ecospirit

 

Anthropologists have long interpreted the Fall from Eden as the loss of the hunter-gatherer culture, replaced by Neolithic farming, which led to the city-state, which was a fortified granary, which led to caste, hierarchy, and privilege.  It’s a damn solid analysis, one I find very convincing. 

The brilliant ecologist Edward Goldsmith, founder of the magazine by that name, writes in his magisterial The Way of the founding of montheistic world religions as a set of remedial acts. The original city-dwellers were displaced, refugees from a stable existence, having lost their land, their livelihood and their gods.  He would thus revision the Axial Age as a belief and value set that arose out of loss. This eventually propelled civilization (thus wheeled or “axial”) into what has became modernity, the industrial revolution, and all the “posts” – post-modern, post-Christian, the Anthropocene and its slippery slope to post-human (in several senses).  The religion that comforted me as a child, and which became much more central to my identity and internal support system as an adolescent who virtually converted to Platonism, was initially, according to Goldsmith, at its pre-axial root a consolation for losing Eden. Reading Narendra’s dispatches from Abujhmadia shows a non-mythic Eden right in the midst of the forests of India, thriving until just a few scant years ago.  A city boy who invented a religion of trees as a pre-adolescent, I felt the reverberations of that long-ago remediation when I read of these simple, non-competitive people, more bonobo than chimp.

Ecospirit. Let’s look at the blog moniker again. One half of this blog’s founding inspiration and title, spirit, really would not be part of the equation for the Abujhmadis.  Their gods of place, specifically the plants, herbs, trees (including specific ones with both positive and negative charges), and (mostly small) animals, are just basic  parts of their world. They  pay them careful  attention, but don’t elevate them.  Most fundamental to these tribalists are the founding couple of their tribe. This couple has the authority over one’s existence that all parents do, in the most fundamental and necessary way.  But the Abujhmadis are not universalists, so these original forebears are nothing like Adam and Eve, the Hebrew inflation of their own origins.  No ancestor worship for Jews or any of the Abrahamic tribe, but rather reverence for the G-d whose tribal origins were rapidly obliterated (see Sacred Discontent, Herbert Schneidau) by a fundamentally displaced people.

And the “eco” prefix to this blog, ecology?  We are closer to the Abujhmadi reality with this one.  The Greek origin, oikos, means “house,” and it has many referents, including friend, work, neighbor, relative, school. They see their specific forest in Central India as their home, more central than their house or clan. For the Abujhmadi, the house would primarily refer to the forest where they lived, and the referents to relative and ancestor would also be operative.  Work and school, even friend, have no meaning for them.  Crucially, there is no name in their vocabulary for the whole of it.

The second part of the modern word is even more unsettling, totally baffling to the Abujhmadi: the logos of the house/home.  There are no logoi for these tribal people, and thus no need for thousands of words, with their nuances and obfuscations.  So ecology, as well as the spirituality of world religions  that I would redirect to the preservation of the Earth-system in the defining banner statement of this site, are meaningless terms to them.  My central goal, as a modern, highly educated man is to bring my neighbors and fellow citizens back into relationship with the Earth, where their oikos is the whole web, a place to do no (or least) harm. But to even talk with these people would require cutting myself off from everything familiar, probably for years, even decades. 

Communication with these tribal folk, Eden-dwellers, would not be easy.  But it might be possible. The sign of this possibility lies in my initial reactions: 1) a kind of primal joy reading about these people in their utter simplicity and 2) being devastated when I read of their destruction.  For a moment, I lost my fortification, comfortable in my shelter from both the elements and my metaphorical fortress against the whims of nature-spirits and the tribal gods of my nomadic species.  For we are adrift without an enduring place, having lost our niche, as my friend Joe Hollis the Paradise Gardener puts it. It was momentarily unsettling to be shown that niche again.   But then the world I saw through Narendra’s dispatches quickly closed to me again.