Transcript: STEPHEN JENKINSON on a Lucid Reckoning /349
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Stephen Jenkinson.
Stephen Jenkinson We tend to change the things we can afford to change. We tend to voluntarily live without the things that we could kind of live without anyway. It's a rare circumstance when people cease their search for the corporate and systemic bad guys long enough to consider all the microdecisions that go into a normal day of sustaining the status quo. I mean, sure, there's bad guys, you know, but we are more than capable of duping ourselves and each other.
Ayana Young Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW is an author, culture activist, ceremonialist and farmer. He teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, founded in 2010. With Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work), he has worked extensively with dying people and their families, is a former programme director in a major Canadian hospital and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. He is the author of several books including 'Reckoning', 'A Generation's Worth', 'Come of Age', 'Money & the Soul's Desires' and the award-winning 'Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul'.
Well, Stephen, I'm so excited to be back with you after a few years. It's really been altering to have connected with you a few times in the past decade and I'm looking forward to these wanderings we'll go through together today.
Stephen Jenkinson Let's see if I got this stuff.
Ayana Young Okay. Well, gosh, yeah, there's so much stuff to wade through. And I recently became aware of a book that you have come out with called "Reckoning" with Kimberly Ann Johnson, who we had on the podcast recently. And I think it'd be a great place to begin thinking through the process of what reckoning in times like these might mean, and how we can engage with the dance of reckoning, of course, not trying to figure it out or looking for solutions, but just being with the reckoning of this time.
Stephen Jenkinson Surely, I think we, by the process of elimination, we figured that that's what we were doing. I said 'reconnoitering,' that sounded too neutral and then reconciling, well, that was premature, so we ended up with reckoning, which, no matter what the Bible, the Bible, I was gonna say the dictionary, and somehow that came out instead? Well, either one, when reckoning shows up it tends to have a sound of real mastery about it, but I don't think that's what it is.
I think the reckoning that we did at least is a willingness to see things. Now that sounds pretty mundane, but if you consider how many varieties of aversion there are available, and highly sought after too, then you might credit the real possibility that the willingness to see things as they are, turns out to be a kind of fit of lucidity in a strange time.
I'm just reminded now that apparently, right at the turn of the last century, there was an official sort of hermit laureate of New York City, not poet laureate, but hermit laureate--a kind of enfranchised and highly-regarded person who utterly withdrawn. I'm sure she's not the only one. Her version of what a hermetic life can give you came to this: that what's crucial now is that we see things for what they are. That's what all those years of silence and refuge brought her to and it's not a kind of solution clarity. It's a kind of absolution clarity, I guess you could call it. So I think we favored ourselves in that way and, and took it upon ourselves to be as faithful as we could about the carnage. And this was just on the back end of if there is a back end to COVID-19 I'm not sure there is. But anyway, the more spectacular parts of the process had abated by this time, by the time we hooked up and we didn't know each other at all. In fact, I I hadn't heard her name before, before speaking with her the first time and I didn't have my glasses on, and so I missed the visuals and the visuals would have indicated to me clearly that she was basically weeping the whole encounter, which I think lasted about 90 minutes. And she wasn't sobbing obviously. I think I will pick that up, but she was, after her fashion, in a mournful state. And when she wrote later on that day to thank me for the time that we'd had together, she happened to mention this in passing that she was basically a wreck. And my recommendation was, let's get back on the horse then before the obligation to be okay, you know, for the sake of family and work and all the rest of it sort of kicks in and moves into the spare room. That's what we did. And that was the genesis of the book, a kind of unexpected carnage.
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm thinking about unexpected carnage, those words together. And in a lot of ways, I think I expect carnage at this point. And getting back to that word reckoning, just sitting with those words and what they're bringing up for me, and I guess I'm considering both individually and collectively. Where do you see the most carnage? Or what do you see as the spaces that need to be reckoned with the most?
