What’s New?

What is new today
is just old news tomorrow.
What would happen if

we skipped a day? What?
You can fill in your own blanks
if you dare. What’s new?

1. Stuck in the Roots

Reflecting on a recent drumming performance I was part of, I realized that I’d missed an opportunity. The rendition of traditional West African rhythms was competent enough, as a brief presentation, a taste of the groove, a facsimile of that culture’s music. What I missed was going deeper into the music, in connection with the free-form dancers in the hall, as my focus had been more superficial. I was more concerned with output, to play a catalogue of “traditional solo” patterns on djembe, along with the corresponding bass drum and bell parts.

The next day as I stretched my legs on a long walk at tempo, the music was still with me but I missed the input from the dynamics of the dancers and the other musicians. In the walking groove of a whole body experience with the rhythms replaying in my bones, I realized I had got stuck clinging to the formal roots, and missed going deeper down into the soil, toward the wellsprings of the music.

Often in my writings I cling to a vague yet certain concept of what is the “natural human.” Genetic modification, brain-machine interfaces, mRNA injections, and other pet projects of the transhumanists fall on my spectrum as most “unnatural.” Western civilization has been quite the cushy ride, but hardly natural, when dependent upon imperial and ecological conquest (past and present) to pay our way. Did the Luddites and Amish have a better way, or the First Nations who sustained themselves forever until “we” came along?

I’m reading a fascinating new book (David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything) that goes to the roots of this question of what it means to be human, especially in terms of such basic principles as property, freedom, equality, and happiness. The anthropological research only goes so far, as do cultural speculations. Quickly in a time of origins we are in mythic territory, where we began only as we imagine.

So what if it is possible to strip away all the layers of historical baggage: the progress and trauma, conditioning and programming, education and received wisdom, media static and social media obsession… and find the roots, right now.

Standing on the earth, in this moment, who is this human, at heart?

The roots might be racial, ethnic, or family history. They certainly are. They are all the experiences piled on the little human growing up. Still, there was a core of innocence, a newborn possibility. Where is that possibility now? Is it still alive, inside?

That might be getting stuck in the roots too. It might take the shape of a career wish, a personality type, even a vision quest. Is that the real you, at this moment?

The problem is that what we think of the roots only go so far, as our concepts of them determine. We can explore beyond the idiosyncrasies of our root assumptions to find the soil that nourishes them and receives them back, in time.

The above limitation should not invite cancelation: of any natural-born gender, or race, or condition, in the name of some all-amorphous rainbow of humanity. Roots indeed are to be celebrated, embraced, and practiced with devotion. Keeping in mind not the fixations of form, or the artifacts of ritual; as these are not the point, but just the trappings en route to the real ground of potential.

So who are we meant to be? If we can imagine how deep our heart can beat today, we might then experience the beginning again, and breathe into who we might become.

We will peer beneath the roots to ask, what can we learn from the soil?

2. Fresh Ground

Walking alone under a starry moonlit sky, late at night with nothing but nature around, I come to know that the elusive “first human” is closer than I had thought. Leaving aside the paved road I walk on, the lights from houses through the trees and blinking across the harbor when I reach the shore, I come to an intuition that my original nature is within breathing distance. It’s all very enlightening to realize the infinite diversity, creativity, and penchant for mistreatment of our fellow bipeds down through the early ages, and still glimpsed as extant lifestyles in remote corners of wilderness to this day—though fast dwindling to extinction via land grabs, resource rape, and eco-extermination. Which should be a clue that to look for what we’ve lost may not be a winning proposition.

Maybe we’ve never yet found that state of bliss that we imagine; rather it has remained a calling from before time, drawing us forward in a quest to hack through all the alternatives to glimpse that grail of ultimate… what—glory, contentment, satisfaction, completion, triumph, surrender?

Maybe in plural, the “we” of a social utopia is the wrong way to look at it, whether in past societies or futuristic visions. The reason I felt so close to that presence of originality, of natural human, was walking alone, with no social static, compromise, ritual, small talk, obligation, or shared agenda. Maybe all the communal and economic models are flawed from the outset, attempting to find perfection in the unpredictable chaos and predictable foibles of its subject species—who are bent, after all, on innumerable personal paths of acquisition, competition, cooperation, distraction.

