Walking on Lava by The Dark Mountain Project

Author:The Dark Mountain Project
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2017-06-28T14:16:31+00:00

Small Gods

MARTIN SHAW

Issue 7, Spring 2015

We hear it everywhere these days. Time for a new story. Some enthusiastic sweep of narrative that becomes, overnight, the myth of our times. A container for all this ecological trouble, this peak oil business, this malaise of numbness that seems to shroud even the most privileged. A new story. Just the one. That simple. Painless. Everything solved. Lovely and neat.

So, here’s my first moment of rashness: I suggest the stories we need turned up, right on time, about five thousand years ago. But they’re not simple, neat or painless. This mantric urge for a new story is actually the tourniquet for a less articulated desire: to behold the Earth-actually-speaking-through-words again, something far more potent than a shiny, never-contemplated agenda. As things stand, I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.

No matter how unique we may consider our own era, I think that that these old tales – fairy tales, folktales and myths – contain much of the paradox we face in these storm-riven times. And what’s more they have no distinct author, are not wiggled from the penned agenda of one brain-boggled individual, but have passed through the breath of a countless number of oral storytellers.

Second moment of rashness: the reason for the generational purchase of these tales is that the richest of them contain not just – as is widely purported – the most succulent portions of the human imagination, but a moment when our innate capacity to consume – lovers, forests, oceans, animals, ideas – was drawn into the immense thinking of the Earth itself, what aboriginal teachers call Wild Land Dreaming. We met something mighty. We didn’t just dream our carefully individuated thoughts – We. Got. Dreamt. We let go of the reins. Any old Gaelic storyteller would roll their eyes, stomp their boot and vigorously jab a tobacco-browned finger towards the soil if there was a moment’s question of a story’s origination.

In a time when the Earth is skewered by our very hands, could it not be the deepest ingredient of the stories we need is that they contain not just reflection on, but the dreaming of a sensual, reflective, troubled being, whilst we erect our shanty-cultures on its great thatch of fur and bone?

It is a great insult to the archaic cultures of this world to suggest that myth is a construct of humans shivering fearfully under a lightning storm, or gazing at a corpse and reasoning a supernatural narrative. That implies a baseline of anxiety, not relationship. Or that anxiety is the primary relationship. It places full creative impetus on the human, not the sensate energies that surround and move through them, it shuts down the notion of a dialogue worth happening, it shuts down that big old word ‘animism’. Maybe they knew something we have forgotten.

Two routes towards the cultivation of that very dreaming were through wilderness initiation and, by illumination of the beautiful suffering it engendered, a crafting of it into story to the waiting community.

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