This question must arise, at least for those of us who love nature: are we allowed to enjoy watching it rise up and smite us from the face of the earth?
There are two parts to this question; loving the power of nature and resenting the powerful ignorance of humanity. But they come together when we feel a sense of righteous satisfaction, witnessing the brutal beauty of nature showing us humans just how unimportant we are, in the scheme of things.
Anyone that despises the way humanity has considered itself to be so high and mighty may be forgiven for a sniff of misanthropy. I have always loved the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which places this in context beautifully. Like so many tyrants, autocrats, dictators, oligarchs and bullies before and after, this “big man” styles himself a “King of Kings,” believing his works to be oh so high and mighty. Yet, around the ruins of his sculpted form:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay, Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ozymandias painting by Charles Griffith
It has been said many times since, but it also applies to us, in smaller, everyday ways. We fade, fast, while life – the universe, our world – lives on. The Biblical chapter Ecclesiastes calls out the ultimate vanity of our ‘conceited self-indulgence’. Jung called out the modern Eurocentric world’s ‘godalmightyness’ while working on the alchemical process as a soul path. Arrogant pride is like a drug and it’s one we’ve always struggled with. The Oracle at Delphi advised not only that we should seek to Know Thyself, but also warned that Surety Brings Ruin – paraphrased commonly as ‘pride comes before a fall.’
And i can’t carry out this conversation without mentioning my main man of antiquity, a genuine culture hero for humanity, Prometheus. A true son of the Goddess, who has the gumption to steal into the heavens and nick out with fire, bringing it back down to poor humanity, who until then were a snivelling lot, living without cooking, warmth or even control over our own interior lighting. That name Prometheus should be engraved in memory forever (oh, wait, the whole point is that there is no future; sorry, i keep forgetting, in so many little ways, every day – that’s material for a future post, no doubt).
But we never learn. Somehow, we seem biologically predisposed to reinvent the wheel of pride every generation, like boys need to learn to run around together and spear kangaroos or woolly mammoths or bears, and if they don’t, they turn into sullen teenagers incapable of better than a grunt … oh wait, isn’t that exactly what happened when we were banned from taking them out bush for initiation ceremonies? (Yep, another future post, thanks to Paul Shepard and his incredible Nature and Madness; what we’ve lost without initiation ceremonies)
Prometheus: master thief, troublemaker, jester, culture hero. And look what happened to him … chained to a rock for 10,000 years, with his liver eaten out every morning by an eagle, to have it grow anew each day, only to be torn asunder by those fearsome, powerful talons again and again. This is the violence of life and death, as Tennyson declared: Nature, red in tooth and claw!
This magnificent Zeus and the imagery of Prometheus is from a mural at the Melbourne Fire Brigade, designed by Harold Freedman.
Bloody Zeus. The gods are ruthless, which is why we must be chained to this rock of earth, bound to the adamantine demands of our myths, strengthened by discipline, determined to suffer unto truth. Not popular, i recognise, compared to donuts, air conditioned buildings, chocolate, fast cars and dishwashers. Understandably. I like all these things too. But that seems to be the rub; easy life, horrible cost. What’s coming, we can see now, is the death and destruction on an unimaginable scale of all that is beautiful in humanity and what we know of the plant and animal kingdoms.
If we deserve it – if we can take some pleasure in watching human civilization unravel – it is mostly because we let powerful bastards run the show. And it’s not like we – the people, most of us, most of the time – wanted this. Power breeds on itself, profit builds arrogance, and while we all share in a little of this shame, it is those ruthless enough to thrill to it that are mostly to blame. However, as we all know, the poor will be more downtrodden, will die first and hardest, while the wealthy who profited the most will watch it on big screens in their bunkers.
What is left, but to enjoy the victory of life over stupidity and to align ourselves with what survives death; some element of spirit, or consciousness, the spark that animated us in the first place, the great mind or the god/goddess matrix, the serpent flying out of the cosmic soup, the light …
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It’s nice to have the company of like-minded souls on the downward slide.
