Into the woods.

When I was a kid, there was a very real sense of the woods being a spooky place.  I mentioned that to someone this week, who repeated it back to me as that I had said the woods were scary.  I’m not sure.

The spooky is somewhere in the vicinity of, I dunno: haunted, enchanted, mysterious, powerful, wild, unpredictable, irrational, dark.  The spooky has its own ways and purposes, which are not entirely knowable.  The spooky has influence on us, and can be thrilling, but you also do not want to get lost in its grip.  The spooky exists in boundary places, or is encountered by crossing thresholds.

This, to me, sounds a lot like the unconscious.  This thing which influences us, and is just outside of the bounds of consciousness, which is vast and expansive and has its own logic.  It requires ritual preparation, something like ceremony to make the boundary a little more porous and to enter into it.  There are rules for how you comport yourself in relation to it.  It’s like the depths of the ocean that way, that other great avatar of what lies beneath what consciousness can perceive.  You descend and ascend with intention, and there is much that you cannot bring with you from one realm to the other.  You will never fully know the depths.

We pass down stories, folktales and fables which tell us something about the realm of the spooky, about its charms, its treasures, its temptations, and its tendency to be the home of the trickster.  These stories tell us real things.

The Western impulse is to figure out how they are real.  “Ah, yes, it’s easy to get disoriented in the woods.”  No, it’s easy to get disoriented in your own mind.  “Sometimes trees fall.”  No, sometimes everything falls.  “The mind can play tricks on you.”  No.

The truths are analogical, and they are also more than that.  They speak to things that cannot be named, and to the vast potential that exists.  These stories contain material morals and they tell us something about the reality that consciousness simply does not have category for.  It’s not just a matter of reframing it.  It’s a matter of understanding how broad real is.

Out of the woods.

The reductive, material, positivist impulse is to decide one way or the other about things.  The woods contain danger, and that danger can be managed.  Perhaps the danger cannot be managed, and so the woods should be torn down.  Perhaps the woods are beautiful, and we should traipse through them.

No.  Sometimes it is the time to venture into the woods.  Sometimes we can go there to be fed, or to encounter something more than we can name, and sometimes there are things going on in the woods that do not need our presence.  We are not welcome when the spooky needs to stretch its legs, or when the understory needs a chance to regenerate without our footsteps.  We need seasons and rhythms that draw us to encounter what consciousness leaves out, and also that lets everything else have a break from the intrusion of consciousness from time-to-time.

The goal is not to illuminate everything, or to make it all the same.  It is not to have a flattened Earth with an infinite horizon, which consciousness can scan at its leisure and observe whatever it imagines it will find.  Do not raise up the ocean floor and flatten out the mountains, do not dissolve the universe into an undifferentiated blob of mediocrity.  Value the particular nature of hidden things.  You exist in relation to the unknown, and it helps to hold up the fabric of existence itself.  It is not good for consciousness to be alone.

The contour of reality.

I call myself a sacramental realist, because I believe and experience that the character of reality which is pointed to by the sacraments is the essential character of reality.  The sacraments are not an overlay or a conceptual framework for conveying moral teachings, but draw our attention to something which otherwise hides just beyond our peripheral vision.  That is my reality, along with so many other realities I live with.

When I was a teenager, desperately alienated and lost, feeling untethered from any kind of ground of my being, and having had a lifetime of formation to doubt my own reality, I found comfort in what I read in the Bhagavad-Gita, what formed for me a model of existence in which all things are connected, and one thing exists in relationship to another.  I don’t know if I would find that in that text as an adult, but it helped to dislodge me from my anxious attachment to a precarious reality, and to start me towards recognizing that I exist in relation to all others, and will not be lost or cast aside.

I have transformed a childhood need to find someone to fuse with, for safety and survival and to know who I was, into a curiosity about the intersubjective experience that emerges through deep encounter with another.  I love to just talk, and talk, and talk, and to let my perceptions be changed, to let a new reality emerge for me through the experiential sharing of another.  I cannot experience their reality directly, but God, how I love to create some space between us in which something real is shared.

