Tag: coloniality

Wilderness

America is a land originally occupied by casualties, fugitives, dissidents, pirates and radical escapees of the European monarchical and religious order. And ever since, what’s been largely, either inadvertently or deliberately overlooked for three, maybe four hundred years is that the western definition of wilderness was always the property of the invader, the settler, the colonizer.

Wilderness conjures images of foreboding, of desolation, a mythic utopian vision of the undisturbed, uncharted pristine state, a territory beyond imagination, beyond human centrality, unspoiled by human presence and the inevitable resulting abuse until it’s eventually overrun by ‘progress’ and becomes defined-and defiled-by that presence. Only then do we adjust our yearnings, mourn its loss and start looking for another wilderness to relieve us of our angst…or guilt…or to satisfy our insatiable quest for new worlds to tame.

What we imagine there is to gain out of that process is a sense of ownership, perhaps even control. And even though any remaining actual wilderness is long gone, we operate as if there will ever be more, as if our personal inner desolation or pristine nature, our loss of home, is always renewable, can always be recovered, that our sins can always be absolved. Our investment and belief in wilderness, like our belief in imagination itself, is total.

It’s been a universal human trait since the beginning of time to explore the wild, to move outward beyond boundaries, to redefine one’s place, to satisfy a primal urge to seek sustenance in the unknown, to venture onto our own unconscious, to assert personal independence and a renewed sense of belonging to the world. These are the primary extractions. We might include a timeless motivation to escape being relentlessly subsumed into the homogeneity of culture and to reconnect with the heterogeneity of the wild. We explore to know ourselves in re-enacting the imagery of relationship with the unknown and the more-than-human.

What is commonly found in wilderness, or what could now more accurately be called protected lands, in the exploratory process, may enrich our lives, at least temporarily. We may be driven by the dulling of our senses in the urban landscape or an ever-present but barely acknowledged solastalgia, the suffering and grief of being uprooted, homeless. Yet long before there was any such thing as protected land, exploring wilderness, at least in America, also became synonymous with progress. And that progress has brought a world in which every form of wilderness continues to be transformed in ever more sophisticated ways. Ironically, imagining one can escape that commodification (even for just a short time) somehow inevitably leads to its increase.

When the human population was much smaller than its current size, before the carrying capacity of the earth had been exceeded, that wilderness in its iconic state did still truly exist, calling upon the human longing for….what?…a challenge, to continue the indomitable impulse to improve our future, for wholeness? The fulfillment of a narcissistic urge for notoriety, fame, adulation? A purely economic interest? Or just peace and quiet? The relentless commodification of every possible resource, now including attention itself, has always been a dominant motivation. And let’s not overlook the myth of returning to our origin, the original Garden. There’s weight to all of these scenarios.

America is a land originally occupied by casualties, fugitives, dissidents, pirates and radical escapees of the European monarchical and religious order. And ever since, what’s been largely, either inadvertently or deliberately overlooked for three to four hundred years is that the western definition of wilderness was always the property of the invader, the settler, the colonizer. The exploratory enterprise into the vast territories of the Americas was also an enactment of Divine Right, spurred by the Papal Bulls of the 15th and 16th centuries declaring indigenous people to be less than human, fueling the promise of riches with ecclesiastical benediction. If that empire required the eradication of indigenous populations, either by intent or by accident, it never occurred to the occupying force that the territories in question were not wilderness at all to those who lived there, but sovereign territory, the nature and dimensions of which the settlers could not even imagine.

Sustaining the American mythology of wilderness is a solution to something. It gives buoyancy to possibility. Yet modern American culture has never quite satisfied a longing for place, and that wanderlust is both a response to existential homelessness, a sense of not truly belonging to the land, and a temporary escape into actual homelessness that wilderness represents. That escape is ironically motivated by pre-cognitive yearnings for a sense of relatedness to the natural world which we experience at a somatic level, but which has been entirely coopted and twisted by modernity into a reaffirmation of the individualist ethos of America. We may be able to superimpose ‘home’ on what was once wilderness, but what we now call home does not in itself constitute indigeneity. In many respects, home is now a wasteland of the banal, the superficial, in which multinational corporations own the mythology and harvest revenue from it by exploiting our psychic attachment to the idea of wilderness combined with the myth of individualism. The Anthropocene at work.

