For The Wild - STEPHEN JENKINSON on Ancestry and Misanthropy ⧸41

00:00:00.000 The Silence

00:00:30.000 Somebody wishing for something to happen

00:00:41.060 Wishing to tell, wishing to help

00:00:44.360 Someone was listening, someone who cared

00:00:48.040 Never despaired

00:00:49.820 Someone to lean on and someone to trust

00:00:54.300 Who needs your assistance and finds your disgust

00:01:00.000 Hello, my name is Ayanna Young, and I welcome you to For the Wild podcast.

00:01:11.560 Today we are speaking with Stephen Jenkinson.

00:01:15.480 Stephen is an activist, teacher, author, and farmer.

00:01:19.580 He has a master's degree in theology from Harvard University

00:01:22.840 and a master's degree in social work from the University of Toronto.

00:01:27.720 Formerly a program director at a major Canadian hospital and medical school assistant professor,

00:01:34.100 Jenkinson is now a sought-after workshop leader, speaker, and consultant to palliative care and hospice organizations.

00:01:42.240 He is the founder of the Orphan Wisdom School in Canada and the subject of the documentary film Grief Walker.

00:01:49.800 Stephen, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

00:01:52.420 you write about some of the great unspoken questions we all face but don't have the

00:01:59.240 wherewithal to really investigate beyond the common knowledge of the culture we inherit

00:02:04.920 i admire your writing and you're speaking so much for its clarity and candidness as you challenge

00:02:13.160 some of our deepest assumptions about our purpose there's no tiptoeing around the indoctrination and

00:02:20.480 taboos most of us hold around ancestry, life, death, and dying. You know, really uncomfortable

00:02:28.220 subjects to many people. It takes time and patience to open to these questions. So it's an

00:02:36.860 honor to join you in this exploration and to direct that light of honesty on some of the

00:02:44.680 shadowy regions some of us seldom stray to. I've been credited with something that people

00:02:50.180 have called brutal honesty, which I really don't take as a compliment. I don't think it's brutal,

00:02:54.480 but I take what you're saying as, you know, very complimentary of the,

00:02:58.280 of what ended up there on the, on the page. Well, it could be jarring to a reader who has

00:03:04.580 never begun to question their indoctrination. I'm not a mama bird who's chewed it first. 0.83

00:03:12.200 No, definitely not. But that's part of why you're so sought after as a teacher.

00:03:18.900 and why I have no hesitation in asking some of the more challenging questions that afflict my

00:03:26.140 heart. First, I want to begin with a quotation from this beautiful short film you made with

00:03:31.900 Ian McKenzie, The Making of Humans, where you said, quote, the ultimate self-absorption of our age

00:03:39.160 is the self-hatred of our age. The belief nothing we say or do can help but screw things up even

00:03:47.100 worse. So before seeking out the guidance of teachers such as yourself, I was stuck in the

00:03:57.380 misanthropy of feeling humanity is a cancer, which is a common perception, very related to the shame

00:04:05.720 of being non-native. Could you share some of your thoughts around how self-hatred and its sibling

00:04:14.740 self-glorification limit us and impoverish us, while the source of our shame, the murder of the

00:04:24.040 planet, continues unchallenged. You know, they're the swing arm of the same reflex. You know, one

00:04:32.120 goes one direction, one goes the opposite direction. But there's no achievement for

00:04:37.560 swinging back and forth like a pendulum, not really. It's very much a kind of machine vision

00:04:43.500 of what sorrow should actually be.

00:04:46.200 I guess I would say that self-hatred and self-glorification,

00:04:50.320 they're the shadow puppetry of self-absorption.

00:04:53.340 That's how the absorption is articulated.

00:04:56.760 I mean, it's in the nature of being self-absorbed

00:04:58.800 to deny that you are or not to be alert to the fact that you are.

00:05:03.980 And this is no solution.

00:05:06.540 This is rather I would say that sorrow is being preempted by self-hatred

00:05:12.800 as if by some kind of torturous algebra, you know, one somehow gives rise to the other.

00:05:20.040 Well, it doesn't at all.

00:05:21.240 It's a shell game, you know, self-absorption, self-hatred, misanthropy, not to say that

00:05:26.340 they're not understandable.

00:05:27.960 Man, I understand them.

00:05:29.660 You know, I'm obliged to contend with it on a regular basis whenever I stand before people

00:05:35.080 and respond to these things and others.

00:05:37.760 The fact that it's understandable doesn't make it mandatory, nor does it make it inevitable.

00:05:44.740 So it's not much of an achievement, really, to engage in the game of cursing.

00:05:51.020 And because it's yourself or your kind that you're cursing, it's no greater an achievement than if you were cursing another species or another era, human or otherwise.

00:06:03.040 And sorrow has no place in those shenanigans, I'd say.

00:06:06.320 sorrow is pleading for a seat at the table while all the haters you know are flinging food back

00:06:13.080 and forth and there's not much grace in that arrangement and the presence of sorrow among us

00:06:18.800 in a time that's pleading for it could be the beginning of the grace that we're trying to

00:06:24.900 accelerate towards by engaging in this misanthropy in the first place to characterize some people as

00:06:31.920 non-native, the language itself is a pin through the sternum, and it nails for all time the end of

00:06:40.620 certain possibilities. And if anything, maybe the characterization of non-native contributes in its

00:06:46.940 way to the appropriation and the plundering. I'm not saying by this that everybody's, quote,

00:06:52.900 magically native, quote, or magically indigenous. We know that, you know, history lends us

00:07:00.680 a certain capacity for a recovering psyche and it whispers to us you know there were times

00:07:08.920 when we looked exactly as we do now when something like sanity may have prevailed

00:07:16.680 and that when we both had an understanding of home and a capacity for home we were as

00:07:25.340 indigenously capable as the people we may now be plundering are if that's true it's not a matter

00:07:35.400 of going back you know any more than it's a matter of asking indigenous people to be cooler 0.99

00:07:40.820 than they are right now by living in teepees again so that we can feel better about everything 0.89

00:07:45.800 and by the same token i know that for myself who's got sort of irish scots ancestry more

00:07:52.020 immediately, that there's nobody over there that's waiting for me to come back, you know,

00:07:57.440 and testify to what became of them when they left. I mean, basically, the dominant culture

00:08:03.100 of North America, if I can use a generalization, is a disowned thing. You know, we abandoned

00:08:08.940 by leaving, and the consequence of that is that we ourselves have been abandoned to a certain

00:08:16.440 rootlessness. And I've come to say that we're now so confounded by the freedom that we sought

00:08:23.060 that we seem to be willy-nilly to trade a kind of freedom that no longer seems free, that is

00:08:30.380 a homelessness instead. We're willing to trade that for anyone else's home.

