning broadens to encompass the classical legacy of our European forbears: Western Civilization, from the philosophical and democratic Greeks to the orderly, civilized Romans, creators of the language we still employ in both law and science. To the European flowering of arts and sciences from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. And the generous role of European culture in spreading enlightenment and democracy throughout the primitive, superstitious Developing World.

Of course, our society’s failures clearly invalidated this narrative in the 1960s and 1970s, and that era’s Counterculture identified most of its fallacies. But according to our hindsight, the Counterculture was a failure, because it never offered an alternative paradigm that would preserve the lifestyle, the “standard of living,” to which we’ve become accustomed. Some people did try communal living and went “back to the land,” but they lacked the skills and/or sociocultural unity to persist, and the juggernaut of consumer culture ultimately overcame their idealism.

In the late 1990s, authorities increasingly drew our attention to another sociocultural failure: climate change. I joined a friend in dinner discussions between the “intelligentsia” – successful white professionals, graduates of elite universities – that again questioned the foundations of our culture.

Like the earlier Counterculture, we again found fault with most of the dominant paradigms of Western Civilization. But again and again, we fell short of condemning the whole shebang, the entire edifice of what used to be called the Establishment. We got stuck on one essential institution, and one undeniable accomplishment: the saving of lives through medical science and technology.

These people (with me as the lone exception) unanimously believed that all the failings of our cultural legacy are redeemed by the statistical increase in life expectancy and reduction of infant mortality achieved by Western Medicine. Hey, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, okay? The important thing is that the baby survived!

A great irony of this conclusion is that the host of these discussions had a doctoral degree from Stanford, the home of Paul Ehrlich, celebrity author of The Population Bomb, and was inspired by Ehrlich’s thesis of overpopulation as our most pressing crisis. Overpopulation which is partly driven by modern medicine’s increase in life expectancy and reduction in infant mortality. Our greatest achievement, simultaneously causing our greatest problem? To paraphrase Freud, technology has increased the quantity of human life, while degrading its quality.

These people fancied themselves critical thinkers, because they’ve always been told that critical thinking is one of the key components of their liberal educations. But critical thinking is only as good as the knowledge it has to work with. And where do we get this knowledge? Almost none of us is working on the front lines of original research, extracting raw data and analyzing it, turning it into conclusions for peer review. Our knowledge comes primarily from our favorite authorities in the media. Ultimately, our “critical thinking” consists only in choosing between one authority and another. We’re sheep, following the leader.

To make things worse, both we and our leaders are participants in a closed system. The propaganda we’ve all been raised with obscures the reality that our society has become dominant by conquering, suppressing, and often erasing the cultures that could offer us alternatives to our failed values and institutions, and solutions to our problems. Our social discourse takes place in total ignorance of these alternatives.

The Ecology of Death

In natural ecosystems, the death of individual organisms is an essential event in the cycle of life and fertility. Each organism’s body is another organism’s food. The more science we do, the more this fundamental principle is reinforced. We die so that others may live.

But driven unconsciously by the Judeo-Christian mandate of man’s dominion over nature, European science repeatedly tries to prove that humans stand apart from the rest of nature, that we are the pinnacle of natural evolution, with our big brains, our “consciousness,” our reasoning, our languages, our technologies. Despite growing evidence that other animals share our “achievements,” and that our differences are quantitative rather than qualitative, that evidence remains confined to specialist discourse, and most of us are still taught that humans are exceptional. To people like the life-extension advocate Ray Kurzweil, humans should be immortal, and our death is a simply another problem to be solved by science and technology.

Many if not all traditional societies – those alternatives that we’ve conquered, suppressed, and ignored – recognize death as an essential, sacred event in the cycle of life. The events and phases of that cycle are what keep the cycle turning: birth, the learning experiences of the child, the adult’s roles as conceiver of new life and provider to the community, the elder’s role as steward of the wisdom needed to address crises. And death, the necessary return of one’s body to the ecosystem and one’s space to the community. This is why traditional societies haven’t developed our advanced medical technology. Not because they’re inferior and need our help, but because they’re often wiser and more successful than us at thriving on earth.

