Author: Mark Seely

My computer welcomes me when I turn it on in the morning. The ATM machine thanks me for withdrawing money from my own bank account. The screen on the pay-pad at the supermarket thanks me for my patience. The sign at the top of the stairway asks me to please watch my step. Doors of public businesses explicitly welcome me as I enter and thank me as I exit. Other doors thank me for shutting them behind me.

The absurdity of this slides right past us. That a mechanical device could be welcoming or feel thankful for anything is ridiculous on its face. That a wall or door or posted sign could act as some kind of conduit for the expression of polite sentiments is ludicrous. The disembodied words “welcome” and “please” and “thank you” appearing on an electronic screen are utterly empty of content. The warning, “Watch your step” is meaningful—and, in some cases, meaningful to the point of being life-saving—but the addition of “please” is beyond superfluous, and entirely gratuitous.

Is all of this simply more evidence of the technological outsourcing of our humanity? Perhaps. But if so, it is the outsourcing of a humanity that was long ago stripped bare of its human authenticity. The very idea of politeness, as reflecting a separate category of action, is evidence of the degradation of human authenticity. Authentic humans engaged in authentically human interactions have no need for please and thank you. To say please and to beg—to plead—come to the same thing. In traditional human society, where all have access and the capacity to give freely is unrestricted, there is little or no need to ask. In such society, “thank you” is a brutal insult: to thank someone is to say that their kindness was unexpected.

It’s the middle of winter, but the fifty-five-degree air says something else. The ground is damp, and my shoes make a gentle sucking sound as they sink and release against the trail surface. Small birds pinball their way through the brush. Their strident call trills like an old-style bicycle bell, only two octaves higher. At intervals through the leafless brambles I see casualties of the windstorm that slapped its way through the region last week: a large limb with freshly exposed heartwood rests horizontally on its branches, appearing to hover above the ground, frozen in mid-fall; a thick, bark-less snag lies flat in disarticulated sections at abrupt angles from each other, reminding me of those hollow segmented tent supports with a central elastic cord that keeps disconnected pieces in close proximity to the joint.

The dog and I decide to leave the main path and explore a narrow spur trail that leads us downhill through a series of switchbacks to the bottom of the ravine, to the shallow creek that moves in pulses between waterfall-bounded pools formed by previous years’ treefall. It is on our way back up the switchbacks, toward the top where the panorama of the ravine opens up, that it hits me.

Hit is not quite the right word. Hit works well to describe both the immediacy of the insight and the instantaneousness of its initial effects—its impact, if you will, but fails to capture its emergent quality, its insidiousness, the sense that it has been there all along in a primal form, latent, inchoate, incipient, gathering its strength imperceptibly, building slowly until it crosses some critical threshold and explodes into being like a sudden afternoon thunderstorm.

It might have been the way the noonday sun fell into the alder trees, their trunks and leafless branches resplendent, completely enwrapped in moss, emitting a luminous green glow somewhere between emerald and jade, radiant and seemingly in motion, a terrestrial aurora borealis. Or maybe it was the large stump to my right, also draped in moss, its base rotted into three sharp spires like stalagmites thrusting skyward, longingly, as if lost in nostalgic reminiscence. It could have been the fragrant shadow of the cedar behind me, or the perfect line of tiny golden mushrooms cued along the slab of rotting bark at my feet. Or the small spruce, recently snapped by a falling neighbor, its slender and limbless trunk bent at a sharp angle to the ground, wet outer layers of wood at the break still intact, peeled back in scallops like the lid of a rusty tin can opened by a cartoon can opener. Or something else sitting just beyond my perceptual grasp.

My life is here, my past and present, written in the wood around me, captured in a fidelity that mere language could never match. A multivolume biography with copious endnotes. Every trivial detail, every nuance, every tragedy, every fear and challenge and hope and regret, all here. Exactly this!

Complexity is the norm, the natural state of the universe. Even simple primates like us have evolved to master the complex, the densely interwoven, the multifarious. Neuroscientists credit our right hemisphere, the holistic hemisphere, with our capacity to navigate the subtle nuances and intricacies of our continually changing circumstances. We enter a room, and right away we feel something is off; there is a “bad vibe” or an uneasiness to the atmosphere. The feeling emerges directly, and long before we are able to identify its source—and often we never actually locate the source, or we misidentify the source, indicting a feature that is salient but ultimately benign.

Intuition, that potent and spontaneous prod that can make us look up or suddenly change course, is our species’ response to complexity. And it is feeling that has the rudder. The right hemisphere is not adept at expressing itself conceptually—concepts being largely a linguistic, left-hemisphere creation—but has, over the eons, become a maestro of emotion. More can be carried atop a momentary impression, a fleeting feeling, than can be packed into a library’s worth of words.

One of the many paradoxes of modern civilization is that it involves a radical simplification of complexity. Despite its labyrinthine bureaucracies and its sparkly surface distractions, civilization replaces subtlety with garishness and nuance with coarseness. Hues that bleed into each other in novel and unpredictable tones are forcefully overlaid with granular categories, standardized and homogenized for maximum distribution, with a premium on the lowest common denominator. And so, we have reds and blues and greens and their approved variants, but we have no words for the densely shaded chromatic spaces between the dominant stripes of the rainbow. We have a single word for lavender, despite the infinity of colors enfolding a single flower.