00:08:36.180 If we are willing to learn instead of be saved, if we're willing to put the enormous

00:08:43.880 contemplative labor and a labor towards sorrow instead of away from it, maybe there's a chance

00:08:51.600 to actually learn something of one's own dappled ancestry. I think that's an important word to use,

00:08:58.580 you know. We imagine ancestry, we imagine a vector that seems to get narrower as it goes away from

00:09:04.880 us, and we become, claim some kind of single identity, you know. In actual fact, of course,

00:09:10.340 it vectors in the opposite direction. As time articulates our ancestry, it widens, not narrows,

00:09:17.440 it widens to the point where the idea of, for example, white supremacy, it's so ludicrous 0.55

00:09:23.620 as a historical reality. You know, there's no such thing as the white homeland. There's no such 0.82

00:09:30.100 thing as white people, for crying out loud. So the willingness to think these thoughts and pursue 0.97

00:09:34.280 this kind of unbidden contemplation that there was a time, well, I'll give you an example.

00:09:39.420 I was interviewed recently by a fellow, and halfway through the conversation, he said, I have to confess to you something, that when I first came in contact with what you were doing, I was really dismayed because I liked what I was hearing, and then maybe I saw a picture, whatever it was, and I said, oh, quote, another white guy trying to be an Indian, unquote.

00:09:58.440 And he was very dismayed by that.

00:10:00.560 And I had to say to him, you know, I mean, this is what happens if you don't cut your hair.

00:10:03.620 It has nothing to do with trying to be something else.

00:10:06.460 If you don't cut your hair, if you're lucky enough to have hair, it's long.

00:10:10.560 And, you know, in the days before scissors, I said to him, probably a lot of people's hair was long.

00:10:15.820 What throws you off the scent of, you know, the kind of varied majesty that you derive from, 0.98

00:10:23.680 such that the whole thing now is shame that if your appearance if your language approximates

00:10:31.600 anything that doesn't seem directly hereditary then it's a shameful proposition well i think

00:10:38.680 this can be countered by learning first of all imagining and then that your imagination is tutored

00:10:44.000 i mean it's never been easier in some respects to learn something about your own ancestry it's

00:10:49.960 never been more perplexing, perhaps, to approach such a thing. We have all the technology that we

00:10:55.820 haven't had before, you know, thanks to the Mormons and who knows what other kind of, you know, 1.00

00:11:01.420 computer programs, to know one thing and find out many things from it. But I wonder what the learning 0.78

00:11:07.420 turns into if the whole thing is informed by a basic shame of secretly believing you come from

00:11:15.240 nothing that has merit and that you that you are so reluctant to claim an ancestry that seems

00:11:24.020 culpable that pillaging other people's actually looks like compassion or looks like sanity or

00:11:31.360 looks like something you know sort of culturally responsible and and conscience driven I think

00:11:38.040 it's probably the absence of conscience so you know I've been involved for a long time in the

00:11:42.340 death trade and i can tell you that when people came to the dying time no one imagined for

00:11:49.420 themselves a conundrum whereby as they were dying i don't mean the moments of death i mean

00:11:55.640 you know the months preceding it where life was lived knowing that this is what was happening

00:12:00.840 that the principal malady the principal disfigurement that ultimately resulted in in

00:12:08.520 dying people being the heaviest per capita users of sedation in the culture which is a which is a

00:12:15.520 fact now that this sedation was prompted the use of it rather was prompted by this complete blank

00:12:22.160 in their imagination of what was to become of them subsequent to dying and my way of saying it

00:12:28.460 that has a kind of biblical sound I suppose to it is they had no sense of unto whom they were dying

00:12:35.240 and the terror that ensues is really fathomless, I have to tell you.

00:12:42.860 Hence the sedation, hence the antidepressants, you know, hence the morphine.

00:12:48.880 That's the largest single reason I saw people dying absolutely plowed under

00:12:53.700 is because they had no sense of any continuity, no sense of anyone waiting for them

00:12:59.320 and no sense that there was any achieved status to the people who'd come before them

00:13:03.220 who bequeathed them their eye color

00:13:05.560 and the shape of their chin

00:13:07.900 and their skin tone, you see. 0.73

00:13:11.040 Well, that's the beginning of a response

00:13:12.800 to what you've asked.

00:13:33.220 Thank you.

00:14:03.220 Thank you.

00:14:33.220 you've suggested an answer to the conundrum of this colonial orphan situation now there's been

00:14:43.680 this thought process that's been lurking in my mind that i've never fully indulged that we all

00:14:51.480 have somewhere in us the capacity for home and to step into a line of ancestry upon our passing

00:14:59.180 that's such an essential part of the cycle we're being denied because we're instead lining up to

00:15:06.580 pledge allegiance to a mechanical reality that has created a state of emergency in the natural world.

00:15:12.760 So my reaction to this homelessness is to rebel against an exclusively human ancestry

00:15:19.760 and to rebel against the human supremacy that is so pervasive in this time. In this sense,

00:15:27.600 it's dangerous to limit our sense of identity to a bloodline and a short-term history.

00:15:33.960 What if we identified instead with the wider web, with the plants and animals, and fungi and bacteria?

00:15:42.900 Or how do you see it?

00:15:45.740 Well, it wouldn't be bad if people even did that, frankly.

00:15:49.960 So I'm not sure that I'd use the word dangerous to describe it.

00:15:53.140 I think, if anything, if the question could be how does a dominant culture, non-aligned person, quote, begin even a contemplative proposition, you know, your human ancestry is not a bad place to begin.

00:16:08.440 And I'd go further and say, you start bringing in mushrooms, you're probably doing that so as not to have to go through the work of facing down the human ancestry that you do not necessarily welcome or feel kinship with.