Let It Come Down

I often remind friends that I’ve spent the past 40 years waiting and hoping for our society to collapse. Some friends agree with me that our society is destroying the earth. Yet in a crisis like this, driven by a hysterical media narrative, many of them are victims of their media addiction. They forget critical thinking and become avid consumers of daily statistics, reflexive followers of their favorite media authorities. They forget that statistics are unaccountable, and media authorities are agents of the state, upholders of a failed paradigm. As citizens of the state, content to participate only as anonymous statistics, we surrender control of our lives to distant leaders we know only as talking heads on a tiny screen.

We forget that our economy, the Growth Economy, is consuming the earth. We forget that we Westerners live in bubbles of affluence and comfort – that worldwide, poor people suffer to provide us with the products of our “progress” and innovation. We only want things to get back to normal, so we can resume our “important” jobs within the machinery of this rapacious economy. We want our kids back in school to continue absorbing the same propaganda we were raised on, to prepare for their own “challenging, fulfilling” jobs within the destructive machine.

I hear serious people earnestly proclaim “Millions will die!” and “This country will never be the same again!” – their point being, our leaders must do something about this NOW!

And as always, I respond: Let go of this fantasy that you’re part of something big and wonderful that needs to be saved. It’s not your country – it never has been. It belongs to the rich and powerful. What you think of as your country is the Evil Empire. Despite its many seductive attractions, your culture is implicated in all the depredations of that empire. Your society will collapse – if not now, eventually – and that will be a good thing both for humans and for the earth.

Diseases are part of life, part of natural cycles. People sometimes die of diseases. Diseases are a natural regulatory mechanism in ecosystems. People are animals who live in natural ecosystems, whether we’re aware of it or not. The more intimately we participate, the more we collaborate in balance and harmony with our natural partners – wild organisms – the more we thrive. The more we rely on technology to save lives, save labor, and empower us, the more alienated and vulnerable we become.

Pandemics are caused by imperialism and globalism – the unaccountable dominance and exploitation of traditional societies by modern states, along with the global transportation networks that states use to maintain their dominance. Pandemics are caused by overpopulation, which results from our scientific and technological innovation: our artificially enhanced agricultural productivity, our medical increase in life expectancy and reduction in infant mortality.

This pandemic, this virus, won’t be the one that brings our society down. Despite the media hysteria, it’s simply not virulent enough. The vast majority of coronavirus cases experience minor symptoms and survive, and will end up suffering more from preventive measures than from the disease. The truly nightmarish epidemics of the past – the Black Plague, Cholera – as well as newer ones like Ebola – are still with us, and are capable of much greater mortality, and much worse suffering. We’ve only temporarily outsourced them to the traditional communities we and our proxies in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa are exploiting or trying to destroy.

Ultimately, by engineering to prevent death, by isolating individuals from risk and danger, we make ourselves weaker, more vulnerable. Like all the wars perpetrated by our aggressive, competitive, domineering society, the scientific and technological war against disease is a war against nature, a war we can’t win.

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The Night I Gave Up Physics

Wednesday, April 29th, 2020: Jobs, Science, Society, Stories.

Cult of Genius

My Dad was a rocket scientist. He grew up during the Great Depression, when there seemed to be harsh limits on human potential. But World War II inspired technological innovations and a resulting leap in the industrialization, wealth, and power of our society. In high school, Dad read avidly about the exciting discoveries and inventions of his time in Popular Science magazine.

As World War II drew to an end, chemistry emerged as the glamorous science that offered “miracle products” and “better living through chemistry.” Dad began his career developing some of these products – for example, melamine, used in unbreakable dinnerware – in a research lab. From there, he advanced to the aerospace industry, where he developed rocket fuel for nuclear missiles.

