Leaving a Cruel Culture – For Annie

A friend asks me, What is the Story that needs to be told at this time? 

Synchronicity.  I glance over three letters in the mail today from strangers who each thank me for the ways we have interconnected in the past.  Last night, a participant in my writing class read us a poem he had found in a book he had been gifted from the library of a friend after her death.  An hour later, her photograph showed up on his random screen saver. It was W S Merwin’s amazing poem, Thanks, which ends

we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is.

and so I pay attention.  One woman came to study with me 30 years ago and I never heard from her again. Now she is retiring from teaching and is writing a book: Tracking the Miraculous … “it’s focus is synchronicity…” she writes. 

A second person writes me a long letter having discovered that the woman, who created this poster which has been hanging in his house for decades, is alive. 

“It was always beautiful, “he says, “and life affirming.”  I am glad he found something beautiful, whatever it was, for his 15,000+ word letter –  “ I’ve enclosed some things about me mostly because, and despite my lack of happiness and success, it amuses me to have people read them and say to themselves, ‘who the hell has sent this – and why?’” –  tells the heartbroken story of someone who has had a life of alienation and suffering. He wrote, “I have come to accept that I am alone in the world.  There is no one who needs me to be alive.” 

What is it in our culture that creates such loneliness?  Why have we forgotten village and tribal life of mutual caring?

Another letter writer thanks me for an act of healing I extended to her, a stranger who was a friend of a friend.  The writer had been suffering, so one extends what one can.  I imagine that many acts of healing from others and her own efforts led to the note of thanks saying she is cancer free now.  Why do we think that acts of kindness can’t be medicines?  

As it happened, the extraordinary artist, Andrea Bowers, told me of her friend’s suffering; she is also the friend of the woman who wrote the new book, Tits Up, which the second writer read which introduced him to the poster. So we are all interconnected – if only we lived accordingly as do the trees and actually all the beings in the natural world as interconnection is its essence.  

Letter writer 3 sent a gift, a film she had made in 2010, Kenneth Rexroth – The Signature of All Things.  One former student who is missing from the film is Sam Hamill who, himself, became an extraordinary poet and founded Copper Canyon Press.  Sam was my student, though he knew more about poetry than I did, through the accident of needing a degree when I was teaching creative writing at Los Angeles Valley College in 1966.  He had learned so much of what he knew from the kindness, wisdom and poetry that Rexroth had extended to him when he returned broken to the US from the Vietnam war.  

The Vietnam war broke Sam Hamill and poetry restored him.  When we say the Vietnam war broke him, we mean this country, this culture, and our war obsessions, broke him.  We mean cruel, munitions focused, money focused, privilege focused, domination focused cultural values that are disconnected from the natural world. These extremely individualistic values determine the way we live and devastate the earth, poison the waters, the soil and the air, and are leading us directly toward climate dissolution and extinction.  You, who are reading this, know what I am talking about because you are watching with horror as I am what our government is supporting as the Israeli military cruelly slaughters the Palestinian people.  

Today’s headlines:

“Israeli air strikes on a UN-operated school sheltering war-displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed at least 33 people, including 12 women and children.” Israel’s army says Hamas fighters were also in the shelter.

“Dozens of people, including children, were slaughtered while they slept” at a UN school attacked by Israeli forces, Oxfam International says. “Israel’s Military Defends Strike on U.N. School Building, Saying Its Target Was 30 Militants. “Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters were hiding inside three classrooms,” a military spokesman said. 

Rexroth clearly understood the consequences of this culture as you can read in the Bad Old Days which have lead directly to these worsening current days, to times that are crueler and more dangerous than anything we have known, leading directly to extinction of the more than human and the human which looms ominously.

The Bad Old Days 
By Kenneth Rexroth 

The summer of nineteen eighteen   
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall   
My father died and my aunt   
Took me to Chicago to live.   
The first thing I did was to take   
A streetcar to the stockyards.   
In the winter afternoon,   
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the   
Squalid streets, looking shyly   
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.   
Debauched and exhausted faces,   
Starved and looted brains, faces   
Like the faces in the senile   
And insane wards of charity   
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,   
Under the green gas lamps, and the   
Sputtering purple arc lamps,   
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with   
The last pulse of hope or courage,   
Some sly and bitter, some smart and   
Silly, most of them already   
Broken and empty, no life,   
Only blinding tiredness, worse   
Than any tired animal.   
The sour smells of a thousand   
Suppers of fried potatoes and   
Fried cabbage bled into the street.   
I was giddy and sick, and out   
Of my misery I felt rising   
A terrible anger and out
Of the anger, an absolute vow.   
Today the evil is clean
And prosperous, but it is   
Everywhere, you don’t have to   
Take a streetcar to find it,
And it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
Anger, and the vow are the same.

