Faraway Places And Forgotten Times

The present is another country

Welcome to this week’s Jonathan Foster’s The Crow.

Firstly, to anyone who (unsurprisingly) expected the third part of The Pale Yellow House Series, please know that I haven’t forgotten, it’s just that life has dropped a number of anvils on me recently and my writing time was the first thing that broke.

Instead of the third installment, this week’s The Crow is a contemplative essay on a very long running fascination of mine - prehistoric human societies. I recommend anyone interested to read David Graeber and David Wengrow's utterly wonderful book The Dawn Of Everything - a new history of humanity, which reminds us that the possibilities for arranging our lives are far, far greater than we imagine. Things do not have to be (and never have been) the way they currently are.

Regular reader’s might recognise a yearning in my writing for a gentler world, a kinder world, an integrated world where people experience mutually dependent and supportive horizontal relationships between each other, instead of the exploitative, empty, vertical relationships with power that most western societies currently deliver.

I love writing The Crow, and I’m very grateful for the encouragement I’ve received from the (slowly, slowly) growing group of people (that’s you) who keep returning to read my writing. Thank you all. If you feel the urge to join my highly exclusive group of paid subscribers, please don’t resist, I could do with the support.

Finally, I’d be fascinated to hear what you think of this week’s contemplation, so feel free to comment.

So, without any further ado…heeeeeeeereee’s The Crow!

Credit: Jonathan Foster

1.

I grew up in faraway places and forgotten times, a child of the planet, barefoot on beaches, spellbound by oceans, bewitched by forests.

I grew up feeling an intense awareness and deep camaraderie with the ancient brethren of humans that came trailing from the past to rest inside me. I was entranced and astonished by the fact that I was the flickering momentary flame in this ever burning fire of life. I felt, not a trespasser in this world, but a hugely significant expression of it, noble, illustrious and extraordinary.

I grew up in a world of mystery, a world of ancient realms that whispered to me, seduced me and transfixed me, a world brimming with beguiling fascinations waiting to be discovered as my young heart pounded with anticipatory joy. The world and I were entwined in an everlasting, incorruptible love.

I grew up in a world where orange eyes glared out of the wilds, where the oceans teemed with impenetrable and incomprehensible creatures that might, given the chance, dine upon me, and where the sky's were robust with tiny bodies that perpetually blinked out the sun.

I was the apple on the tree, the wave on the ocean, the slip on a wet stone and the break of a young bone. The world sang and I was the tune, sailing through the universe, both momentous and insignificant, my wide eyes streaming as I held on to the white knuckle ride of life, with time howling past.

Yet, slowly, a dread began to spread through me. As the years piled upon themselves and the world’s edges came into focus, I began to realise that the Ways Of Man where at odds with the world. Slowly, somehow, the realisation dawned that the world was being ravaged and razed by these Ways Of Man, that a strangulating grip was throttling the beauty and the mystery and all the potential. The dark orange eyes were disappearing, the oceans were no longer teeming and the sun shone hotter and hotter as the tiny bodies of the air no longer blinked away this relentless, throbbing star.

And because I was also a child of these Ways Of Men, as much as I was a child of this world, a terrible disunity and rupturing began to overwhelm me like an illness that came not from without, but from within.

2.

Let me change gear and pivot a little here (and employ a more conventional prose). Whenever we humans draw a line or pull a thread in our attempt to understand the world, we are also constructing and creating the world, and whenever we shine a light on “reality” we are ignoring the darkness either side of the beam.

Theoretical physicist David Bohm, a brilliant scientific thinker, influenced by Einstein, the mysticism of J. Krishnamurti and the philosophy of Buddhism, wrote beautifully about the nature of reality and consciousness. Bohm interpreted the world through innovative and unorthodox ways that led to his understanding reality in terms of a Totality, an unbroken Wholeness.

I’ve always being drawn to thinkers who recognise that the incredible content of our thought systems, amazing as they may be, are not perfect descriptions of our world, but reflections of our thought systems. I’m fascinated by thinkers who realise that we are always constructing, as much as we are revealing the world. Bohm wrote about such ideas in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, where he portrays a world enfolding into itself, inwardly and outwardly, in a perpetual shimmer of non-locality and Everythingness.