Stephen Jenkinson Well, it's a rough act to establish a kind of pecking order for mayhem, really. You don't want to have to be in a position to do it. But we have a lot of, as you say, a lot of contenders for the top five, the top ten, whatever it is. So in no particular order, but as they occur to me in a scale of urgency, I think the recognition that it's profoundly too late for a lot of the notions that people still insist on floating solution-wise. The notion that a market economy, a consumer culture will have its own accord choose to curtail its buying activities. I mean, I think if I were to choose one, it would be the sad unlikelihood that a culture addicted to personal choice and sovereignty and all the rest, can't find a way to nominate itself for austerity and for ratcheting down the volume, at least not voluntarily. I think that's probably the big one.
You know, because we know, at the level of science, I would guess, at the level of technology and all the innovations and so on, that there is a kind of collective alertness to what needs doing. Certainly, what's come to pass. But we're undone by another reality that we are the heirs of and the authors of and that's the notion that nobody should be told what to do, that we have, you know, able-bodied citizenry fully capable of exercising the responsibilities of democracy. I mean, it's just palpably, demonstrably not the case, unless you consider self-destruction to be an exercise in democracy. So it's with great lament, I acknowledge that the limitations that we fail to take upon ourselves now voluntarily, will come to roost as mandates and not as possibilities sooner than later, I think.
Ayana Young So, I guess I'm wondering from that response, are you, or should we be questioning that desire for sovereignty? Or are we resisting the wrong things in our culture, in our over culture? Sometimes I think that maybe not that specifically, but I've wondered whether it's with protest or fighting back against the system.. Are we just weaving ourselves more into this system? Are we actually finding the portal through? Or are we getting more entangled within it?
Stephen Jenkinson Yeah, I think the way you've asked the question indicates that you have a fairly disturbing sense of what the likely answer is that I think you've answered it. And I would agree with you that it's more likely the second scenario. I'd take a page from my days in the death trade on this one, and say, you know, it wasn't that people were dying, it's not easy, but dying in and of itself is not the unhinged moment. That consumer culture of Anglo North America would have us believe it's dying in a death phobic culture, that is the road to ruin for so many dying people. It's the context, you see, it's not the event. And the context of is a death phobic one. As a result, then, when people are dying, you would reasonably expect that the death phobia would come to call that it would gather itself, not literally around the deathbed nearly as much as around all the decision making, all the posturing, all the relationship cantankerous and otherwise with the powers that be in the health care systems in the healthcare system, certainly, but just to certainly in the culture more generally. And I use that to reflect upon what you've said in this fashion.
The notion that a freely self-determining people will, by definition, gravitate towards sanity and good solution making, simply because they're free to choose, it just doesn't hold. One of the ways we make sure that we're on the path that we're on. It's not an alternative. It's another, a bit of a maybe too strong to call it smoke and mirrors. But certainly, the notion of unabridged self determination is a consumer reality. It's a consumer orientation to life, I think, I certainly don't think it's a responsible one in the literal sense of the term, capable of responding. It's capable of pulling out, maybe so. So with great reluctance in great sorrow, I acknowledged with you that the chances are pretty good now that most of the solutions that don't disturb things fundamentally come from the things, not from an alternative. That people left to their own devices, it would appear, you know, it would seem to work to say that people are doing their best when they get the correct information and the, you know, the correct science and things of this kind, you know, an individual turn, is a matter of convenience in most cases. It's not a matter of necessity, it's a matter of convenience. In other words, we tend to change the things we can afford to change. We tend to, you know, voluntarily live without the things that we could kind of live without anyway. It's a rare circumstance, when people cease their search for the bad guys, the corporate and systemic bad guys long enough to consider all the micro decisions that go into a normal day of sustaining the status quo.
Ayana Young Yeah, well, I'm really glad you're speaking to this in this way, because I have been in a quandary and a deep inquiry around where we are and where we've been, especially in the last three years, but also the last decade or so when there's clearly been so much information being fed to us. But where is it getting us? I can't see us getting closer to connection or reciprocity. I'm not saying everywhere, of course, it's a general statement. But looking at climate change, or decisions being made by our political leaders, and even decisions being made on an individual level, it feels really chaotic and willynilly is the word that came to me. I don't know why. But that's kind of how I feel like we're all running around trying, maybe not trying anymore, maybe thought we were trying, and I can't quite tell what we …. I guess we, the we are speaking to are the ones that are conscious or think we're awake to the realities of this time. And I'm not trying to judge myself or any one of us, I have a lot of compassion for the confusion and the frustration and even choosing complicity at times, I can say that for myself. There's moments where I throw my hands up and say, where do we go from here?