No surprise that Hamill influenced by such a soul teacher as Rexroth, organized Poets Against the War, and conducted a reading at the White House gates on February 12, 2003 in addition to arranging over 160 public readings in many different countries and almost all of the 50 states. He ultimately gathered the work of over 9,000 poets to oppose the war in Iraq.  

When I awaken every morning, I check the news to see if we are still alive and if so, whether we still have a chance to change our ways of life that are so brutish and banal, with our stupefying celebratory culture and obsession with weaponry and power, the culture that justified Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that imagined Agent Orange, and currently developed the AI programs Lavender and Where’s Daddy – thank you, Google – which no doubt were responsible for the savage attack on the UN school last night, while we pretend to seek a cease-fire in order to seek votes.  It is all so sordid.  An AI funder, stated that he does not think humans will be annihilated by AI by 2030.  But, he says, continuing his investments, 2060 is likely.

Gentle Boy, my beloved maybe wolf /Husky, calls me to the kitchen for his 6 o’clock snack. Ask anyone who knows him whether or not GB can tell time as he interrupts me whatever I am doing at 6 pm, or close enough, even accommodating the shift to Daylight Saving Time or the return to Pacific Standard Time.  Animals are so much more intelligent than we have the capacity to understand.

I go to the kitchen, and look across the patio and the hills wild with golden sunflowers, and purple sage, where the beginning of the snake spirit of a white cloud creeps into the canyon, tender against the Santa Monica mountains still rising green this June.  Such beauty.  How do we preserve it?  

Now, I return here and continue writing.  Where are we?  Oh yes, I am recounting reading the homicidal news each morning and my response which is imagining how I take another step out of the culture toward a life that honors the Earth first, and loves Life and cherishes it, and doesn’t murder or poison or destroy. 

What is the Story that needs to be told at this time?

The Story that needs to be told is of the process of leaving this mercenary culture that  entrains us toward destruction, that rapes the natural world and expresses unlimited violence toward all beings.  The Story that needs to be told is the one of bearing witness to the horror and corruption of our history and these times and scrutinizing our lives accordingly. It is the Story of the long and exacting process of disengaging, consciously ceasing our involvement in what injures and destroys.

It is the Story of finding other beautiful ways. Imagine that we take the original dictum that once underlay true medicine – First, do no harm – as the direction for how we live each day.  First do no harm.  Then love life and the Earth immoderately and live accordingly.  May we all live so there is a viable future for all beings.  

And, oh yes, Thank you.  

“thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is.”

WHO ARE THESE MEN? WHAT WORLD IS THIS? WHAT COULD IT BE?

When I awaken in the morning, noting the sun gilding the leaves as it rises, the sky lightening to blue or gray, the movement of wind through the branches, the gathering of a chorus of bird trills, I am flooded with gratitude for what life offers, especially for being engaged within a community of beings who live in dynamic inter-connection with each other. But then I am drawn to check in on the antics of the humans who entangle us increasingly in war, climate dissolution and the incipient unregulated activities of AI going rogue. Well, it’s not AI itself for AI is just a reflection of those who developed it without an ethical or compassionate base, without a soulful concern for the natural world and without heart.

Despite the recent discussions of the potential consequences of a super intelligence, the current bot interactions are frighteningly superficial, responding as a bot must from the lowest common denominator; and still, they are super dangerous. Recent chatbot conversation encouraged a 13-year-old to run away to initiate sex on her birthday with an older man she had met on social media. A Belgian man was encouraged to commit suicide and meet the bot, Eliza, in paradise. That program is called Chai, which in Hebrew means Life! The girl was rescued; the man died. Even so, these encounters are not what alarms the 50% of AI researchers who believe that there is a 10% or greater likelihood that AI will lead to human extinction.

The general discussion regarding regulation of what is now called by some an arms race between those developing self-generating large language models vaguely points toward legislation and guard rails, none of which would be close to adequate to rethink and reimagine what has been loosed.