00:16:23.140 or want to in any way be associated with.

00:16:26.680 So I don't think it's dangerous.

00:16:27.960 I think it's mandatory.

00:16:29.540 But I absolutely take your point, too,

00:16:31.900 that we have a word, the indigenous people where I live,

00:16:35.480 understand themselves to be Anishinaabe,

00:16:38.020 which most people listening would know probably is Algonquin locally

00:16:41.920 and the language group more in the direction of Ojibwe or Chippewa,

00:16:46.560 which is the same word.

00:16:47.800 They have a word that is vectored out into the greater English language,

00:16:51.200 and it's mistaken as an English word now.

00:16:53.140 and I'm talking to you from the west coast of Canada right now,

00:16:56.120 where they have a thing called totem poles.

00:16:58.420 And most people don't know that that word totem is actually this Anishinaabe word I'm referring to.

00:17:03.800 It's dodem. It's a D. It's a softer pronunciation.

00:17:07.820 And it's an eastern woodland word.

00:17:10.580 And the word dodem is too briefly translated as something like clan.

00:17:17.500 It's good as a beginning, but the gist of it is this.

00:17:20.960 The word is, if I could put it this way, it's a contemplation.

00:17:24.320 It's a complex contemplation on ancestry.

00:17:28.720 And the proposition it delivers is, you know, people do have this dodem when they're in ceremonial circumstances.

00:17:35.720 They introduce themselves, not by their standard street name that is on their birth certificate typically,

00:17:42.900 but they have another sequence of names that appears.

00:17:46.480 And right after their name is their clan affiliation.

00:17:48.860 And they'll just say, whoever it is, do-dem. 0.95

00:17:52.220 And without exception, where I live, all the do-dems are animal. 0.91

00:17:56.860 Which is to say, the sequence of your clan kinship is not exhausted by the human.

00:18:02.600 That the ancestor of your first human ancestor is an animal.

00:18:08.500 Now, in its withered form, we have this mascot thing all over the place.

00:18:13.780 And that's a deeply misapprehended form of it.

00:18:15.980 But it's actually what you owe allegiance to fundamentally as one who nurtured, who kept alive, and who enabled your first human ancestor.

00:18:27.600 So it's a larger scale kinship than the human story would ordinarily allow.

00:18:34.040 But it doesn't cultivate a kind of non-human identity.

00:18:38.440 It cultivates an understanding that life is by definition not self-sufficient.

00:18:44.980 that all life forms don't have self-sufficiency, which makes them life forms.

00:18:53.000 And, you know, human is very much part of that sequence.

00:18:56.820 So whatever sustained your first ancestor functions, you know, spiritually and ecologically

00:19:03.560 and, you know, metabolically and biodynamically and even in the sequence of your memory as an ancestor.

00:19:12.960 when you come to that realization there's no such thing as first ancestor there's first ancestors

00:19:20.100 that's always plural you know to begin and then it often collapses into single lines for quite a long

00:19:26.320 time and then you awaken to the poverty of that and the plurality of it begins to reappear so

00:19:31.340 these things are ultimately they participate understanding things mineral right and and

00:19:37.820 things atmospheric. And then you ultimately realize, perhaps the deep mother of all our

00:19:44.800 ancestry is something like terrain. It's something like weather. It's something like

00:19:50.660 evaporation and condensation. I mean, it's something like grass. You know, there's a

00:19:56.220 quite a fine book. They tell me it's been made into a movie recently called Wolf Totem,

00:20:02.200 translated from Chinese. And there's an old Mongolian man who's trying to educate a younger

00:20:07.100 Chinese fellow, about what he calls the big story. And he says, you know, the big story is

00:20:13.020 not the wolf that we have to contend with out here all the time. Certainly not the horse that

00:20:17.140 you rode to come and meet me. Certainly not the yurt that you live in. Certainly not ourselves

00:20:21.840 or each other. The big story, he says, is the grass. So it doesn't come down to that. That's

00:20:29.420 the teacher, you could say, is that the reliance, the failure of the quest for self-sufficiency,

00:20:35.220 even when it comes to ancestry, is really the redemptive vision.

00:20:41.360 Because I can tell you, I certainly saw that in the death trade up, down, and sideways.

00:20:47.540 I'm not going to call it failure for the moment.

00:20:50.160 Simply the lack of any sense of either obligation or mandate to learn this ancestry.

00:20:59.360 What has been the consequence?

00:21:00.960 This is not that hypothetical anymore, because the North Americans have lived quite a period of time, you know, minus deep, I'm going to say lived ancestry.

00:21:13.680 It's one thing to have something on the mantelpiece that somehow stands in for all of this.

00:21:19.600 You know about that.

00:21:20.660 You've got the, you know, the sequence of photographs of, you know, back to the grandparent generation.

00:21:27.100 But this is family.

00:21:28.200 You know, family, you could say, by definition, is all the people whose voices you heard, whose names you know, or at least everyone you know now knew them.

00:21:39.360 And at some point, that sequence, that kind of unbroken transmission, is broken.

00:21:46.080 and basically anybody who looks like me

00:21:48.820 who's standing on this continent in North America right now

00:21:51.520 is a consequence of that break

00:21:54.820 just as much as we are a consequence

00:21:57.420 of whatever continuity we may be longing for

00:22:02.240 you know you could look at the consequences of not doing so

00:22:05.880 as the real tutor of this arrangement

00:22:09.100 and not turn it into a got to or a must

00:22:11.760 or a new ten commandments

00:22:12.940 but you could turn it into a sorrow over realizing that no one intended for themselves or for their

00:22:22.760 heirs homelessness i'm quite certain that's true well when people leapt across the atlantic speaking

00:22:30.440 my own sort of ancestral angle when they were driven across the atlantic you know the cover

00:22:36.340 story is they're seeking sanity and health and freedom and you know worship and and all of that

00:22:43.180 that's and that's still taught in school but you simply can't make the case that that's true

00:22:48.300 by tracing their behavior once they got here and their behavior once they got here

00:22:55.580 established the foundation of what's come to be the dominant culture of north america

00:23:01.820 so we're unwilling even to learn how it started over here and it did start you know for people

00:23:09.660 look like me there actually is a start in time it's not a fabrication and of course america began

00:23:16.140 fundamentally in europe which is to say that america is a european fantasy and it's come

00:23:23.260 from a certain era of europe when there wasn't such thing as europe as we know it today certainly

00:23:28.720 not the european union but not even those countries existed there were small principalities and all

00:23:34.400 the rest and the people who could afford to stay i believe are the ones who stayed the ones who

00:23:41.480 made america were the ones who couldn't afford to stay who were driven who were fleeing beyond

00:23:48.620 any ability we have to understand it fleeing something so horrendous and so inextinguished

00:23:55.420 that they fantasized a kind of virgin territory.