So yeah, a lot of being in the trouble, sticking with the trouble and I want to bring up your book A Generations Worth and you write quote, "Over time, money became a surrogate for kinship. They replaced the old hospitality of kinfolk, the radical etiquette of trade, the mutual recognition of cultural patrimony, of worth. It probably started off as a stand in for the soul of trade and shunted the soul of the traders to the side, and by virtue of its essential emptiness, became the soulless soul of commerce," end quote.
So I'm wondering, how has modernity duped us into thinking we should feel fulfilled with inherently unfulfilling things like money or continual consumption? Or even, you know, some of the things that we've been speaking to earlier, like, resistance or democracy.
Stephen Jenkinson I'm not persuaded that we've been duped, really. I don't mean we got it. You know that there's clarity all round. Certainly, that's not so. But the notion that we are constantly and incontrovertibly on the receiving end of a kind of cabal of malfeasance somewhere, ensconced somewhere. I mean, sure, there's bad guys, you know, but, but we are the capital W, ‘We’ of Anglo North America, are more than capable of duping ourselves and each other.
You know, if you think about the proliferation of vote information, that's a very neutral word for what it is. But if you think about how it gets where it goes, it's not because the guys with their fingers on the buttons are sending it where it goes, it's because the likes of everybody else are in on circulating this stuff, right. I mean, these things are they don't have a lot of adjudication attached to them. They're the... the sensoria is excited by them, and round and round it goes. And, you know, one of the clinical sort of psychic and mythic dilemmas of Anglo North America is what used to until recently be called, probably still is, the fear of missing out, right, the fear of not being in on the inside track. As if, you know, being on the force, the forced end of the firehose of information, constitutes you being on the inside. And being on the receiving end of the metrics that come from your own predispositions, your own anxieties, your own habits, because of course, that's what they're selling to you. So you can either, you know, spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out who they are, and then I don't know what happens after that. Or you can change your habits for crying out loud, and reconsider whether or not you’re passing things along because you find them titillating or compelling, or must-see for everybody else, achieves what you imagined it does.
Ayana Young Yeah. I'm wondering alongside the value of community and kinship, you also identify the value in strangerhood. And I'd love to talk a bit more about that.
Stephen Jenkinson Well, strangerhood is a number of things at the same time. First one, is there such a thing? Second thing is, it's not a problem. And so the third thing would be a stranger in your midst is not to be corrected and turned into another one of you. The stranger in your midst is the opportunity literally, for the best of your culture, which I would call etiquette. That's what I'm thinking of now. The best of your culture comes forward on the occasion of the encounter with the stranger, wherein you're not trying to diminish the strangerhood of the person in your midst. You've engaged the stranger as the opportunity for you to get your own situation clarified and the best of you, manifest. In other words, you're not speaking the shorthand of kinship and familiarity with a stranger, for obvious reasons. You're speaking the longhand of a kind of profound and well-considered cultural patrimony that takes the form of how you are with people unfamiliar with you, and you with them. If you picture that in the context of table fellowships, you can certainly see what I'm pleading for here. And people do do it, of course, in the context of their home lives.
You know, I just came back from Israel, just in time for the place to blow up, you know, one more time. And I was on the receiving end of a certain degree, not much, hate mail. And as hate mail goes, it probably wasn't the most hateful thing ever. But still in all people who clearly anointed themselves of having a greater understanding of these, the complexities of these matters than I have, strongly suggested I had no business going anywhere where they were interested in boycotting. The notion of course, being that they had a greater understanding of Israel by not going than anybody could ever achieve by going. I'm not pretending I don't understand the appeal of a boycott. I mean, I'm old enough to remember South Africa and then some.
