For The Wild - STEPHEN JENKINSON on a Lucid Reckoning ⧸349

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00:02:40.240 hello and welcome to for the wild podcast i'm ayana young today we are speaking with stephen

00:02:51.880 jenkinson we tend to change the things we can afford to change we tend to voluntarily live

00:02:58.800 without the things that we could kind of live without anyway it's a rare circumstance when

00:03:04.300 people cease their search for the corporate and systemic bad guys long enough to consider

00:03:11.240 all the micro decisions that go into a normal day of sustaining the status quo.

00:03:17.780 I mean, sure, there's bad guys, you know, but we are more than capable of duping ourselves

00:03:24.160 and each other.

00:03:26.200 Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW, is an author, culture activist, ceremonialist, and farmer.

00:03:33.300 He teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, founded in 2010, with master's degrees from Harvard University, Theology, and the University of Toronto, Social Work.

00:03:46.420 He has worked extensively with dying people and their families, is a former program director in a major Canadian hospital, and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school.

00:03:57.520 He is the author of several books, including Reckoning, A Generation's Worth, Come of Age, Money and the Soul's Desire, and the award-winning Die Wise, A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul.

00:04:09.560 well Stephen I'm so excited to be back with you after a few years it's really been altering to

00:04:23.180 have connected with you a few times in the past decade and I'm looking forward to these wanderings

00:04:30.480 we'll go through together today let's see if I got the stuff okay well gosh yeah there's so much

00:04:38.560 stuff to wade through. And I recently became aware of a book that you have come out with

00:04:46.040 called Reckoning with Kimberly Ann Johnson, who we had on the podcast recently. And I think it'd

00:04:51.440 be a great place to begin thinking through the process of what reckoning in times like these

00:04:57.380 might mean and how we can engage with the dance of reckoning. Of course, not trying to figure it out

00:05:05.000 or looking for solutions, but just being with the reckoning of this time.

00:05:10.680 Surely. I think by the process of elimination, we figured that that's what we were doing.

00:05:17.240 I said reconnoitering, that sounded too neutral. And then reconciling, well, that was premature.

00:05:24.880 So we ended up with reckoning, which no matter what the Bible, I was going to say the dictionary

00:05:31.260 and somehow that came out instead.

00:05:33.180 Well, either one.

00:05:34.720 When reckoning shows up, it tends to have a sound of real mastery about it.

00:05:40.660 But I don't think that's what it is.

00:05:42.020 I think the reckoning that we did, at least, is a willingness to see things.

00:05:48.360 Now, that sounds pretty mundane.

00:05:51.240 But if you consider how many varieties of aversion there are available,

00:05:55.560 and highly sought after too, then you might credit the real possibility that

00:06:02.200 the willingness to see things as they are turns out to be a kind of fit of lucidity

00:06:08.940 in a strange time. I'm just reminded now that apparently right at the turn of the last century,

00:06:15.140 there was an official sort of hermit laureate of New York City, not poet laureate, but hermit

00:06:21.800 laureate a kind of um enfranchised and highly regarded person who'd utterly withdrawn i'm sure

00:06:31.100 she's not the only one her version of what a hermetic life can give you came to this

00:06:37.240 that what's crucial now is that we see things for what they are that's what that's what all

00:06:43.760 those years of silence and refuge had brought her to and it's it's not a kind of solution clarity

00:06:52.340 It's a kind of absolution clarity, I guess you could call it.

00:06:57.440 So I think we favored ourselves in that way and took it upon ourselves to be as faithful as we could about the carnage.

00:07:07.060 And this was just on the back end of, if there is a back end to COVID-19, I'm not sure there is.

00:07:13.360 But anyway, the more spectacular parts of the process had abated by this time.

00:07:19.440 by the time we were we hooked up and um we didn't know each other at all in fact i i hadn't heard

00:07:26.540 her name before before speaking with her the first time and uh i didn't have my glasses on

00:07:32.900 and so i missed the visuals and the visuals would have indicated to me clearly that she was basically

00:07:40.000 weeping the whole encounter which i think lasted about 90 minutes and she wasn't sobbing obviously

00:07:47.500 I think I would have picked that up but she was after her fashion in a mournful state

00:07:54.120 and when she wrote later on that day to thank me for the the time that we'd had together

00:08:00.740 she happened to mention this in passing that she was a basically a wreck and my recommendation was

00:08:07.120 let's get back on the horse then before the obligation to be okay you know for the sake 0.92

00:08:11.980 of family and work and all the rest of it sort of kicks in and moves into the spare room

00:08:16.640 that's what we did and that was that was the genesis of the the book a kind of unexpected

00:08:22.940 carnage yeah i'm thinking about unexpected carnage those words together and um in a lot

00:08:32.580 of ways i think i expect carnage at this point and getting back to that word reckoning just

00:08:39.840 sitting with those those words and what they're bringing up for me and i guess i'm considering

00:08:45.160 both individually and collectively where do you see the most carnage or what do you see as the

00:08:52.560 spaces that need to be reckoned with the most well it's a it's a rough act to to establish a

00:09:02.920 kind of pecking order for mayhem really you don't want to have to be in a position to do it but we

00:09:08.820 have a lot of as you say a lot of contenders for the top five the top 10 whatever it is so in no

00:09:17.400 particular order but as they occur to me in a scale of urgency um i think the recognition that