My own childhood inherited this postwar optimism and passionate faith in science, technology, and innovation. Science and technology would bring us ever-increasing comfort, convenience, power, and speed, ultimately rocketing us into Outer Space! We were living in the Space Age, and President Kennedy, a national icon of youthful optimism, became one of its heroes, analogous to Elon Musk today.

But this scientific and technological innovation required the mastery of mathematics and other difficult subjects, nudging us further toward a meritocracy, in which power is achieved by those with the most advanced training and skills in the areas our society values most – those with superior ability, “aptitude,” and ultimately, “intelligence.”

Thus arose a cult of intelligence and “genius,” which signified the highest achievement in the most difficult field of endeavor. In our newly “scientistic” society, with its absolute faith in science, the most difficult field was believed to be physics. And the greatest achievement in physics was the Theory of Special Relativity, discovered by Albert Einstein, who was now recognized as the smartest human who ever lived – the very definition of a genius.

In general science and academia, as well as being the most difficult science, physics is considered the fundamental science, the science upon which all others are built, and the Laws of Physics are considered the most fundamental laws of the universe. Physics grapples with matters which used to be the sole province of the Judeo-Christian God. Hence it wasn’t just Einstein, but every exceptional physicist who became acknowledged as the smartest humans.

Dazzled by Choices

Growing up in that era with a rocket scientist Dad, it was unsurprising that I devoured science fiction and dreamed of being a scientist, and with physics as the most important science, the science of geniuses and everything from the atom bomb to space travel, it was no surprise that I was drawn to that subject. In junior high, even before I was old enough to study science, I was captivated by media accounts of lasers, the latest and coolest product of physics. In media and the popular imagination, lasers appeared to be the “death rays” forecast in science fiction, but they also promised unlimited benefits to peacetime society.

In the classified ads of Popular Science, I found an offer of blueprints for building a solid-state ruby laser. I ordered it, and when it came, although the technology was fairly simple, it was way over my head, so I consulted our high school physics teacher, and an older neighbor who was a ham radio geek and handy with electronics.

As the builder of a laser I become a local celebrity, and around the same time, IQ tests were administered in our schools and I was found to be exceptional. When I advanced to high school, I discovered a phenomenon well-known to talented students in our educational system. I became the target of seduction by teachers who were frustrated by their bored, unmotivated, underachieving students, teachers who were competing with other teachers for limited funding and equipment. In me, they saw a potential new star in their field, someone whose future glory they could eventually bask in. When they lobbied the administration to buy new equipment and teaching aids, they were doing it for students like me.

Our physics teacher had already become an early mentor. But after the IQ test, it emerged that I had equal aptitude in every subject. The only difficulty was to choose between them! Most people struggle to find something they excel at – I struggled to pick from seemingly infinite choices.

Our math teacher bought a computer for me – a long metal box topped with flickering vacuum tubes – and set it up in its own special room. Our English teacher enlisted me in a small circle of elite pupils to meet weekly in her home for readings and analysis of contemporary poetry. Our biology teacher lived on a farm and caught wild animals for me to study, including a beautiful, sleek black snake with a glistening yellow belly that became my favorite pet.

But the teacher I loved the most, and was the most loyal to, was my art teacher. He was the only one who exposed us to things that challenged not only our intellects but our most fundamental beliefs and values. He wasn’t pandering to our youthful attraction to cool fads, he was trying to make us uncomfortable, to get us to experience the world in new ways. He was truly wise, and he became my lifelong mentor.

Mastering academic subjects was so easy for me that I looked for more inspiration outside of school. My mom was an English teacher working on her master’s degree at Indiana University, and I accompanied her on trips to campus, where I picked up books on world religions, philosophy, and psychology. I devoured Neitzsche and Jung, inspired without really understanding what they were writing about. All that reading just filled me with urgent adolescent questions about the fundamental nature and meaning of life. I had mystical dreams and felt myself in the grip of profound mysteries.