What I'm saying here, though, is we don't all have to do the same thing. And as it happened, I was a stranger in their midst for about two weeks. And I worked with large groups of people almost every day for those two-weeks period. And I can tell you that there were a lot of consequences, dynamically speaking, to me being there. I'm not crediting myself with any particularly helpful consequence, what I mean is simply because I was there, and I wasn't one of them, and they were concerned to make themselves understood without defending themselves. Because all these matters are extremely complicated, of course, and they seduce you in the direction of paralysis constantly. And that might be one of those places on earth that will never get fixed, I don't know.
But I was really taken with seeing over and over again how the autopilot that they would engage in if they had to defend themselves against accusations from outside was suspended because I wasn't doing that. I was simply not seeing things their way, but very deeply committed to seeing them. And somehow they felt the difference, and they responded accordingly. And there was something about their willingness to be seen in an unguarded way that was a direct consequence of the fact that I wasn't pretending I was more familiar with them and their plate then I was. And it brought something out in them. Which I, again, I'm taking no credit for at all. I'm saying that's the dynamic that I'm describing to you now and it just happened a couple of weeks ago. And you know, I'm in touch with these people now and they're writhing. They're absolutely writhing and you know, they're working on their scene from the inside. And God knows where it goes. But it's a beautiful, and in some sense, anarchic life lesson, to be a stranger in the midst of people with a highly politicized, highly polemical background to them, you know, if they're willing to be undefended.
Ayana Young Thinking about strangerhood in its connection to othering and belonging and being present in this extremely divisive time, where people seem to look for hatred amongst each other, or differences to disconnect us. Seems like inviting in the stranger is a type of way of challenging that notion. And I don't know, I wonder what it's, what it's calling on us to be comfortable with strangerhood when people are getting more and more insulated, I guess. And we're seeing where that's taking us. Nowhere good, obviously. And, of course, as it gets harder to live on this planet that was once so inhabitable for us, I wonder how that plays into the future. When water becomes more scarce, and the skies become smokier, and it gets hotter, and we need to find some way of getting along with strangers or maybe we don't I mean, that's the other thing, we don't necessarily need to do anything. We can keep going down the path we're going down but it doesn't seem like a really connected way to live. And so I wonder if you connect those things, getting comfortable with strangers and the etiquette of that, and how that relates to, and I don't know if it relates to belonging in general, but I think it's a type of stretching in a practice that would be really good for us.
Stephen Jenkinson You know, I'm not advocating, personally, the idea that we get comfortable with strangerhood. Because I think comfort is the halfway house to turning the stranger into another person that you kind of know or presume that you sort of know or, you know, good enough for, or you know, their strangerhood, the intensity of it wanes, as a consequence of you being comfortable. By virtue of the stranger being in your midst, you can't say 'we' in such a facile way—that the notion of 'we' kind of decomposes. And you have to find alternative ways of expressing yourself that don't use what I called earlier, the shorthand of familiarity.
So I don't think the job here is to turn down the stranger hood. I think it's the presence of the stranger hood, and the kind of gravel it introduces into the automatic list of things that I'm appealing to. And if we get good at that, it doesn't mean getting comfortable with it. It means practicing it without exercising a degree of omniscience on the matter, you know that somehow you magically understand how this goes because don't forget, somewhere in the middle of the stranger hood, is a person or a group of people, it's not a concept. And those people may be proceeding much differently. So that if your culture is going to be otherwise as a consequence of strangers in your midst, it can't be because the stranger is, quote, behaving themselves. This is an enormous challenge to a relatively, I don't know if I should use the word open society at this juncture, but a nominally democratic society—there how's that?—the idea that the stranger is on their best behavior is not a prerequisite for us seeing ourselves clearly. But it's an enormous challenge to see it that way and to allow the real possibility that the strangers in your midst, may bring to the fore your reactivities because they don't look as you presume a stranger who's glad to be among you should behave or should look.