00:09:24.340 it's it's profoundly too late for a lot of the notions that people still insist on floating

00:09:31.200 solution-wise the notion that a market economy a consumer culture will of its own accord

00:09:40.380 choose to uh curtail its active its buying activities i mean i think if i were to choose one

00:09:47.220 it would be the the sad unlikelihood that a culture addicted to personal choice and and

00:09:55.100 sovereignty and all the rest, can't find a way to nominate itself for austerity and for

00:10:03.800 ratcheting down the volume, at least not voluntarily. I think that's probably the big

00:10:11.380 one. Because we know at the level of science, I would guess, at the level of technology and

00:10:18.480 all the innovations and so on, that there is a kind of collective alertness to what needs doing,

00:10:26.940 certainly what's come to pass. But we're undone by another reality that we are the heirs of and

00:10:35.560 the authors of. And that's the notion that nobody should be told what to do, that we have, you know,

00:10:42.860 able-bodied citizenry fully capable of exercising the responsibilities of democracy.

00:10:48.480 I mean, it's palpably, demonstrably not the case, unless you consider self-destruction to be an exercise in democracy.

00:10:59.080 So with great lament, I acknowledge that the limitations that we fail to take upon ourselves now voluntarily will come to roost as mandates and not as possibilities sooner than later, I think.

00:11:14.800 Hmm. So I guess I'm wondering from that response, are you, or should we be questioning

00:11:23.460 that desire for sovereignty or are we resisting the wrong things in our culture, in our over

00:11:33.480 culture? Sometimes I think that maybe not that specifically, but I've wondered whether it's

00:11:39.980 with protest or fighting back against the system? Are we just weaving ourselves more into the

00:11:47.880 system? Are we actually finding the portal through or are we getting more entangled within it?

00:11:55.620 Yeah, I think the way you've asked the question indicates that you have a fairly disturbing sense

00:12:01.880 of what the likely answer is, that I think you've answered it. And I would agree with you

00:12:05.460 But it's more likely the second scenario. I'll take a page from my days in the death trade on this one and say, you know, it wasn't that people were dying. It's not easy. But dying in and of itself is not the unhingement that consumer culture of Anglo North America would have us believe.

00:12:28.540 it's dying in a death phobic culture that is the road to ruin for so many dying people

00:12:36.280 it's the context you see it's not the event and uh the context of is a death phobic one

00:12:43.580 as a result then when people are dying you'd reasonably expect that the death phobia would

00:12:51.640 come to call that it would gather itself not literally around the deathbed nearly as much as

00:12:56.780 around all the decision making all the posturing all the relationship cantankerous and otherwise

00:13:04.200 with the powers that be in the health care systems uh in the health care system certainly

00:13:09.500 but just as certainly in the culture more generally and i use that to reflect upon what

00:13:17.680 you've said in in this fashion the notion that a freely self-determining people will by definition

00:13:25.520 gravitate towards sanity and and good solution making simply because they're free to choose it

00:13:35.140 just doesn't hold one of the ways we make sure that we're on the path that we're on

00:13:39.880 it's not an alternative it's an it's another a bit of a i might be too strong to call it smoke

00:13:46.540 and mirrors but certainly the notion of unabridged self-determination is a consumer reality it's a

00:13:55.260 consumer orientation to life, I think. I certainly don't think it's a responsible one in the literal

00:13:59.980 sense of the term, capable of responding. It's capable of pulling out, maybe. So with great

00:14:08.120 reluctance and great sorrow, I acknowledge with you that the chances are pretty good now

00:14:12.160 that most of the solutions that don't disturb things fundamentally come from the things,

00:14:19.680 not from an alternative the people left to their own devices it would appear you know it would

00:14:26.980 seem to work to say that people are doing their best when they get the correct information and

00:14:33.520 the you know the correct science and things of this kind you know an individual turn is a matter

00:14:40.040 of of convenience in most cases it's not a matter of necessity it's a matter of convenience in other

00:14:46.520 words, we tend to change the things we can afford to change. We tend to, you know, voluntarily live

00:14:53.800 without the things that we could kind of live without anyway. It's a rare circumstance when

00:15:00.020 people cease their search for the bad guys, the corporate and systemic bad guys long enough

00:15:07.520 to consider all the micro decisions that go into a normal day of sustaining the status quo.

00:15:16.520 Oh, yeah. Well, I'm really glad you're speaking to this in this way because I

00:15:24.260 have been in a quandary and a deep inquiry around where we are and where we've been,

00:15:32.600 especially in the last three years, but also the last decade or so when there's clearly been so

00:15:39.700 much information being fed to us, but where is it getting us? I can't see us getting closer to

00:15:48.800 connection or reciprocity. I'm not saying everywhere, of course, it's a general statement,

00:15:55.700 but looking at climate change or decisions being made by our political leaders and even decisions

00:16:05.600 being made on an individual level, it feels really chaotic. And willy-nilly is the word

00:16:14.560 that came to me. I don't know why, but that's kind of how I feel like we're all

00:16:18.360 running around trying, maybe not trying anymore, maybe thought we were trying and

00:16:25.160 I can't quite tell what we... And I guess the we I'm speaking to are the ones that

00:16:32.320 are conscious or think we're awake to the realities of this time.

