🐵 "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently."
–Graeber quoted in Adam Curtis' documental series Can't Get You Out of My Head (2021)
🙉 Alexander Ebert, "Truth" (Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros, concert at the Big Top, LA, Oct. 2013)
🙈 Joe Webb, “Spoonfed”
Money creation during Covid, States’ immense debts and cancelation of the very same debts by the IMF –even the seemingly most tangible things of our reality are only so solid for some of us.
Nineties, me as a child, I can’t seem to comprehend the existence of poverty. I logically ask my mum: “Why don’t we create more money?”
There’s no need here to discuss why things are the way they are; I think it is self explaining: if you want to manipulate a behaviour, the easiest way is to offer two possible options which nevertheless fall within the field of the behaviour you are trying to impose. It is a diversion which tend to provide the feeling that there’s a choice when really coercion is imposed. It is amongst the techniques of what’s called positive education: when a child doesn’t want to eat, you can offer him·her chips or cheese. The opposition between having or not having money is of the same type of authority: there is no alternative, except for those who decide.
Still as a child, I used to watch a cartoon which episodes told the “war” against the microbe, the “factory”-cell and the “attacks” of antibodies. The use of a vocabulary that is that of industry and war in order to explain how the human body works reflects an era who perceive what happens to us and our environment as something that we need to control, domesticate, dominate, exploit, and as something that is exterior and adverse to us. And it isn’t the third World War against Covid that would make me claim it isn’t true.
Paraphrasing Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, having imagination is nonetheless the only weapon against reality. Stories are all we are and all that builds us. Obviously, a child growing within a mechanistic view of creation does not see the universe the same way as a child growing with the idea at, initially, the world was carried on the back of a turtle.
Some of the peoples of North America tell the story of Skywoman. She was so eager to know the universe that she started digging, digging and digging the canopy of the sky until the hole was so big that she finally fell into it. At this moment, on planet Earth, there was only water, water everywhere and a lot of animals. When they saw Skywoman falling from the sky, realizing that her fall was going to create a huge cataclysm, the Animals took council. The Birds’s were designated to cushion the shock while the Turtle was in charge of receiving the load. Once installed on the back of the turtle, the Animals understood that Skywoman was pregnant. Soon enough, it was necessary to find more space for her offspring. Skywoman made a guess: at the bottom of the ocean, there must be earth. So then, one by one, the Animals dove and undertook finding the bottom of the ocean. Various almost died in the undertaking, until Muskrat came back to the surface, passed out, with a small amount of dirt in his hand. Little by little, the Animals piled up the earth until the Earth was created.
The difference between a prosaic (in prose) understanding of the world and a poetic one is a difference of taste (of life), it is not a radically different reality. What I mean to say is that there’s never any other reality than the one we chose to see at a given moment. We change view on events and things within a lifetime and even within a few seconds sometimes. Does it mean that we are lying to ourselves? I think that we just evolve and that it is a saner process than staying stuck within fixed ideas. In this context, reality does no exist, at least not really. It is multiple, rather.
“Mythology is not a lie; mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth - penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images (…). Mythology pitches the mind (…) to what can be known but not told.”
–Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)
It’s the same difference that lies between a literal reading of a sheet music and the exploration of the soul of the same score, in other words the search for what its author had in mind while composing it. Mahler’s music for instance, is infused by modern human condition: exterminations of the the 20th century and nuclear science. It conveys a lot better its transformative power when the conductor knows that the only way, according to the composer, to transcend this modern condition was to meet again the child inside every one of us, the child that should have never disappeared. This way, we can comprehend why is first symphony Titan starts its third movement by a version in a minor key of Brother John, which sounds like a funeral march, introduced by an upright bass whose voice breaks like that of an adolescent marching towards adulthood while leaving behind the child he·she was.
At another level, the dissonant partition of the soul in the modern world is often understood as its division. I am referring here to what contemporaneous society designate by the words “schizophrenics”, “bipolars” and “depressed people” who are, according to me, not sick people but individuals who have a normal reaction while being confronted with abnormal conditions. In other calendars and geographies, we called them Jesus, Muhammad, Joan of Arc, shamans and healers those humans who have the ability to navigate between worlds and communicate with the invisible when faced up by critical situations. It is a form of wisdom and a lifework to successfully make an art of the voices, the images and the emotions that we can't help but perceive –for the invisible to become a legitimate guide of reality.
Some of this post’s sources:
Thomas King, North-American native storyteller (The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, 2003)
Hearing Voices international network which exists all around the globe and aims to accompany, educate and share a different understanding of what “schizophrenia” is, beyond the stigma
Kelly Brogan, renegade psychiatrist (Own Your Self, 2019)