I was struck by this diary by DWG the other day:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
It moved me. I felt I should honor this by trying to drill into deeper layers of thinking. It may be that climate change is such an inscrutable issue because it is happening in the human heart as surely as it is happening in the atmosphere and in the oceans. It may be that we should be thinking of psychoanalysis for whole nations, a concept that as far as I know, has not developed much since Wilhelm Reich posed the idea in 1930s Germany. After he published his book, he had to run for his life.
I hope writing can be a way to do more than describe problems, but to go further, to activate our minds towards solution making. I have been frustrated by the observation that poetry and literature operate in such a different way from politics that there is little hope that the deeper truth-seeking of the literary tradition can inform the more immediate and practical realm of politics. But it is urgently necessary to try. Our future may depend on it.
This is a poem, although it can be turned into any number of things. An essay. A play perhaps. A novel. Or Op Ed copy. I find that this form allows me to drill deeper into the truth, thus it isn't a finished work. It is preliminary.
There is a personal issue at the center of this. The core issues were revealed to me through asking many times what happened and why, but the happenstance of it is not as important as what comes of the effort to fully understand.
Our lives are affected by many things on many levels that we may not always be aware of. I have found that it can take months, years or even decades to reach the deep truths. Even then it is a contradictory and ambiguous thing. This is why communication is so fraught with difficulty. We are not rational beings. We are beings brimming full of desires and drives that we struggle to articulate. Politics may be proxy for this process of becoming. A public myth play. A psychoanalytic acting out.
Global climate change is more profound and is a deeper issue than we realize. When you ask why it is that people do not respond to the facts, this should set off a contemplation of our own experience and why it is that we are so slow in general to have a better consciousness. Our experience as individuals and our experience as a species are connected in the larger wholeism of what we could call the psychological dimension of the the Gaia system. Subjective truth, of course, to go with objective.
The Commodity Heart
by Stuart Heady
April 2015
See this is the thing, this is the thing;
why
it takes years and decades
to understand
what we have done
what pain we have caused ourselves and
our loves all along the way.
We have commodified our heart
Love at first sight or as it grows is
pure instinct
unquestioned. unquestioning. unquestionable
pure as it is.
But the crisis is in our consciousness.
Global climate change is happening in our hearts.
We sold our souls long ago
not to anyone as elegant as a devil
but at a garage sale
we had it all these years out in storage
we closed and locked the door
to our deepest truth
out of fear
of the lack of things
that make us feel
comforted for the moment.
This lack
in our doubts, depressions and
our seeking love with commodified heart
to find the Other
commodified heart
to help us justify
betraying ourselves.
From this place where we now stand
we consider the earth
and what we have done.
Many humans are resistant to the idea that we are connected to others in a larger sense, should think of ourselves as responsible or needing empathy, or that there is anything beyond our immediate concerns we should focus on. In truth, there are deep primordial fears here which we would rather not face.
What it will require is work on all the levels on which we can work and this will have to include working on becoming more conscious of things we would generally not like to be conscious of.
We as individuals, We The People, We Homo Sapiens as a species with a developing global consciousness. We need to speed up the process of becoming.
You can't put this deeper, subjective analysis into a political party platform. But deeper thinking ought to inform our political thinking. We must accelerate the speed at which the whole political field of debate advances by enlarging our thinking on all levels by working through whatever we have to work through and by making sure this process can involve as many as possible.