00:16:37.320 And I'm not trying to judge myself or any one of us. I have a lot of compassion for the confusion

00:16:44.020 and the frustration and even choosing complicity at times. I can say that for myself. There's

00:16:53.320 moments where I throw my hands up and say, where do we go from here? So yeah, a lot of

00:17:00.420 a lot of being in the trouble, sticking with the trouble. And I want to bring up your book,

00:17:08.840 A Generation's Worth. And you write, quote, over time, money became a surrogate for kinship.

00:17:15.160 It replaced the old hospitality of kinfolk, the radical etiquette of trade,

00:17:20.500 the mutual recognition of cultural patrimony of worth. It probably started off as a stand-in

00:17:27.780 for the soul of trade and shunted the soul of the traders to the side, and by virtue of its

00:17:33.220 essential emptiness became the soulless soul of commerce." I'm wondering, how has modernity duped

00:17:45.500 us into thinking we should feel fulfilled with inherently unfulfilling things like money or

00:17:52.900 continual consumption, or even, you know, some of the things that we've been speaking to earlier,

00:17:59.020 like resistance or democracy. I'm not persuaded that we've been duped, really. I don't mean that

00:18:07.540 we got it, you know, that there's clarity all around. Certainly, that's not so. But the notion

00:18:13.100 that we are constantly and incontrovertibly on the receiving end of a kind of cabal of malfeasance

00:18:22.180 somewhere, ensconced somewhere. I mean, sure, there's bad guys, you know, but we are,

00:18:30.960 the capital W, we of Anglo-North America are more than capable of duping ourselves and each other.

00:18:41.600 You know, if you think about the proliferation of, quote, information, that's a very neutral

00:18:47.400 word for what it is. But if you think about how it gets where it goes, it's not because the guys

00:18:54.500 with their fingers on the buttons are sending it where it goes. It's because the likes of

00:18:59.740 everybody else are in on circulating the stuff, right? I mean, these things are, they don't have

00:19:06.720 a lot of adjudication attached to them. The sensoria is excited by them. And round and round

00:19:14.980 it goes and uh you know one of the clinical sort of psychic and mythic dilemmas of anglo north

00:19:22.860 america is what used to until recently be called or probably still is the fear of missing out right

00:19:30.200 the fear of not being in on the inside track as if you know being on the on the force the forced

00:19:39.200 end of the fire hose of information constitutes you being on the inside and being on the receiving

00:19:46.600 end of the metrics that come from your own predispositions your own anxieties your own

00:19:52.860 habits because of course that's what they're selling to you so you can either you know spend

00:19:59.600 an ignored amount of time figuring out who they are and and then i don't know what happens after

00:20:07.240 that. Or you can change your habits for crying out loud and reconsider whether or not you passing

00:20:16.040 things along because you find them titillating or compelling or must-see for everybody else

00:20:21.900 achieves what you imagine it does.

00:20:26.240 Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm wondering, alongside the value of community and kinship,

00:20:37.240 you also identify the value in strangerhood. And I'd love to talk a bit more about that.

00:20:45.600 Well, strangerhood is a number of things at the same time. First one is there is such a thing.

00:20:53.540 Second thing is it's not a problem. And so the third thing would be the stranger in your midst

00:20:59.780 is not to be corrected and turned into another one of you. The stranger in your midst is the

00:21:06.100 opportunity literally for the best of your culture, which I would call etiquette. That's

00:21:12.940 what I'm thinking of now. The best of your culture comes forward on the occasion of the encounter

00:21:18.660 with the stranger, wherein you're not trying to diminish the strangerhood of the person in your

00:21:25.880 midst. You've engaged the stranger as the opportunity for you to get your own situation

00:21:31.540 clarified and the best of you manifest. In other words, you're not speaking the shorthand

00:21:37.940 of kinship and familiarity with a stranger for obvious reasons. You're speaking the long hand

00:21:44.900 of a kind of profound and well-considered cultural patrimony that takes the form of

00:21:52.080 how you are with people unfamiliar with you and you with them. If you picture that in the context

00:21:58.580 of table fellowships you can certainly see what i'm pleading for here and and people do do it of

00:22:04.940 course in the context of their home lives you know i just came back from israel just in time for the

00:22:12.260 place to blow up you know one more time and i was on the receiving end of a certain not much

00:22:18.300 hate mail and as hate mail goes it probably wasn't the most hateful thing ever but still in all people

00:22:24.320 who clearly anointed themselves of having a greater understanding of the complexities of

00:22:29.900 these matters than I have strongly suggested I had no business going anywhere where they were

00:22:35.820 interested in boycotting. The notion, of course, being that they had a greater understanding of

00:22:41.580 Israel by not going than anybody could ever achieve by going. I'm not pretending I don't

00:22:47.220 understand the appeal of a boycott. I mean, I'm old enough to remember South Africa and then some.

00:22:52.540 What I'm saying here, though, is we don't all have to do the same thing.

00:22:56.960 And as it happened, I was a stranger in their midst for about two weeks.

00:23:02.020 And I worked with large groups of people almost every day for those two-week period.

00:23:07.400 And I can tell you that there was a lot of consequence, dynamically speaking, to me being there.

00:23:13.500 I'm not crediting myself with any particularly helpful consequence.

