Looks like fun!

IT looks such fun at the outset: a low-risk fast-track to social identity… fancifying the semiotics of self into an avatar then living through it, one safe step back from reality.

Grooming ourselves to an image is a step popular culture powerfully incites us to take… constructing, inhabiting, then becoming bound to identities we hope others will reward with attention, companionship, opportunities and hard cash. The Photoshopped ideal may be impossible to achieve in the flesh but a fair approximation is alluringly within reach. And it brings us many of the things we crave… not least, a romantic sense of “me”.

But one day, sadly, it’s bound to bite.

In the world — part real, part imagined — that attaches itself to our image, it’s possible, even desirable, to unhook body, mind and spirit from each other, and it’s a rare person who can sustain that sort of existential dismemberment, day in and day out, without a gathering awareness of conflicting needs. Our necessary devotion to sustaining the vital, youthful, attractive image that represents “me” is likely to fully preoccupy us. So, as the groomed self eclipses the real self… happiness gets less reassuring, relationships falter for want of depth… we trust less fully, more conditionally and less impulsively. We feel we’re doing what we “have to” rather than what stimulates or satisfies us. Worse, we sense both the fragility of that “self” that others relate to, and its hold over us. Just when we most need our whole selves, they seem furthest from us… denial and anti-depressants are easier.

Real “real life” is an unstoppable process that rolls implacably along: from birth, through childhood, into adulthood, on to old age and, finally, to death. Our bodies are magnets for scars, lines that deepen to wrinkles, imperfect teeth, cellulite, liver spots, split ends and grey hairs. Our skin dehydrates and roughens, our muscles lose tone. Our demeanour drifts; our hair thins, our libido wanes and our memory unwinds; our stamina weakens. Pains and aches disturb our sleep and change our gait. Short of dying young there’s no way to stop it.

The physical trajectory of life is vividly clear. What popular culture would deny us is the opportunity for that trajectory to be experienced as liberating, continually surprising and filled with meaning and delight — as an ongoing release into the full flow of life.

The great secret of life is not about making it last forever; it’s about living it well. It’s about following vectors of beauty, truth, passion, curiosity and love every step of the way — and it takes some time to learn the art. Popular culture is not about living life well; it’s become a heavily promoted, cash-flow driven escape from life, as abusive as it is addictive.

So, more and more, for example, we see “normal” physiological processes being re-branded — and medicated — as pathologies. There are pills to govern sleeping and wakefulness, activity levels, moods and emotions, appetites and libidos. And such is the anxiety about pain levels that we’ll take painkillers when we feel a headache “coming on”. And there’s advertising to focus us on our disappointments and encourage our sense of entitlement to a never-ending twenties-something “lifestyle”. It renders us less free to be, to become or to explore the truths of our relationship with experience… and it’s all about market extension.

So, in the churning wake of global “Big Pharma”, there bobs along the less intimidating nuisance of the “health products” industry, its extracts, potions and placebos all of which would be obviated by a sensibly varied diet, the acceptance of minor discomfort and a little more exercise.

Similarly specious, but with more marketing whack, are the overtures of processed food purveyors who have taken to add “health” claims to their products, usually based on alleged properties of additives they have added to all of the other additives. So, along with the preservatives, colourants and colour retention agents, acids and acid regulators, thickeners, bulking agents, texture and moisture regulators, emulsifiers, artificial flavourings, salt, sugar, corn syrup and canola oil… we also get vitamins, iron, antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, fibre… breakfast is about making my bowels move after all of the substances I’ve unwittingly just consumed? This is “reality”?

In 2010, Joanna Jastrzebska, a psychiatrist in North Shields, England, wrote in frustration to New Scientist magazine about seeing “an increasing number of people consulting psychiatrists for all sorts of life-related problems and using diagnostic terms to tell us that they are ‘depressed’, ‘bipolar’ or ‘suicidal’.

“I am astounded,” she wrote,  “by the number of people who come to me for a diagnosis, and who then are unhappy when I try to explain that this is called ‘life’.

“At first “I thought it was all the fault of us doctors, that we medicalise these poor, unhappy, non-coping people. But the longer I work, the more clearly I see that people want a ‘diagnosis’ because a diagnosis means there must be a treatment, and a treatment amounts to an easy way of getting their life or themselves fixed. …They want tablets to stop them crying, although their mother died only a few weeks ago, or something to calm them down when they become aggressive after they have a drink. They ask us to sort out their unruly children who have ever known any boundaries. They want it sorted and they want it now. This problem is partly a result of the modern pressure to be happy and advert-perfect all the time; if you aren’t, there must be something wrong with you.”