Your homelessness leads you by the nose to the next solution. So, nobody should be shocked that every solution we come up with deepens the problem the solution was designed to solve.—

—-Stephen Jenkinson

Regardless of where the urge to occupy wilderness originated, at some point it morphed into something much more than any original or merely personal reason to go beyond the horizon just to see what’s there. In the face of accumulating encounters with other cultures already embedded in what we (western explorers and American settlers) persisted in calling wilderness, the enterprise became something very different from the original vision.

In what has since become a central tenet of the mobile tableau of modernity, the vision of exploring the unknown is equated with the drive for perpetual growth, a messianic mission promoted with religious fervor to ‘improve’ life for ‘everyone’ while looking away from the true costs. Recruiting enthusiastic compliance with the program has not been entirely successful. Having a dwindling supply of authentic earthly new worlds to conquer, human imagination is captivated with doing more than gazing at the heavens, but actually exploring space–which of course continues largely without human participation, but occasionally goosed by the chest-beating of the uber-wealthy. The mullahs of physics and biology reach into the mysterious territories of sub-molecular function, even into the vast spaciousness of individual atoms where matter and energy are barely distinguishable. The nature of the human mind continues to inspire and baffle.

Preserving the fantasy of European ‘discovery’ has been a key North American enterprise ever since the origins of its nation-states. Erasure of the indigenous equates the encroachment of wilderness with the creation of home and the ethics of growth, as if history only began with the colonial project. And now, as an alternate narrative of what America exactly was before colonial occupation gains firmer footing and takes hold in popular consciousness, powerful backlash comes from those still asserting that America was a natural and cultural wilderness before white men set foot on its shores. For them, anything pre-dating coloniality does not matter nor did it even exist. Imagine the dissociation necessary to deny all of that violence. Colonial America may have been an escape from empire, but it immediately seeded the creation of a new empire, an ongoing occupation of what is still regarded as wilderness in virtually every elementary school in America.

The nomadic vanguard (a term coined by Patrick Turner in this essay in New Critique), is a property of American coloniality essential to America’s creation story. We were born from a nomadic vanguard and America would not be America without one today. The fact that there are no physical wildernesses left doesn’t deter us from endowing the entrepreneurial spirit with the same ethos of coloniality that occupied and exhausted every inch of territory from sea to shining sea, and which now seeks to invade and claim every inch of ‘market’ space as well, either by data management, surveillance or AI.

In that sense, the new explorers are the old explorers reinvented with more sophisticated tools, sales tactics, marketing and lobbying power to stake out economic territory and collect every possible advantage provided by the corporate state. They may even be enacting admirable features of the American Story, but like it or not, they are still extending and deepening the reach of empire, a story of extraction, exploitation and repression which has not changed in any substantial way.

We are confused about wilderness and fighting over what requires preservation and how to do that. We cannot continue to promote a pioneer ethic without recognizing its true consequences and the empty nobility attached to it. The nomadic vanguard of today is attacking the remaining shreds of what should properly be recognized as real wilderness, not the coopted mythical wilderness of yore.

突破: Breaking Through

I have wandered off from the campfire. I’m roaming in the dark, placing myself at the mercy of beasts of the night, divorced from camaraderie, landmarks, scents, ancestors, teachers, children, the whirling firmament and the community of souls that brought me here.

There have been moments when I’ve fancied myself a writer. It wasn’t always that way. I crept into it slowly, writing casually for entertainment, correspondence or popular appeal. Certainly, there were moments of personal disclosure when I would be navigating complex feeling, intention, memory and association. I didn’t particularly seek those moments, but neither did I avoid them. Along the way, I found a groove, enacting devices to engage, provoke or inspire. Writing arrived with the glib pouring forth of words to describe a travel experience or when I was either so angry or sad that I didn’t have to think what to write next. Or else I fancied myself at least a passable expository writer who could present a detailed subject with some clarity.