00:23:17.500 consequence what i mean is simply because i was there and i wasn't one of them and they were

00:23:24.280 concerned to make themselves understood without defending themselves because these all these

00:23:30.960 matters are extremely complicated of course and they seduce you in the direction of paralysis

00:23:37.180 constantly and that might be one of those places on earth that will never get fixed i don't know

00:23:42.100 but I was really taken with seeing over and over again how the autopilot that they would engage in

00:23:50.500 if they had to defend themselves against accusations from outside was suspended because

00:23:56.420 I wasn't doing that. I was simply not seeing things their way but very deeply committed to

00:24:04.280 seeing them and somehow they felt the difference and they responded accordingly and there was

00:24:11.200 something about their willingness to be seen in an unguarded way that was a direct consequence of

00:24:16.680 the fact that I wasn't pretending I was more familiar with them and their plight than I was.

00:24:22.420 And it brought something out in them, which I, again, I'm taking no credit for at all. I'm saying

00:24:28.540 that's the dynamic that I'm describing to you now. And it just happened a couple of weeks ago. And,

00:24:33.440 you know, I'm in touch with these people now and they're writhing. They're absolutely writhing.

00:24:39.760 And, you know, they're working on their scene from the inside.

00:24:44.840 And God knows where it goes, but it's a beautiful and, in some sense, anarchic life lesson to be a stranger in the midst of people with a highly politicized, highly polemical background to them.

00:25:01.840 You know, if they're willing to be undefended, they're trying to figure it out, you see.

00:25:06.280 sometimes it's the presence of a stranger

00:25:09.740 whose strangerhood is not taken to be a problem to solve

00:25:14.780 that can have enormous

00:25:16.560 kind of recalibrating consequence

00:25:19.700 and sometimes redemptive consequence too

00:25:29.200 Beneath the truth lies the bones

00:25:34.580 Of a truth

00:25:39.740 More complete

00:25:43.920 Than I'll bet everything I own

00:25:48.420 Is a truth

00:25:53.940 That's bittersweet

00:25:57.840 Beneath the waves of pleasure

00:26:03.680 Or beneath the tangled sheets

00:26:12.080 It all comes together

00:26:17.360 Still it's all bittersweet

00:26:26.100 Peers to the high, peers to the low, the human heart endures, and so it goes, and so it goes.

00:26:56.100 Yeah, I'm thinking about strangerhood in its connection to othering and belonging and

00:27:08.180 being present in this extremely divisive time where people seem to look for hatred amongst

00:27:20.800 each other or differences to disconnect us. It seems like inviting in the stranger is a type of

00:27:28.440 way of challenging that notion. And I don't know, I wonder what it's calling on us to be comfortable

00:27:37.240 with strangerhood when people are getting more and more insulated, I guess. And we're seeing

00:27:44.840 where that's taking us. Nowhere good, obviously. And of course, as it gets harder to live on this

00:27:55.260 planet that was once so inhabitable for us, I wonder how that plays into the future when water

00:28:04.180 becomes more scarce and the skies become smokier and it gets hotter. And we need to find some way

00:28:12.120 of getting along with strangers, or maybe we don't. I mean, that's the other thing. We don't

00:28:16.700 necessarily need to do anything. We can keep going down the path we're going down, but

00:28:21.400 it doesn't seem like a really connective way to live. And so, I wonder if you connect those things,

00:28:30.380 getting comfortable with strangers and the etiquette of that and how that relates to...

00:28:36.760 And I don't know if it relates to belonging in general, but I think it's a type of stretching and a practice that would be really good for us.

00:28:47.740 You know, I'm not advocating personally the idea that we get comfortable with strangerhood.

00:28:54.920 Because I think comfort is the halfway house to turning the stranger into another person that you kind of know or presume that you sort of know or you know good enough.

00:29:03.720 Or, you know, there's strangerhood, the intensity of it.

00:29:06.760 wanes as a consequence of you being comfortable by virtue of the stranger being in your midst

00:29:13.160 you can't say we in such a facile way that the notion of we kind of decomposes

00:29:22.000 and uh and you have to find alternative ways of expressing yourself that don't use what i

00:29:28.700 called earlier the shorthand of familiarity so i i don't think the the job here is to turn down

00:29:36.000 the strangerhood i think it's the presence of the strangerhood and the kind of gravel it introduces

00:29:42.740 into the automaticness of things it's that i'm appealing to and uh if we get good at that it

00:29:49.600 doesn't mean getting comfortable with it it means it means practicing it without exercising a degree

00:29:57.700 of omniscience on the matter you know that that somehow you magically understand how this goes

00:30:03.360 because don't forget somewhere in the middle of the strangerhood is a person or a group of people

00:30:10.780 it's not a concept and those people may be proceeding much differently so that if your

00:30:18.280 culture is going to be otherwise as a consequence of strangers in your midst it can't be because

00:30:23.580 the stranger is quote behaving themselves this is an enormous challenge to a relatively

00:30:29.680 I don't know if I should use the word open society at this juncture, but a nominally

00:30:35.080 democratic society there. How's that? The idea that the stranger is on their best behavior

00:30:41.600 is not a prerequisite for us seeing ourselves clearly. But it's an enormous challenge to see

00:30:49.040 it that way and to allow the real possibility that the strangers in your midst may bring to

00:30:54.300 the fore, your reactivities, because they don't look as you'd presume a stranger who's glad to

00:31:02.280 be among you should behave or should look. Along with strangerhood, another word that I've

00:31:08.500 seen come up in your work recently is companioning. And of course, I think I see the value

00:31:15.480 in companioning and supporting each other through these times. But I'm wondering, how can we offer

00:31:22.180 a companionship that does not seek to merely appease, but rather offers meaningful challenge

00:31:29.620 and critical thought? I'm thinking as a Canadian now, yeah, we've become somewhat infamous now

00:31:38.280 for the entire consequence that is the residential school system as it was government policy until

00:31:47.100 the 1960s or so. And so one of the things that's ensued from this as an imagined corrective

00:31:53.400 is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that fanned out across the countryside, did a lot

00:31:58.680 of fact-finding, talked to a lot of people, recorded a lot of things, wrote a big frigging

00:32:03.820 report, I suppose, for the federal government. Where it sits at this point, I don't know.