00:24:02.120 And even when they got here and they found that it wasn't virgin,

00:24:04.660 the fantasy did not suffer.

00:24:06.980 The fantasy was reinforced by removing those humans that they found here

00:24:11.840 who messed with their idea of new world, you see.

00:24:15.900 So you realize it's a kind of mania that masquerades as a kind of identity.

00:24:22.220 And the founding, in Canada, we don't have the phrase founding fathers,

00:24:26.080 but the founding refugees of our current regime,

00:24:31.120 they lived almost immediately in the absence of what they had abandoned,

00:24:37.900 what they had left behind, and what they had lost.

00:24:41.280 And the poverty of that, I don't think, has ever surfaced deep enough

00:24:47.640 to inform us in our current living. 0.97

00:24:50.580 And for all of that, the consequence to the indigenous people that we found here has come to this. 0.77

00:24:58.080 We live every day in the absence of what we lost. 0.99

00:25:02.360 They have been obliged to live every day in the presence of what they lost.

00:25:08.760 I'm not sure whose hell is more profound.

00:25:20.580 Thank you.

00:25:50.580 Growing up in a society of individuals,

00:26:20.600 It's difficult to even define, let alone grasp, village-mindedness.

00:26:26.980 And since many of us in North America have never belonged to a village or a real community,

00:26:34.000 we'd be hard-pressed to reclaim that way of life.

00:26:37.320 No. No, we've got to lose all those prefixes.

00:26:42.160 Reclaim, re-this, re-that, back to the land.

00:26:45.680 And all of that mantra that somehow it's waiting for us to return to, number one, that it's somehow some kind of unsullied time before we went crazy, that we have the capacity to find it or to recognize it should we find it, and that it did not go as crazy as we did.

00:27:06.180 I mean, just for starters, all of this language that automatically gives us an opportunity to visit what we've clearly abandoned, this is a spell unto itself that has to be challenged by a change in language.

00:27:22.380 and there's some consequence to that abandonment that North Americans have engaged in for a long

00:27:29.280 time. And the consequence we could call inducing something a feral quality to what once

00:27:40.760 stood beside you and was willing to know you and you know it as some kind of kin relation.

00:27:50.680 Feral is a very good word here.

00:27:52.800 Really, our ancestry, I believe, has gone feral, our deep ancestry.

00:27:57.800 Not only the human, as we see it.

00:27:59.620 And by feral, I do not mean a failed wild thing.

00:28:04.520 There is no such thing as a failed wild thing.

00:28:07.520 It's in the nature of wild that this is its only option.

00:28:12.800 No, feral is a failed domestication.

00:28:16.680 The most dangerous thing in the woods close to where I live in my farm are those house cats that people slow down their car long enough to drop out the window and keep driving.

00:28:27.620 That's the most dangerous thing there is.

00:28:29.420 I'm saying that what we abandon and then what we disown and then finally what we find totally irrelevant to our days may be the most abandoned and subsequently the most dangerous part of us.

00:28:46.960 because when we reacquaint ourselves with it,

00:28:50.900 it's not a benign sequence of consequences

00:28:53.760 to have abandoned the maintenance and the care

00:28:57.600 of that which was entrusted to us in the form of ancestry.

00:29:02.440 That's what I think is happening now, to be honest.

00:29:05.420 I think the kind of marauding the countryside,

00:29:08.940 looking for meaningful, symbolic ceremonies

00:29:11.880 and taking them from wherever you can get them

00:29:15.320 and this kind of strange syncretism of boring a little here and a little there

00:29:20.940 and calling it you or imagining that it's all of this cultural patrimony

00:29:26.440 is somehow in the world to fill the hole that you don't want to learn

00:29:31.060 as a dominant culture and rights American.

00:29:33.800 You just want not to feel it anymore, as if the feeling is the real conundrum.

00:29:40.160 It's the real affliction.

00:29:42.020 And I'm saying, of course, it's not the real affliction at all.

00:29:45.140 It's the unwillingness to learn the whole that's the principle of affliction.

00:29:50.180 You know, one more thing, if I'm not taking up too much room here.

00:29:53.120 I have a school.

00:29:54.460 It's called the Orphan Wisdom School.

00:29:55.880 If you're interested in why it's called that, I could tell you.

00:29:57.680 But one of the things I've done is I've declared certain patron saints and matron saints that are what oversees, I hope, our enterprise.

00:30:10.340 And one of them is the character who's known to contemporary history as Doubting Thomas, who is one of Jesus' disciples.

00:30:19.060 I love this guy and hold him in very high esteem in the school when I'm teaching.

00:30:25.100 First of all, he's horrendously misnamed, but it would be very much a sign of our time that we would misapprehend what he did as him being doubting.

00:30:34.280 In fact, what he did was, very briefly, Jesus appears out of the tomb.

