No Argument Here
Arguments, agreements, advice, answers,
Articulate announcements
It’s only talk
What a Way to Go could have been a very angry film. As we were making it, as we were reading both widely and deeply about the world situation, as we were knocking our heads up against the inevitability of it all, I’d get into these fits of rage. I’d rant to Sally, and she’d listen carefully, simply giving me the space I needed to feel what I was feeling, and she’d help me sort out what was under the anger. And over and over it was this: my body had not yet accepted what my brain already knew - that there was no “fixing” the predicament, that there was no way around it. We had to go through.
I got angry because I wanted people to wake up, to be better, to live into the glorious potential of the human animal. I wanted them to wake up so they would fix things. So that I, and the people I love, could avoid having to face the challenges that confront us. Even though my head knew that to be impossible.
Sally would help me see that this was where I was stuck. And, seeing it, I could relax, and take a breath, and sink into the deep lake of grief that rested at my core. And from my acceptance, and my grief, I was able to sit at the computer once again, and do the work I needed to do to complete the film the way we knew we had to: with openness, and compassion, humility and acceptance, and with inspiration and guidance from the Earth itself.
I’m reminded of this now by a pair of articles that landed in my in-box this past week. In “The Fierce Urgency of Now“, Bill McKibben goes after those who don’t “truly get global warming”. The climate situation is so urgent, McKibben argues, that we have to overlook the negative consequences of various “clean energy” projects in order to get them in place.
McKibben’s complaint about those who don’t “get it” made me laugh, and I was starting to formulate a response when I saw that Jan Lundberg beat me to it. In “Bill McKibben and the Technofixers’ Tragic Myopia“, Lundberg goes after both McKibben and Common Dreams (who reprinted his original article from the Toronto Star), pointing out all the things McKibben and the folks at Common Dreams don’t “get”, like peak oil, and the futility of the technofix, and the need for a “new cultural paradigm.”
It’s all over the place. I hear it everywhere. And I do it myself. He doesn’t get it. She doesn’t. They don’t.  It was in my rants. It’s in McKibben’s piece. And Lundberg’s. It’s the habitual complaint that somebody doesn’t see what we see, or know what we know, or understand what we understand, or believe what we believe.
And it may be - if we are truly seeking some “new cultural paradigm†- that this is really getting in our way.
In my opinion, the heart of What a Way to Go resides in these lines from the voice-over:
If what we want is to stop the destruction of the life of this planet, then what we have been doing has not been working. We will have to do something else.
As I move through the world, as I read and think and write and speak, this is the edge I stumble along, the darkness through which I grope, the wall against which I push. Where are we insane, doing the same thing over and over again and yet expecting some new result? And where are we actually moving into some new paradigm, some new mind, some new way of being? Where are we doing something truly else?
And I have to say, and I cringe when I say this, that when I notice my own ranting, when I read McKibben and Lundberg and so many others who are writing about our present predicament, I see very little of that something else.
It’s only talk, most of it. It’s arguments and agreements and answers and advice. It’s babble and burble, banter and bicker and brouhaha. It’s the very lifeblood of the worldwide web. It’s the heart and soul of our politics. It’s the way we do family, friendship, commerce and culture. It’s the way we are with each other, most of us, much of the time, we “civilized†ones, we prisoners, we inmates. We meet the world with our opposable tongues, lashing out and speaking up and talking down and talking back and taking aim and ticking off and wondering why… wondering why… things never seem to really change.
I’m lucky, perhaps, in that my family or origin set me up to be able to notice this. Smart and articulate, we four Bennett brothers were a veritable boy-band of banter. The repartee flew fast and hit hard, the arrows dug deep and stung sharply. And while it may have looked all smiles and laughter, there was a dark and painful reality lying just underneath. With no means, given either by family or culture, to speak our truths and feel our feelings and expose our vulnerabilities, banter and bicker were pretty much all we had, serving as the release valve on a pressure cooker we barely knew was there. It was offense and defense, thrust, press and parry. It was armor, mail and sword. It was a way to survive. And I was really good at it.