00:32:08.500 I met one of the commissioners of that arrangement who came to something that I did,

00:32:13.420 in a very tearful way thanked me for what I was doing. So she at least found some consistency

00:32:19.360 between their project and my little project. And for all of that, I have to say that I find the

00:32:26.500 whole notion of, let's leave the word truth aside, which is contentious enough, but this word

00:32:31.360 reconciliation really comes in for very little investigation, and it needs more than it gets.

00:32:37.320 So I'll just do it now quickly and say, the word reconciliation here is premature in a way that's almost impossible to act upon.

00:32:48.280 By which I mean this, the word itself tells you that there's a primordial condition that reconciliation is subsequent to.

00:32:57.900 The primordial condition is conciliation.

00:33:02.180 I mean, obviously, etymologically, you can hear it.

00:33:04.720 so the the primordial condition was conciliation something happened some kind of rupture in the

00:33:11.860 scheme and reconciliation becomes now the order of the day i think you can guess what i'm about

00:33:17.560 to say the conciliation never happened it wasn't that primordial condition of europeans

00:33:25.220 washing up on these shores and laying claim to the place with kind of unseemly haste 0.72

00:33:31.680 and with no apparent hesitation on the matter.

00:33:36.600 That's the historical record would indicate that that's, you know,

00:33:39.760 by and large, what took place up and down the Atlantic coast,

00:33:43.460 from Baffin Island all the way down to Brazil.

00:33:49.100 So what we need is conciliation.

00:33:52.280 And conciliation, I think, explicitly means the capacity

00:33:56.160 and the willingness to sit down in a circumstance

00:34:01.420 where it is a given that you are with your equals.

00:34:08.600 If that's not there,

00:34:10.940 reconciliation is ludicrously premature to talk about

00:34:14.140 because there's no skillfulness

00:34:17.100 in saying that you're about to recreate something

00:34:20.480 that you never created in the first place.

00:34:22.960 There's no skillfulness

00:34:24.160 And there's no record that I can tell that indicates that the European side of the ledger ever really conducted itself as if it was in a place it didn't belong, as if it had to negotiate its presence from that day to this, basically.

00:34:40.660 So we continue to live off the veils of a system that internal to itself was illegal, internal to itself.

00:34:48.800 And so we will, in this country, continue to be a kind of immature and adolescent kind of enterprise, the extent to which we're unwilling to reconsider our beginnings as not being, by any stretch of the imagination, us being all we could be.

00:35:06.780 I feel like this idea of cultural monsters that you bring up kind of fits with this topic a bit.

00:35:14.680 And in your book, A Generation's Worth, you write, quote,

00:35:18.760 I've contended for years that monsters are a consequence and not a cause, and so are not fundamental, elemental, though their endurance seems to whisper otherwise.

00:35:29.780 I pick them for forgotten deities, abandoned place gods, unrecognized spirits of hearth, home,

00:35:37.820 he forgot to whom? That's mostly forgotten too, end quote. And you also go on to say,

00:35:46.300 quote, it appears that we are in the monster trade as well, withholding any and all acknowledgement

00:35:52.400 of the spirits of place that don't inform, favor, and vindicate our residence here, end quote.

00:35:59.340 Yeah, I would just love if you could dissect this a bit for us and maybe give us some examples of cultural monsters.

00:36:06.820 Yeah.

00:36:09.480 I don't think I would use the qualifier cultural in front of the word monsters here.

00:36:14.640 But here's the way it occurred to me in explicit detail.

00:36:18.060 I'm lucky enough, before the pandemic, I had a school that was ongoing for eight or nine years.

00:36:22.740 One of the stories I examine deeply in the context of the school is the oldest document we have in the Proto-English, in the early form of the English languages you and I are speaking it now.

00:36:36.620 That story is called Beowulf.

00:36:39.880 And in the story, there are very clearly monsters, maybe three or four, I think.

00:36:45.560 and so picture this now I have a room full of alternative types who've come to my school

00:36:53.600 and they're really willing to really consider the unconsidered in their lives personally but

00:37:00.020 much more importantly I think in the context of the the culture that they come from and I looked

00:37:05.900 all squarely in the eye and I asked them is there such a thing as monsters and the place just froze

00:37:12.380 up and clearly they were hoping i was being metaphorical or failing that that i could become

00:37:18.860 metaphorical in talking about it and entertaining their answers because most of their answers went

00:37:23.360 in the direction of well there's there's monstrosity as a kind of idea whether it's

00:37:30.180 kind of frankensteinian or whether it's a macroeconomic but it's an idea there's not an

00:37:36.400 actual physical form with a metabolism and eyeballs and malevolence, is there? Clearly,

00:37:44.260 that's not what I meant, was it? But that's exactly what I meant. That's what I was asking.

