[lbo-talk] Carville picks up the "narrative" idea

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 9 14:16:09 PST 2004


Doug:

I'm having a hard time picturing it right now, but there must be some way to "narrativize" values like egalitarianism and tolerance. That quote you like from Obama about the hungry kid on the South Side is an example - some appeal to fellow-feeling (which is kind of erotic, always a prob for Americans). Ditto with some critique of capitalism that conveys the idea that the rich aren't rich because they're so clever and hard working, but because they appropriate the labor of others. I'm being verbose and non-narrative, but you know what I mean.

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When I was twelve I belonged to a Boy Scouts like group that took city kids on extended, and quite challenging, camping trips.

We learned basic survival skills - how to navigate by compass, how to identify safe water and edible plants, etc - and acquired, through immersion in a non-built environment, an appreciation of our fragility.

There's something humbling about being, entirely without warning, within eye shot of a bear or almost, just almost slipping to your death while walking along a narrow trail.

You become an oddly quiet and confident little person when you've experienced these things.

During one of these trips, we camped near the top of a mountain in Pennsylvania, part, as I recall, of the Appalachian chain. There was a large lake, perhaps the water filled crater of an ancient volcano. We pitched our tents there. A huge boulder was near our campsite. Dr. Morris, our camp leader, an astrophysicist and passionate lover of the deep woods, explained how the retreat of glaciers more than ten thousand years ago had left this immense rock here, sitting as if the hand of Zeus had idly tossed it. He told us this, as he told us all things, in a tone that guided you into a reverence for the barely understood natural processes at work all around us. It was a science inspired reverence but no less spiritual than other forms.

The days were exhilarating, the nights exciting, cold and dark - the sort of darkness we rarely experience anymore; so complete it feels like a liquid flowing around and through you. A beautifully terrifying blackness.

Except of course, for the sky.

One night, the last night as I remember, we took a hike to the rim of the lake. There, the trees thinned and we could see the sky without obstruction. Dr. Morris told us all to lie down on the ground and look up.

And then I saw, for the first time, the Milky Way. Good god, so many stars. Too many to count. I imagined visiting each one and observing their nuclear fire at close range perhaps seeing, along the way, others who built things and longed to understand the universe.

It was remarkably quiet. Dr. Morris explained how we were looking into the heart of our galaxy and that the Earth and its stable little sun were hurtling along as part of one of the spiral arms. He asked us to imagine some beings, youngsters like ourselves, looking up into their own night skies and seeing our star from far away.

"And do you think" he asked "that with all of this before us the best we can do is destroy each other? We are the eyes and ears of nature - we are how she knows herself - through our consciousness and our science and our art. We have an obligation to work with each other to make the world the wisest, fairest and best place it can possibly be."

I can't know for certain, but I believe that my commitment to what we call left or progressive principles was born at that very moment because to this day I refuse to believe that the best we can do is bomb cities to make them "safe for elections" or not provide for the health and safety of every person or create non destructive ways to deal with each other or be terminally stupid.

Dr. Morris was asking, essentially, that we each do our part to help humanity reach full species maturity and be worthy, therefore, of the stars.

Not the most direct route to socialism but it worked for me (and many of my childhood friends who were deeply inspired by this moment) as a beginning.

.d.



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