Drops in the River

This is #48 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. 

screencaps of videos of uncontrolled intersections in Vietnam and Ethiopia
(you have to watch the videos to get an idea of how this self-choreographed dance actually works, with reportedly few accidents)

Sometimes when I’m walking in the neighbourhood I imagine all the people I see as awkwardly dressed apes, all pretending we aren’t lost and bewildered, busy doing the things we’ve been relentlessly and ruthlessly conditioned to do all our lives. Things like going to ‘work’ doing repetitive, mostly meaningless tasks for other people, our ‘bosses’. Especially when those bosses, who do next to nothing of any real value, keep most of the money our work ‘earns’. Just crazy! Why do we put up with this?

And sometimes, like when I’m looking at the traffic from up on the roof, I imagine all these people as ants, scurrying around doing what we’ve been told and trained to do, mostly in our little tin cars. And, just like with the ants, none of this is volitional, none of it ‘our’ choice. It’s all determined by what apparently came before, given the circumstances of the moment. We have no say in any of it.

Lately, sometimes, like today when I’m walking along the river path, watching all the movements of people and other animals, of plants in the wind, and of the clouds and the river, all flowing together and around each other, I imagine our whole little planet as one single Gaia organism, where all these movements can best be ‘understood’ to be Gaia’s body moving along its inevitable but shaky, often-interrupted evolutionary path to whatever is next, its ‘components’, like you and me, no more separate from the whole than the blood corpuscles flowing through our veins are separate from the thing we call our ‘body’.

It’s like this river I’m watching now: What exactly is a ‘river’? I see all this water and I give it the collective label of ‘river’. But it is not ‘a river’. It is not a ‘thing’ at all. It is not even, as some philosophers would suggest, a process. It’s just an imagined, conceptualized part of inseparable everything.

And it’s the same with ‘us’. We are not ‘individuals’. That’s just a label that we put on things, to try, foolishly, to make sense of ‘everything’. And, as impossible as it now is for our entrained brains to imagine, there is only ‘everything’. For us to conceive that this thing we call a ‘person’ has an individual intention and an individual volition to achieve it, is as absurd as conceiving that an ‘individual’ corpuscle in a blood stream has a conscious ‘intention’ and ‘volition’.

So now, as I walk along the river, it ‘feels’ like just one of Gaia’s blood vessels. From being ‘something’ ‘separate’, it first seems to morph into just being a ‘part’ of everything, and then, for a fleeting moment, it seems to become just an appearance in and of ‘everything’. For that moment, perhaps, I see the river the way wild creatures ‘see’ it, without labels, without conceptualization, without separation. Unlike us deluded humans, they have no need to ‘see’ it as anything other than what it is.

And now I look up and imagine that Gaia, our ‘label’ for this whole planet, is just stretching, making herself more comfortable, scratching her itches. She’s trying out her latest approach to the cancer that has recently befallen her (namely our maladapted species). The first approach she used, deploying antibodies (what ‘we’, the cancer, call ‘pandemics’) does not seem to have stemmed her disease. Her latest approach does seem to be working, however — heat therapy! Not only is it starting to kill the cancer, the cancer cells themselves seem hell-bent on augmenting the heat to accelerate their own demise. Collapse at 1.5 degrees.

It’s a faulty metaphor, of course, as all metaphors are, but for now I find it amusing, and as I walk up from the river shore to the road and then to the park with its artificial lake, I find I am suddenly breathing more easily, ‘seeing’ myself as just one unintentional participant in the disease that is plaguing Gaia, which she will soon rid herself of.

I smile at the other ‘disease cells’, and some of them smile back. Nobody’s fault. The only thing that could possibly have happened.

.    .    .    .

One of the things I’ve started to notice is our species’ very animal propensity for self-organization. Only the sickest of us, it seems, really want to be told what to do and how to do it. The rest of us instinctively collaborate with others, improvisationally, constantly, to optimize the situation for the colony, the hive, the whole.

In the café, the patrons automatically and collectively self-manage the arrangement of the chairs and tables, and the lines they form. If it gets crowded, singles will move to smaller tables, and move open chairs away so they can be taken to where they’re needed. If it’s quiet, they will space themselves out to give themselves, and others, as much space for movement and conversation as possible. Butting into the line is almost never done, and when it happens, the ‘crowd’ self-organizes the rude patrons back into line.