00:37:49.880 And people had an exceedingly hard time crediting the possibility that there's such a thing as

00:37:56.460 monsters, and they don't belong necessarily in children's storybooks. So as you read there,

00:38:03.800 what i've come up with as a way of understanding the presence of monstrosity

00:38:08.040 is to suggest it's a consequence of abandonment principally not a consequence of malevolence

00:38:16.780 principally there's a scene in beowulf where there's a monster who's seeking admission

00:38:22.320 to the merriment in the feast hall that the hero and the other characters are engaged in at the

00:38:30.580 moment and they say he places his hand upon the door as a kind of supplication or seeking entry

00:38:40.060 we find out in a couple of lines later that he's more than capable of destroying the place

00:38:44.780 and getting in just as he sees fit or she but in that moment the monster doesn't do so the monster

00:38:53.640 pleads for entry

00:38:55.800 pleads for inclusion

00:38:57.280 and because of the merriment

00:38:59.840 they literally don't hear the sound at the door

00:39:02.100 and the story is off and running now

00:39:04.300 with the monster

00:39:05.420 properly

00:39:06.580 how should I put this

00:39:08.400 I'm trying to make a verb out of monster

00:39:10.220 monsterfied I suppose

00:39:12.420 and

00:39:13.340 implacable from there on in

00:39:16.120 for the rest of the story

00:39:17.140 so the simple question was

00:39:19.160 how did the monsters get so

00:39:20.920 badly humored

00:39:22.640 is that just part of the deal or or is there some way of understanding the possibility that

00:39:29.660 monsters aren't born that way they're a consequence of something that subsequently ensues or fails to

00:39:37.500 take or something of that kind my suggestion was absolutely it's a consequence of among other

00:39:43.800 things the regime of the various monotheisms that have washed across the world over the last

00:39:48.620 what, 3,500 years or thereabouts, and have reduced the local deities, the local gods of place and

00:39:56.520 time to symbolic, metaphorical, pseudo-presences. And I suppose you could run a parallel that goes

00:40:07.420 something like this. Do you think if there's such a thing as your ancestry in the present tense,

00:40:13.400 not in the past, in the present tense. If there is such a thing, and although they're not alive

00:40:19.140 as you and I are, but they have their presence, and in that sense may have their ways, do you

00:40:25.540 think there's any consequence at all to you living the fullness of your life with virtually no regard

00:40:33.340 or reference to them, except when you're in some kind of peak experience moment,

00:40:39.240 hallucinogenically induced or otherwise or you're in a desperate kind of straight and involuntarily

00:40:46.240 you just invoke the notion of ancestor could there be a consequence to your generalized neglect

00:40:53.900 that's not punishment it's just consequence the failure to maintain them in some fashion

00:41:01.120 could it not have the consequence of rendering them unable to respond to you when you call

00:41:07.500 well if that's true for ancestry i submit to you it's probably true for spirits of place

00:41:13.580 or gods of place as well and there's such a thing as a starving god i suppose as well as a homeless

00:41:20.300 one and uh modernity may be looked upon in time to come as a particular consequence

00:41:28.300 of our inability to live as if they are so

00:41:31.820 My father is an orphan

00:41:44.480 He is dying soon

00:41:50.520 My father is an orphan

00:41:57.320 He is dying soon

00:42:03.960 I am reminded

00:42:10.120 One day I'll be an orphan too

00:42:17.260 Yes, I will be an orphan too

00:42:28.000 My father is an orphan

00:42:36.920 He is dying soon

00:42:40.940 Oh, my father is an orphan

00:42:45.160 He is dying soon

00:42:50.300 And I am reminded

00:42:56.380 One day I'll be an orphan too

00:43:03.700 Yes, one day I'll be an orphan too

00:43:15.960 Oh, one day I'll be an orphan too

00:43:25.200 Oh, one day I'll be dying too.

00:43:41.600 glad you brought up ancestry because i have definitely been sitting in a bit of confusion

00:43:58.700 around it recently i of course i'm seeing people's draw to understanding their ancestry

00:44:06.040 more, going to ancestry.com, getting their blood work, trying to understand where they come from,

00:44:13.280 who they come from. And when I think about people coming back with their results and they're going,

00:44:19.520 I'm 50% German, I'm 30% French or whatever that graph tells them. I think to myself, well,

00:44:29.380 who decided the date of when your ancestors are? I guess I feel skeptical about who's deciding

00:44:41.260 the formulation of our ancestry. And then we attach on to these things. And of course,

00:44:51.060 there's beauty to it and importance. And then there's real tangible realities like land claims.

00:44:58.340 And so I'm not trying to judge it so severely, but I'm definitely not comfortable with how

00:45:05.180 we're coming to who we are and what we're leaving out and what we're grasping onto.

00:45:12.800 And so I'm not sure if you have thoughts on that.

00:45:17.500 Well, you can be pretty sure that I've likely thought about it and you're right.

00:45:21.980 And I appreciate the sort of, it's not confusion that what you've just said indicates.

00:45:29.980 It's a certain number of dead ends in the current understanding of what constitutes ancestry, perhaps.

00:45:37.700 But here's, I mean, in no particular order, here's the first thing.

00:45:40.180 You mentioned French and German.

00:45:42.560 Most of these nation states are very modern apparitions.

00:45:47.300 They didn't exist as we understand them today, even a couple of hundred years ago.

