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MISANTHROPY

This has been one of the wettest, and certainly one of the coolest, summers in memory.  There have been, at most, three or perhaps four days of genuinely oppressive heat, and already summer is winding down.  For this coolness I have been exceedingly grateful.

Though we've still a few more weeks of summer left, I begin looking about me now to see if I can locate the earliest signs of fall, just as I sought to spy out the earliest signs of spring even in the midst of winter.  There exists, of course, a sharper line of demarcation between summer and fall than exists between winter and spring:  when the heavy frosts come, all the insects will die in one blow, along with many of the plants.  But some weeks before that occurs there will arrive a day when, in the midst of a sunny afternoon, the air will seem to "turn" – will have a certain coolness to it, betokening a deeper chill to come; and the breeze will have a different scent – crisper, sharper, drier – than the heavier, more dank perfume of summer.  That day has not yet been.  But already there are a few signs – "signals," one might almost call them – of summer's demise.  A light scattering of leaves has lately fallen.  The number of flies has increased noticeably.  Mushrooms and toadstools are becoming profuse.  The skunk cabbages, long since collapsed, are beginning to rot.  The sense of luxuriant abundance that once permeated the woods has faded:  now the saplings lining the pathway that leads down the side of the gully have an air of wasting about them; their leaves are thinner, drier, chewed up, spotted with brown.  Mosquitoes, gnats, and countless other nameless specks of life dart frantically through the air.  The daddy longlegs have begun to proliferate; or perhaps it's just that, having reached a state of full growth, they've become more noticeable than they were before.  In a few weeks they'll be swarming in masses over the ground, mouths pointed downward, spindly legs scrambling desperately over leaf, stick, and stone.  Everywhere there is a sense that the plenitude of summer has passed its peak and the time of scarcity is fast approaching.  The days are growing shorter.  The season of dying draws near.

I finish eating an apple while sitting under a tree at the cemetery and toss what remains towards a chipmunk hole nearby.  Sometimes I'm lucky enough to see the little being that lives in there dart out, grab the apple's core, and drag this sweet, juicy bit of treasure home.  I bring grapes with me as well, and, as I walk through cemetery and woods, drop one here, one there, into the mouths of small burrows.  These are my calling cards.  My little "gifts."  My way of saying hello.  I've begun too to once again pick up the trash I find in the woods, not just along the path that I follow but everywhere I go.  I've picked up perhaps a half-dozen small bag's worth so far – everything from the usual plastic flowers and sodden bits of ribbon that have blown loose from graves to the usual beer bottles and soda-pop cans that have been tossed aside by human hands; from countless pieces of broken glass to the doll's arm I'd discovered earlier this year to discarded bits of wire and pieces of cloth, a rusted-out can of lighter fluid, a bent spatula . . .  It's amazing, really, what I find.  In one spot I came upon an old outdoor grill that I had to disassemble and carry out in pieces; also three separate metal-mesh boxes, each about two foot square.  These latter items I found set round an old campfire pit; apparently they'd been used for sitting on.  I've come upon no less than five old campfire pits so far, small heaps of burnt wood and ash circled with stones.  These I've disassembled as well, taking the stones to the side of the gully and rolling them back down to the bed of the creek.  Doing this has given me more pleasure than anything else, I suppose because I'm actually destroying the signs of careless intrusion rather than simply clearing them away.

Curiously, however, I'm forced into an awareness of a kind of egoism involved in my efforts.  One day, having picked up a soda can and shaken it free of the dirt that had collected inside, I noticed that some of the dirt contained ants – the tiniest, most miniscule ants I've ever seen.  Inspecting the can's interior more closely, I saw that it was being used by these ants as a nesting place.  Nearly every tin or aluminum can I've come across has been similarly occupied; now I just leave them be.  Another time I found an old, plastic-covered seat cushion lying half-buried in the leaves.  It was near one of the old firepits and had obviously been used to protect somebody's bottom from the damp ground; lifting one corner of it, I saw that it too was being utilized as a form of shelter by a nest of ants.  Another time, happening upon a lengthy sheet of heavy plastic covered with leaves, I found that it as well had been employed for protection against the elements:  hiding underneath were earthworms and slugs, spiders and millipedes and more ants of course, along with many other tiny, nameless creatures.  Perhaps after the heavy frosts have come I'll be able to remove these items, but for now I leave them be.  Nature has made use of them in ways I would never have expected, and do not wish to disrupt.  Nature, in fact, does not seem to mind the trash nearly as much as I do; which leads me to believe that my spending so much time and effort at the activity of picking it up is merely a form of self-indulgence.  Or it may be that this particular endeavor of mine is a misappropriation of my energies:  the pollution here in the woods is, relatively speaking at least, sparse; the environment largely left in its natural state.  Is there then a more beneficial way to put my concern to use?  Perhaps; but there is also, I think, a danger of minimizing the value of my efforts too much.  If nothing else, I find it rather pointed that it is the ant which I have found myself most often in danger of disturbing.  What, I wonder, might this signify?