But I am no longer traveling, and my outrage button has become exhausted, replaced by disgust at the extreme performative nature of public dialogue and a nagging resignation about the future. It all resides in a cavern of helplessness that seems to have numberless rooms to explore, places to get lost, where scant light ever ventures. If you’ve ever been in a vast cave, lit only by the artificial kind, you might already know how boring it can quickly become, especially if you tire of being reminded, everywhere you look, of how small you are in the great unwinding of time in silent darkness.

As far as expository writing is concerned, I must finally admit it’s too barren. It cannot come close to communicating the diversity and complexity of the real lives we are living in this time of the great unraveling—or how we are being lived by events and each other, by the warming oceans disrupting the primary currents, the disappearing ice. It’s thus just plain boring. I’m not journalist. It’s not my job to bring you the news in that familiar way and it’s about time to stop trying instead of using volumes of words to defend vague ideas in an impersonal way.

But where does this place me? I must learn something new all over again. Maybe I’ve been that journalist, that academic, that remote observer, that pretender to some ivory tower. But now, deciding what kind of writer I am not is not the same as becoming the kind of writer I will be. Because, really, when we get down to it, we’re talking about what kind of person I will be, how I imagine myself, how I am connecting (or not) to the world. And right now, it’s the ‘not’ connecting that’s haranguing me from the back rows, which is to say, I have wandered off from the campfire. I’m roaming in the dark, placing myself at the mercy of beasts of the night, divorced from camaraderie, landmarks, scents, ancestors, teachers, children, the whirling firmament and the community of souls that brought me here.

I haven’t been a storyteller. I’m not sure I ever set out to become a storyteller or if I even knew what it really is to tell a story. And that right there is the story, the poverty of my course, the dubious credentials I’ve claimed so far. Telling the story is not solely about someone as it is about a time, a place, a multi-dimensional thread of events creeping in from all directions and from distant peoples and times. It’s about the teachers we would not normally recognize. It’s the sensory, the cognitive, the relational, the mysterious and the unseen coming together in dynamic play, in evolutionary unfolding, in paradoxical awakenings, in pregnancies delivered just in time. Because that’s the nature of the lives we are living. Nothing will ever be straight again.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that nothing was ever straight to begin with, even though we clung to a biased fantasy of some narrow empiricism, the exclusion and violence at the heart of coloniality, the subtle catechism of modernity that all things have a place and must stay in their place as they are defined by science, religion and politics. We’ve been walking through these things as if in a hall of mirrors, wishing to see ourselves reflected back, confirming the ‘way things are.’ The entire enterprise resides in a fixed epistemology that always yields the same conclusion—the muting of nature and the supremacy of the (white) human and western ways of knowing. There, we never have to worry about the entire deck being thrown up into the air—as it is now—all the time.

When the way seems blocked, it’s time to break the mirrors. All bets are off. Empire is the Anthropocene monster eating its own tail, an exhausted enterprise shedding all but its most desperately loyal supplicants. The more they cling, the more they deny and pit themselves against the relentless and now accelerating de-westernization occurring throughout the global south and Asia, the greater the danger to us all. This beast of a nation will surely, under an authoritarian president, start an(other) entirely cynical and thoroughly corrupt (forever) war to reclaim its fantasy of supremacy, dragging a generation into hot conflict, brutalizing all dissent along the way, distracting from the rot within and the advancing consequences of its own extravagance. This will be the death throe of America—an economically and ideologically cornered giant drunk on its own self-dealing delusions and doubling down on its primary addictions.

The stage is set and the time for pretension is so over; the time to own up to my own pretensions is long past. Perhaps that’s why I am feeling so lost. Perhaps that’s why my recent gestures toward expression have felt so stale, so limited, and uninspired. Maybe it’s because the fire of my own truth burns as a small ember. I have retreated into my own incarceration. I am the jailer and the jailed. I am forgetting what I belong to. I am the sole party to the severance of my dependencies, my alliances, my symbiosis with the world. It’s time for oxygen, a return to (dare I say it) authentic spontaneity, time for a jailbreak, to explore the green glimmers of foreign and still hardy epistemologies, biding their time, and if it’s not too much of a cliche, breaking through the concrete of the dying order, revealing our true nature to ourselves and to each other.