Totem

Find the contours of the first man, the absolute savage; scrape off, with the slow wear of these forest walks, the social man's varnish... draw that first man.

[Frederic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking]


Perhaps, collectively, man is subject to an inevitable self-destroying madness, if he does not question and understand the real purpose of his existence.

[William Corlett & John Moore, The Islamic Space]


Much of the real work involved today is a sort of existential exfoliation and relieving your Self of the identity-package that your 'you' has been encrusted with. Whether it's Gros urging us, Thoreauvian-like, to scrape away the varnish on forest walks (the clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness) or Corlett & Moore urging us to question and understand, there's a lot to be said for a little kenosis, kinetics, and questioning.

The great metaphysical cleansers and existential exfoliants are auto-mobility (moving-thinking under your own steam), space (as the absence of blockage), silence (as the absence of ‘noise’), and solitude within landscapes (as an opportunity to see your original self).

Modern society is diseased. In the current climate of techno-worship and individualism, society has lost touch with its togetherness, and conviviality. A rampant godlessness, shot through by the media and corporate messaging, has led to the desecration of the human being, his animal brethren, and the land that feeds and shelters both.

‘Our entire society’, writes Jerry Mander in the 1991 edition of In the Absence of the Sacred, ‘has begun to suffer the madness of the astronaut; uprooted, floating in space, encased in our metal worlds, with automated systems neatly at hand, communicating mainly with machines, following machine logic, disconnected from the earth and all organic rality, without contact with a multidimensional, biologically diverse world and with the nuances of world views entirely unlike our own, unable to view ourselves from another persepctive, we are alienated to the nth degree’.

A quarter of a century later, with the explosion of the internet and the flurry of social media, our existential alienation, and what Mander refers to as our ‘intra-species incest’, continues unabated at an alarming pace.

As aliens to our more convivial, more conscientious selves (the western world is now one of ‘science’ not ‘con-science’), we have no vested interest any longer in maintaining our planet. Like a child that has been removed from its mother at birth, people are kept in the dark as to their true parentage by the machinery of progress.  But society has commodified our common Mother. It has commodified space, time, nature, and the human being. Animals too, when they haven’t been moulded into ‘pets’ in order to stabilise one’s lop-sided life, are produced like products in order to appease our ever-burgeoning fragmentation.

For the first time in millions of years we have been largely separate from our animal cousins, and this has had devastating effects on them and on us. I have heard children as old as ten speak of sheep as white dogs; children unable to identify local birds or plants but who can easily identify specific corporate logos and slogans. Children who simply do not know what food is, never mind where it comes from. The list goes on and brings you to tears.

Modern society is based on lies and deception. On utility not unity. Our whole society's foundations are steeped in dishonesty and untruthfulness: duplicitous histories, and crowbarred cultures, inveigling their way into our living. The obesity epidemic in western cultures is due precisely to this sort of deceitfulness. Being ferried around in an intoxicated state, we simply do not where we are anymore.

The totem brings us back down to earth. It sobres us up, ontologically, phenomenologically, existentially. It is rooted like a tree into the soil. It has branches and limbs, eyes and ears. It is human, tree, and animal, all rolled into one. It is silent and still. It confers upon us the power of all animality, the power of being animated and the power of animated being. The totem knows that which we apparently do not: that the human being is only a human being in contact and conviviality with what is not human.

The totem is alive, just as an idea is alive. It re-minds us. Not of anything in particular, but simply to render us mindful once more. Like a mirror of the greatest magnitude, it allows us a glimpse of the great-souled self cleared of the claptrap. And like a poem, it offers us the opportunity for contemplation, and universal disclosure. As far as this is concerned, these words and drawings - healed wounds, scars in the shape of words and images, after the bandages of civilization have been removed - are more of an ‘existential memo’ than anything else, a prophetic record of the essential and the necessary.

In an increasingly analytical and anti-contemplative society where your naked existence is scorned upon and has no value, the totem pole, as a reminder of our unity and universality, as a symbol of a new worldview (which is actually quite ancient) could not be more important, could not be more vital.

So clear it away, I say. Empty the mind. Welcome space into your thinking. Welcome non-thinking as the epitome of contemplation. Maybe then, you will see your original face staring out at you, from between the face of a fox and a bear, on the great tellurian totem pole.