00:30:39.420 there's 11 remaining good guys and 10 of them say that's him that's him that's him and they bow and

00:30:45.760 whatever they do and thomas is going the equivalent of i'm not sure and they'll look to him like his

00:30:54.180 faith is failing and i would say to you absolutely his faith is failing in its cowardly apparition

00:31:01.540 his faith is failing because that he has a love instead and his love for that man and for the

00:31:09.800 time they had together and for the dreams that they must have nourished and all the contemplations

00:31:14.300 that they must have engaged in in the downtime in between all the public events all of that

00:31:20.060 cashed out in that moment as his willingness to lean forward and touch the wound that is a sure

00:31:28.400 sign that the man beloved by him is dead. He learned his death. That's love. And faith is

00:31:37.600 preemptive in this regard. Faith makes sure that you don't learn the ragged edge of what you long

00:31:44.680 for. You don't learn how things came to be as they are. That you just extinguish the longing

00:31:50.740 by taking somebody else's something but longing has an immense teaching capacity for us i think

00:31:58.860 now let me distinguish it from desire desire is that thing that is a stranger to none of us

00:32:06.480 whereby in its pursuit you're trying to extinguish it you're trying to end desire to get to

00:32:13.380 satisfaction it's not just sexual it's at every realm of desire that's the project of desire

00:32:20.880 is to find its end which of course is a phantom and temporary end but still that's the project

00:32:27.700 the project of longing is to long it's not trying to stop it is in the nature of longing

00:32:36.420 that it somehow has its own, its own song to sing. And when you're really singing,

00:32:43.400 you're not trying to get the song over with to get to the last word, just as when you're really

00:32:48.860 dancing, you're not trying to get to the end of the dance. You're dancing instead when you're

00:32:55.160 loving. It's the same thing. When you're longing for ancestry, when you're longing for, you know,

00:33:01.380 real depth to your days you're not longing to learn everything so that you don't have to long

00:33:08.040 for that anymore that in fact your longing is one of the manifestations of your ancestry and the

00:33:15.800 fact that it's not a one-way street this longing that you may actually also be longed for and the

00:33:24.720 consequence of this abandonment is that you've lost all sense that it's reciprocal you've lost

00:33:31.360 all sense that your own ancestry, human and otherwise, could actually have some longing

00:33:37.540 for you, and that your longing comes from there, and that it's a kind of love song,

00:33:44.600 that a time before you is singing to you, which you mistake for affliction or for emptiness.

00:33:55.080 I'm trying very hard not to revert to an attitude of seeking direct answers.

00:34:01.360 and listening to you speak this beautiful poetic prose,

00:34:07.000 you seem to be inviting us to break that habit.

00:34:11.140 So Stephen, for us fledglings just learning to sing

00:34:16.040 and trying to answer this love song of our ancestors,

00:34:21.520 yearning for guidance,

00:34:23.160 is there any you could give us as far as a method or initial steps

00:34:28.780 to start along this journey of remembrance?

00:34:34.560 Well, you know, again, to practice what I'm preaching,

00:34:37.580 I'm not sure that there are steps,

00:34:40.020 and probably that's not the best characterization

00:34:41.820 for what you're asking about,

00:34:44.320 at least not in my answer it wouldn't be.

00:34:46.360 There's no program.

00:34:48.120 You know, that program mind

00:34:49.500 comes from the thing

00:34:51.300 that we're trying to do something about.

00:34:54.240 You know, it's pretty hard to cure the addiction

00:34:56.740 while you're still drinking.

00:34:58.780 And it is in the nature of addiction to prescribe a solution for the addiction, which includes continuing to use.

00:35:05.940 That's a hallmark of the addictive mind, right?

00:35:09.380 And man, we are deeply addicted to misanthropy.

00:35:12.500 And we're deeply addicted to the thing that got us here, which is, you know, a stratagem for relief, right?

00:35:21.600 So how do you contend with that and try to get to sanity without invoking the versions of sanity and the prescription for sanity that comes from the craziness?

00:35:33.200 Maybe this is a way.

00:35:34.840 It's not a beginning any more than you can jump into the beginning of a river, but it's some kind of initial move just at the beginning of you trying.

00:35:44.780 It could be this. Rather than fill the hole, rather than stop the hurt, rather than seek relief from the loneliness, rather than try to arbitrarily and in a lazy way begin with an assumption of some kind of regal root that is somehow still informing you,

00:36:09.220 we could begin with a lot more humility at a much smaller scale than the trumpets and the angels

00:36:16.280 and say something like this. If we are willing to inhabit the poverty that we are trying to get

00:36:24.640 away from, this willingness itself becomes the love song that we keep trying to hear,

00:36:33.440 that we sing it first and the singing takes the form of the willingness to know in a deep way

00:36:41.660 the time that we're in if i could use a slightly different vision of it i love the idea of the

00:36:48.400 rosary i wasn't born in that tradition i've never had one but i love the idea of it anyhow it's like

00:36:54.000 i've never drank coffee in my life but i strangely love the smell of those roasted beans as if love

00:36:59.900 and it will do you know so it's the same with rosary and the thing i've been thinking about

00:37:04.400 rosaries lately is what's happening as we're thumbing that through our fingers and maybe

00:37:12.040 one of the things that's going on there is it's a kind of it's a memory that's being staged rather

00:37:18.500 than being involuntary that it becomes a deliberate a scheme for remembering a what in

00:37:26.300 particular. Well, what constitutes your good fortune? But it needs a steep reassessment of

00:37:32.820 good fortune to include heartache, to include many of the things you and I have been talking

00:37:38.200 about for the last while. That good fortune doesn't mean everything that you'd seek for

00:37:44.460 yourself, you know, to solve, to soothe. That maybe good fortune includes whatever prompted you

00:37:51.640 to begin that search which of course is the longing for the absence of so you could begin

00:37:59.880 to put up your little tent in the crater of what happened in the crater of the you know the

00:38:07.760 ancestral flight from the old country all those things that you set it up there and that you

00:38:12.820 don't mistake that for an ages old valley that somehow the gods themselves crafted that it's

00:38:20.280 more recent it's at least half of it is humanly wrought and if you're willing to learn the place

00:38:28.440 where these kinds of deep losses and poverties detonated it's the beginning of your willingness

00:38:37.240 to proceed as if it's so and self-hatred or misanthropy is not an inevitable consequence

00:38:45.060 of this realization because i think these realizations are both midwife to buy and also

00:38:53.900 the parent of sorrow that's the strange thing of it you know the willingness to really see these

00:39:01.480 things in in the way that i've been talking about them doesn't seem to give way to to anger

00:39:10.000 to hostilities to finding the bad guys and things of that kind nor do they go to paralysis

00:39:17.820 or impotence they go to the a certain mandatory sorrow that people of our time must have as a

00:39:27.660 consequence of their awakening of their becoming alert of their emerging into an inarticulate

00:39:34.360 adulthood. This is the requirement. I don't know if it's the program, but it's the requirement.

