Beyond Nature

I wish to dispel the notion that natural equates good.  Head toward any hospital for a clear indication that we live in a world where nature is broken.  Even discounting the limitations of human effort and flaws/evils of human will (producing accidents, abuse, neglect, and violence), we spend billions on health and research to stave off nature's onslaught of disease, decay, and disaster.  We take antibiotics against infection, injections for hormones, and i.v.'s for electrolyte and fluid imbalances.  We supplement nutrition, filter blood, rearrange digestion, reroute vessels, transplant organs, implant synthetics, excise cancers.  We do not "let nature take its course," but instead we work continually to counter the course of nature.  Eventually such efforts fail us.  I'm not trying to be nihilistic but point out that our practice does not embody a trust in the natural.

Consider the hostile elements associated with foods we might consider natural.  Aflatoxin produced by fungal growth on organic peanuts causes liver cancer as does patulin from fungus that grow on apples.  The carcinogen ptaquiloside found naturally in the bracken genus of large ferns has been attributed to gastrointestinal cancers; yet certain ferns are used in our dishes.  Many of our common household plants are, in fact, poisonous.  We've needed training or expert guides to distinguish what is suitable for food or not.  The current market capitalizing around designations of "local," "organic," "free range," "vegetarian fed," speaks to sustainability but also what is considered safe, natural, good but it's not all good.

We shelter and shield ourselves to survive; build barriers and HEPA filter, air condition, moisture-wick, humidify, reverse osmosis, sleep number, gore-tex, terraform our environment.  Living does not come naturally nor easily.  We've long concluded the universe is not centered around man, but is likely indifferent and hostile even.  Is that it?  There must be more.
Celebrated science fiction author, Philip K. Dick once wrote:

• We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
  
• Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical—I believe it.

What is this idea, this yearning for something else?   What is this longing for an unseen world.  Based on his writings, Philip K. Dick was likely speaking towards other dimensions or alien life.  These aren't the only possible answers.  His comments seems driven by humanity's survival instinct or desires beyond what this life may offer; echoing a yearning for something better, something which this physical nature apparently fall short on delivering.  We may even rage against this nature: human nature, the nature around us.

This life must mean something, no?  Some atheists offer that, "You create your own meaning" because none is offered.  The purer atheists state, "There is no 'meaning.'  All things are dictated by chance and time, ascribing any value to anything is futile."  But theists believe (there's that word again) that there is something more.  PKD identified himself as a panentheist (belief that the universe and God were one and the same).  Therein lies a potential answer, a consciousness that is beyond our fragile, finite, mortal existence with the ability to impart meaning, purpose and value.  Atheists respond by mockingly propping a strawman of the great spaghetti monster—a response which provides a smokescreen but does not offer an alternative answer beyond nature.

Grizzly Man - Movie Review

Grizzly Bear
Originally uploaded by blmiers2.

I watched the documentary Grizzly Man narrated and arranged by filmmaker Werner Herzog. The film is a character study of Timothy Treadwell, the self-proclaimed protector of grizzly bears, one of which violently tore apart and ate both Timothy and his girlfriend. The last character-study-type film I saw was There Will Be Blood, also a tragedy but I find myself reacting so differently. This was reality. Timothy Treadwell was both lost, wanting to get lost, and became lost in such different senses. A back injury had ended his college diving scholarship; thus his schooling and the path of life became so easily unhinged. Acting pursuits fizzled and many relationships were fleeting. He so desired and sought after a significance he could not find in humanity.

Treadwell was an unconventional naturalist, an emotionally mixed up nature worshiper and who became increasingly paranoid and angry at human beings. Most naturalists would work to preserve by minimizing the human footprint, and acknowledged a difference in the nature of man and the nature of animals. Treadwell repeatedly wanted to and did become entangled in nature and thus many say he lacked a healthy respect for nature and the boundary that separates humanity from nature. He had an acute sense of loneliness and did not have answers and was drawn towards nature which cannot choose to reject you in its indifference. Instead, nature became idealized, fantasized, and creatures were anthropomorphized as innocent children. Treadwell seemed to voice both the danger he put himself in while simultaneously overlooking or ignoring its savagery.

It is here we are offered some insight into Werner Herzog whom says the common denominator of existence is not innocence but violence. Herzog was visibly shaken on hearing the audio recording of the two individuals being mauled to death and told a former girlfriend of Timothy's to destroy the tape. Herzog also interjects to differentiate himself from Treadwell when Herzog observes bears as examples of the soulless indifference of nature.

Herzog touched lightly on the psychiatric medication that Timothy was once prescribed, a move likely to minimized additional ammunition to those calling Treadwell "crazy." However, there is enough description of the medication to suggest that bipolar disorder may have been a diagnosis. The film's depiction could also suggest a borderline type personality. Such individuals are characterized as having such a deep sense of emptiness that they are driven to be charming or possessive out of a fear of rejection. Their relational emotions are dialed to express either love or hate but not the in-between. Such diagnoses are only hypothetical musings.