I once contemplated doing graduate study in environmental studies, then was advised what I really wanted was to study poetry. It was true. For this soul path, at least, I need to look beyond the anthropology and sociology of our primate evolution, and recall the primal power of those first writers of Nature who inspired me as a young adult: Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau. These were the pioneers in their own time who cut through the centuries of conditioning and programming, doctrine and indoctrination, even through the freshly translated Bhagavad-Gita, to find a pure unadulterated relation with the natural world.

They treasured solitude, yet passionately communicated in fresh and direct language their experience so that others could be so inspired, could share in their taste of the divine immediately at hand. Indeed, their love of language as artists enabled them to find the very expression of Nature itself through their own hand: amplifying its voice, transmitting its wisdom. Their pioneering and revolutionary efforts as solo wanderers and rebel thinkers paradoxically became widely celebrated (as the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements, respectively). And so memorialized, their legacy was nurtured a century and a half and more, to awaken me when my spirit was ripe, initiating me to the teaching of their sacred groves.

Returning to Graeber’s panoply of human organization and social traits, fascinating in the endless dance of good, questionable, and downright evil, I know that the man I am looking for is not there in the literature, but my own nature, the blank slate of my power of choice, the fresh future which still holds all the potentials of the past, and more, yet to be imagined.

3. The Power of Flow

To sum up, in this three-part essay I have moved from seeking integrity in specific roots of the past, to recognition of an original state of being that is available in present consciousness. Yet that state too, even while anticipating an available future, is insufficient to capture the essence of human freedom. Our original nature is accessible yet elusive: to pin it down to a static form is incomplete. Perhaps our most defining attribute is to found in our adaptability, flexibility, and freedom to change: a dynamic rather than a fixed identity.

The hero of my latest novel, Charlie Utopia, first becomes disillusioned with the ideals of intentional community, then finds himself cast adrift even from his fallback refuge, a self-created nuclear family and homestead laboriously carved from the wilderness. He descends to a kind of zero-point, at the bottom of “a black well in a white desert” of the soul, where the steady-state bedrock of his essential nature proves a springboard to reinventing himself. He emerges not in the buckskin guise of the primitive skills tribes, nor the spiritual robes of the seeker after inner nirvana, but rather in the rainbow hues of the neo-gypsy, an afficionado of Flow.

We turn to music for inspiration, a way out of mental slavery, a release from our subservience to social institutions and from language’s limitations. In India I came to appreciate music’s highest purpose, to lift from grime and destitution, to evoke a state of calm and grace, or even of embodied celebration, frenzy, ecstasy.

We arrive, ready for what comes. This opening, an invitation, an incantation.

In the new truth ritual, we hereby unspell our despair over ancient battles (The Woman King), and the global wars of our recent ancestors… hereby release the rotting edifice of Western Empire (the “Empire of Lies”) built of campaigns of greed and destruction.

‘The circles behind the Great War and the Great Reset have such loathsome and malign intentions that they can effectively be described as evil. Against this dark force, we therefore need to channel the light… to enshrine and radiate all that we love about the life that they want to steal from us: our belonging to nature, our friendships, our local traditions, our romances, our dreams, our sense of joy at being ourselves, in our own bodies, in our own communities.’ —Paul Cedenec (Winter Oak), A Crime Against Humanity: The Great Reset Of 1914–1918

The hard part is to identify with those conquered peoples, raped or slaughtered, captured as slaves. The Agojie (female warriors) of The Woman King, acting as defenders of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the slaving era, sang the motto, “Fight or Die.” It’s a stance familiar to the peace-loving citizens of the modern era bombarded by propaganda from the elite-run press pushing both World Wars. Speaking of which…

A brief digression here on the film itself, which emotionally left me numbed by the Hollywood tropes on full display. In this case they align convincingly with the familiar agendas of Woke and Trans, which is to say, celebrating the visions of the Great Reset.

