Barefoot Rage - Part 2

Howling a new symphony into the universe

This week, the concluding part of Gregor’s story. There are a lot of themes and ideas floating about in this story, so it might be useful to start at the beginning. If you haven’t read part 1, you can find it here.

And I just want to say thank you to everyone who reads The Crow. I have found enormous satisfaction in sharing these tales and essays and ideas. The excellent writer

Holly Starley

said recently in a comment that she found Substack to be morphing into something of a writer’s community where we find support and share ideas. I agree. She then prophetically proved her point by perfectly summing up this very story: “I keep thinking about what you’re saying about the power of our symbolic world—how it’s usurping the material world. It speaks much for our connections, for the pondering and thinking we’re all doing together. I mean the many of us who create and think and want to connect with and be in the physical world we call wild.”

Enough of this…now the story…I hope you enjoy…

Photo by Chris Ensminger on Unsplash

1.

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

I’ve heard it said that humans are an anomaly in nature, cast upon the Earth like some disease. I’ve heard it said that our specific form of consciousness is the problem. That our so-called human nature is at fault, which has somehow broken free from the natural order of things like a discordant note in a sublime melody. I’ve heard it said that the world would be better off without us. But this is all wrong. Terribly wrong.

I watch Gregor scanning the valley from ridge line, listening with all his being, and I watch him laugh as two pesky crows reveal our position with their petulant warning as they pass overhead, and I watch him relax back into himself as we must now wait a little for the world to settle again.

I watch him choosing a line as we descend from the ridge, listening attentively as the snow speaks, skirting the ice that lies shallow below some patches and evading the deep slush filled pockets. I watch him pause as the low sun casts a beam upon his face and he closes his eyes in gratitude for this gift.

I watch Gregor swing his axe to half split a log, then reach and turn it, take a step back as the axe shaft slides through his grip, then swing again as his left hand joins his right and the steel half splits the log with the crack of a shot, then I watch him retrieve dried birch bark loaded with salmon fat and load the centre of the split log and then tie it round and round with a thin strip of moose hide and make a torch which takes but a minute to burn like the centre of a star.

I watch him cut strips of frozen moose flesh and lay just enough for the pair of us into his iron skillet and I inhale the odour of sweet generous death and spitting fat, and I see him lost in the small and delicate chores that will sustain us through another day. And because of this I know Gregor is not an anomaly, not a disease. There is something else at fault, but it is not Gregor.

When the towering ice sheets of deep antiquity evaporated in the north of this pulsating planet, and ancient people first followed the herds of aurochs and bison and moose and deer and wolves onto this newly unfurled land, ancient people that were not yet torn from this world but still lived within the flow of the mysterious rhythms of our Mother Earth, I know to my core that these people were not some discordant note. These people were but one more extraordinary expression of this world, and I feel peace enough to rest into myself and be in gracious harmony.

There is a curse upon this Earth, but it is not us. There is a curse being played through us, a discordant note screeching through the biosphere, a terrible symphony of death played by the Symbolic Orchestra of Mankind. Now the time has come to change conductor, to replace the sheet music with new symbols and to play in harmony once more.

2.

"Nor less I deem that there are Powers, Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours, In a wise passiveness.”

— William Wordsworth

Gregor had been working as a guide for Barefoot Experiences for a year, living in a forest tent made of hide and canvas, a half hour’s brisk walk from of the Northern Sanctuary Glamping Village. Of course he was still living under the shadow of money, being paid monthly by the company, and compelled to buy certain supplies and other necessities from the Fountainhead General Store, but out here, away from the city, he seemed to have escaped money’s totalising and objectifying gaze.

I was surprised he was working for the same company he’d so wholeheartedly abandoned, but Gregor merely grinned and said “We’re all working for the same fuckers anyway.”

Something had changed in Gregor, his snows had melted and like a mountain valley in springtime he’d blossomed. He’s always had poise, that ease of an animal, but up here in this hinterland between the World of Man and the World of the Wolf, Gregor’s inner animal had found his natural habitat.