Thinkers like Bohm, thinkers delicately poised between philosophy and science, give strength to the narrative nature of our human understanding. It doesn’t even matter whether Wholeness and the Implicate Order is a measurable and exact truth that perfectly reflects the current Materialist or Quantum understanding of reality. What matters is that thinkers like Bohm give us tools to understand our relationship with the vast incomprehensible universe in which we have emerged and in which we experience our lives.

So, in the spirit of narrative, let me draw a narrow and fragile path that we might follow, that could lead us from the past, through today, and possibly into the future.

I’m drawing this path to illuminate why I’m so fascinated with an experience of the human condition at a time before the growth of today’s philosophical and cultural structures that currently dominate (and are destroying) the world (and ourselves).

Before I continue, let me just quote Wade Davis, the Canadian Anthropologist who very intuitively and concisely captured my feelings about prehistory when he described current indigenous cultures by saying “These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit—other options, other visions of life itself.”

I have always felt Davis’s quote perfectly captured and embraced current cultural diversity, but also, if massaged a little, is a wonderful encapsulation of the validity and legitimacy of “visions of life itself” from prehistory.

Those people who are wedded to concepts of linear progress and cultural hierarchy will wrestle a little with this idea, but, remember, we’re dealing in narrative form here, so maybe try to do as Aristotle suggested when he said, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." (Or do as I suggest when I say “chill out friend, just enjoy the ride!”)

3.

Okay, let’s imagine that Plato and his (unfortunate) idea of perfect forms in nature is the beginning of this journey. Platonic idealism imagines there’s an underlying essence to all things and that the real physical world around us is merely an imitation of these non-physical, timeless and absolute forms. Platonic Idealism managed to kick off what eventually became a deep feeling in Western culture; that there is a splinter between humans and nature. An idea that gained more and more ground when Christian beliefs of “Man” being created in the image of “God” where thrown into the mix. Add some Enlightenment concepts of mastery over nature and boom, Plato’s splinter grows into a chasm.

Further along this path come ideas of separation and dominance, within a hierarchy of power, which start to create the right circumstances for an exploitative economic value system to gain a foothold. By the time the Commons were being appropriated by (so-called) Kings (and other socially invented entities), communities that had previously lived in self-sustainable modes (with some degree of self-determination) were now forced to experience their lives in a form of perpetual dependency subject to the whims of power.

(As an aside, the English nature poet John Clare (1793-1864) wrote beautifully about this desperately sad period in human history, where he described the angst and sorrow of people living in England during and after the forced privatisation of collective land. If you’re interested look up poems like, The Mores, Remembrances, and To a Fallen Elm).

Anyway, to carry on, when we throw all of these concepts into this increasingly dominant economic value system, an economic system primarily designed to exploit nature, people, and culture, an economic system that requires powerful hierarchies and seemingly unchangeable power structures, and an economic system that eventually perfects the alienation of humans from nature and each other, we then find ourselves in this modern era where vertical dependency relationships (to corporations) become the dominant form, instead of (the previous) horizontal, mutually interdependent relationships (with each other). Then voila, we arrive at the place that philosopher Albert Camus calls Absurdism, where there is no longer any point in seeking meaning in life because, as Camus claims, there is no meaning in a meaningless universe.

And here, finally, after all that, the reason why I’m fascinated by human societies in prehistory becomes apparent (to me at least). My journey from a child to an adult seems to vaguely mirror the West’s philosophical journey, which began with humans deeply immersed in nature, and slowly travels through the conceptual inventions of Man, to reach the current point of such alienation from nature and each other that Camus’ philosophy of Absurdity can be voiced and felt.

My fascination with prehistory may not even be a fascination with the past, but a fascination with rediscovering and re-finding meaning and dignity in the human condition, a fascination with discovering new (or old) human social forms and possibilities that encompass and encourage a return to meaning. I’m fascinated by prehistory, not because I want to return to some Before The Fall nirvana, but because prehistory is another way to unlock and reach the understanding that things do not have to be (and never have been) the way they currently are. Prehistory is another tool to understand our relationship with the vast incomprehensible universe in which we have emerged and in which we experience our lives. And prehistory allows us to know that the current injustices and stupidities we are suffering are a reflection of the current period and not of humanity itself.

Okay, that’s enough for the time being. There is so much to say, but for now I hope you’ve enjoyed this off-the-beaten-track ramble. Let me know if any thoughts have sparkled into existence in you from this essay, and until next Friday, have a beautiful week.