• Glorification of the mantra, “Fight or Die.” Normalizing war as necessary, a lose-lose proposition branded as a win; and painting human life in Hobbesian hues (“nasty, brutish, and short”). This fundamentalism maintains life in a state of fear, the paralysis of victimhood, where we welcome still more control held over our lives.
• Pushing feminine power past equality to the extremes of superiority, even in physical combat (said to depend not on strength but on skill). At the far end of feminism is the end of attributes of a sexual or gendered nature: the cadets are forbidden to flirt, marry or have children. Their uniforms are designed to minimize the feminine form, inverting the old Hollywood stereotype to a new normal: the unisex or ungendered person.

• The ultimate authority in the Kingdom of Dahomey remains with the male King Ghezo. Even as General Nanisca is (spoiler alert) promoted to “Woman King,” it is bestowed by the male monarch. How telling that she becomes an associate King herself and not a female monarch, a Queen. Doesn’t “Woman King” suggest the same derivative nomenclature as wo-man created after man? Queens, it appears, are cancelled. (“The Queen is dead; long live Pedo Pink Charlie!”).

For all we know, “Queen” is now designated as an alt-right construct. Now we must bow to our transgender Health Authorities, especially since there’s an ongoing Emergency, and They Must Not Be Offended with Insufficient Tribute.

• A footnote to Dahomey reminds us that shining utopias of citizen solidarity usually come with a hidden price. To celebrate the Agojie’s hard-won freedom comes the ritual execution of those unfortunates the Kingdom holds as captive slaves. The movie conveniently leaves out this underside of Dahomey’s history, revealed in the IMDB “trivia” notes: “The film does not mention or depict the Kingdom of Dahomey’s practice of human sacrifice. The kingdom had a tradition of beheading large numbers of people for certain observances. For example, as many as 800 people were sacrificed in honor of King Ghezo shortly after he died.”

• Collective allegiance is paramount. The individual citizen or cadet must obey—“for the common good; for the good of all.” They must sacrifice their own desires, freedom, family, everything they held dear, to a new squad of comrades, their new “family” more humane than their backward and abusive parents.

 

It’s Mao’s reeducation all over again, a hundred flowers blooming in the script editors’ inboxes, premarked for inclusion, production expedited “at the speed of science.”

Beset by such solutions, replacing all former problems, we recreate the slave kingdoms of the past, only writ larger, on a stage called, for nostalgic resonance, The Globe. Gone is the past of our native village; the future of our people or of our own choosing. We are survivors, as we have acquiesced. We have chosen neither to fight or to die. Thus we arrive at the New World Order.

‘[Before WWI], free-thinking young people, gathering notably at Ascona in Switzerland, were rejecting the cold machineries of modernity and dreaming of an alternative world based on free communities and harmony with nature. This was a powerful counterculture, a rebellion against the extinction of life and happiness which was being ruthlessly inflicted by the industrial empire of greed and profit under the false flag of “progress”.

‘But this blossoming of hope was crushed and buried in the deliberately pre-planned slaughter of the Great War. Not just hopes for the future, but connections to the past were blasted into smithereens by the shells and machine-guns on the fields of France.

‘The war represented a sudden acceleration of “modernisation”, the process by which human beings are torn from all their belonging and turned into helpless and isolated victims of a rapacious system of exploitation.’ —Paul Cedenec (Winter Oak), A Crime Against Humanity: The Great Reset Of 1914–1918

Past projection, present conditions… What does the future hold? Is it in our hands, our minds, our spirits, or out of our control? Are we mere victims or automatons, juggled like gameboy data across a playing screen? To say so makes it not so. We see what we have become and we know we must become more. Evolve or die. Go deeper. Where is the essence?

Flow beyond sets us free.

We observe the looping iterations of the rogue operating system, and decide to fire the staff of engineers, strip them of their security codes.

We chart the spelling in and out of charms of understanding, dancing in illusion.

We recognize as mind marionettes, our rendering of life and the world.

So be it, we go forward, beyond past and future projection into the heart of the now, and now again.

Are you ready?