By the beginning of the millennium, anti-ageing treatments and technologies were a serious business. It’s led to some eloquent moments of naivety. In 2009, for example, the American Advertising Standards Authority compelled Estee Lauder to withdraw an advertisement after a touchingly credulous customer complained that Estee Lauder’s premium-priced Tri-Aktiline Instant Deep Wrinkle Filler failed to make her wrinkles “disappear instantly” as the advertisement claimed it would.

Cosmetic surgery, in the United States alone, was a $10 billion a year industry by 2007. That was the year that, at the terrifyingly advanced age of 44, the erstwhile Hollywood actress Demi Moore, by then married to her 29 year-old third husband and having spent half a million dollars on cosmetic surgery, announced she’d drawn a line in the sand and launched a campaign against “ageism” in Hollywood… she wasn’t getting $12 million movie roles any more.

That kind of ego-gouging discrimination is disproportionately but not exclusively inflicted on women. For men, the nightmare issue is “erectile dysfunction”: the inability to indefinitely sustain a hammer-hard erection. In fact, a song to celebrate this decrepitude, called The Fumbler’s Rant, was doing the rounds in Glasgow, Scotland, back in the early 19th century. It went, in part, like this:

     Come Carls a’ of Fumbler’s Ha’,             (old men all of Fumbler’s Hall)

      and I will tell you o’ our fate,

      Since we ha’e married wives that’s braw,         

      and canna please them when ’tis late.

      A pint we’ll tak, our hearts to chear;

      what fauts we ha’e, our wives can tell;              (faults)

      Gar bring us in baith ale and beer,                    (then… both)

      the auldest bairn we hae’s oursell.                    (oldest child)

      Our bairn’s tocher is a’ paid,                             (child’s dowry)

      we’re masters o’ the gear our sel';           (masters of our own goods)

      Let either weel or wae betide,                           (good or bad)

      here’s a health to a’ the wives that’s yell.        (barren)

Nowadays, let this sort of libido failure last three months, and many doctors — instead of pulling a fumbler’s pint to celebrate — will deem it a “clinical condition. Erectile dysfunction crushes the self-esteem of 40 per cent of 40 year-old men and 70 per cent of 70 year-old men. It’s caused by a complicated set of interacting psychosocial, neurological, and vascular factors commonly known as “ageing”. Come on, guys. It’s permission to relax, to lighten up and laugh.

While, on the one hand, there’s this aversion to life-as-it-is, there’s an almost hysterical reluctance to let go of it.

The Eighth International Congress on Anti-Ageing and Biomedical Technology in 2000, held not inappropriately in Las Vegas, gambling capital of the world, attracted more than 3,300 physicians and scientists — “experts” — half of whom said they fully expected to live to be at least 120 years old. For the men, that would add about 45 years of erectile dysfunction anxiety to their lives and, for the women, more than 32 additional years of expensively disappointing encounters with miracle moisturizing creams.

It’s ironic that, while youthfulness is such a favoured state, so many people seem eager to vest greater proportions of their whole-life experience in the socially despised and marginalised condition of old age… all of those added years of incontinence and hospital gowns, your butt moulded to a bedpan, gumming food that tastes like denatured tapioca and sitting in your wheelchair in “care facility” lounges watching daytime television or comparing medical histories. I lack words to express how much I’d sooner slash my wrists with the shards of a freshly-emptied bottle of malt whisky.

In contexts like these, it’s perplexing to realise that there’ve been simpler societies that have not only accepted ageing but have embraced it with genuine respect for the elderly. Their respect had to do with the wisdom their elders gained through real-life encounters with real stuff in the real world… and perhaps they were not so lacking in grace as to spend their time trying to ape the hyperactive sex lives of 20 year-olds.

Around the whole of what can be thought of as “popular culture” there runs a fence — the morbid fear of death — but popular culture is so vast and vigorous that there is no need to constantly fret about it. More noticeable is the strong attractive force at its centre: a comfort zone.

Comfort zones, sustained as they are by pharmaceuticals, mass media, 24/7 entertainment and the efficiency of supermarkets, and accessorised with high tech toys and other totems of consumption, provide at least the mirage of a life without pain or uncertainty, or threats of unfamiliar moods and foods, sensations and vexations.

So the further one imagines venturing from the hearth of one’s comfort zone, the larger looms the razor-wire of fear: fears of criminals, of spiders, of asteroid strikes and of terrorists, of foreigners, of dogs and cats, bedbugs and crowds, of “third hand smoke” (the lethal residues that are said to linger where people used to smoke), of carcinogens and snakes, of the “devil”, of alien abductors, of darkness, of young people, of germs and allergens and “bad things” in general, imagined and unimaginable.