We can’t help staring into the flames. Whether it be a humble campfire, the stars at night, or the glitter and glam of stage and screen, we are drawn to light like primate moths around a flame. That’s why we also love burning fuel; from the humble whale oil lamp to nitrous guzzling race cars, Prometheus rules our evolution. The demigod who taught us to control the flame could have guessed we would become addicted to it, but i’ll bet he would have hoped we’d also learn to temper our love with wisdom.
Prometheus bringing fire from the gods to humanity
Because we can’t help ourselves, we can become passive consumers trapped by the market, as well as inspired beings finding our own way towards the intelligence and wisdom of light. The screen upon which you are reading this, the TV that came before it, even electric light itself – only a century or so old – our attention can be drawn along by flashing luminescence. And in modern times, this ancient fascination is owned. We don’t look to nature for connection, but to technology. That’s where we are at home; in the new ‘natural’ environment of the city, hooked up to the light bulb, the lime light, the paid advertisement, the street lights and LEDs in the ceiling. We can hardly move without being flooded in light, mostly provided by the burning of fossil fuels hundreds of miles away.
We love our cities of light and hardly question why
It doesn’t have to be that way. We used to find the light within, as well as without. In fact, we don’t have to look anywhere, if we are talking metaphorically, for the light of consciousness. We can trust ourselves, we can find a way, we can figure out where we stand … we can listen to our bodies and to the nature they represent.
This is because light is within all matter; in fact, matter is very slow light wavelengths (or electromagnetic radiation), just as light is the same stuff moving infinitely more quickly. This is physics, not philosophy. So, it would be more accurate to say that light is matter, matter is light, in a unified field or flow of all things, or the “only one thing,” as physicist and author Frank Wilczek writes in The Lightness of Being. Hence, the sun’s power within carbon, released as fire, is also the same as the light that emanates from stars; our friendly yellow one as well as the red giants and pulsing quasars of distant galaxies.
Light is what we are and what it all is: a unified field filled with celestial intelligence, the knowledge of all things as it was sent upon its cosmic journey by the fire of life. This is wisdom, love, goodness and abundance, as well as power. That means power over, as well as power with. Power is neutral and we choose what to do with it. And behind every light falls the shadow. In the case of human consciousness, this shadow is greed, hatred, and ignorance. Manifest in its most potent force, it is the elite at the top of the pyramid, those who control the market, who demand that we receive the sign, the mark of the slave class, the workers who create profit and send it up the line. And the ultimate victory for the shadow is when it convinces us that it represents the light, the one true light, the only light, the guiding light … the light that draws us on, which we follow into the cave, which enslaves us. Here are the sun kings, ancient and new, and the corporate stars that replace them.
As Orwell pointed out, we must not only fear Big Brother, we must love Big Brother. And we do; Big Brother rules, brings us the light of order, peace, security. Perpetual war is the cost and we accept it; war upon the earth, which creates so much wealth we no longer even question our right to it. We love the Big Brother of the marketplace while he promises us full shelves in the supermarkets, freely available fuel for our cars and planes, and cities of light so bright it hardly matters whether it is night or day.
And so the shadow wins; we believe we live in perpetual light and we have not asked clearly or persistently enough the only question that really mattered: what does it cost?
It costs us the earth. To relate this to the Christian religious framework that sits behind the godless capitalism that chokes the planet to death now, the modern city is a place where we sacrifice dark fossil fuels to create endless light – the New Jerusalem of Revelation, which today is a church of endless consumption.
The New Jerusalem, once a spiritual vision of life completely divorced from earthy realities, now a shopping mall, just as dangerous.
The New Year’s 2020 bushfires in Australia are a logical result of our Promethean tendencies and they are also a warning from the future that we have created; this is the beginning of the apocalyptic conditions, which arise out of the devilish bargain we have made with our ‘resources’. The increased ferocity of storms, heatwaves, hurricanes, droughts and floods that are all still forecast by the same climate modelling that promised us these fires were coming will not stop soon. They are coming because we burn too much fuel. But while fire is the focus, let’s remember something about its nature as light, and hope that this also reminds us of a few things about ourselves. We are the light, as is the earth, and this is our only home while we are here in these bodies. This is right relationship to our planetary home. This is what we can learn from out of control fires, if we choose to do so.