When I was a boy, I used to catch ants and drop them into spiderwebs; I liked to watch the ferocious spiders dart out.  Seeing them bite their prey, then wrap it up in a few strands of sticky silk for later feasting, both horrified and fascinated me.  How much of my horror, I wondered, was shared by the ants?  How much admiration was due the spider?  Ants are, of course, highly social insects; the value of the individual rests solely on its ability to serve the greater social good.  Thus they stand as a paradigm for human society, in which both compassion for others and the survival of the individual is to be realized through the maintenance of the prevailing social order:  protect the status quo and you thereby ensure its protection of you.  Spiders, on the other hand, are solitary.  Spiders are self-serving and self-sufficient.  Spiders prey upon ants.  Spiders exist outside the social order of the ants – just as, even as a boy, I knew myself to do, though I did not yet understand why that was or what it meant.  Yet I cannot, as an adult human being, imitate the spider completely:  if nothing else it is, practically speaking, virtually impossible.  To live the life of a spider would mean to live the life of a criminal; by necessity it must be so, for I cannot ever entirely disengage myself from human society and thus, if prey I must, must prey upon it.  But to be a criminal means to end up more often than not confined to a cage even more real, more restricting, and more psychologically damaging to me than the one I live in now.  To be a spider is to risk punishment – and thus to risk succumbing to the forces that support that punishment:  to be a spider is to risk the requirements of rehabilitation.  To do this for the strictly self-serving purposes of the common thief seems pointless to me.  Yet neither can I be the contented ant, abnegating my individuality to satisfy the purposes of the status quo.  The societies which humans create and inhabit cannot be said to operate in comfortable accord with the world of nature, nor can they be said to give full and proper expression to inner natures of humans; and though humans may be evolving towards some new expression of nature's intents, they have not yet delineated those goals in such a manner as would allow me to accept the society in which they (and I) live out of blind trust.  I cannot be the ant any more than I can be the spider; rather, it seems, I must create within myself some amalgamation of the two.  Part ant, part spider then.  A member of society, and yet an outsider to it.  Thus I become the Watcher.  I become the Seeker.  I become the Artist.  I become the Dreamer.  I turn my back on the world, but I do not leave it.  Instead I strive to reach a point of stillness – like the spider patiently waiting at the center of its spiral of sticky thread – even while continuing to act as willing participant in society – like the ant.

I am the Dreamer, yes; also I am the Dreamed.  I am dreamed by every spark of consciousness that exists; I am dreamed by the sum total of all consciousness as it emerges from the void.  To be both Dreamer and Dreamed, both cause and effect, is how I enact stillness within my participation in society:  and that society includes both that which has been created by humans and that which is produced by nature.  Oddly, this description of myself renders me not so different from the great mass of humanity, which is made up mainly of people who seek to maximize the fulfillment of their own private wants and needs while continuing to operate within the definitions placed upon them by the prevailing social order.  It's a kind of game we play:  the rules are delineated by the society in which we live, but our successful participation in the game frequently depends upon our ability to use, bend, avoid or ignore those rules in such a way as to shape a reality that suits our own interests.  My own aims are not so very different.  But the game that I play now is not to be measured in terms of success or failure with regard to social achievement.  Rather, it involves the attempt to increase and manipulate my own personal power for the purpose of gaining self-actualization.  And if I cannot state more precisely what that aim consists of, or what may result from its fulfillment, it's only because this aim, and the methodology which I use to achieve it, shifts from day to day – almost, I might say, from hour to hour, even from moment to moment.  What I can say is that my methodology involves the examination of how that which is generally perceived as the metaphysical actuates itself to influence and change the course of physical reality.  I can say that my methodology lies somewhere between that of the ant and that of the spider.  I can say that my  methodology is that of the Warrior.  And I can also say this:  It is time to let the Warrior dance.