In capturing a source of our existential anxiety, Kierkegaard’s famous quip “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” highlights something fundamental about our epistemic situation: we can understand events only in hindsight.

That, in and of itself, is not a problem. What makes it problematic is that we grant unwarranted value to our keen aptitude for making sense of things after the fact. Our ability to build a reverse-engineered causal chain, to construct a coherent narrative in the past tense, to cast a tightly woven retrospective net across experience, engenders a false sense of confidence in our ability to apprehend the world as it truly is.  

In addition, the most potent events in our lives are invariably those which are entirely unpredictable ahead of time, what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “Black Swan events,” events that have an extremely low probability but an extremely high impact, events that are impossible to anticipate or prepare for ahead of time but entirely explainable—understandable—after the fact. Even the most unprecedented events seem somehow mundane in retrospect. Every event of importance, in our personal lives and in the world at large, has a Black Swan quality to it. Every single one.

This should terrify us. But it doesn’t. False confidence gleaned through the lucidity of hindsight prevents us from perceiving the precariousness of our situation. We are walking backwards toward the edge of a cliff, a canyon carved out of otherwise flat terrain. We see the path that we have traveled receding into the past, with all of its previously unforeseen obstacles clearly visible, all once-hidden dangers obvious and discernable, all unexpected twists and turns clearly marked. And when we step off the edge and crash down to the canyon floor, hindsight will be our guide.  

There has been a lot of political teeth-gnashing—amplified and intensified by corporate news media—over building a wall along the southern US border. Reasonable folks on both sides of the issue (pun intended) recognize that a border wall is largely, if not entirely, symbolic. It will make it more difficult for wildlife to traverse their migratory routes, but it will do little or nothing to keep brown people out or dissuade illegal commerce. I suspect, however, that the most virulent supporters of the wall are unable to separate its symbolic role from its efficaciousness. To them, the most important thing is to have some concrete and tangible representation of what is in reality mere idea, a geopolitical invention.

Borders don’t exist, of course, at least not those associated with politically-defined territories. They are abstract entities, and their placement is entirely arbitrary. Many make use of physical boundaries, rivers or mountain ranges that serve as natural barriers to easy travel. But others consist of nothing more than map coordinates. I remember visiting the Four Corners monument as a child, standing on the engraved circle at the precise point where Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado meet, and marveling at how the surrounding land looked exactly the same in every direction. Why exactly here, I thought, why not three feet one way or another? It would have made absolutely no difference.

To say that I am a fan of open borders misses the point. I am a fan of open acknowledgement of the reality that borders do not exist outside of the make-believe worlds of civilization. I am a fan of open awareness that borders and property boundaries of all kinds are weapons of immiseration, technologies of oppression and control, tools the powerful use to keep and enhance their power.  

It’s called transverse orientation, navigation at night by keeping a fixed angle of orientation to a distant light source. In the natural world, salient nighttime light sources are invariably celestial and indeed distant, the moon, Venus or Jupiter, the waxing or waning glow on the horizon that precedes and follows the sun. The trigonometry changes dramatically with luminescence from a nearby terrestrial source, a streetlight, a porchlight, a campfire, and the resulting path of travel becomes an inescapable circular vortex, a nocturnal Charybdis. Moths aren’t attracted to light from the window, they are just unable to fly away from it because all plottable courses lead them right back to where they started.

I was visiting a cousin who lives in a corner apartment on an upper floor of a high-rise condominium in downtown Seattle. The view in both directions was heavy and angular. The iconic space needle, just a few blocks away, loomed from behind a cluster of buildings outside the window on one side, and on the other was the Sound, with docked container ships dwarfed by massive oil tankers resting just offshore. Objects in the distance were attenuated into vague impressions of themselves by the late afternoon fog. People pay a premium for this, for a private voyeuristic viewing platform, for a climate-controlled glass box from which to gaze at leisure upon an aerial pie slice of death and concrete.

Transverse orientation. People aren’t drawn to the city so much as they become trapped by their own navigational trigonometry, caught in a vortex created by the city’s consumptive commotion, failing to recognize its source of luminescence is the spark of life being violently extinguished; its siren’s song, a fading scream; its beguiling pulse, a death rattle. All plottable courses lead them right back to where they started.

According to Jonathan Swift, “You do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into.”

But this is only part of the problem, and a small part at that. If the orthodoxies of civilization were like those of religion, it would be a simple matter of injecting tiny corrosive packets of uncertainty here and there, sowing seeds of doubt fertilized with a balanced application of critical thought and skeptical reflection, waiting for the ground to swell with the first signs of ripening disbelief, and then—and this is an extremely important step—demonstrating that there are more satisfying alternatives, alternatives grounded in the reality of our situation as temporary beings immersed in symbolic worlds of our own creation.