And because I was so good, I can feel it in my bones when Chellis Glendinning says this in our documentary:
If the world, the system that we’re living in, is harming other people, then that’s something that, you know, you can’t live with that.
I know the harm of living like that. I caused some harm. And it is very hard to live with. I can feel it. And because I can feel it, I can notice it. And because I can notice it, I can stop doing it. And because I can stop doing it, I can begin to look for a way to do something else.
I’m learning to move beyond argument. I’m learning to just show up, be open, listen, and suspend my assumptions long enough to hear another’s truth. I’m learning to do this because, to me, this is something truly else. And I want to do something else.
I’m not very good at it, much of the time. Which is why I often don’t say much. The acculturation runs so deep that often I despair of ever moving into that new way of being. I feel like Moses. I can see the promised land, but I don’t get to enter.
But every now and then the clouds part. My heart opens. My ego deflates. My talk falls silent. And I can hear…
We keep focusing on the other as the problem. They don’t get it. Some people show up at screenings of our movie and afterwards all they can talk about is How can we get everybody to get this? How can we change the movie so it’ll reach a wider audience? How will we create a mass consciousness change? As if a mass consciousness change can be dominated and controlled and managed just like everything else. As if the “problem†really is everybody else. And they wonder why things never seem to really change.
We show up, take our positions, don our armor, rally our defenses and take aim at the other, convinced that if only they saw what we see, and knew what we know, and understood what we understand, and believed what we believe, then everything would be fine.
And in doing so, we fail to enter into true dialogue, a place of real listening, a place of surrender and acceptance and welcoming. And because we keep wagging our opposable tongues, we fail to hear the still small voices of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And I gotta say, because I have sat in circle with groups who, because of the very structure of the circle, managed to shut down their wounded egos and still their talking long enough to actually listen, because I have sat in the empty silence that then arises, and because I have heard, in those moments, the Universe itself actually speak, I gotta say, our failure is colossal. There is a larger wisdom available to us. It’s all around us, all of the time, just waiting to be heard.  Call it the Universe. Call it spirit. Call it group mind. Call it synthesis. Call it consensus. Call it collaboration. Call it whatever. Just call it. And then get quiet. And listen…
The joke here, of course, is that this blog itself, and any blogs I write, could very well be yet another White™ guy showing up and saying what he thinks, taking a position and defending it, talking about how it is, trying to get others to see what he sees. And to the extent that this is true, I could easily defend it by pointing out that, just as with my brothers and I, this is all we have. We aren’t together. We cannot sit in circle for as long as it takes. Lundberg’s on the West Coast. McKibben and I have yet to cross paths. And where the heck are you? For most of us who wish to engage each other regarding the collapse of our present systems and the destruction of this living planet, what we have is words on pages on screens in blogs and websites and books and newspapers, with the occasional video or phone call or audio file or conference thrown in.
And of course this is true. And of course there is value to be found in all of this. And of course we must do what we are called to do, even with the imperfect tools we have, even in the imperfect situation in which we find ourselves. And of course I have no desire to shut down McKibben’s passionate dedication, or Lundberg’s clarity of insight and courageous risk-taking. And of course I want to do the work I came here to do.
But I do have a hope. Or a prayer. An intention, perhaps. Or a commitment. I do have a wild notion. And maybe it’s just more ego. But it doesn’t feel like it. So maybe it’s something else.
Maybe it’s this…
Maybe, by my saying what I’ve said, and McKibben saying what he’s said, and Lundberg saying what he’s said, and by countless others saying what they’ve said, maybe, in some way we cannot even see, we’ve formed some new sort of circle into which we are now all emptying our talking, our thinking, our woundedness, our positions, our beliefs, our knowings. Maybe, as the world unravels around us, we are getting closer and closer to that point of surrender and acceptance, where the other ceases to be other, where the walls fall down and the lights come back on, where the illusion of separation evaporates in the dawning of something truly new, where the talking stops and the listening begins, where something else has an opening to emerge.
And maybe… maybe… woven somewhere into all of this White man’s talking, the voice of something larger than us has spoken as well.
And that possibility is reason enough for me to write.
TTG