The Thin Edge of the Wedge

A friend asked me if I believed in the current structures and, if not (I don't), what would I replace them with?

Another friend asked me why we didn't hand out flyers at our Boxing Day AnthropoScene or ask people, "What are you doing to create the extinction crisis we face?"

I got really irritated with both of them and I'm still irritated.

Regarding handing out flyers and asking people point blank... seriously? Ya, the reason I have diligently used my naked, VULNERABLE self/body as an expressive/artistic/political statement for  MORE THAN 10 YEARS of HEAVY LIFTING is because I haven't thought about flyers or asking people pointed questions. 

The decision to intervene, to trouble, to create—dare I say it?!—discomfort is purposeful.

Portrait of me by Elemental.

In my portrait here, by Elemental, she used an interview she conducted while sketching me to pull my quote. I say: "This is a culture of avoiding pain at all costs." 

But it's worse than that! We're a culture of avoiding discomfort at all costs. 

And, hypocrite that I am—because who cannot be a hypocrite in this culture?—like pretty much all of my cultural criticism, I am also criticizing and implicating myself. I have said many times and I'll say it again: I'm teaching what I need to learn.

I know that the work I've done in the Human Body Project and the new AnthropoScene Collective isn't easy to parse. 

It's more like a poke in the psyche for the people who come upon it. Yes, it creates discomfort. I dunno, is discomfort worse than facing mass extinction? A fate that is decidedly closer with President-of-the-Petrostate Trump's inauguration. 

Just because our society's emotional/neurological systems haven't evolved to FEEL the PAIN and seriousness of the ongoing situation so that in most cases NO AMOUNT of logic will penetrate... I'M supposed to figure out a surefire way of reaching people?!

And I'M supposed to know the best system to replace it with?!

This is what I know and have been expressing in my personal/political art practice for more than 10 years: we don't understand or deal with VULNERABILITY. 

Because in this ego-based culture, in this culture built on millennia of domination and violence, our understanding of vulnerability is suppressed pre-verbally. 

(From my personal perspective of doing DECADES of self-study and therapies to heal, I have come to understand my own PTSD-like nervous system symptoms as something that happened at birth. Simply put, my extremely sensitive baby being couldn't believe I had landed in such a cruel, unloving, DISCONNECTED place and my extremely sensitive 55-year-old being still can't. Ya, ya, people are basically kind but are emotionally damaged, etc. I'm on board with that. That's the whole point.)

We are all walking around in various states of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). To cope, we learn to suppress our vulnerability. This suppression of vulnerability is especially socialized and internalized by masculine beings.

So conversations about climate change, mass extinction and the end of capitalism as an idea that functions for the good of most people—incredibly challenging conversations—are impossible to have when one-upmanship is the norm. 

And impossible to have when one-upmanship (a nicer word for domination and violence) created the situation in the first place. Hence thinkers such as Audre Lorde: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

The choices the American people had for electing a leader were mistress-of-realpolitik Hillary Clinton (status quo, or, arguably, worse) and an INSANE PERSON addicted to one-upmanship. The system—and many people—allowed the insane person to win. 

The current structures of English and most dominant languages, as well as dominant institutional structures for governance, "trade," education, etc. do not allow for us to have the kind of conversations we need to have AND have created the situation we are in.

As I explained to the friend who asked me what structures I would replace the current house of cards with, that's not my job! I'm the thin edge of the wedge already!

Do the visuals help? The thin edge of the wedge people are taxed in a way that most people couldn't possibly comprehend. We're up front chip-chip-chipping away, creating the space for movement and change.

Like the tip of any wooden doorstop, we are beaten and battered but, at least in my case, still in service.

Not only that, "be the change" has been my purpose from the beginning. To own and hold vulnerability, to share vulnerability, I do work that is exactly the opposite of comfortable. 

And, not only that!! To offer a space to be vulnerable and show up vulnerably is exactly what we need to have honest and NECESSARY conversations.

As I explained to both of my friends, after doing this for more than 10 years, my work is about due diligence. I show up and do the work. I don't get money. I don't get jobs. I am not generally befriended or welcomed by art or theatre people. Academics don't get it. I am CONSTANTLY coming up against criticism and judgment, my own and others; or worse, indifference. There are moments of fun when I'm actually out there but far more moments of difficulty (MENTAL ILLNESS/processing shit-type stuff) behind the scenes. I got Stage 4 cancer for fuck's sake.

DUE FUCKING DILIGENCE. I hereby honour myself.

As my friend suggested I ask: what are you doing to prevent the mass extinction crisis in which we find ourselves?

I try not to rant but so be it.

The next AnthropoScene will take place in solidarity with the Million Women's March on January 21, 1pm, in Centennial Square, Victoria, BC.

A Natural History of Peace

The title above comes from the title of an article in the April 2006 issue of Harper's magazine. The article is written by Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neurology at Stanford University, and I read it shortly after the time when I was writing below about critical mass. It gave me great hope because it seemed to confirm that concept but comes at it from a different angle: primatology.

The article summarizes recent thinking in the study of primates (i.e. monkeys, i.e. our closest animal relatives). Sapolsky first writes about how in the 60s the violence of primates became known. They, like humans, kill each other, use violence strategically, use toolmaking skills to make better weapons, and even engage in what can only be termed warfare. Sapolsky says this gave rise to a prevailing theory of humans as killer apes; that violence is part of being human.

But newer evidence has emerged that offers hope for people like me who believe that humans (and other primates) do not intrinsically need or wish to be brutal. I believe that given the opportunity to survive peacefully, people will choose that route. It seems like monkeys go the same way. I'll simplify Sapolsky's evidence: several experiments have indicated that moving highly agressive monkeys (in particular, young males) into a different more peace-loving, "affiliative" cultural group caused the violent, young alpha-monkeys to change their behaviour within hours and to retain their less agressive behaviours. These changes continued into their descendants.

In one study where a group of agressive monkeys had died because they had all foraged at the same infested dump, the baboon troop was left with less agressive males. Agression died down significantly in the whole troop. Males even groomed each other on occasion, an almost unprecedented behaviour in baboons. Sapolsky says this is not only because of the female-male ratio but because of the types of males that were left. What is really interesting, though, about this particular study stems from the fact that baboon males will leave their birth troop to mate. Twenty years later none of the troop's males were born or grew up there--they grew up in more agressive cultures--yet the peaceful culture of that troop prevailed.

Sapolsky also mentions studies that have shown that humans are hard-wired to distrust those who are unlike their "tribe"--seeing foreigners sets off the amygdala, the so-called reptile brain, setting off, in turn, fear. This has given rise to pessimism about the innateness of xenophobia. But newer evidence suggests that when testing subjects who have experience of people of different races or by subtly biasing subjects ahead of time by asking them to think of people as individuals, the amygdala remains undisturbed. Humans, it turns out, are flexible.

Writes Sapolsky: "We have fashioned religions in which violent acts are the entree to paradise and religions in which the same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting... possible? To say it is beyond our nature is to know too little about primates, including ourselves."