To be persuasive, a genuine risk needn’t even exist. Almost anything a little unusual — a petite woman with her head demurely covered by a headscarf, for example — can get a hotter hazard rating than real and immediate dangers that lurk in the inner sanctum of the comfort zone. In most societies, for example, murder victims are far more likely to have been done-in by a friend, acquaintance or family member than by any of the countless strangers they’re bound to have met during their shortened lives. Accidents carry off many more souls than assaults. Your car and your home are high-risk areas. And obesity is deadlier yet… statistically, fast food queues are killing zones.

Popular culture creates the illusion that there’s always an “off” switch to deal with discomfort. It gives breath to the lie that our actions needn’t carry consequences and that virtual worlds do no harm. But, at the end, it can feel like impalement… and that shouldn’t be a surprise: it’s not as though we evolved to inhabit comfort zones.

The Astroturf is no greener out there. It’s not even Astroturf… it’s grass, and YOUR LIFE, your real life that’s out there. It’s freedom and it’s wonderful.

One day, you’re almost sure to hear it howling, like a wolf in the night.

I suggest you run to it.

Freedom’s where spirits expand and “lives” become life. 

Making connections

IMAGINE the emotions that seized human consciousness as its first possessors began to realise the enormity of the mystery that they’d been thrust into. They had the same minds and intellectual powers as we do but none of our media-mongered notions, formal learning or complicated ideas.

Which, of course, is the way that each of us is born today: as “primitives”, vulnerable to particular, personal and possibly unusual experiences. As we grow up, we learn to put a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’: we become “sophisticated” while our ancient ancestors remain, to us, “primitive”. Our origins are something we like to think we’ve moved beyond, and elevated ourselves above. We tend to think vertically about such things, forgetting that it’s still earth that lies beneath our feet.

Our earliest ancestors were impressive by many of the standards we cherish today. They were tough, courageous, innovative, curious and insightful. We may not know much about the details of their lives or thoughts, but we can learn from them none the less. They were faced, as we come to be faced, with the knowledge that we have been created by forces we can neither explain nor control, and that at every breathing moment we are still nakedly vulnerable — so… what are we to do? Ultimately, the order we devise in our lives is illusory and we are each of us inescapably alone. We experience nothing except by way our own, unique, personal consciousness. And each of us must face the infinite alone.

It was a powerful experience of that when I was about 18 that kicked in my awareness of a different “self”.

I’d been skin-diving alone and was coming out of the water onto the remote boulder beach of an isolated island… I still like times of solitude.

It was dusk, a storm was imminent and the light was getting low. There was a sudden crackle of lightning and a crash of thunder. Great heavy drops of rain began to pound down from a flashing ogre-sky heaped with red-tinged blackness and power. The drops of rain burst on the sea-swell, which seemed to breathe, every drawn-out rise and fall rolling rocks about so they chuckled and clinked. And I was standing naked in the rain on the rocks.

So enormous seemed the moment that time looped and coiled within it while the shore chuckled and pea-sized raindrops, bitterly cold, struck my flesh like bites from a whip. I was transfixed. My teeth chattered and the wind rose and the lightning snapped and harried the bulk of the clouds that rolled and tumbled about but never parted, although the sinking sun daubed fleeting blushes of orange and deep red here and there. I felt I could not move no matter how much I willed it. And, through the coldness, there began to break a feeling at first of something like panic, and then of transparency.

Everything dissolved into far bigger kind of everything, filled with every sound and every feeling — a magnificent immensity in which I seemed to be feeling all of my emotions and ideas simultaneously, and they were just a tiny part of what I was experiencing. They blew apart in the wind and I lost awareness of my body and my identity. I felt I needed to pull my being to a centre before I vanished, but the core I was clenching myself around was strange to me, something new: a perceiving but motionless place and, as I closed around it, the cold passed and then the sky darkened altogether. It became very still, but the stillness was mine.

I lit a fire and warmed up, the stars came out and I felt transformed. I had no words or imagination for what I’d experienced but slept that night in a pure kind of peace. Since then, I’ve been very aware of a vast, unknowable but immediately present reality to the universe, myself and other people that envelops the few dimensions that are open to our casual experience.

It’s as though what we inhabit in the “everyday” is the dusty surface of just one face of a multifaceted diamond: a flat surface we crawl around on as though that’s all there is. And we have to let go of that “everyday” to be startled into life by the inexplicable infinities that lie both “out there” and within. In that brilliance, we become transparent. When we cling to our little selves, the brilliance fades. It’s a reality that came to me as something wholly strange and that I’ve since needed to explore.

It’s a mystery within which there are no directions. It gave me a tear-loosening awareness of beauty and how precious it is to the core of our being, and how available it is: there is not, for example, one single colour or natural form that is of itself unbeautiful. And, since that evening, I have never had a nightmare, nor do remember feeling afraid. I still can recover that feeling at will, and I go there in solitary reflection. It changes me and challenges me.