Science of the Bomb

Of course, it was now the late 1960s, and my whole generation, average students as well as prodigies, were in revolt against the beliefs, values, and institutions of the older generation and its Establishment. Boys were threatened with the Draft and military service in a brutal war in a distant tropical jungle. We were shocked by horrific images in the media, and slightly older peers were returning home in body bags. This was the atmosphere in which we came under relentless pressure to quickly figure out what to do with the rest of our lives. Pressure to pick the right next step, college or vocational school, and the right career to ensure our future success – assuming we survived the draft and the war.

In early 1968, our government escalated the war, and the death toll accelerated. Closer to home, pacifist hero Martin Luther King, Jr. and liberal icon Robert Kennedy were assassinated in rapid succession. College students held desperate antiwar protests around the world, culminating in the chaotic, bloody Democratic Convention in Chicago, the big city of the Midwest – the city where my parents had met, a little more than 200 miles northwest of my home town.

The dangers and decisions I faced in the near future seemed more and more daunting. In the fall, at the start of my junior year, I don’t remember deciding on a particular career. Who does, after only two years of high school? But our physics teacher announced that I’d been selected as one of our state’s delegates to the National Youth Conference on the Atom, to be held in Chicago. And a newspaper clipping says that I planned to be a research physicist.

This prestigious event for high school students had been organized by the nation’s public utility companies, all of whom had been engaged in promoting nuclear energy. Since the 1950s, nuclear science, and in particular nuclear or “high energy” physics, had been considered the most cutting-edge of the sciences. It was the science that claimed to probe the essence of reality, the fundamental nature of matter and energy that supposedly make up everything in the universe. But it was also the science of war and mass destruction, the science of the Bomb, which my generation was trying to ban. Nuclear science badly needed a flattering makeover.

I didn’t record my feelings on being chosen for this honor, but I’m sure that despite any misgivings about the subject, I was impressed and excited about the trip. I’d be accompanied by our physics teacher, but I’d have my own hotel room, and at the age of 16, I’d be visiting a world-class city without my parents, staying in the center of the world-famous “Magnificent Mile” of North Michigan Avenue.

Eternal Danger

The Sheraton-Chicago Hotel turned out to be a massive, towering complex combining a 42-story Art Deco structure, faced with elaborate relief sculptures, and a newer, shorter contemporary annex. On arrival, I was advised to check out the 14th-floor pool, an ornate facility inspired by the architecture of Ancient Egypt. And for the first night’s dinner, I was taken to the hotel’s high-end restaurant, Kon-Tiki Ports, a phantasmagorical immersive series of themed spaces inspired by explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s bestselling book. I’d never seen anything like Michigan Avenue, the Sheraton, the pool, or the restaurant, and I can remember feeling like Alice through the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole, or whatever. Transported to a completely overwhelming alternate reality. The pregnant darkness, the millions of multicolored lights, the frenzied, random motion, the thronging, sophisticated voices. Modern people who experience almost everything through a tiny two-dimensional screen will have a hard time imagining the sensory overload I felt there as a teenager from a small farm town.

During the three-day conference, I attended lectures and demonstrations in the hotel’s spacious auditoriums. I saw a research physicist from Oak Ridge National Laboratories operating a gas laser, far more sophisticated than what I’d built. I went on a tour of Argonne National Laboratories and got up close to a famous research reactor. It was all overwhelming, but nothing left a lasting impression, except the reactor, which felt chillingly ominous, an object of profound, nearly eternal danger.

The conference schedule began with “hard science” topics like particle physics and space science, but the agenda became more transparent in the final sessions: “Nuclear Energy Centers for Underdeveloped Nations,” “Tapping Latent Science Talent in the Ghetto,” and most critically “The Flight From Science.” In the final lecture, a physics professor from the University of Chicago tackled what she believed to be my generation’s fundamental problems with science. But in keeping with the boosterish tone of the conference, she focused on superficial, simplistic arguments that were easy to refute, ignoring the deeper and more troubling critiques of the emerging Counterculture.