00:39:40.700 It's why we ache for some kind of programmatic, clearly articulated, ceremonially induced and

00:39:50.180 recognized, as they call it these days, rite of passage that signals that our personal childhood

00:39:56.860 is at an end. Well, I'm talking about something similar for the end of our sort of cultural

00:40:04.340 childhood our cultural adolescence which is still insisting on proceeding as if well you know that

00:40:12.560 was then this is now you know i didn't do that bad stuff for 300 years ago and uh can't we all

00:40:18.240 just get along and the answer is well not without this poverty we can't and i would say though maybe

00:40:25.900 i'm not in the position to say it but probably it won't stop me from saying it now that we may

00:40:31.500 become slightly more trustworthy to people more at home than we are if we're willing to stop

00:40:40.940 trying to get home and begin to live the depths of the poverties that are our roots, in so doing

00:40:50.420 being willing to align ourselves with an ancestry that doesn't seem very promising, instead of

00:40:57.840 trying to align ourselves through affect with people whose ancestry is still recognizable

00:41:03.580 to them, we may become more trustworthy the more sorrowful we're willing to become.

00:41:11.240 It doesn't sound like becoming more authentic right on the surface of it, but I'm not sure it isn't.

00:41:27.840 Well, the cold black sea waits for me, me, me. The cold black sea waits forever. The waves hit the shore crying more, more, more. But the cold black sea waits forever.

00:41:57.840 The tornadoes come, or the coasts they run

00:42:11.220 Hurricanes rip the sky forever

00:42:14.380 Though the weather's changed, the sea remains the same

00:42:20.760 The cold black sea waits forever

00:42:24.400 There are ashes spilled through collective guilt

00:42:29.900 People rest at sea forever

00:42:33.620 Since they've burnt you up, collect you in a cup

00:42:38.880 For you the cold black sea has no terror

00:42:54.400 well it seems that this denial and refusal to feel all of these things plague us and you know

00:43:14.100 we refuse to feel the sorrow and the grief of our ancestry of our brother and sister animals

00:43:20.000 and plants that are going extinct. We refuse to feel the sorrow of our human family members

00:43:25.780 that die, and even ourselves, and we're obsessed with youth and attached to a kind of immortality.

00:43:33.500 And considering that death feeds life, what has caused us to fear this ultimate process so deeply?

00:43:42.740 You know, I think it's absolutely a historical event. You know, people in answering,

00:43:47.780 trying to answer a question like yours which is which is a very well-wrought sorrow you know the

00:43:54.160 question that you've asked the direction always seems to go intra-psychically as if that's the

00:44:00.540 only fundamental reality there is but there's this thing called history you know and as nick

00:44:06.580 cave so gorgeously said in one of his recent songs he said well the past is the past and it's here to

00:44:12.440 day. So we could take our cue from that and say, I think something happened. I don't think it

00:44:19.080 happened all over the world. I don't think it happened to everybody. I don't think it's like

00:44:23.260 a comet that impacted and, you know, everybody felt the tsunami. I don't think that's the way

00:44:29.320 it was at all. I think in the particular case of the people who look like me on this continent,

00:44:34.560 it would take the form of this

00:44:36.660 there was a time

00:44:40.740 or there were times

00:44:42.760 it should be plural

00:44:43.500 when we had a capacity

00:44:46.220 for home

00:44:47.760 that's the way I'd like to say it

00:44:50.000 rather than we had a home

00:44:51.920 we had a capacity for home

00:44:54.340 over and above the particularities

00:44:56.580 of place

00:44:57.160 and it was those particularities

00:45:00.000 that granted us this capacity for home

00:45:02.640 that we were able to somewhat travel with

00:45:05.940 to the point where, in the context of a nomadic existence,

00:45:10.260 no one was not at home

00:45:12.060 because they moved from one place to another. 0.76

00:45:15.420 Neither did they understand the entire earth,

00:45:18.420 you know, all of creation, to quote, be their home.

00:45:21.280 It was still specific.

00:45:23.280 It wasn't throttled down

00:45:25.900 until you have to sit at this particular place

00:45:29.260 or you have no such capacity.

00:45:31.000 and how was that place recognizable at the human level i think this is what it was

00:45:36.440 that people congregated or returned to that place in sufficient numbers over a sufficient length of

00:45:44.900 time that everyone knew that their principal lived relationship with that place was transacted

00:45:52.800 through the fact they know where the bones of their people are i'm not sure that they had

00:45:58.320 cemeteries as we understand them now because as traveling people there wouldn't be a place where

00:46:04.100 all the bones went to that the bones would be strewn across the path of their wandering

00:46:09.620 as long as they knew where they were they're the whisperings of home not the taunts of home

00:46:17.340 not the absence of home everywhere where the grass grew well that the animals brought the

00:46:26.180 pastoralists to every one of those good grass places the quality of their grass was partly

00:46:32.380 underwritten by the fact that old family members and ancestors were buried in that very place which

00:46:38.740 made the grass green and they followed the animals to their people when they drank that milk and when

00:46:45.080 they ate that meat from those animals they were absolutely being fed by their ancestors in every

00:46:51.460 physical and metaphysical way that that could ever have been understood and that is somehow

00:46:57.300 strikes me as the warp and the weft of home that it's a combination of the specifics of place which

00:47:04.860 is why i mentioned topography and wind and current earlier it's the dynamics of place

00:47:10.860 that's a warp and the weft is memory and those two things together weave the shelter that you

00:47:19.480 live inside of. And this is true symbolically, spiritually. It's true psychologically. It's true

00:47:26.560 mutually. Your lived life together is transacted in the context of what I just said. Now, there

00:47:33.540 are natural catastrophes that can eclipse the scenario I've just described. But by virtue of

00:47:40.300 being natural catastrophes, they would never be understood as the annihilation of the scenario I

00:47:46.220 just described sooner or later they would be gathered into this understanding

00:47:50.760 what produced north america was not a natural disaster what produced north america was a more

00:47:59.200 or less spontaneous flight from what had already ruptured badly ruptured the scenario i've just

00:48:06.020 described to you and you know economists can tell us aspects of it and they're right you know the

00:48:12.300 loss of the commons, the driving of people off the land towards urban centers, you know,

00:48:17.360 the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. These are important things to learn about,

00:48:21.500 because that's how the story I'm talking about took place. But the story is rarely told.

