Coda: Earth Time
If I were to choose a word that represented modern times, I would choose frenzy. Rush hour would buttress that word, so would gridlock, expressway, traffic jam, Blitzkrieg, nuke it, and meltdown. One way or another, people were in a hurry. The intoxication of modern times had a lot to do with that hurry. Each human head was bursting with purposes and thoughts of what was going to happen next. Though human heads always have been bursting, modern times made for a texture of life that literally was driven. Each car needed a driver.
Meanwhile, the earth registered many driven changes: fields became cities, ice melted, land sank. People fretted about or ignored those changes. The earth had been around for a long time. It would survive in some form. Whether people would survive their own inventions was anyone’s guess and probably depended on personal predilections as to optimism or pessimism. Regardless of outlook, people assumed that modern times were something like forever, an endless spectacle of more machines.
In the sense that the machines were not going to disappear, that conclusion had some basis. In the sense that human affairs are organized around matters that are largely imaginative, such a conclusion was false. Imagination has a more than exhilarating quality. One need only look at the Futurists, those furious men, who celebrated the genius of speed. Modern times, they believed, would abolish the dull trickle of time. Everyone would be accelerated. More would happen. Ecstasy would touch everyone.
The opposite genius—slowing down—seemed like no genius at all. What genius was there to torpor and tedium? Progress was forward moving: the more busyness the better. Humankind could never produce enough stuff; there always was a need for more. This created an economy of wanting. The frenzy of material invention came to seem like life itself. Though it was hardly the vision Marinetti proposed, the apotheosis of movement as an end in its own right was a logical outcome—speed at once minimized and filled in time and space.
This jet engine did its super-kinetic work while the great monotheistic religions plodded along their appointed rounds. God or Allah deserved reverence but what that reverence had to do with earthly affairs was not easily parsed out. The great religions looked back at their remarkable origins. They looked heavenward. They looked at Jerusalem or Rome or Mecca. How much they looked at and revered the actual earth, not as God’s handiwork, but an entity in its own right, was open to question. The earth existed to be used. Modern history was, if not eloquent on that point, at least demonstrative.
Earth reverence was pagan, primal, and primitive, something that had been left behind, the way “native people” had been left behind or lingered as a bumper sticker attitude—Love Your Mother imposed over a drawing of the earth. The sustenance that supported humankind—soil, crops, weather—was an occasion for a dinner table blessing but the blessing was in Someone Else’s divine name. Since most food was purchased rather than grown (to say nothing of manufactured), the blessing could seem far-fetched. Bless this two-for-one coupon for Jell-O.
What gets left behind is more than an occasion for nostalgia. Humankind, may, so to speak, leave itself behind in the sense of its meaningful connection to the earth. Or it may have gotten ahead of itself as it ponders where to put the nuclear waste or stop the acidification of the oceans. An appreciation for the connected fragility of living things has not been a human strong point. Many a discussion has started and ended with the expedient invocation of necessity.
A way of life devoted to carelessness can never promote appreciation, to say nothing of reverence. Modern times certainly could produce awe—a man on the moon—but reverence was different, something much harder to communicate than “Wow!” Reverence made nothing happen, went nowhere and, for many, bore a whiff of superstition. Yet without reverence, I wonder what the point of life is. The thrill of being is an understandable end in itself, but those thrills are rooted in sensation and have no memory or sense of kinship. The automatic entitlement that modern times promoted—press the “on” button and something will happen—seemed to banish vulnerability.
As sickness, age, death, and heartbreak remind us, vulnerability is built into the human condition. The crucial question is how we see that vulnerability. The story that much of humanity (though far from all) has obeyed is the story of doom—expulsion from the garden—and salvation. What this story tells us is that our vulnerability, which is to say, among other things, our mortality, is a curse. We used our putative free-will to pursue knowledge, which sounds like a parable of atomic, modern times. To argue the profundity of that ancient story would be unwise—human beings have been tormented by knowledge—but to treat it as immutable would be to embrace hopelessness or the unaccountable grace that some have found on the far shore of abasement. The descendants of Adam and Eve are neither children who submit to the great forces that animate the physical world nor adults who can accept their banishment and complicity without believing in some greater Pie in the Forever Sky.
The garden remains. If it had not, life on earth would not have sustained itself. The challenge humankind faces is to accept and celebrate the earth’s abundance. Anytime humankind gets beyond that awareness, thinking that invention does not need the earth, it is making a mistake. Anytime it scorns that awareness, thinking that it is above the earth, it is making a mistake. Humankind has made and continues to make a plenitude of mistakes but that goes with our vulnerability. To reject the story of doom and exile is to accept what I have called “earth time.” The opportunity to dwell with the earth—to sympathize and realize—can make us fully alive, since all life as we know it, rests on that challenge. The earth has no interest in tales of self-consciousness such as “Modern times.” The history of the earth is the first, truest history and, daily, a living history.
Humankind responds to circumstances. One wishes that the circumstances did not have to be disastrous to elicit a response. Apocalyptic thinking is the result of much frustration and despair: we can’t do any better and deserve to perish. That is not the earth’s story, however. The earth’s story is affirmative. All the creatures assent to that. To gratefully accept our dependency on the earth has nothing to do with progress but everything to do with sanity. To perceive the earth’s harmony (which very much includes volcanoes, earthquakes, and plagues) and the human place in that harmony is the crucial imaginative endeavor and one that dwarfs any name that might be given to any era. When we walk away from the power of imagination to help us perceive and teach us how to live, we walk away from what has sustained us over epochs.
*Next week: A personal reflection on this year-long endeavor.*
Baron, my friend, I will miss this series so much. I hope to see the essays between covers a.s.a.p.