On Friday night, after dinner, the physics teacher and I parted. We returned to our separate rooms, and I put on a warm coat, took an elevator to the ground floor lobby, and set out into the big-city night by myself. A 16-year-old kid from the cornfields, loose in the city of Al Capone and John Dillinger. The city where my parents had met during the birth of bebop. It was truly the city where my existence had been made possible.

The Night I Gave Up Physics

I don’t remember many details from that night. I do know I wandered down to the Loop, Chicago’s center, where I left Michigan Avenue for State Street. Near the Loop, Michigan mostly hosted corporate offices, which were dark at night, whereas State was the street of theaters and nightclubs. Photos of nighttime Chicago typically show a blaze of light. But wherever I went in that night of hazy memory, what I remember most is darkness and mystery. Shadowy towers looming above me. Shadowy strangers on mysterious missions. A sense that I was invisible, a secret agent, a silent observer, a child posing as an adult. A sense of danger mixed with a feeling of new power and potential.

What could I do in a place like this, away from the safety and comfort of my family home? I’d read Emile Zola’s Nana, the tragic story of a Parisian prostitute, and I knew that some of the people around me had to be hookers, gangsters, violent criminals. Actors, directors, corrupt politicians, multi-millionaires, captains of industry. The kinds of people I’d only read about or seen in movies.

Somewhere along my nocturnal path through the heart of the city, I felt myself absorbed into its mystery. As tiny and insignificant as I really was, I felt my heart swelling with feelings I didn’t begin to understand. After all, I was an adolescent! Everything about me was in constant flux, evolving toward the unknown.

But there was one thing that became crystal clear on that solitary exploration. I would not become a physicist, or any kind of scientist at all. Nothing I’d heard or seen at the conference had moved or inspired me. None of these high-powered professors or researchers had captured my interest. It wasn’t a question of my ability – there was clearly nothing in these subjects that I couldn’t master. I knew I could achieve just as much as any of these eminent scientists if I wanted to.

I also knew my generation was rebelling against science, specifically the military-industrial complex that employed so many scientists, but also against the broader dominant paradigms of European culture. But I don’t think my generation’s rebellion motivated my decision to abandon science. What I realized was that my essence is to seek experience – in all its beauty, horror, magic, and danger – to process it, and to return it in the form of art, music, poems and stories. I feel things profoundly and I’m driven to create in response. I’d always known that, but in the turmoil of adolescence, the pressure to decide on a career path, and the competitive seduction of my teachers, my thoughts and feelings had remained muddled and conflicted. Until now. Until that night alone in downtown Chicago.

Real-Life Education

Eighteen months later, when I graduated from high school, it was with our town’s art scholarship. But that was long before the internet, and even before the now-widely-available comparative reviews of colleges and universities. The only way I knew about colleges back then was word-of-mouth: from family, teachers, and the guidance counselor in our little farm town.

Sure, everyone had heard of legendary schools like Harvard and MIT, but to a kid in the boondocks they were as distant and unreal as the moon. Nobody seemed to know anything about art schools, but my broad talents suggested that I needed an equally broad education. Our high school guidance counselor solved the problem for me when he received a recruitment package from the University of Chicago, in that vibrant, mysterious city where my parents had met and I had forsaken a  career in physics. That was where I started my long, winding, and ultimately misguided path through what our society calls “higher education.” Ahead of that mess, my real education was waiting for me, outside the ivory tower.

I entered college on the eve of a recession, and it quickly became evident that a career in the arts wasn’t going to support me. After a couple of years mastering anatomy and the classical techniques of figurative drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture in Chicago’s picturesque Midway Studios, I was forced to fall back on my math and science skills. And ironically, the degrees I ultimately obtained – BS and MS – derived from a branch of physics: dynamics, the science of motion and change, the science of Einstein and his Theory of Relativity. So I gave it up that night in Chicago, only to be forced back into it a few years later – although I never ended up actually working in the field.