I’m lifted whenever I re-kindle the embers of that experience. I’ve described it very poorly here but, for want of better words, and without knowing or believing or hypothesising what the word “god” might identify, It gave me a great calm of trust in the unknowable; in the mystery, in “god” if you like. Whatever it may be, some array of forces and energies brought us to this point and gives us everything we know or can possibly know… who are we to be picky? Besides, we’re in no position to change the actuality of existence… be it our own, or anything else’s.

The experience is one that’s potentially available to everyone — and I’m sure it’s one that many of my ancestors knew. The North American people called it, or something very like it, a “vision quest” and all boys — and, I understand, many women — traditionally sought it as a necessary gateway to adulthood.

I SHOULD add that the sea for me back then in my youth was more than a playground; it was a second home. I entered it with feelings of respect, but also of familiarity, and more happily than any safely sequestered schoolroom. I was born and grew up in New Zealand and a huge amount of my time was spent in, on, under or beside the Pacific Ocean or Tasman Sea. As kids, we played there year-round. It was where many of us adventured, learned and matured. Everything we needed was there: excitement, life, sun and wind and snack food (there were no snack bars: we simply feasted on raw shellfish). I learned to swim as a pre-schooler, began diving with a mask and snorkel when I was eight or nine, and sailing and surfing when I was around 12.

From fish, I learned something about risk and to know what a “food chain” is: fish live in a predator-prey world, a fundamental relationship that’s made endurable by satiation (getting full) and by circumstance. Prey fish and penguins have no fear of a shark that’s recently fed. A feasted shark becomes lethargic, easeful and relatively placid. A hunting shark gives out entirely different signals, and they are unmistakable. I learned young to have no great fear of sharks or orcas (killer whales); a friend and I swam with them readily: a shark under water is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful creatures alive. The level of popular fear in relation to sharks is inexplicable: a beachgoer’s chances of being attacked by a shark has been reckoned at fewer than one in 264 million. Bees, dogs and horses are much more deadly and, if you’re on the water, a boat is more likely to kill you than a shark. More people are killed by lightning than by sharks.

Sharks are graceful, agile and powerful creatures. We mostly played with harmless school sharks, but we saw hammerheads and a few mako underwater. Being near a mako shark like that is electrifying. There’s an assertion of significance that radiates from the streamlined muscularity, the grace, the languid power and sheer presence of a mako. It is there, and then in an instant vanishes. Each time I saw a mako, I wondered afterwards whether I might not have imagined its presence.

And to be peered at and appraised by the tranquil eye of an orca three feet away changed my sense of selfhood, compelled as I was by that stare to know that there was a consciousness in there, far more wisely attuned to the sea than I could ever be, and probably smarter. I also found I could get to know and be known by families of reef fish.

It’s occurred to me that maybe the level of generalised fearfulness in our society has something to do with our never satiating. We’ve found ways to make consumption endless, and not just through online shopping and 24/7 malls. On one hand, money lets us postpone consumption but to hoard the potential to consume; on the other, debt enables us to have now what we can’t pay for until later. And economists keep telling us that a lack of growth — stability — is failure. The treadmill has to keep accelerating, whereas the shark swims by.

ANOTHER environment that was always close at hand to me as a child was the beautiful New Zealand bush. Thanks to an interestingly enlightened biology teacher, I learned to listen from birds. A bird called the “tui”, like whales, has family-specific and region-specific calls. If you spend enough time in the bush, you begin to know what part of the country you are in from the tui calls. The whole fabric of bush life is somehow held together acoustically: by bird and insect calls.

I could lie in the bush and close my eyes and listen as the thick press of plants became transparent. I learned that I could experience and remember a place of things heard… as vivid and as interesting as the place of things seen. I preferred that to movies as a kid, partly because my friends and I rarely got to go to the local cinema anyway and, as my parents had no television, the conventions were alien to me… but also because they never got things “right”: I always wanted to understand my own experience in those days before entertainment mattered.

ALL of this, became, for me, “spirit-scape”. I’m not going to make the mistake of trying to define “spirit” or “soul” any further than I have, except to suggest that maybe it’s got hard to find because we want to see it as a “thing” or a substance, when it’s really an assortment of seemingly disparate experiences.

We’ve got so overly used to thinking in terms of “things” that I’m sure a caterpillar’s similarity to other caterpillars far clearer to us than its similarity to the chrysalis it becomes or the butterfly that emerges.

The essence of things is easily overlooked but, with no sense of it, we are poorly equipped to understand ourselves, let alone caterpillars. The caterpillar is the same living creature as the butterfly, and what I think of as “my spirit” is, in as essential a way, a constant experiential reality. It’s there… it just shape-shifts and looks different, depending on what’s going on.

Mutability, not invariability, is where the greater truth seems to lie… and for us, perhaps the necessary mutability is within, in consciousness.

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Also see: Looking for truth