Deep History and Popular Amnesia

Recently a blogging colleague of mine, Bogus Magus at Only Maybe, linked to the TED talk by Yuval Noah Harari, whose epic history book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was published in Hebrew in 2011, but translated into English in 2014. I have not yet read it. I've read a lot of reviews. A rising academic "star", the Israeli historian gets a glowing blurb from Jared Diamond, and a funny and not-so-impressed review from the formidable Christopher Knight, who, incidentally, has my favorite take on Noam Chomsky, in a 2010 interview in Radical Anthropology HERE. (<---I've already digressed!)

Knight's take on Harari's thesis: that we need a planet run by Green Intellectuals, but all we need is the myth...I find this on the level of cosmic hilarity. Because I basically agree with Harari - and Knight sorta does, too; it's just that he's not all that impressed by Harari's scholarship. The Conundrum. What to do?

I used the term "cosmic hilarity" just above. Perhaps more apt: hilaritas, a term/idea I got from Giordano Bruno via Robert Anton Wilson: roughly, it means, in every deeply funny thing there's something deeply painful. And vice-versa...

                     Now just reeeeelaaaax...you're feeling very calm...calmer...you've never
                     felt so relaxed. Now repeat after me: The State, borders, money, God,
                     corporations and the National Debt are just as real as your own hands.                        

Recently in these spaces I touched on the 1992 trialogues with three acid head intellectuals, who would agree with Harari.

For as much as an anarchist like Chris Knight can pick on Harari, if you haven't read Harari or watched the TED clip I linked to above, or heard him talk, or anything, just note that he hammers on perhaps humankind's biggest problem: somehow the species went from dealing with what's real: other people, animals, rivers, feeding ourselves, and finding a comfortable-enough place to sleep...to actually allowing "fictions" to rule over our lives and consciousness: god, corporations, money, the State, borders...what Harari calls the "legal fictions." We've gone from an actual order of "reality" to an "imagined order." And our only way out is an "alternative imagined order."

As Robert Anton Wilson said about this: we talked our way into this.

And with talk comes hypnosis. I catch myself - or "snap out of it" - every day. "Nations" have an ontological status via the legal system. So do corporations. Money too, although it originated as sort of a convenient fiction: easier to carry a little piece of silver or gold in order to walk over the hills and buy two yaks than to haul three pigs with me in barter. But first, the guy who had the yaks on CraigsList had to believe that a piece of metal was "worth" or "equal to" his yaks. And I guess I believed it too, when I saw his ad.

The "god" Q? You be the Judge.

Speaking of Jared Diamond, his Guns, Germs and Steel was so engrossing to me the first time out - when it first arrived - I'm re-reading it, and it's even better the second time. Here is my gold piece.

Because certain types of thinkers who actually read books like Diamond's or Harari's tend to get emotionally invested in the possible political motivations of writers (and a certain caste of mind will see a surname like Diamond or Harari and go into their books with a specific bias), one thing I'm looking for in Diamond is his politics. I know he followed G, G&S with Collapse, a grand historical warning about the fates of previous human societies that wrecked their own environments. I even saw him give a talk about that book in Berkeley one evening, to a rapt, packed audience.

On page 90 of G, G &S Diamond's talking about how profound the shift to agriculture was. And he tips his hand. There's no hierarchy in hunter-gather band societies because every able-bodied person has to devote a lot of their time to finding food, but under agriculture:

In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of the food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage in full-time political activities.

Yep. The old schoolyard game from here to eternity. Why do some of us regularly forget this stuff? How did these posited original "takers" pull it off? Probably at first by brute strength? "Gimme yer lunch money!"

In HG Wells's Outline Of History, there's always a recurring bunch of heathens on horses who ride in from the north and rape and pillage and take the food.

(Or: I guess "take the food" really is part of pillaging. It's been a while since I've pillaged and I fess up I plum fergit. I'm pretty sure pillaging involves a handful of things, which I do not have the time to list for you here, but when I say something like "the Saxon hordes," what scenario pops up in your imagio? Just go with that.)

In Vico, the savages wandering the forests of the world happen upon a latifundia, and settle for serfdom, which is the beginning of class warfare. It's probably a variation of all these themes?

Later, on the same page (p.90 of Guns, Germs and Steel) Diamond is telling us about how stockpiles of food allowed for people to specialize: there are kings, bureaucrats, and a standing army. And there are those Weird Ones who heat the metals found in the ground and see what they can do with this stuff. Ah-HA! a spear so long, heavy, durable and sharp you can probably run a guy through with it and take all his wheat and cattle!

Oh, and another specialist arises:

Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest.

Note that in the NPR interview Harari says that the Agriculture Revolution is history's biggest fraud. Then he attributes this idea to Diamond. But it's a favorite left-ish political trope. It's in McKenna. It's in Rousseau. You can name others. Probably many others...

Certain things happened, which caused trillions of other things. And I get to sit here, well-fed, and read fat books and blog. I did not grow my own food. I have never hunted. The only gathering I've done was mostly for kicks, and some of it would you might call "stealing." There: I said it.

Back to the Yearn For Green.