None of this is a denial of material realities, but the material’s primacy is not absolute.  The material has primacy in material matters, but not everything is a material matter.  Vaccines and viruses address material realities, and material methods matter much more than anything more subjective than that.  The subjective may draw our attention to what is left out by attending only to the material, but it does not deny the reality of the material.  We may be aware how our distortions and ignorance causes us to misread even the material, and how imperfect our efforts will always be, but this does not make it utterly futile.

So I find myself with a dual consciousness, or perhaps even a little more multifaceted than dual, and perhaps not consciousness alone.  I can believe in science and spooky forests, and sometimes the two have something to say to each other.  I think of Chesterton in “Orthodoxy” talking about how water moves not because of gravity, but because it is bewitched.  This does not have to be a reactionary anti-intellectualism, but can help us to recover awe and wonder as we learn about gravity and hydrostatic pressure and the contour of terrain and watersheds, and also draw us towards the mystery of why rather than the relatively knowable how of how reality is held together.

Maps and ownership.

I find so much that resonates, in structure if not always in content, in the work of magic realism to reunite the splitting of reality in Latin America by these competing ways of knowing and experiencing.  So much, too, of the model of qualitative research that Wilson talks about as Ceremony, embedded in an Indigenous model of relational accountability, and relational reality.

Those things are not mine.  When white folks try to appropriate magic realism, I sometimes see a response that magic realism arises out of having to exist in the colonial world, while also remaining embedded in something other than the colonial world, and finding a way to make both of those things real.  The suggestion, then, is that white people exist only in the colonial, and should not try to steal from culture, again, as they have so often stolen in the material, as part of the colonial endeavour.

Whiteness is undeniably a construct of colonialism, and one of the defining characteristics of both whiteness and colonialism is the ways in which they exclude other possibilities.  Vancouver Island becomes a colony, and so it can no longer be what it was before it was a colony.  That’s not necessarily true, but it is the view colonialism espouses: an atomistic, commodity-oriented model of ownership.

To identify with whiteness is to be willing to give up everything else that whiteness might leave out.  It is like being identified with consciousness alone, and cutting down all the forests.  Colonialism makes mountains low.

The thing about whiteness and colonialism is that they are, though, so fundamentally incomplete.  They are like a trade jargon: they may be adequate for some kinds of communication, but they are not fit for other purposes, and it would take a true artist to find a way to make them do something creative.

Appropriation and emptiness.

I imagine a white person saying that they want to situate themselves in the model of “Research Is Ceremony”, and I suspect they don’t mean they want relational accountability and to be expected to defer to Elders (and ancestors) and to follow protocol.  They mean that they feel something missing, and want to find a way to accrete something beautiful that they see in another context.

I think if one really appreciates the work Wilson did to recover research methods which honoured his ways of knowing and being, the calling is to take up that same task with one’s own ways of knowing and being.  Everyone has a birthright that is more than the consensus reality of global capitalism, and the trade jargon of mercantile consciousness.  Those things cannot nourish a whole person, and all of us are whole people.

The mercantile lie, the model of colonial scholasticism, and all its scientific reductivity, is to believe that we can identify the good parts of a thing, and then only have those good parts.  You can figure out what makes something work, and then simplify it down to just those things.  Moreover, the emptiness of individualism creates an inflated, unsatisfied narcissism in which we might be fooled into thinking that the good is synonymous with what we like.

So we might think we see something good in Indigenous methodologies, and want to find a way to graft it onto ourselves, but that intensity?  That is our own emptiness, much as when I was a teenager I fell so profoundly in love with people that it threatened to destroy me, because I felt like I could not exist without someone to be merged with.  The intensity is telling us not that we need to harvest and feed, but that we need to create something within ourselves.

For a white, colonial, settler sort of person who finds themselves so bewitched, there is a need to engage in our own work along the lines of what Wilson did.  To deepen our connection with our ancestral and innate ways of knowing.  It may end up looking a lot like what he has produced, but probably not entirely, and this is good.  It may end up looking entirely different, and that is good, too, because perhaps that is what is real.