It took me decades of hard living to begin to overcome the cultural conditioning of my formal education. So much misdirection, so many false gods, such a narrow scope of knowledge – our precious Western Civilization. There were a few solitary voices along the way urging me to question authority, but they were drowned out by the dominant paradigm. My childhood pastor, Richard Merriman, who urged us to reject received wisdom and think for ourselves. My junior high and high school art teacher, Mel Gray, who challenged me by asking hard questions and listening patiently to my long, agonized answers. My freshman social science professor, Bill Zimmerman, an antiwar activist and founder of Science for the People, who revealed that, far from being an objective search for truth, science is a political activity, a tool of the imperialist state and the capitalist economy, and scientists should always be held responsible for the practical applications of their work. Richard McKeon, the spellbinding philosopher who framed the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But most of my so-called teachers were just trying to indoctrinate me in the same gospel of Western Civilization that they’d been programmed in themselves: the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Bach and Beethoven, Galileo and Darwin, blah blah blah.

Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t really think for myself until I’d gained a broad and deep experience of life outside the ivory tower. In ghettos and barrios, on movie sets and rural communes, in nightclubs and underground performance spaces, in jail cells and courtrooms, on military bases and toxic waste sites, in mines and oil fields, in remote farming villages and Indian reservations, in mountain and desert wilderness.

From that mature perspective, looking back on the formal education our society provided in my childhood and youth, some of which was generally acknowledged to be the best in the world, it’s easy to see that it was primarily an indoctrination in imperialist European culture. After I escaped that system of indoctrination, I struggled for decades to break through the veil of illusion it created, to correct the errors in thinking and overcome the bad habits.

Science of Death

One of those errors is the paradigm of reductive, mechanistic science, represented by physics and chemistry. Physics and chemistry are so universally accepted as the foundation of science that virtually no scientists today question them. But they originated in a wacky, controversial thesis from Ancient Greece, which held that everything in nature is assembled from tiny, invisible particles called atoms, and anything can be understood by analyzing its component parts. Of course, you have to destroy things to break them down into their component parts, so this principle of reductionism was essentially destructive. This destructive principle was initially validated by the transformative, and most often the destructive, power of early chemistry, beginning a feedback loop in which science was progressively validated by its power to destroy nature and transform natural resources for human purposes.

The material universe, including living organisms, was a machine for Descartes, which could in principle be understood completely by analyzing it in terms of its smallest parts….The belief that in every complex system the behavior of the whole can be understood entirely from the properties of its parts is central to the Cartesian paradigm. (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life)

Physics and chemistry were initially one science, based on this atomic model. Models – simplified man-made structures which are presumed to represent aspects of nature – are fundamental to the scientific method. They are usually termed “mathematical models” because mathematical formulas and equations describe their behavior, but in the beginning, scientific models were uniformly inspired by man-made machines – particularly the Asian and Middle Eastern mechanical clocks and computers that were the earliest known complex machines. These machines inspired the cosmological theories of Galileo and Copernicus. And it became accepted practice, which continues unquestioned to this day, for scientists to base their models of nature on man-made machines.

Ironically, it turned out that the atoms and molecules of physics and chemistry – these tiny natural machines that were the building blocks of the periodic table – could only be observed by still more and more powerful machines, often via acts of destruction in “atom smashers.” As models proliferated, particles became waves, and waves became strings, but it was always the same old same old – invisible phenomena that only physicists could observe, and only using ever more powerful machines.

As the European sciences solidified into a hierarchy with physics and chemistry at the foundation, they also split into the physical sciences – the sciences of nonliving matter – and the life sciences – the sciences of living organisms. Traditional indigenous societies avoid that distinction – they view all of nature as alive. Even geologists acknowledge this when they speak of the living rock.

Physics has its own history of naive mysticism, which is usually interpreted as the harmless eccentricity of sages with big brains. Prominent theoretical physicist David Bohm maintained that all matter possesses consciousness – but no one really took him seriously.