It seems like a desperate move. There's no going back. Harari seems to engage in some sort of satirical reductio in saying we may as well download ourselves into silicon and live forever as merged-AI robotic something or others. Other times, only the richest of us get immortality; the rest are losers who have to die the olde fashioned way. (See Harari's bit with Daniel Kahneman.) I see Harari as a legit scholar who's also a skilled polemicist, with a touch of the hermetic-trickster in him; I said above I had not yet read his Sapiens. For now, in my minor discussion of Harari I have merely been practicing Bayard's Art.

How does all this forgetting about the "imagined order" occur? How does it occur that many people seem to have never even encountered these ideas at all? And how are we doing, collectively as a species, with this new "alternative imagined order"?

No way Harari really believes all that stuff about what's in store for our future. At least I hope he's trying to make a satirical point. Myself? I tend to favor sentient flesh. No robot sex for me. We fall for a lot of stuff that thugs and con-artists pull out of the Imagined Order of Reality. Perhaps all we can do today and tomorrow is talk a little bit about the Imagined Order vs. our new Alt. Imagined Order with our friends and loved ones. Maybe?

And I, like Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake (and Ezra Pound?) would like to get back to the Garden. After all, we are stardust. We are golden.

Poetry and Human Nervous Systems

Eight years or so ago I read a book called The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, by Ernest L. Rossi. Subtitled "New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis," it was challenging and almost unduly interesting. When we hear or read words, a fantastic world of non-conscious systems gets kicked into gear. The ramifications staggered me. I remember thinking something along the lines of, "This is too powerful. It can't be correct...can it?" 


We already have life-experiences with language, words, phrases, the way they're conveyed...all of this effects the limbic system and hypothalamus (emotional brain), which reverberates to the frontal cortex. But the emotional brain, being involved, means that information cascades to all parts of the body via the neuropeptide system and involves the endocrine system/autonomic nervous system, and the immune system. And that's just the basics. The book was a tough slog, but a total buzz, and even if I only understood 30% of it, it was worth it. 


The upshot: just more evidence that Descartes was wrong. Mind and body are not separate at all. They have always been a unity, and Descartes fell prey to an overweening rationalism, or a "tender-mindedness," as William James might have put it.


(Around age 12 I accidentally "discovered" that, if I summoned a certain type of image in my "mind" almost immediately a radical reaction took place in an area near my pelvic region...Some academics would hear my personal story, and vis a vis Descartes, say my experience constituted "dissentual data." Okay, but it seemed fairly "sensual" to me!)


In the ensuing months, I began to feel haunted by some ideas Rossi's book seemed to suggest. The book was concerned with the psychobiology of hypnosis and how it "worked" in healing. But it also "suggested" almost too much about the electronic media and politics, how advertising works, how political language could be used...I started to feel paranoid. On this topic of language and politics I will blog in future days, goddess willing, but I'd rather use this time to talk about something beautiful along the lines (hypnotically?) suggested in Rossi's book: poetry, and how it might infuse us, psychobiologically.

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I recently read a lecture that one of my favorite living poets, Robert Hass, gave in May, 2003, in Berkeley, "On Teaching Poetry." In the middle of the lecture he talks about teaching Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a poem he fell in love with in high school.

Here's Hass:

"The narrator of that poem comes across a lonely knight who is 'alone and palely loitering' around a withered lake. The narrator asks him what his ailment is, and the knight tells the story of a beautiful woman, or some kind of female creature, who took him into her cave and made love to him and abandoned him before he woke up in the morning; and he, the knight, can't leave the place where this occurred because she might come back again [...] One of the delicious moments in the poem is the young knight's description of his seduction:

                She looked at me as she did love,
                 And made sweet moan.


"Now, if you will, say that last phrase aloud. 'And made sweet moan.'"

Hass says that when he teaches this, young men in his class are not daydreaming. They are paying attention. But there's a nuance to this charged eroticism about paralysis by ideal beauty, and it's in the physicality of a line like "And made sweet moan." Hass again, on what happens when you say those words:

"...if you articulate just the sequence of vowel sounds - ahhh, aayyy, eeeee, ooooh - is that they begin in the far back of the throat, move to the mid-back, to the mouth, and then breathe out through the lips, in a perfectly modulated and progressive release of breath. That's one of the first things poetry is: the physical structure of the actual breath of a given utterance and its emotion."

Hass says, and I believe him due to personal experience, that even if we read the musicality of poetry to ourselves, there's a mental equivalent to the physical sensation, and it becomes deeply implanted in us, its effects are deeper than any of the "ideas" the poem may be offering. The resonance of our nervous systems and the ideas comes a bit later.

Let us attend to the sounds of words and their musicality.

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The Mad Poet Ezra Pound called this musical aspect of poetry melopoeia. In his essay from 1927 or '28, "How To Read," he says this about melopoeia:


"The melopoeia can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even though he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written. It is practically impossible to transfer or translate it from one language to another, save perhaps by divine accident, and for half a line at a time." - p.25 of Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, but "How To Read" is found all over the place.


NOW: what does this line from Ezra Pound do to all the non-conscious systems in your body?:


                                          As cool as the pale wet leaves 
                                               of lily-of-the-valley,
                                          She lay beside me in the dawn.


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The Hass lecture is from a pressing of only 400 paperbound copies, but it will probably turn up in some collection of his, if it hasn't already. I highly recommend his book of poems, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. It'll do unspeakable things to your entire nervous system!