Fire And Smoke

A Crimson Light Upon The Earth - Who Are You?

Credit: Jonathan Foster - The Dog

By mid afternoon, a sliver of burning crimson lay across the western horizon, sending an explosion of tangerine and green along the underside of a great peninsula of cloud that sat above the city. On the eastern horizon there was nothing but deep inky darkness, a void so profound that the blackness beckoned forth ancient emotion. No animal of the day could peer into this nihility without craving sanctuary.

The dog and I were heading south across the Golden Bridge from the Stockholm’s Old Town when we stopped to take in the beauty, the two of us a tiny island as a river of pedestrians streamed around us. We stood in shallow breath, struck dumb by the  overwhelming force of everything. The life affirming rich complexity of warm colour slowly transforming into an endless emptiness of lonely deep space.

Standing there on the Golden Bridge underneath the majesty of the fathomless heavens I felt time as both insignificant and momentous, awash as I was in the simple duality we humans so often suffer. Light and dark. Fear and sanctuary. Monster and prey.

And then, time itself lifted like a morning mist and the unity of past and present and future sharpened like a holy landscape before me in a moment of peace and acceptance, called forth by the sublime grandeur of the non-human world, from the mighty heavens to the smallest ripple in the ebbing tide.

In that clear and beautiful space I decided to write an overtly political piece here on The Crow, which I tend not to want to do. Nonetheless, the following are my thoughts.

2.

Over the last year I’ve been creating a vocabulary of symbolic themes here on The Crow. One of them is the theme of Fire and Smoke.

Fire, being some kind of trauma, and Smoke, being the resultant effect of that trauma through time. Even though a Fire was lit long, long ago, the Smoke blows through generations and imperceptibly influences everything afterwards.

I use Smoke as a way of encapsulating a broader version of epigenetics where societal or personal trauma is as influential to the personal/social space and to our social and psychological spheres as famine or abundance would be to our physical make-up (DNA).

Humans, the delicate creatures that we are (despite all the evidence to the contrary), are very prone to distress from traumatic events be they physical or psychological, or both.

Humans, the social creatures that we are (despite all the evidence to the contrary), are also extremely invested in fairness and justice. We are essentially morality generating creatures. In fact a sense of fairness and justice is hardwired into most species. Apes, monkeys, crows, whales, you name it and they’ll display social behaviours that encourage cooperation and fairness, even at their own expense.

The striving for, and policing of, fairness and justice appears to be a simple common principle that has evolved in highly social creatures. Many creatures display altruistic and cooperative behaviours, empathic behaviours, and even justice behaviours. And in humans these tendencies are vital to our well being as individuals and when we form complex societies.

The problem is that our tendency to fairness and justice can be overwhelmed. Our hard-wired tendencies can be smothered by the economic (in its broadest sense) and social structures in which we find ourselves. It turns out that the social and economic environment determines whether we can maintain the equilibrium behaviour required for fairness and justice to thrive.

And guess what. In today’s political and economic structures, we’re in a terrible place. We cannot maintain equilibrium. Not even close. The absurd inequality and rapacious exploitation of our current systems actually reward the very opposite behaviours to fairness and justice. And our complete inability to confront any of the terrible wrongs we’ve perpetrated upon each other over the centuries mean the wounds inflicted in the past are still open. There are all kinds of complex reasons for this we need not go into here, but essentially I’m saying that while we humans might be morality generating creatures, the most dominant and powerful social/economic system on earth is a Trauma Generation Machine. It’s all Fire and Smoke.

3.

One of the tragedies of the recent US election is that it was essentially a choice of which kind of Trauma you preferred. The distribution and delivery of Trauma having been partitioned out between two political parties, neither of which usually frame their offering in these terms, until this election when the republican party overtly offered nothing more than to inflict pain and trauma on various groups of people/the environment/life on earth.

It is a strange phenomenon, considering we humans are hard-wired towards altruism, cooperation, empathy and justice, that we have entombed ourselves inside a political and economic structure that generates so much of the opposite.

The tragic truth is that today’s political systems generate ongoing and increasing trauma where voters are more and more required to align with the side doing the punching and kicking, or get punched and kicked. In the US, the Democrats assumed their slightly gentler punching was far more attractive than the Republicans much more vicious kicking. But they were wrong. The Democrats underestimated the amount of trauma in the population, and they underestimated the level of already felt injustice, and they underestimated peoples desire for scapegoats, retribution and revenge. The republicans offered up targets and half of a traumatised population readied their punches and their kicks. It didn’t matter that they were aimed at entirely the wrong targets. It didn’t matter that the real culprits were in fact the very people half the population were aligning with.

And consequently because we are breathing in Smoke from Fires lit in the past, and because the dominant political and social system ignites Fire upon Fire all the time, we are in a dangerous situation where it appears there is nothing but wildfire ahead with people desperately fanning the flames to accelerate the seemingly inevitable.

So, what to do?

Personally I am much better at poetically describing the current idiocy than I am at mapping a route to a better place. And what that place might look like is far beyond my capacities to foresee.

But I can tell you what the dog and I spoke about, I can tell you how he brought me to my senses in these dark times.

4.

The dog and I continued up the hill toward home, the planet continued to spin and the dark winter continued approaching as the dog glanced at me with concern in his eye. Will he make it through another benighted time? he thought, Will he bear the weight of yet more broken shards of men destroying everything for no more reason than…than?

“Listen,” the dog said, “you can’t just ignore all this, you need to act, you know you do, you’re a moral being.”

“I’m 55. I’m broke and I’m worn out and nothing I do will change anything.”

“No, you’re so wrong, what you do changes everything, for those that you love, for those that depend on you and love you, for those of us in your life, nothing you do will change anything, are you kidding?”

I sigh and nod and look toward the sliver of burning crimson. “You’re right, I’m lost in anxiety and I’m forgetting myself,” I turned to the dog, “What should I do?”

“Do? Well, you could be brave my friend, and listen more, pay more attention, dream more, play more, love more…venture further into the deep forest and think more,” he looked me in the eyes, “keep all that beautiful gentleness close to your heart, keep those people with hearts that beat in brave unison in close sight, keep the poets and the lovers and the artists and the humble and the kind, keep the quiet waters that run deep, keep that observant eye and the brimming of laughter,” he stopped and turned to me, “so you can lie naked like the cold salty sea and hear your body calling to the stars and feel the wavelets lap upon you and be…just be…until you evaporate into the sublime grandeur and you are gone.” He walked on again, slowly, seeming lost in his own poetry, his light brown eyes gazing on a thought, “and forgive those hearts that beat only for themselves for they are choking on the Fire and the Smoke and they know not what they do,” he said.

“I don’t know if I can forgive,” I said.

“You have but one choice,” he said, “in this eternal battle between light and dark. It’s not the choice of what to do, but who you are.”

I walked on and said nothing, for I know that Evil exists. And I know that Love exists. And within every monster is prey and within every prey is a monster. So I took a deep breath and dropped to one knee and took the dog in my arms and held him close and whispered, “I cannot promise, but I can try and that is all I have.”

And he looked at me and said, “That is all anyone has.”

And I stood, and together we walked on toward a pulsating sanctuary of hearts, silhouetted by a crimson light that shone upon the earth.

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