Industrial spirits

There is a very direct dialogue between civilization and the earth occurring at this very moment. Well, its not so much a dialogue as a series of terms being overlaid toward the earth, for at least the past 515 years this discourse has followed the path of greatest resistance, that of imperial trade and political expansionism. This dictate, although secular in its emergence, is entirely spiritual in discourse. After all, Spanish conquistadors dictated the Roman Catholic terms of engagement to Indigenous peoples in Central America in ways that could only be understood in Latin, much to the detriment of the entire populations that did not speak the language. They either learned very quickly or died.

This dialogue, at least from the occidental perspective, occurs on strict linear terms. The discussion follows projections and straight trajectories with very specific ends that very rarely justify the means because the ends very rarely benefits communities. These terms have been quite specifically laid out in grid mentalities and patterns of North American landscape ontology in the 20th century. One specific example of this grid line ontology is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and the Industrial Canal of New Orleans, where the way water flows is determined by the quick and easy access of goods, from the coffee I enjoy every morning to the excessive sugar I put in it. Instead of having this delicacy once a month, I am able to enjoy it many times a day, without a second thought of the energy or flow of water that allowed it to fill the empty space that makes my cup. New paths of least resistance are dug from the swamp lands and hydrological nuances that create and recreate land.

Mississippi River Gulf Outlet:
Image: "America's Wetland: Campaign to Save Coastal Louisiana"

The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (M.R.G.O.) and the Industrial Canal, as straight and narrow as they are, are entirely alien forms to the serpentine ontology of the Mississippi, acting as a syphon draining the millennial process of sedimentation required by the flow of water and sediment from across the Midwest. This is the new least resistance, the lines that allowed Hurricane Katrina a straight and narrow path for the storm surge that topped over into the Lower 9th Ward and Chalmette.

I had a conversation with Jim Igoe in Baton Rouge about linear and cyclical mentality, and how apparent the value of linear thinking over cyclical thinking exacerbated Hurricane Katrina, a disaster many years in the making, all for the cost of cheap coffee, sugar and inexpensive gasoline. Jim offered the premise that cyclical mentality should not necessarily be given absolute priority over linear thought (though there is a great lack of this in Western civilization), but that an intersection or confluence of the two, the convergence of the linear and the cyclical, resembling an internal conch shell, may reveal a more balanced approach to understanding.

Image from 2004, Dr. Rita Cowell ©, "Radiant Equations."

image by Jim Igoe 2007 ©, New Orleans.

I am curious, now, of the amazing intersections that already exist, such as this Zen negative silo, an image of New Orleans that exists through industrial meditation on the movement of water in a world that demands straight lines where there are curves. I am reminded of a recent documentary I watched on spiritual possession in Tibetan Buddhism, in which the narrator described how the first Dalai Lama rose to prominence. Apparently, while making his way through Tibet, the spiritual leader came across many different tribes in many different regions. In the areas he visited, there had been established long standing traditional belief systems based on the nature spirits inhabiting those regions. There were spirits that inhabited river systems, mountains, and forests, and these beings were deeply embedded in the cultural memory of the indigenous populations. On his travels, the Lama conversed with these spirits, wrestled with them, and on occasion enlisted these beings to join him. They are even now revered through the Buddhist oracles in Tibet.

The experience in North, Central and South American colonial expansion has been quite a departure from this exercise. After all, the language used to dictate the terms first came ashore through Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English, and not in the languages most familiar to the ears of the Indigenous inhabitants, or as Joe Sheridan and Dan Longboat have said,

"What concession has English made to North America? Why does English, the language that thinks us as much as we think it, continue to structure as imaginary the numinous experiences that happen in the territories beyond its origin? English clear-cuts cultural and biological diversity alike. Speaking only English, can we think our way back to the indigenous languages that are our ancient birthright? Does speaking English or its echo preserve this lousy Weltanschauung?" LINK

In other words, the shape of the land reflects that language that realizes it. However, Katrina offers another response, one that reveals that the land here still does not agree to the terms being dictated to it. Nor does it agree with the straight line ontology that results in MRGO and the Industrial Canal. The terms dictated by Katrina speak more to the syphoning affect years of development have had to the region's natural buffer system, the wetlands, that are continually being flushed into the Gulf of Mexico.

No, the spirits encountered by the first Dalai Lama were not industrial. They were natural and revered by the Indigenous peoples. However, this discussion has never been entertained on a large scale by the colonial visitors to Turtle Island, making the occasion a perpetual visit as opposed to a process of indigenization, one that would have required understanding the terms of the discussion as proposed by the serpentine structure of river systems and the languages used to articulate their stories. The beings that may have been recognized by Indigenous populations like the Houma were likely never even considered in the rush to secure Louisiana first for the Spanish, then the French, the British and the Americans. How could things have been different if a perceptive Frenchman recognized the all encompassing power of the Mississippi, overlaid with the millennial forces that created it and it's environs? Perhaps such a person would have recognized that conversing with this region required a humble approach, one that acknowledges both the cyclical and linear approaches to living within the means of one's environment. Perhaps the Mississippi itself could have confined development along the Old French Quarter as it intended, instead of perpetually flexing the muscles of development to the lowest lying areas.

Instead, the beings that dwell along the Mississippi have enforced a dialogue that can only be understood by Industrial spirits. Such a force is indeed one to be reckoned with, yet such a force becomes immutably small in the face of a counterclockwise wind pushing up straight line mentalities.