Instead of living habitats in specific places, the physicist imagines abstract mathematical space. Instead of natural cycles, events, and progressions, the physicist contemplates mathematical equations based on the linear variable “t.” Rather than living ecosystems, the physicist sees “matter” and “energy” – mathematical abstractions which can only be detected by machines. The European distinction between living and nonliving matter has enabled us to justify our ruthless destruction of natural habitats and overconsumption of natural resources. Physics and chemistry, the sciences that gave us napalm and nuclear weapons, are the scientific leaders in this destruction. They are the violent sciences of death.

This circular, self-validating thinking – nature is a machine which can only be studied by breaking it down using other machines, I understand how this machine works, hence I can transform nature for my purpose, hence I understand nature – is the essence of most science today. But there was a brief period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s in which a minority of scientists – part of the Counterculture – rebelled against mechanism and reductionism, seeking to replace it with holistic science, a science in which entities are only studied as components in systems, the way we actually find them in nature. A more objective, holistic, life-based science would have its foundations in ecology – the study of nature – and anthropology – the study of humans.

The great shock of twentieth-century science has been that systems cannot be understood by analysis. The properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole….Accordingly, systems thinking concentrates not on basic building blocks, but on basic principles of organization. Systems thinking is ‘contextual,’ which is the opposite of analytical thinking. (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life)

By this point, physics should be obsolete. But it remains far too essential to the exploitative, coercive agenda of the state and its economy. After the 1970s, the idea of holistic science was rapidly swept aside and mostly forgotten as computers, genetics, robotics, and other reductive and mechanistic paradigms triumphed in furthering the ends of the capitalist marketplace and the imperialist state.

As we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network of concepts and models in which there are no foundations….Since there are no foundations in the network, the phenomena described by physics are not any more fundamental than those described by, say, biology or psychology….Physics has now lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality. However, this is still not generally recognized today. (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life)

Physics and chemistry represent what is sometimes called Big Science – science which is funded and directed primarily by governments, including the military-industrial complex. Whereas they are considered the foundation sciences, they are actually the least objective sciences, because they are implicated in the power politics of the imperialist state. Claiming to define the fundamental laws of the universe, physicists are not even smart enough to grasp the concept of the Umwelt, recognized by pioneering ecologist Jacob von Uexkull. The knowledge of each living species, including humans, is limited to the sensory, experiential bubble we live in. We can never understand what’s outside that bubble. Far from the smartest humans, physicists are among the most naive and ignorant, confined in their circular theoretical universe of mechanical models and violent machines.

As a chemist and a rocket scientist, my Dad worked with some of the most toxic substances known to man. They destroyed his health and ultimately his livelihood, so that by the age of 55 he had to transition to part-time work, and by the age of 60 he was essentially unemployed, financially insecure, and becoming an invalid. The 10-square-mile rocket plant where he worked became a toxic Superfund site. The miracle products he helped develop in the 1950s were eventually found to be polluting our environment, poisoning our water supplies, killing wildlife, and changing global climate. This is the vicious cycle of science and technology. Scientists and engineers innovate in isolation, ignorant of the larger context for their work. Their innovations are promoted by entrepreneurs, media, politicians, and teachers, with little or no consideration for the long-term consequences in nature and society. Young people are attracted to novelty and pursue careers in the most exciting fields of their day. Decades later, scientists in other fields discover that these innovations are actually destroying us and our habitats.

What tragedies and misery we set our kids up for, hoping for their success in a toxic society, urging them through an educational system that indoctrinates them in destructive paradigms!

Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our own world of technological confinement. (Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth)

Beneath the veneer of civilization, to paraphrase the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian and animal, but the human in us who knows the rightness of birth in gentle surroundings, the necessity of a rich nonhuman environment, play at being animals, the discipline of natural history, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the expressive arts of receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the cultivation of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan membership and small-group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. (Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness)

Where do the little people of the world turn when the big structures crumble or grow humanly intolerable? At that point, it becomes important for us to know what a political and intellectual leadership devoted to the big system orthodoxies will never tell us: that there are small alternatives that have managed to bring person and society, spiritual need and practical work together in a supportive and symbiotic relationship. (Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society)

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