Kicking the Can
While working on Scout In The woods, I’ll share some blog posts here from time to time - a bit of creativity / pause for thought in the background.
Anyway, while the wheels are spinning on the early episodes, here are a few verses from last week on concepts and stories that came up in research for the show. A tad ’melancholic’ perhaps (I mean who hasn’t wondered, ‘What gives us nickel and lust?’, lols), though hopefully thought-provoking in the round!
Notes/sources at the bottom. Also FYI, the reference below to cancer is more of a metaphorical one. In the poem, it’s really a signpost for death/entropy, and whatever else it is that can make our best laid plans or most valued relationships go tits up - for reasons we might struggle to fully comprehend.
Kicking the Can
I kicked a can and the universe
gave us cancer.
We were lost and the universe was rust.
I kicked a bucket out of frustration
and the universe sent ripples of fuss.
What is the story of nature?
What is the purpose of life?
How does a me mean anything at all?
What gives us nickel and lust?
I kicked a bin when the universe
gave us cancer,
and seemingly no way to win.
I kicked the bin time and again,
and it kicked me right back on the shin.
The can and the bucket are you, my friend,
and it hurts when you hate on yourself.
It’s easy to quit and you can if you will,
or go fight for your friends and your health.
I kicked open hospital doors in haste,
watched as you tunnelled away.
What form of fear conquers love like this?
I wring my hands, kick at my heels,
coil and cramp into nothingness.
The will of the world is a sea, my friend,
and you are the wisp of a wave.
We’re neither nothing nor all in this ocean, my dear,
but relations and how we behave.
I kick the machine hard in disgust.
I am rage but I swell and subside,
since your voice is right here in plain sight.
You have fire in your belly and kicks in your heart,
all shrouded in mystical light.
The story of nature is the nature of story:
wanting the life we cannot.
Move with the winds and the seas, my love,
and trust in what time forgot.
My friend gave me faith in the universe,
and kicked the can far out of sight.
Time gives us nickel and lust, I learned,
while love gives us movement and light.
Notes/sources:
Carlo Rovelli, a leading voice in contemporary popular science, draws on the philosophy of Nāgārjuna (200CE) to suggest that the quantum world we live in is in fact purely relational and not material at all. See: Helgoland (2020), pp121-131
Donald Hoffman goes further in challenging physicalist theories of emergent consciousness. He is convinced, after revelations in particle physics since the turn of the century, that neither Newtonian laws nor quanta created the conditions for 'experience’ to develop ‘within our brains’. Instead, what is underlyingly real is better given e.g., by meditative experiences of oneness. In Hoffman’s worldview of ‘Conscious Realism’ (a version of idealism), consciousness does not emerge out of hard matter. Instead, matter, and even the theory of evolution itself, are better understood as representations we have developed - akin to coping mechanisms or survival behaviour - which mask deeper realities we are yet to fathom. See: www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421
A long-held fascination for me has been the question of whether death is (atheistically) a cold-hearted full-stop; or whether alternatively (agnostically or spiritually), it’s a construct designed to give rise to meaning and life - much like, say, the temporality of a novel (beginning-middle-end) lends it structural integrity. If death, and moreover entropy, is a construct like the limits of story, then not being able to see beyond our own endings perhaps renders a type of impossibility or impermanance which gives rise to ‘wanting’. In other words, whatever is ‘alive’ in our universe competes for limited resources in time and space, resulting in experience, free will, evolution and all the means by which life attempts to protect and extend itself - contingent on the inevitability ultimately, with entropy/death, that it cannot (or at least not in this place that we know).
The growing number of outer-body and transcendental NDE reports out there (Near Death Experiences) are revealing utterly fascinating patterns. They typically confer important knowledge and meaning to those who experience them. The patterns include: watching your body from above, often with a degree of emotional detachment, as medics attempt to ‘bring you back’; accounts of non-local awareness where patients later report what family members or others were doing, saying or thinking elsewhere at the time; going through a tunnel or being delivered into light; time and space dissolving; then feelings of unrivalled ‘love’, ‘peace’, ‘unity’, ‘oneness’, or being ‘home’; ‘telepathic’ communication or intuition with other beings or souls present, e.g., departed loved ones, pets, faith figures or spirit guides; spherical vision and other new or enhanced senses, such as novel colours or exquisite music; a life review (reliving all of your life at once, as far as we can comprehended this, with consciousness extending also to other people in those scenes); in life reviews, minor acts of kindness and their ripple effects are time and again the main focus for experiencers, as well as the harms to others that result from not doing the right things; there is often an understanding that we are souls and that we design key challenges for our soul journeys in each iteration of human or even non-human life; when people then return to their life on Earth, it is very often against their wishes as the soul experiencing the NDE; moreover, they return to their body with the understanding that it is ‘not their time to go’, and a sense of unfulfilled purpose(s) to carry out here. See: e.g., www.nderf.org; Anthony Chene Productions or the channel Coming Home on YouTube. Additionally, Glimpses of Eternity (2011) by Raymond Moody explores how relatives and friends at hospital bedsides etc. have shared in transcendental phenomena alongside their loved ones as they have passed on.
Folk who report unusual experiences in bereavement, messages via mediums, or visitations from loved ones (e.g., in vivid dreams) often understand that their friend or family member who has passed wants them to know that they are okay.
Paranormal literature often describes spirits - whether unknown and apparently malign ones, or welcome apparitions of relatives or close friends - with reference to shadowy darkness or mystical light. For NDE experiencers, ‘fear’ and ‘love’ are often cited as the core elements which make up our experience and allow us to navigate our physical space, not to mention our moral sphere.
Anger: where does it comes from, and what does it do to us and our journeys in life? There’s lots of talk these days of manifestation, and karma. It can get a bit solipsistic and power-trippy (not always a cool vibe IMO!) to think that your actions, good or bad, can have significant affects on ourselves and others - besides secular assumptions, that is, about how our actions impact the world and other people around us. However, for me, I think it’s helped this year, for example, to consider at least that there is something bigger than each of us out there, which works in mysterious ways. It somehow pays dividends to think that how we behave in everything we do is important to us and everyone else, even beyond lay notions about our influence. And I think it can often really help for folk to believe this, wherever you can stay humble within it.
Faith: someone was telling me recently about the 12-step programme in AA, and how mysteriously successful it has been since its infancy in instilling a sense of belief for recovering alcoholics about their purposes and possibilities in life. An important element for participants for nearly a century has been a sense of wonder that there is something bigger out there than just themselves.