There was something else too, a contentment perhaps, or a resolution of sorts. It was hard to put my finger on, but it felt, in those few days we spent together before the world fell apart, it felt as if all that was unsolved in his heart, was now settled. There was a quietude, a wise passiveness where he seemed absorbed into rather than struggling with the world, as if he had taken a step away from the madding crowd with all its babbling concepts and symbols and its infinite self-reflecting maze of mirrors within mirrors within mirrors.

He spoke rarely now, which at first I found unsettling, but in the quiet I became aware that my own restless thoughts had no real purpose but to build a wall around me, to comfort me, and to insulate me from the world. And I found if I paid close attention certain truths made themselves known. And when we did occasionally speak, something of value was said.

We spent three days tracking the wolf pack alone, away from the other enthusiasts who hadn’t sighted a single wolf the entire time. The wolves knew we were watching them, but they seemed unperturbed, letting us come close, somehow aware that our intentions were not like others. We spent many hours in the gentle peacefulness, gesturing when necessary but often not, for what will come made itself known and occurred regardless of us.

On the afternoon of the third day, after I’d made and lit a torch and fried a salmon and we sat and ate, my babbling mind returned and I told him I should be leaving and asked him what his plans were. He looked at me for a long time, even for those days of quietude, and said, “There’s something I need to do.”

I waited and then after a time he continued.

“There’s a tree called the Stone pine, it has a unbreakable bond with the Nutcracker bird. The Stone pine has cones that don’t open without help from the bird, which then goes around collecting and hiding his cache of seeds all over the place, dispersing the Stone pine across the mountains. Without the nutcracker the Stone pine would go extinct in one generation. It’s mutualism, a bit like mycelium supporting the forest. Such complexity, such extraordinary beauty. Just think of the time it took for these two completely different species from two completely different Kingdoms to even discover each other, and then evolve in mutuality. Incomprehensibly long swaths of never-ending time just rolling along, on and on and on with complexity increasing and all kinds of arrangements being made.” He looked at me again.

“And then along come our ancestors, a few million years ago, also playing an extraordinary and complex tune on the strings of time, playing a slightly new tune than those from which we evolved, weaving ourselves out of all the previous life, dancing to the rhythms of for ever and ever time. And then, then came Now.”

“You know,” he gestured over his shoulder, “these trees are beings swaying backwards and forwards through time just like they do in the wind. The trees that came before shall honour those that come afterwards, who in turn shall honour those that came before. This is law in the Kingdom Of The Tree. Love and Compassion come in many forms, my friend."

It was the most he’d said in days, probably months. But I didn’t really understand what he was saying. But then he said it. The sentence that finally hit home

“There is a curse upon this Earth, but it is not us. There is a curse being played through us, a discordant note screeching through the biosphere, a terrible symphony of death played by the Symbolic Orchestra of Mankind. Now the time has come to change conductor, to replace the sheet music with new symbols and to play in harmony once more. I need to play a new tune and so do you.”

I laughed and said “I thought you were going to ask me to buy dynamite.”

He laughed, “You’re right though, we do need a war of sorts, but not in the material plane, we need to fight in the symbolic plane, we need to change our relationship with the world.”

Gregor and I had watched a young male wolf challenging the authority of the Alpha pair at a kill. And we had smiled at this reinforcement of the hierarchy. The young wolf didn’t want to change the social system, he just wanted to move up in the ranks and raise his status.

I mentioned this to Gregor who smiled widely and nodded, “I have no intention of fighting the system. I’m just not playing anymore.”

3.