On the sports event track in the park, we casual walkers and runners self-organize into lanes by speed, and work around those who fail to pick up on the hints that they’re impeding the flow. It’s the same in our apartment’s gym. No one reads the posted ‘rules’ for the gym. Instead, we self-apportion the equipment, more or less equitably, depending on how busy it is, and which equipment is currently in use. And noisy users ‘get the message’ that they should tone it down, usually without having to be told.

On the buses and the Skytrain, similar collective self-organizing behaviours dominate. There are signs for where ‘seniors and people with disabilities’ should get seating priority, but they are mostly ignored, and unneeded. As I look across the heads, almost all the grey-hairs are seated and almost all the younger passengers are standing. In fact, I can tell exactly how old and tired I’m looking each day before I get to my destination, by whether and how often I’m offered a seat.

Same thing applies at the ‘uncontrolled’ intersections that prevail in our neighbourhood. (Though they’re nothing like the ones depicted in the videos linked at the top of this post.) Despite a steady stream of pedestrians and some horribly designed infrastructure, the drivers take their turn, and the rare honk is generally a polite one of “pay attention please, I’m coming through” rather than one of anger at breaking the self-organization ‘rules’, which do follow the Drivers’ Handbook mostly, but don’t really need it. Bicyclists, for example, know that they have certain sensible leeways that cars cannot have. The drivers of E-scooters and the ominously silent E-vehicles have self-created new custom rules for their vehicles that help them integrate with all the other traffic. Studies have repeatedly shown that there is less congestion in uncontrolled intersections than in the most carefully- and dynamically-programmed similarly-busy intersections with stoplights. We know how to do this, folks.

Most of the time, when things are going well, when Gaia is feeling comfortable, we don’t need or want anyone to tell us what to do. We, plural, can look after that, thank you.

.    .    .    .

However, we can, it seems, be entrained and conditioned to do, and to believe, almost anything.

I’m nattering with two of my new young Persian friends, and they tell me that, among the local Persian diaspora, opinions about Trump’s recent bombing of Iran are completely polarized, with about half thinking that even if their country is desolated by attacks by the US, if the current theocracy is henceforth ousted it will be “worth it”. The other half, often citing the ruination of so many other US-bombed nations in the area, are convinced that the unprovoked bombing by the US is an outrage and its perpetrators are war criminals. And both sides say of the other: How could anyone believe that?

It’s all in how we’re conditioned. Some good friends who are long-time collapsniks are also fervent Zionists supporting the genocide, or are rabid anti-vaxxers convinced that CoVid-19 was a vast government conspiracy. So I often find myself asking the same question.

I think about the people I chat with at the Stop the Slaughter protests, and they tell me some of the horrific things people have said and done to them just for protesting. I think about the mind-bending beliefs espoused by all the world’s religious cults, and the MAGA cult, and all the other conspiracy theorists.

And then I think of all the things I was so wrong about, and I turn the question around and say: How could I ever have believed that?

That’s the power, and weakness, of our language and our stories. If it wasn’t for words…

.    .    .    .

On the way home I stop off to pick up a pizza. The restaurant has a gigantic screen blaring music videos, that I find annoying at first, but then I start to watch and listen (I don’t watch TV or movies at home, so I’m a sucker when I find myself in front of a big screen; I’ve lost all my immunity).

The music is really quite good — a powerful woman’s voice singing blues-y torch songs, backed by an excellent jazz-blues band. And the video, all done in ‘vintage’-style black and white, is evocative and haunting. So of course I Shazam it, to find out who the performer is.

You know how this ends. Shazam comes up empty, four times running. And then as it dawns on me, I notice the old manual typewriter depicted in the video has the wrong letters on the keys. And the electric guitar seems to be missing two strings. And the musicians depicted are out of sync. Oh wow.

The whole thing is AI. The songs, the lyrics, the depicted performers, the recording, and all the scratchy ‘period’ video and images. All made up. It took me that long to catch on. The people working in the pizza shop had no idea.

Strange days, as Jim Morrison put it. When the music’s over, turn out the lights.

Yes, the river knows.