Maps and ownership 2.

The first lie of colonialism is “this is how things have to be.”  Land must be owned by someone.  We must settle here.  This must be ours.  That’s how it begins, but it continues into a limiting of imagination.  Of course we can’t give the land back.  Of course we can’t govern differently.  Of course we can’t live differently.  Everyone is formed to believe this lie.  To believe that bread can only ever be bread.  To believe that we are all so radically divided from one another.

There is a second lie that I have only recently become able to name, although it still requires some circumambulation to really pin down.  I think it is an important lie, however.  It is something like “this is our way of life.”  Perhaps even “this is our culture.”

This lie suggests that the way things are in the colonized lands is simply the extension of one cultural way of being into a new place.  In a very materialist way, this also maintains the status quo and creates the need for racism and for the commoditization of culture, because it insidiously asks: and how can you prove if one culture is better than another?  How can you say it is wrong for me to practice my culture?

The trouble is that colonialism is a company culture and whiteness is a commodity way of being.  Nobody is white, but they bought their way into it.  Colonial culture is what happens if you raise generations of children in an extractive, highly structured workplace, with a prohibition on encounter with the outside world.  Sure, some come and go, but the collective reality is constructed in a way which leaves out all other possibilities.

Maybe it is easier to simply prove the existence of this lie than to name it.  Colonial culture could never exist or be accepted in the places from which it ostensibly came.

I think about how if I went to Scotland, I would have the right to travel over land, over anyone’s land, in the paths where my handful of Scottish ancestors walked.  Those traditional rights have been maintained.  Every European culture has some kind of notions of places and ways of life that are such important cultural traditions that they belong to everyone, that they cannot be restricted.

This is not how things are in colonies.  You can identify who owns what, and ownership is nearly absolute.  Indigenous people have to clear impossible hurdles to regain access to traditional fisheries, travel routes, and the woods that yearn to feed them, if they are granted those rights at all.  Nor is it something that even white settlers expect for themselves, by and large, although some feel a right to personal enrichment through extraction of common wealth so unbridled that we call it poaching.

Colonialism and whiteness set up more rigid and comprehensive boundaries than the cultures and governments that gave birth to them.  Colonialism and whiteness are tricksters, who will entice you into a bargain with them in which you forget who you ever were.  They draw you into the woods and then change the terrain so that even if you had a map it would do you no good.

The rules cloak themselves in rationality, so that their irrationality lies hidden, where you cannot access it or challenge it.  You are denied access to any ways of knowing which might destabilize this precarious arrangement of power.

Hopes.

To talk about these things may give rise to the illusion that there are neatly separable categories, around the illnesses which have diminished us, and the ways in which we have been diminished.  There is a temptation to find technical fixes, to find limited interventions which target deficiencies and so bolster the status quo.  I find no hope in that.

We must shatter the illusion that these structures which exist to serve a certain kind of extractive wealth-building were ever for us, or about us.  We must let ourselves see more broadly and more deeply, and court our awareness that some things are not for us, or about us, or even at all accessible to us.  We must live at the edge of darkness, and let ourselves be enchanted by it from time-to-time.

I find hope in a spookier world, which is neither scary and to be destroyed, nor love and light which is freely accessible.  I find hope in ancient wisdom which is not subservient to individual will.  I find hope in the good work others are doing to recover who they really are, that I might do so, also.  I find hope in the destabilizing of cultural binaries and norms which we are so enmeshed in we cannot even name.  I find hope in recovering my ability to see the world is, as an icon and a sacrament, which is filled with good things I can glimpse, and powerful things I will never know.  I find hope in moments where the veil thins, and something more can be glimpsed.  I find hope in the many ways of being, and knowing, as a person.  I find hope in the depths of the oceans and the woods.  I find hope in existing alongside things I do not understand, and in the joy of getting to create a little reality that can, imperfectly, be shared.  I find hope in experiencing all of these things and more I cannot, or will not, name.