Comeback Kids

“Scientists have calculated that if two houseflies met and mated and no predators ate them or their offspring, the fly pair and their offspring could produce enough flies to cover the entire earth 47 feet deep with flies, in just one year”

Loren Nancarrow/Janet Hogan Taylor, ‘The Worm Book’, 1998

(flies are amongst the most prolific breeders. A female house fly can laybetween 500 and 600 eggs during her life, in batches of 75 to 100 eggs. Thewhole process from egg to adult takes less than two weeks. If all the eggs froma female house fly were to hatch, and all the offspring were allowed to survive,breed, and lay their own eggs, then we would have 180,000 flies in just twogenerations. In three generations we would have 54,000,000 flies: sourced online)

"The mathematics of uncontrolled growth are frightening. A single cell of the bacterium E. coli would, under ideal circumstances, divide every twenty minutes.That is not particularly disturbing until you think about it, but the fact is that bacteria multiply geometrically: one becomes two, two become four, four become eight, and so on. In this way it can be shown that in a single day, one cell of E. coli could produce a super-colony equal in size and weight to the entire planet Earth."

Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain, (1969)


I quote the above horror scenarios of uninterrupted exponential growth partly in response to Yourmindfire’s piece ‘Growing Up’. As YMF argues, an over literal fixation on growth is a psychotic action leading straight to a new and deeper annex of Hell, rather as the scenarios with the flies and e.coli would be; that nature permits neither to manifest at this point is evidence enough of our blessed state, one might surmise. Nature insists on diversity and predation (spiders, the weather and seasonality, disinfectant, those funny ultra-violet insecto-cutor machines you get in chips-shops…), as well as nurture, cyclical rhythms of growth and shrinkage and an amazingly complex web of interdependent factors. The same is true of the human psyche – our behaviours are informed by an immensely complicated network of interdependent and interrelating factors, internally as well as in terms of outer relationships. Alongside these complex connections, systems and networks, all of which promote mutuality, we also notice that certain junction points in this mesh (Indra’s net?) function as thresholds. Some of these are biological (puberty, parenthood, menopause) others cultural (you’re 18 now, you’re getting married, you’re fired) still others psychological (depression, stable ego-identity) and perhaps yet others are spiritual in nature (peak experiences in practice, particular quality of dreams, meditational realisations) – I could go on.

My point here is that thresholds necessarily interrupt the flow of connection – they disrupt our comfort zones, push us up against our boundaries or lack thereof. They also resist our desires – no good trying to bribe the ferryman to carry you across whichever Styx you’ve reached – he sees through your bullshit, you’re either authentically ready or you’re not, in which case you sit and wait until you are. These are profound and deep moments, and as King Lear observed ‘Ripeness is all’. Promethean acts in the face of thresholds and their guardians result in getting one’s fingers burned (and one’s liver eternally pecked out, perhaps). Humans have always understood this, always that is, until relatively recently. If we hadn’t quite ignored the knowledge of thresholds before, we surely did in the 1940s with the birth of the atomic age – storming the gates of unreason with the needle-mind of power. Everything changed at that point, as has been well explored from many angles. But in crossing that threshold, did we stop to consider what we’d have to give up? And what our lionising of ‘progress’ as power actually entails? Here was truly born the state of ‘post-modern confusion’ and its associated utter relativism of values.

Are we become ‘lords of the flies’, Beelzebub’s humming cousins in our ‘Hummers’, virulent aggressive and apparently limitless in our self-conception? Perhaps so. One function of this (among many), from where I’m standing at least, was to believe (enough of) the hype I encountered as I grew up. For example, I took it for granted that I lived in a world where, barring a few dictatorships and aberrations, torture was universally viewed as ‘not OK’. Same went for fundamentalism of religion, political ideology or scientific dogma. Well it seems I was Spectacularly (I use the word advisedly) deceived. My naivety is one thing (of course torture, state terrorism, abuses of every kind by the so-called forces of law and order, proliferation of fear, despotism and pre-emptive war carried on in spades, and if not for my insulated spatial disposition in life as a white male, I’d no doubt’ve spotted it sooner) for which I alone am culpable, but the context in which that dance played out wasn’t only (or even) down to me (or you). It’s a cultural phenomenon, predicated upon cosseted ‘first world’ holier-than-thou and certainly richer-than-thou morality.

Where is all this going – randy flies and unstoppably fecund bacteria, nuclear capabilities, thresholds within interdependent networks? Well, bear with me – since, the biggest threat to human survival is currently a three way tie between catastrophic and unsurvivable climate change, full-on nuclear holocaust (a favourite hell realm of mine, and I suspect anyone growing up in the 80s) and catastrophic collapse of everything underpinned by reliance on fossil fuels, especially oil and gas (i.e. the structures of so-called ‘civilization’). Of these, one common theme is the ‘catastrophic’ element, another is the ‘self-inflicted’ aspect (I’m giving up on assuaging the objections of climate change doubters or peak oil deniers – let them eat cake) and still another is the ‘threshold’ nature of the events and the circumstances through which they would manifest. My contention is that I (and I’d go so far as to suggest, ‘we’) have over-estimated the collective human consensus around the ‘conscious’ parts of ourselves and dangerously ignored the ‘unconscious’ aspects (which would appear to be much greater and more potent than we’d bargained for) – the rule of ego and its concomitant rule of law cannot sustain themselves against this denial and repression – hence we erupt, we leak, we dare the threshold too soon, and we act out every shadow fantasy collectively. Meanwhile, nature and the world we are embedded in continues to try and cope with our maniacal behaviours (towards it and each other) and also operates according to much deeper rules. Finite rules, not market-led mechanisms to facilitate endless growth.


Nature’s imagination trumps ours in terms of creativity, abundance and diversity, and also because nature manifests more than we humans can envisage – the earth’s annual yield is unimaginably complex and wonderful, balanced and sustaining – and yet we now exceed it massively, flipping Mother Nature the bird. Well, it can’t last – and the comebacks I referred to in the title of this piece are not just those I thought I’d seen the end of – the mainstream acceptability of torture, nuclear proliferation and attachment, pre-emptive war – but also those within nature that we conveniently forgot about. Like the finite reserves of one-time-only fossil fuel endowments (they didn’t magically vanish in the wake of the 70s oil-shocks).

We are like children whose inner and outer worlds have yet to fully differentiate – we believe that what we want to be true will be, a magical thinking, but one that, for all its puer grandeur and sweeping vision, is never actually to be realised. Pre-egoic children don’t cross the thresholds of adulthood without experiencing traumatic chaos – one could say we’re all living in a more-or-less functionally repressed, PTSD state – especially if one factors in prior-lifetimes of involvement with this samsaric wheel. We’re damaged kids, the kids aren’t alright, they’re us – and until we reclaim our dreams from the traumatic conditioning, until we heal ourselves by descending into our deepest fears and truly facing them at the thresholds inside – then we will not be allowed the grace of crossing the outer thresholds and ‘saving’ our planet. It is our selves that need the saving.

Kh
14.7.06


IMAGES: Lord of the Flies (2006) painting by Douglas Thompson available from the artist, E. Coli on Blood Agar (2006) photograph from University of Cambridge, Department of Pathology.