“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild. With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand"

— Y.B. Yeats

I am made of flesh and blood. I live the material plane. When you cut me I bleed. When you starve me I perish. I’ve never seen spirits or gods or fairies. I know good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. I know there’s no one keeping an eye and balancing things out through divine intervention. I know there’s not even such thing as good people and bad people. I know there are some things that are true, and some things that are false, and some things that will never be either depending where your standing. I know it’s a simple world and I know its an infinitely complex world. I know that quantum objects fluctuate in a state of probabilities until they are measured by an observer when they collapse into a definite state. And I know that in fact quantum objects never collapse into a definite state but that the universe has infinite states that rise with each observation. And I know there are experiments that prove both of these things at the same time depending on which quantum interpretation you prefer.

But I also know that inexplicable things happen that no amount of data can explain. Things that shake the very foundations of everything I know. Or thought I knew. Gregor made sure of that.

On the last evening we took the snowmobile to the ridge and waited. A full moon gave the landscape an otherworldly beauty, like a netherworld where spirits and ghosts forever wander, where there was no weight to anything, where everything was a shimmering facade of beatific reflections. It was cold too, minus 17 perhaps, cold enough for death to emerge from the shadows of your mind, like a flirtatious stranger slowly making their way in your direction.

Gregor had brought only one pair of snowshoes which he took himself, leaving me on the snowmobile, the keys in his pocket. In the blueish light Gregor turned and placed an hand upon my shoulder and said, “This is your world, not mine. And in this world you must accept the violence or confront it. You’ll know what to do if you listen to your heart, but do not run from that which is unsolved for there is no place to hide.”

He then pulled off his hat and gloves and unzipped his snow suit and tore off the clothes until he was naked and steaming in the blue light, only boots and snowshoes between him and the reaper of the cold, his face a beaming wide smile of excitement. I leapt from the scooter but he moved like an animal and I sunk into the deep snow as he fled from me with agile movements. I screamed at him but he moved on, running along the snowy ridge toward the valley, his body illuminated like a strange dream.

I grabbed for his snowsuit and fumbled the keys from his pocket, then started the snowmobile and gave chase, racing across the crust of dry powder following the snowshoe tracks in the moonlight. I saw him stumbling now in the cold, dropping to his knees as hypothermia surely sapped his coordination and mind.

But then the tracks changed, no longer the wide deep holes of a man running in snowshoes but now smaller, more nimble, lighter markings. I saw Gregor now, seemingly running on his hands and knees, his body slender and in the moonlight. As I got closer he turned and the snowmobile headlights caught two yellow eyes flashing back at me. In the confusion I stopped the machine and there before me was not a man but a wolf. We stared at each other for a while, then it growled and bared its teeth and turned and ran toward the valley and the forest into a moonlit dream.

4.

“The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.”

– Hippocrates

I don’t believe Gregor killed himself. I know he didn’t. But I also know he is no longer upon this Earth. At least not as a man. Did Gregor transform into an actual wolf? I find it impossible to believe this insanity. Men do not become wolves. Not literally. There was no room in my world for such things. That could not be. And yet.

After Gregor disappeared into the night, I become disoriented, confused beyond comprehension. The world had folded itself inside out. I was panicking. I was furious. I turned the snowmobile and drove through the frozen moonlit night toward Barefoot Experiences, my tears freezing to my face below my goggles, my mind a hysteria.

What is this world if we must abandon our humanity to survive? What have we done when the most beautiful and unique and compassionate among us can find no rest in all this madness? What kind of idiocy builds a machine that destroys all life, a machine that no-one controls, a machine we must obey before we obey our hearts?

I could hear myself screaming above the engine as my frustration and anger burst into the night. I knew then that I could accept this violence no more. That I must confront it. That I must not run. That I must obey my Heart. That I could not continue as I was. That I too must become a wolf among men.

The Northern Sanctuary Glamping Village, the Fountainhead General Store, the LongHouse Brasserie and the Raging Rapids went up like one of Gregor’s torches. It took no time for mighty flames to burn like a star and dance in rhythm with the glorious aurora borealis that spiralled and flickered across the the heavens like a green portal to a new world.

And all I could hear as I danced in front of my burning creation was the chorus of singing wolves howling a new symphony into the universe. And I sang too. With all of my heart.

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