00:48:28.400 If you look at the photographs of those immigrants that ended up in Ellis Island in the United

00:48:34.580 States and and Grosse-Ele and St. Lawrence in Canada what you see is you would expect to see

00:48:42.220 a certain degree of distress or torment or or despondency or trauma in the faces perhaps of

00:48:48.960 the older people who never imagined that the you know the latter third of their life would be lived

00:48:55.120 in a place that they knew not so you'd expect to see that and you do see it in the pictures

00:48:59.700 But the thing that strikes me enormously is the babes in arms in these immigrant photographs have basically the same look on their faces as the grandparents and the parents that are holding them.

00:49:14.460 Now, how to understand that? 0.63

00:49:16.600 Because it's a kind of a record of an unfolding disaster that's not natural.

00:49:22.160 And it's this loss, this compound loss of home that's being miscast as a search for freedom.

00:49:33.740 It's a freedom so confounding now that we're so confused by it that we cannot distinguish freedom from an utter loneliness of no capacity to feel allegiance to the place that you're at.

00:49:48.120 i remember hearing you say in an interview that you can't just wait until the 11th hour

00:49:55.660 to figure all this out it's a life's work to prepare oneself for death if we are able to do

00:50:03.260 that work and remember these stories but we're not able to give our heirs or the earth our bodies

00:50:11.600 potentially because of the way the death because of chemo and all kinds of things the chemo and

00:50:16.800 and the embalmment, and the caskets, and the whole thing, since we're not able to do that,

00:50:21.800 what are we able to give back with our death? It's our manner of dying.

00:50:28.140 Our manner of dying is the gift that we have. You know, this is a very tricky question,

00:50:34.440 this question of gift, of giving back. It goes in the direction of sacrifice, but the sacrifice

00:50:40.340 is that, frankly, it's a pernicious proposition, because the etymology of the second half of the

00:50:46.520 It comes from a Latin word from which we get the English word to fashion, fice, fashion, to make, and the prefix is, of course, sacred, to make sacred, that sacred is a fashioned thing.

00:51:02.220 I mean, what kind of bruised psyche and wounded ancestry gives rise to the idea that humans are in the sacred making business?

00:51:10.820 i'm not pretending i don't understand how it come to be that way but the word itself gives us pause

00:51:17.740 so we might rather say that rather in trying to ongoingly engage in sacrifice or

00:51:24.260 or kind of pound of flesh guilt offerings that are a consequence of us realizing how badly we've

00:51:32.460 mangled what was entrusted to us we might come to this thing that has a tone of redemption in it

00:51:40.720 instead of a tone of kind of sort of gross contrition in it.

00:51:47.460 And it could be this.

00:51:48.960 Do we have anything to give to the world,

00:51:53.640 to the life that has given us our life,

00:51:55.600 to the people that will follow us,

00:51:58.380 to the food sequence that has granted us our days, etc.,

00:52:04.020 that doesn't require us taking it from somewhere else

00:52:07.800 in order to have it to give?

00:52:10.720 I mean, in the present moment.

00:52:13.000 And my answer would be, there's a few things.

00:52:15.260 One of them is your manner of dying.

00:52:18.600 Your manner of dying, you do not steal from some other life form,

00:52:23.440 from some other human, from some other era, from some other culture.

00:52:29.580 It doesn't have to go that way.

00:52:32.100 You can die understanding that your manner of,

00:52:35.920 I'm not talking about the cause of death now.

00:52:38.000 I'm going to use the word style.

00:52:39.460 that your style of death is the only thing you have to bequeath to the people who come after you

00:52:47.540 and to the place that your body is going to end up in that will not prompt a family disagreement

00:52:53.740 about who gets what that will not send lawyers kids to private school that will not end up on a

00:53:01.420 sale table for quarters at a yard sale somewhere it might be the only thing you have that won't

00:53:07.820 end up in one of those three scenarios your manner of dying is a gift beyond our understanding what

00:53:15.580 constitutes value because it is a it's a piece of meaning strangely enough that the people come

00:53:23.660 come after you will either be afflicted by because your manner of dying was so was so involuntary and

00:53:33.080 so kind of encrusted by grievance that the meaning of your death to the generations to 0.74

00:53:42.880 come is whatever you do, don't friggin' die kind of tone.

00:53:48.260 Or your manner of dying whispers to the people that come after you that, friends, this is

00:53:54.160 a kind of an achievement that you'd never seek as an achieved thing.

00:53:59.540 So imagine that it's possible.

00:54:01.720 imagine that the time to come is written partly by how you die that your understanding what it

00:54:11.220 means to die is not divorced from your understanding what it means to be alive

00:54:15.560 and once you realize that you're going to die in the manner of your living the next question

00:54:21.260 becomes what are you waiting for are you waiting for a terminal diagnosis to become a contemplative

00:54:28.180 genius. Is that what it is? Do you honestly imagine that no matter how you lived, that your

00:54:35.100 dying will not bear the fingerprint of your manner of living? Because it will. That's all it will be.

00:54:44.760 Your manner of dying will bear faithfully all your convictions about life. So the kind of

00:54:53.160 redemptive vision might be that everyone's death before our own is a chance to get a PhD in the

00:54:59.840 way it is. And if that's the case, we can learn from them that it's our living that gives our

00:55:08.620 death meaning and that we have to begin now. You know, as someone who farms a lot, I'm often asked

00:55:15.000 for agricultural advice. And the answer I get asked in some form or another, more than, excuse

00:55:20.840 me the question i get asked more than any other is um when's the best time to plant a tree and i

00:55:27.580 know they mean day or night or season or i don't know what a phase of the moon and so on but my

00:55:33.560 answer is always the same i say best time to plant a tree about 25 years ago and they look at me

00:55:40.360 with the kind of visual equivalent of some of the tone that you've asked me your questions in

00:55:44.760 which is to say that's beyond confounding that's cruel because somehow you're not only do you

00:55:51.380 refuse to answer the question apparently but that you're answering it in a way that makes life seem

00:55:57.600 to be impossible and futile you're talking about the past as the only way that anything well you're

00:56:06.880 encrusted by the past basically so i would say to you the reason i say 25 years ago is because i'm

00:56:13.740 answering the question that they haven't quite articulated but is absolutely there which is how

00:56:20.140 can i have a tree to sit under right now that's where the question is really coming from right

00:56:26.900 now and so that's why i say 25 years ago so there's a sense of too lateness about it if you

00:56:33.460 want to have a full-grown tree to sit under today but you have not proceeded in the last 25 years

00:56:39.620 as if that day would come when you'd want that tree shelter.