A civilization heretic with evangelist leanings, with desire and drive to pull the veil from the eyes of the faithful, faces a double challenge. Unlike the religious situation, where appeals to logic and reason can only be met with avoidance and denial, civilization presents something approaching an epistemologically closed system, where almost every potential threat from reason is met with a rational sounding counterpoint. To mount a successful attack, it is first necessary to undermine deeply embedded presuppositions and assumptions about the nature of human nature itself, starting with Hobbes and his claims that uncivilized life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And then there are the demonstrable facts of medical technology aimed at treating civilization’s many iatrogenic disorders, and after that, the sheer convenience civilized life affords to its privileged classes.  

And even if this first part of the deconversion process could be successfully employed, the second part is very likely to end in failure. Civilization allows for no alternatives to itself, denying even the possibility of the binary choice: are you in or out?   

What are they called, those brown, curved, cashew-like parts of a pine flower? Strobili? I saw one on the sidewalk today and was suddenly in my maternal grandparent’s front yard, on a warm fall afternoon, sitting on the grass in the shade, with my back against the trunk of a large ponderosa pine, its rough bark of stacked puzzle pieces biting gently through my shirt, a dry strobilus rolled between my thumb and forefinger, quickly denuded of its granular substance, leaving a sharply convoluted stem. I have fragments of recollection, likely netted across a dozen or more years, where I can see small piles of harvested grains on the sidewalk beside me, microscopic corn rubbed from thin, brittle cobs.

There are thousands of these kinds of things littered throughout my earliest memories. Collectively they comprise the overwhelming bulk of my past, features of the world that have been swept into unimportance because of their mundane familiarity, rendered commonplace and banal by their lack of connection to the invented worlds I am expected to inhabit.

And it is not just in the distant past, or those things illuminated within the penumbra of childhood nostalgia. Yesterday harbors uncountable shards of similar momentary awareness, transient instants of wonder and discernment attached to concrete details perceived in passing, details quickly lost or forgotten, dismissed as insignificant, trivial characteristics of everyday life, not relevant to the goal presently being pursued, unrelated to the destination, part of the surrounding topography, minor stones on the pathway.

The pattern of shadow across the dog’s face. The chittering of the tiny bird just outside the window, and the way the twig recoils as it bolts to a different branch. The familiar fragrance of decay folded within the cool moist morning air on the first official day of winter.     

The phrase has a military origin, a reference to a marching column of soldiers in mechanical lock step. Militaries are machines, and, as with all mechanical devices, function only when each part is operating in sync with the others.

Our psychological sensitivities in this area are informed from two directions, internally, from intuition grounded in evolved primate proclivities, from two and a half million years of life in small foraging groups where affiliation and consensus were matters of life and death, and externally, from the forced mechanical roles of civilization, from a lifetime embedded in steeply hierarchical power relations where compliance is nonnegotiable and obedience is ensured through the application of lethal force.

These two, the internal and the external, meet in the middle, in compelling social pressure, in a social-psychological compulsion, impossible to ignore, overwhelming in its insistence that we conform, that we “toe the line”—a quip, incidentally, with its origin in the starting line of a footrace. To be out of step is not merely an uncomfortable state, to remain out of step for any length of time is intolerable. And to be intentionally out of step, to purposefully step out of line, to forcefully extract yourself from the drivetrain, is a clear sign of mental illness.

But what are you to do when you start to see civilization as the death machine that it is? What if standing apart, or stepping out of line becomes a moral imperative? What if you can no longer, with clear conscience, continue to conform to a system that intentionally intensifies suffering, a system that is systematic in the ways it metes out misery and death to everything within its purview, a system that insists that there is nothing in the entire universe outside of its purview?

Layers.

There are layers to this, strata containing hollow permineralized husks, fossilized residue of the past in ribbons.

Some are thin, composed of detritus from a dramatic event, like the charred black clay left behind by a fire, or the powdery silt washed in during a massive flood. Some are thick, and hold scattered bones laid down during periods of climatic stability.

The thin layers tend to run in succession, one after another, several stacking upon each other in tessellated patterns of minor tragedy—fallout from an extended period of change and transition.

Close inspection shows that the thick layers are not as uniform as they first appear, but the colors and textures interdigitate and interpenetrate at the margins so that differences only emerge when comparing the extremes, darker and rockier deeper down, farther back in time, lighter and sandier toward the upper, more recent formations.

And there are recognizable epochs, separated by a thin line sealing the past behind a before-and-after boundary, an asteroid strike, a cataclysmic mass extinction. A single event that changes everything, that rewrites the rules. A child. A divorce. Cancer.

My reverie usually follows a highly stratified epochal frame: a memory emerges, and its extraction unearths others from within its own layer, following a lateral pattern of excavation that rarely scrapes past the borders. In this way I find myself immersed within periods of the past that appear isolated and individuated, as if standing upon too-broad stairs on a poorly designed stairway, impossible to climb with alternating steps, and forced to use the same leg each time—awkward and infantilizing. To travel across layers is to move to entirely different altitudes, qualitatively different realms, to step from the valley floor to the tree line with little or no sense of the interstitial, the complex, temperate, life-abundant areas between.