00:45:51.980 a number of them. And they are a consequence of standardization across a wide range of

00:45:58.520 local diversities and linguistic diversities and so on. So it's the homogeneity that allows us to

00:46:06.920 use the word German or French is executed at a cost of considerable diminishment of localities

00:46:15.240 and peculiarities and the intense version of what it means to speak a dialect that comes from a

00:46:22.120 place you know all these languages come from places they don't come from people there are

00:46:27.820 echoes of very specific places and times so you're right to wonder you know how far back

00:46:34.360 ancestry.com goes and the answer is all you're getting from stuff like from the dna testing

00:46:40.500 is the answer to what we've discovered about everybody else but not you that's what your

00:46:48.260 results are telling you and they're a consequence of how many people have contributed their their

00:46:53.460 core sample to the uh the technology and and the calculations right that's what it is so

00:46:59.340 so i mean it's something it's more a rorschach than it is a photograph perhaps and yet and yet

00:47:07.600 there's something about it that wasn't there in the time between when these cultures started to

00:47:13.400 become disassembled as local in particular things and took on this form of city-state status or

00:47:20.940 nation-state status and now there's something available to us that wasn't there a couple

00:47:27.020 hundred years ago and it's kind of you could call it overviews to the exclusion of a lot of

00:47:34.020 particulars. These things are particularly important or provocative, I think, for people

00:47:40.340 from the so-called New World, right? For people who are Anglo-North Americans in a generic sort 1.00

00:47:46.280 of way, for whom the middle passage, you know, the passage of immigration from Europe to here

00:47:53.200 to North America was, among other things, a consequence of a lot of flight, a lot of misery

00:48:00.220 on the one side and the vector for a lot of misery on this side so there are people in there you see

00:48:07.900 that's what i'm trying to say here as well there are people with genuine foibles a genuine kind of

00:48:15.740 good intention to some degree other an awful lot of fear and a misapprehension about what it means

00:48:23.400 to no longer be where you once were, and the sense of automaticness that turns belonging

00:48:30.560 into a place belonging to you.

00:48:34.200 I mean, people did that, and those people have to show up in the DNA testing as well.

00:48:39.460 And their deep misapprehension of the consequence of them appearing here has to show up in the

00:48:45.900 DNA testing as well.

00:48:47.780 And until it does, you know, we have little bits of information that somehow lend a three-dimensionality to our boat, not that distant origins.

00:48:59.660 But I wonder what it evokes in terms of our sense of participation in the inconvenient part of the story, as well as the honorable and even heroic part of the story that is unearthed by the testing.

00:49:13.260 Mm-hmm. Well, thanks for sifting through that one with me a bit. I did want to touch on the

00:49:22.260 pandemic, plague, COVID-19 world we've been swimming through a bit. And looking at our

00:49:30.200 reaction to the pandemic, I am wondering, how did our desensitization towards death contribute to

00:49:40.460 worsening realities during this time of grief and dread.

00:49:45.780 That's a very good distinction you made between becoming numb to death on the one side and

00:49:51.000 grief and dread on the other side. Yeah, that's a very, very useful distinction to make. Let me

00:49:55.520 see if I can pull it a little bit now. I didn't have much else to do because I was decommissioned

00:50:01.840 during those more or less three years. Very little work to do. I'm not a fan of working

00:50:06.940 on the internet so that kind of wasn't available. So I spent a lot of time trying to pay attention

00:50:12.540 which I'm glad I did although it has its boredoms and one of the things that occurred to me is that

00:50:19.200 you know the principal dread that accompanied the arrangement was not really for Anglo North

00:50:27.340 Americans at least was not really mortal. In other words the possibility of of dying as a 0.65

00:50:32.840 consequence of the plague i don't think it was the big one after all sad to say because the simple

00:50:40.720 possibility in the early days that legions of us could be dumped on the sidewalk seemed to be real

00:50:47.360 as a fear it was it seemed legitimate and substantiated and with a few local exceptions

00:50:54.900 it never came to pass so if it was ever about ending up you know piles of bodies on the street

00:51:02.320 it wasn't that for very long and i think the greater dread by far for people who are

00:51:09.680 self-determination junkies was the frustration of the ability to choose out your manner of defying

00:51:19.520 the odds i think the great dread that you pointed out it's a beautiful word by the way

00:51:26.020 It has to do with the challenge to your self-determination that was real.

00:51:34.620 And I think I'm going to say necessary.

00:51:38.000 And this is where my great lament comes to roost in the apropos of the COVID-19 days,

00:51:45.760 is that we had a genuine opportunity to absolutely reconsider our addiction to mastery and self-determination.

00:51:54.020 and i think we doubled down on it instead generally speaking across the dominant culture

00:52:00.480 of north america that's what's ensued from it there's other things underneath that for sure

00:52:06.360 and they haven't gone anywhere but uh the great sorrow to me is the missed opportunity

00:52:13.200 to wonder about our habits of mastery and self-determination and to wonder whether

00:52:20.920 They're really what we imagine them to be.

00:52:25.000 And do they really have the consequences that we attribute to them when we exercise them to the full?

00:52:31.020 So I'm perhaps a minority in the minority of people for whom COVID-19 was a close call.

00:52:38.320 But perhaps, sadly, we're going to need an even closer one to have us wonder about these fundaments that we hold dear.