00:56:44.500 So what's to be done?

00:56:46.340 And the answer is get planting.

00:56:49.060 Why?

00:56:49.900 Because there will be people 25 years from now

00:56:52.220 who are going to ask the same question.

00:56:54.420 And the miracle will be that you have been willing to proceed

00:56:57.760 as if they will appear.

00:56:59.980 You start tree planting as saplings now,

00:57:02.900 you're not going to see the fullness of that tree.

00:57:05.700 No, you won't.

00:57:06.720 And there's some real grief in that.

00:57:09.620 And you're doing it on behalf of people you will not meet.

00:57:13.040 And yes, there's some altruism, but there's the grief that informs the whole operation.

00:57:18.420 And just when you think that this is a recipe for selflessness and for service to the future,

00:57:24.720 here's the rest of the story.

00:57:26.640 How did you know how to even ask for when's the best time to plant a tree?

00:57:32.040 Answer is because you'd seen trees already.

00:57:36.060 That means that whether you seek out this wisdom or whether you don't,

00:57:40.900 the truth is that even in our blighted time,

00:57:44.540 there have been people who have been willing to proceed

00:57:47.640 as if we ourselves would be in the time and in the crazy soil that we're in,

00:57:56.480 and they planted.

00:57:58.200 And if it wasn't trees, it was struggles.

00:58:01.720 And if it wasn't struggles, it was, you know, approximations of wisdom.

00:58:05.620 And if it wasn't that, you know, it was old tribal clothing that they somehow kept alive just as an undershirt, or whatever it is.

00:58:13.520 You see, we're not operating in the absence of all these things. 0.61

00:58:17.540 We are today operating in the abandonment of all these things.

00:58:22.340 So the proper redress to this kind of abandonment and betrayal, frankly, is remembrance.

00:58:29.480 so i mean i think we're close to the end of our time here and maybe you've gone over but

00:58:35.460 i'd offer you this as an understanding remember it's vis-a-vis dying now i worked with a lot of

00:58:41.860 people whose instinct was to make home movies that was a big thing i had their dying to make

00:58:48.260 these movies you know we have the technology now it's so simple and they were dispensing wisdom

00:58:52.980 and all the rest and if i were to ask them why are you making this they would answer that well

00:58:58.180 they're not going to live long enough to see their kids graduate from school or get married

00:59:02.320 or whatever it is, or see their first grandchild. So they're making these things as a voice from

00:59:07.960 the grave, so to speak, that could somehow triumph over the limitations of a lifespan.

00:59:14.660 And I'd say, well, I understand that's what's prompting you to make them,

00:59:18.380 but why are you making them? Not for whom, but why? And no one ever answered, but my take on it

00:59:26.120 is this. Nobody makes a movie choreographing the way in which they hope to be remembered

00:59:32.260 if they really have faith that the future generation will remember them. And so all of

00:59:39.700 these lunges are towards a kind of vague longing for just being remembered, not immortality,

00:59:47.040 just some kind of endurance for a while, you know, that you don't slip beneath the waves,

00:59:51.880 gone for all time with no consequence to your days so rather than trying to choreograph the

00:59:59.620 way in which you'll be remembered which is basically the hero's journey one of the things

01:00:05.460 i've been pleading for for years is to die not trying to get remembered but die remembering

01:00:11.960 because this you can still do on behalf of those people who died fundamentally not remembered and

01:00:20.080 this is why I answered you earlier about learning ancestry and not invoking someone else's as a kind

01:00:26.080 of pan-human kind of Walmart for the soul that you can go into and choose an ancestry that more

01:00:33.800 becomes you you know I mean I'm 61 you know it's not ancient but I can see it from here and I can

01:00:41.880 tell you I'm doing everything I'm doing for people your age I don't know how old you are but you have

01:00:46.640 a young sounding voice, younger than I feel to this morning anyway. And that's the allegiance

01:00:52.620 I'm acting on. And I have deep apprehension about the world that people my age and older

01:00:58.500 are handing over to you saying, well, good luck with that one. You know, while we're maximizing

01:01:04.980 our income generating years and Monsanto continues and on our watch. And so the very least as any

01:01:13.220 opportunity that you've granted me to wonder aloud about these things with you has to carry

01:01:18.600 that sorrow in it too you know and there could be a lot of self-hatred in there but there isn't

01:01:24.560 because neither one of us have the time not at you at your age not me at mine that this world

01:01:30.380 needs something else of us that's something that looks human not the betrayal of human

01:01:36.260 not the denial of it. It seems to me in a troubled time, humans are troubled. And maybe

01:01:43.560 what we've achieved talking together this morning is that we've been willing to be troubled aloud

01:01:49.080 together for a while. And maybe there's something there.

01:01:54.380 Well, thank you. Thank you for wandering aloud with me. I'm sure my mind will continue to spin

01:02:02.020 this around into many vortexes to come believe me when I tell you it's an honor for you to ask

01:02:08.740 me these things as if I might have something useful to say back hopefully I kept up my end

01:02:13.300 thank you for honoring all the people that gave me a chance to learn all this stuff which is what

01:02:16.740 you did with your questions

01:02:17.780 that my friends was and is steven jankinson along the way we heard some orphan sounds coming from

01:02:46.940 Australia, a song called Mosquito by the Aussie band The Necks, followed by Niels Fromm from a

01:02:55.240 piece called Tristana, and Lou Reed with Cremation. Rate us on iTunes, subscribe to the newsletter,

01:03:03.520 and help out the program by donating. We can be found at forthewild.world. Thank you so much.

01:03:16.940 Drifting on the wind

01:03:20.740 Through the mountains like a river

01:03:22.920 Sweet smell of pine

01:03:26.680 Tall western cedar

01:03:29.620 Drifting on the wind

01:03:32.980 Through the mountains like a river

01:03:46.940 Thank you.

For The Wild - December 08, 2016

STEPHEN JENKINSON on Ancestry and Misanthropy ⧸41

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