Lost Things; a Soliloquy on Love

This time last year, I was deep into the project, Hunt for the Lost. I wanted to identify all the things we were mourning, as ecocide and fascism appeared to have made a marriage in hell that was pulling us all into an abyss of despair and destroying all value in the world before the 2020 presidential election.

One of the things I identified we had lost and needed to find were our forests. Since then, we have seen many reports about the relationships between global warming, droughts, loss of watersheds, global fires and deforestation. Despite much publicity and various campaigns to plant trees, however, we are still losing forests at alarming rates. Most of that loss is to agriculture, as, cattle ranching, one of the more devastating ways to squander the Earth’s resources, particularly in the Amazon region.

Planting trees doesn’t come close to replacing what we’ve lost and continue to lose.

In the Hunt for the Lost, I left hints for where to find some of what I thought had been lost and counseled by implication what to do with what might be found. In the case of lost forests, I counseled that if found, the forest’s location should be kept secret. I gave that counsel because right now, there are still so many people happy to extract resources to the point of oblivion, that they can’t be trusted to value anything except profit. Greed conquers all. Therefore, we must hide our valuables.

What remains unclear to me, is what stops greed? So far, neither threat of human extinction as a consequence of climate change nor the beauty of the non-human natural world seems to overcome the drive to dominate, extract, impose will and hoard riches amongst those who see life, including forests as maidens ripe for rape. Truth is, not all those perpetrators are evil, though some certainly are. Some are just desperate to support their families. For those people, it’s sometimes a toxic loop: well-loved sustainable habitat has been destroyed by extractors (usually white colonials and corporations). Indigenous peoples worldwide are often the victims whose means of livelihood are eradicated.

So why are some people so intractable in their convictions about entitlement; so incapable of empathy for consequences to others; so blind to the horrors they unleash; so willing to sacrifice metaphorical maidens on the alters of real bank accounts?

With other ecofeminists, I would argue the drive to dominate by some men is founded in the values of a patriarchal culture. So what drives these patriarchal values? I would argue that the most infantile obsessions and delusions drive patriarchy, reduced to the putative power of the inflated penis. As we watch the men of the Taliban excoriate, persecute and murder women, they appear to embody a patriarchal system which seems clearly the most toxic form of masculinity and the most grotesque, as though a three-year-old child were given power to have the ultimate tantrum, to act out the most insane need to dominate their mothers and all they need is their penis to wreak havoc. Of course, it’s never that simple.

As I prepare to work on the final copy edits for my book, “Divining Chaos,” which will be published next summer by New Village Press https://www.newvillagepress.org/new/, I have been catching up on films and serials I might have missed to consider what narratives work and why. This past week, I watched all the old episodes of “Hung”. Then I went on to “Lorena,”. The former pivots on the male fantasy that a large penis will make a woman feel sexually fulfilled and be all a man needs not only for undying love but for material success. The latter, “Lorena,” is the dark real-life side of the same delusionary fantasy about the power of the penis: that not only is the penis the locus of all value for a man but that although it entitles the owner to infinite license to power and control over a woman, that there are insane women (Lorena Bobbitt, survivor of domestic violence and rape) who will literally castrate a man to amputate that unlimited entitlement. Is there no simpler explanation for the ethos of patriarchy?

Where do the boundaries blur between need and greed? Who sang, “needy makes greedy?” Are these pathetic child-men devouring the Earth and destroying women just lost in a memory of wanting more from their mothers but delusionally convinced that waving around a penis will grant them power? And is that a loop too? In a patriarchal society, why should any woman love any man, even an incipient man? It seems a miracle to me that many women under a thumb of patriarchy seem able to still conjure love. In the end, arguably, patriarchy, like fascism is an unjust system that breeds on and creates hate. Both patriarchy and fascism dominate others for the profit of a few. Injustice will inevitably breed hatred. So in Afghanistan, we must hide the women or spirit them away. We must hope to forget our hubris there that lost us so many lives. And while we are at it, we must hide the forests.

That was a dark alley of free association.

So if needy made greedy, how do we love the Taliban, the ecocidalists and extractors, the patriarchs and Fascists, the John Wayne Bobbitts of the world into sanity and justice and wean them from violent hate? I wish I knew.