00:52:48.400 and i just wonder how much closer does it have to get how how many times can we have be on the

00:52:56.040 receiving end of the lesson without a tremendous amount of collateral damage because that's where

00:53:02.700 we are on the back end of this last three three and a half years a very close call a very clear

00:53:09.680 opportunity to learn and very little in the way of collateral damage to pay for the learning

00:53:14.820 at some point it's got to be clear to everyone who's willing to think about it

00:53:19.860 that we are going to pay dearly for the lessons that we are going to have to learn in the near

00:53:26.580 future that we could have got for a penny now well steven this has been such a beautiful

00:53:36.980 conversation. And I wish we had hours upon hours. But as we come to a close, there is one last

00:53:46.040 thought I was sitting with, which is making meaning. And even without the support structures

00:53:53.320 of deeply embedded or connected communities, I still think finding and making meaning is vital

00:54:01.500 to the human soul. And I'm wondering, how can we start finding meaning right where we are,

00:54:11.720 right in the present in all of our trouble and confusion and disconnection?

00:54:17.480 It's a great question to end with. Well, here's the first thing. I don't think meaning is that

00:54:22.540 scarce. I think we should make a distinction here in the question between the meaning we want to be

00:54:29.060 there, the meaning we want to sign off on, the meaning we want to associate ourself with,

00:54:34.260 and the rest of the muck and the mire that we imagine is, quote, meaningless.

00:54:40.380 But I don't think it's meaningless. We disagree with the meaning, which is a completely different

00:54:47.040 orientation. So, no, meaning is not as scarce as we would make it out to be, I think. We don't

00:54:54.620 make meaning for our own lives i would say this is what wakes are for among other things

00:55:02.700 as long as you're around and a lot of people my age are now insisting on being around for their

00:55:08.120 own wake you're hurrying hurrying up the process so that they have the wake before they die 0.55

00:55:13.240 which is it's ludicrous so ludicrous in fact it almost beggars speech but it's just another

00:55:20.840 form of entitlement of getting what you want while you still can.

00:55:25.620 But awake requires your absence, clearly. Clearly, that's what it requires.

00:55:31.020 Awake needs you dead in order to happen at all. So you're gone from the fray, right? Your voice

00:55:38.000 is no more. And it's now and only now that the meaning of your life begins to be assembled

00:55:45.080 and considered and disassembled and reassembled yet again, and this is where your life is taking

00:55:53.180 on its ballast, its valence, as the consequences of how it was lived by you are rolled out by the

00:56:00.500 people who are your witnesses, faithful witnesses or otherwise, you know, tangible witnesses or

00:56:06.560 otherwise. So this is who we are to each other, it seems to me. Ultimately, we're the architects

00:56:12.920 of the meaning of other people's lives and if we really understood the power and the consequence

00:56:19.780 of that responsibility we might not be so fast and loose with what we say

00:56:24.780 i'm not saying we would pass everything through the filter of everything that's agreeable no but

00:56:31.160 authenticity minus your attitude about the person is kind of the order of the day and

00:56:36.940 the other side of gossip i guess is what i'm talking about and that's real village mindedness

00:56:42.880 at work i think is the willingness to attribute to a recently dead person a layer of consequence

00:56:51.360 among you that they couldn't have entirely uh performed when they were alive because it was

00:56:58.900 still it was a project wasn't it the meaning the meaning of your life was a project and now that

00:57:05.200 you have nothing more to say about it it's the chance for the rest of us to weigh in and assign

00:57:10.200 that to you understanding of course that the day is coming where your life will be similarly

00:57:17.020 spoken of and spoken into existence and that understanding could very likely have the

00:57:25.320 consequence of moderating and evening out your instinct for recrimination or otherwise

00:57:32.120 and something about the authenticity of the times could actually survive your feelings about the

00:57:39.300 dead person, such that even your feelings become a small part of the story instead of the authorized

00:57:45.400 version of the story. You know, that's what I'd hope for anybody listening, is that they could

00:57:50.940 live in such a way that such a time would come to everybody around them that they claim to love and

00:57:56.720 hold dear and hold in some kind of regard. And then you see this as a serial reality, as an

00:58:02.660 oncoming reality for you personally and it governs your willingness to pass judgment

00:58:08.020 you know and it doesn't mean close your eyes to things you don't you found troubling but it does

00:58:14.520 mean that you include the capacity for a kind of merciful assessment that doesn't leave anything

00:58:23.040 out but is not trying to retroactively cleanse something that shouldn't be cleansed it should

00:58:30.580 be understood instead. Stephen, thank you. I really appreciate this time that we shared together

00:58:41.080 and love the challenge. It's really good for me. So I'm sure others are feeling that too.

00:58:49.360 You're very kind. And I thank you very much for the invitation and say, I deeply welcome the

00:58:55.580 exercise myself. And I welcome the challenge too. And you know, we're not trying to be right.

00:59:01.640 We're trying to see if we can see, just trying to see things clearly.

00:59:19.040 Thanks for listening to For the Wild. All of the songs in today's episode are original pieces by

00:59:24.860 Stephen and his band with Gregory Hopkins, Nights of Grief and Mystery. Their band is currently on

00:59:31.220 tour. For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekram, Julia Jackson, Jackson Krupf,

00:59:38.920 Jose Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.

00:59:54.860 Amen.

For The Wild - September 20, 2023

STEPHEN JENKINSON on a Lucid Reckoning ⧸349

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