I’ve been reading an excellent, insightful book by Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness. This is a brilliant and sweeping examination of the development of Western Civilization, with a keen sense of the struggle against nature and all that may be termed “wild” that has been the hallmark of “progress” from the taming of Mesopotamia and the deforestation in the spirit of Gilgamesh of Ur, through the rise and establishment of both Judaism and Christianity, and on towards the concretization of the Christian political states all the way through to the “discovery,” violation, genocide, and exploitation of the “settling” of the New World. The rebel scholarship of the author, seemingly founded in a d.i.y. ethic and deeply Earth-based spirituality, and the sheer scope of this work both amaze and resonate with me, and I’ve found myself over the past several days not only deeply impressed with the book but also, once again, deeply disturbed by the depth and entrenchment of the pathology of the spirit of Western Civilization–the spirit explicitly stated in the subtitle: the Western Spirit Against the Wilderness.
It’s painful to live in a society so alienated from the seasonal rhythms and nature and the simple sacred fact of the ongoing creative (and destructive) process that is life. Fresh aches from old wounds, then, are found in the following poem which I wrote today, after discussing with my wife my irritable and seemingly unending existential angst, the recurring despair that time and again shuffles its gloomy, cobwebbed, restless, skeletal form up through onion layers of consciousness and even medication, to be exorcised only in conversation, in written lines, in the undirected futile anger of kicking something, something that seems to go nowhere of consequence.
Despair and Lethargy
Never to touch the Earth,
the rootless wings of sun-worship
and sky envy, detachment, mechanics,
propel the modern monster down
paved highways. Sorry, “post-modern”.
These losers don’t even know what
has been lost, worship Gilgamesh
in his Crusades against the
unbelievers of Earth, painting the
verdant soil with blood and asphalt.
Once again the wilderness screams
“Enough!” and breaks tractors
with wild enigmas, spilling gasoline
and oil over black pitch. Civilization
shrugs off another Earthquake,
Trudging continually forward in ignorance.
The stupid armies gather once again
at Armageddon, playing rock-and-roll
on pay-per-view television. The Greeks, Romans
ancient in their pavillions, cheer stupidly.
Morning comes and no one notices,
but all wake to alarms and eggs over easy
unwrapped from plastic and cardboard.
The television jabbers, always the same
similar morning show, too confident,
too proud.
