Beheld— At West End Gallery
We are an exceptional model of the human race.
We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves.
We no longer raise our young.
We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon.
We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us.
We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived.
But when the lights are off we are helpless.
We cannot move without traffic signals.
We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby.
We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life.
And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life.
We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand.
We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.
— Charles Bowden(1995), Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America
I had never heard of journalist Charles Bowden, who died in 2014 at age 69. But I came across a number of passages from his 1995 book, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America, that really jumped out at me with their blunt and sometimes harsh observations of our American way of life. The bit above stood out immediately for me. It was something I have been thinking for some time, that we are becoming less and less capable and more and more dependent on others for so many aspects of our lives.
With it comes an ever-increasing need for more of everything. A greediness has seemingly been planted in our psyche. As Bowden wrote, the only change we will willingly accept is to grow more grand.
I say this with hesitance, but it’s hard to not agree with how ends this passage: our way of life is killing us.
Maybe Bowden’s is a dark vision. I don’t know. But what I have read does not feel out of step with my own limited observations and the thoughts I have about what we have become. And I include myself mainly in that we. I often think of ancestors, particularly my great-grandfather, at such times. I have researched some of their histories, seeing how they lived in their times, and I wonder how they would think of what we have become and how they themselves might fare in these times.
My great-grandfather, Gilbert Perry, was born in 1855 at the northern end of the Adirondacks, near the Canadian border. His Canadian-born father was a farmer, as most people were in that time and place. In 1872, at age 17, Gilbert was emancipated as an adult (a notice appeared in the local newspaper proclaiming this fact) and set out into the woods with a crew of men he had enlisted to harvest trees. They set out with nothing more than double-bit axes, crosscuts saws, and a team of horses.
That first foray into the woods with his small crew turned into a way of life for Gilbert. Over the next forty years his small crew grew and at one point, as one of the pioneers of the Adirondack lumber surge that fed the building boom that was taking place in this nation, he employed over 350 men and had over 50 teams of horses.
This was all at a time when everything was done by hand and brute force or with the assistance of a horse. There were no chainsaws, tractors, or trucks. No electrical power, only kerosene lamps or candles at night. No smartphones guide you via GPS, to call home with, or to check the radar weather reports. No doomscrolling nor blogs from fools like me.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am not saying that I would trade this time for that time. No way. I am too much a product of this time, too used to the ease of modern life. I have experienced that way of doing things to a small degree and am grateful for the experience, I don’t want to repeat it at this point in my life. I am too damn tired.
When I started building my house, much of it was built before the electrical lines were ran. Many of the boards were cut with a handsaw. Thousands of nails were driven by the swing of a hammer. No nail guns.
I now have all sorts of specialized tools to do things that I once did by hand, as well as all sorts of gadgets that usually do one limited task and sometimes not all that well.
Every time I see a TV ad for some new ridiculous gadget that does tasks that are still easily done by hand, I think of my great-grandfather. I didn’t know him (he died in 1936 at age 81) but can imagine him scoffing at the fools that think they need to pay hard earned money for this foolish gadget to do something he could do in mere seconds with his hands and mind.
While I say I wouldn’t want to go back, I do think there is something lost with us now. It’s a loss of self-dependence and the belief that we can do things with our hands and minds. We don’t have to be tethered to machinery and technology.
I see this in myself. I have got to the point where I often forget that I can do things or can figure things out. Every so often I am forced to get past that mental block. Something will happen and I find myself forced do things with my own hands and mind if things are to be set right.
So, I just do it. I find that it is invigorating, even liberating, to rediscover abilities that have faded beneath the weight of technology. I feel more confident afterwards, more able. It reminds me of another passage from Bowden’s book:
There will be no first hundred days for this future, there will be no five-year plans. There will be no program. Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts. Then what is to be done?”
The part that jumped out at me was imagine a future where we possess less but are more.
I don’t know that we can do that. It is human nature to seek the easy way, the path of least resistance. And this would be anything but that, at least in our minds. And that might be the problem. We have the ability but no longer have the will.
That brings to mind another passage from Blood Orchid:
Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness. Imagine the problem is not physical and no amount of driving, no amount of road will deal with the problem. Imagine that the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act. We hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears, we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside.
Those last two sentences are brutally honest. The future is so often laid out before us, but we refuse to see it or to act on it. I suppose part of it comes from the helplessness that has been pushed upon us by our dependence on technology.
Yes, we often feel incapable and helpless. Been there, done that. But we must remember that we are still capable of self-dependence. Even greatness. Our ancestors did it and we are no less than they were, despite everything we see and are told.
We are cut from the same cloth.
Okay, enough for today. Maybe too much. Probably not enough, actually, since there are no answers or solutions in this.
But that might be the point, that the solution comes from each of us.
We are capable. We are not helpless.
Or hopeless.
Here’s one of my favorite songs, one I have shared a number of times. This is Helpless from Neil Young. I love this performance from The Last Waltz accompanied by The Band with an unseen Joni Mitchell providing backing vocals from backstage.
Redtree Times 