Shepard,
Paul. "Nature
and Madness" on primitivism.com
Sheperd explains
our culture's disregard for nature as "collective personality
disintegration." Our entire society is
mentally ill, at least in part because we squander our
"ontogeny," the period from infancy until adulthood, which he calls "a
regular giraffe's neck of unlikely extension, vulnerability, internal engineering,
and the prospect of an extraordinary view from the top."
Giraffe's
neck. I love that term. Anyway, what Sheperd means is that while
other animals mature quickly, humans receive an extended period of
growth - twenty years, which Sheperd says we squander. Here's how he describes
what those twenty years could be like: "The
newborn infant... needs almost continuous association
with one particular mother who sings and talks to it, breast-feeds
it, holds and massages it, wants and enjoys it... the mother
is always there, a presence in the tactile warmth of her body.
For the infant there is a joyful comfort in being handled and
fondled often, fed and cleaned as the body demands...
The play space--trees, shrubs, paths, places to hide and climb--is a visible,
structured entity, another prototype of relationships that hold fast.
"
That resonates for me, and I sincerely wish I
could have experienced that, because I know to my bones the vague
hunger, the empty place, the place that can never be filled, although
god knows I've tried to fill it, with men and alcohol and sex.
Sheperd says that deprivation makes
us sick, and alienates us from nature and from each other.
It keeps us from knowing our own selves and our place
in the natural world and keeps us stuck in infantile neuroses and
pathologies. That deprivation is what makes us murder, declare
war and rape the environment, because, he
says "In such a world there is no
wildness, as there is no tameness. Human power over nature is largely
the exercise of handcraft."
Instead we grow up floating rootless in time,
without rituals marking our passage through life, surrounded
by technology and the frigid realities of our culture. I agree,
so okay, we're all totally screwed? Yeah, we are. Screwed. And
yeah, I get it. Sigh.
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