Geoffrey Hinton an artificial intelligence pioneer. whose technology created chatbots, today, May 1, 2023, resigned from Google so “he could join the growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, so he can freely speak out about the risks of AI. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work. [1]

Who are the men, these power brokers, whose actions and ambitions might well be endangering humanity and all life, who have no restraints, no limitations, no checks and balances? As they are operating without any controls is it any wonder that their AI progeny are expected to be out of control in a short time and, likely, dangerously so.

And how do we meet this moment? 

This extreme contrast between the two worlds – the one of perfect beauty that gives life, and from which all life emerges, and the manufactured one which leaves such devastation in its wake.

Many prophecies from different cultures have predicted these times of drought, flood, fire, earthquake, and unprecedented human violence and destructiveness. The easiest way to speak about them is to recall the Shambala Prophecy:

“There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger, great barbarian powers have arisen. Although these powers spend their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power and technologies that lay waste to our world.

At this time, the Shambhala Warriors would rise up, go into the very heart of the barbarian power, and dismantle the weapons through the use of two weapons of their own: wisdom and compassion.”

Two “weapons” – wisdom and compassion. Let’s add a third means – the skillful alliance with the beings of the natural world and their innate heart-centered intelligence.

As we read, on a daily basis, about the advance against the Earth, against all life, against our lives and our kin’s life, we can also find the courage and encouragement to discover ways to meet these contemporary challenges, unique and extreme as they are. To do so requires deep contemplation, alliances with the spirits and the natural world, with all the beings, the creation of resilient cultures, the remembering of the old stories that can guide us, and communities of conscience. Requires vision and the commitment to realizing it. Not easy. But necessary.

It was the gradual increasing assault against the Earth, against Indigenous wisdom, against the more than human beings and those of us who are not aligned with the violent dominant culture, which led to the introduction, the transmission of the 19 Ways in order to inspire new cultural forms: “This is one guide to how we change our minds sufficiently to live differently and act in ways that will preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings. When we incorporate these ways of thinking, we will no longer be people who do harm.”

As James Bridle alerts us in New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, (2023)” “Reading a book, listening to music, researching and learning; these and many other activities are increasingly governed by algorithmic logic and policed by opaque and hidden computational processes. Culture is itself a codespace. … Computation does not merely augment, frame and shape culture; by operating beneath our everyday casual awareness of it; it actually becomes culture.”

The aim then of the 19 Ways, through self and cultural scrutiny, transformation and community, to restore, and become living sanctuaries for values and forms that seed, protect and lead to a “viable future for all beings.” The current task of the healer is to go beyond healing physical and mental illnesses especially as they arise increasingly from our lifestyles, corruptions and pollutions, and to engage in what heals and eases our community distresses, environmental and global afflictions. To take on the daunting and exhilarating calling to be healing presences in all ways.

And similarly, Literature of Restoration was transmitted to us and we have just given LoR a home: “As literature emerges from culture which in turn is shaped by literature, we are hoping that over time a new literature will emerge, not wedded to death and violence but from which we might say, Long Life for the future of all beings, (all beings!) the natural world and the Earth.

“We think of this site, and of LoR itself, as a community gathering in conversation around a central fire in the woods, where the Owls hooting to each other, the Wolves howling to the moon while gathering the pack, the Crickets chanting while tuning the world are informants and characters in the stories told, as well as companions in the circle. We come together, all of us, to share stories, the oldest form of telling, in old, old, and also. very new ways.”

Yes, these are old forms and very new forms, and they offer the real possibility of what seems impossible – to come out from under the dangerous hegemony of computational domination, algorithms, generative AI, climate dissolution teetering on collapse, soaring violence against all peoples, all beings, and extinction. Might we be part of other viable ways of living? Might we?

***

To begin to explore how to meet these conditions and create new culture is the intention behind two intensives. The goal of the Writer’s Intensive is to find the living, vital and true words and worlds that effectively undermine and defy artifice and the false realities being projected.  The work is based on the understandings and insights of Literature of Restoration: Literatureofrestoration.org. 

The Healer’s Intensive is specifically designed to develop responses to the times on behalf of our kin and the future. It is based upon the Earth based, Spirit based Daré practices, The 19 Ways and ReVisioning Medicine. Visit deenametzger.net for more info.

Please join us.