Ayana Young Along with strangerhood, another word that I've seen come up in your work recently is companioning. And, of course, I think I see the value and companioning and supporting each other through these times, but I'm wondering, how can we offer a companionship that does not seek to merely appease, but rather offers meaningful challenge and critical thought?
Stephen Jenkinson I'm thinking as a Canadian now. Yeah, we've become somewhat infamous now, for the entire consequence that is the residential school system, as it was government policy until the 1960s or so. And so one of the things that's ensued from this as an imagined corrective is a truth and reconciliation commission that fanned out across the countryside, did a lot of fact finding, talked to a lot of people, recorded a lot of things, wrote a big friggin report, I suppose, for the federal government where it sits at this point, I don't know. I met one of the commissioners of that arrangement. She came to something that I did, and in a very tearful way, thanked me for what I was doing so she at least found some consistency between their project and my little project.
And for all of that, I have to say that I find the whole notion of, let's leave the word truth aside, which is contentious enough but this word ‘reconciliation’ is really comes in for very little investigation, and it needs more than it gets. So I'll just do it now quickly and say: the word reconciliation here is premature in a way that's almost impossible to act upon. By which I mean this--the word itself tells you that there's a primordial condition that reconciliation is subsequent to, that primordial condition is conciliation. I mean, obviously, etymologically, you can hear it. So the primordial condition was conciliation, something happened, some kind of rupture in the scheme, and reconciliation becomes now the order of the day. I think you can guess what I'm about to say. The conciliation never happened. It wasn't that primordial condition of Europeans, of washing up on the shores, and laying claim to the place with a kind of unseemly haste and with no apparent hesitation on the matter. That's what historical record would indicate that that's, you know, by and large, what took place up and down the Atlantic coast from Baffin Island all the way down to Brazil.
So what we need is conciliation and conciliation, I think explicitly means the capacity and the willingness to sit down in a circumstance where it is a given that you are with your equals. If that's not there, reconciliation is ludicrously premature to talk about because there's no skillfulness in saying that you're about to recreate something that you never created in the first place. There's no skillfulness, and there's no record that I can tell, that indicates that the European side of the ledger ever really conducted itself as if it was in a place it didn't belong, as if it had to negotiate its presence from that day to this basically. So we continue to live off the veils of a system that, internal to itself, was illegal, internal to itself. And so we will in this country continue to be a kind of immature and adolescent kind of enterprise, the extent to which we're unwilling to reconsider our beginnings as not being by any stretch of the imagination, us being all we could be.
Ayana Young I feel like this idea of cultural monsters that you bring up kind of fits with this topic a bit and in your book A Generations Worth, you write, quote, "I've contended for years that monsters are a consequence, and not a cause, and so are not fundamental, elemental. Though their endurance seems to whisper otherwise,. I pick them for forgotten deities, abandoned place Gods, unrecognized spirits of hearth, home, heath, forgotten to whom. That's mostly forgotten to," end quote and they also go on to say, quote, "It appears that we are in the monster trade as well, withholding any and all acknowledgement of the spirits of place that don't inform, favor, and vindicate our residence here," end quote. I would just love if you could dissect this a bit for us, and maybe give us some examples of cultural monsters.
Stephen Jenkinson Yeah. I don't think I would use the qualifier cultural in front of the word monsters here. But here's the way it occurred to me in explicit detail. I'm lucky enough that before the pandemic, I had a school that was ongoing for eight or nine years. One of the stories I examine deeply in the context of the school is the oldest document we have in the proto English, in the early form of the English language you and I are speaking now. And that story is called Beowulf. And in this story, there are very clearly monsters, maybe three or four, I think. And So picture this now, I have a room full of alternative types who have come to my school and they're really willing to really consider the unconsidered in their lives personally. But much more importantly, I think, in the context of the culture that they come from, and I looked them all squarely in the eye, and I asked them, "Is there such a thing as monsters?" and the place just froze up. And clearly, they were hoping I was being metaphorical. or failing that, that I could become metaphorical in talking about it and entertaining their answers, because most of their answers went in the direction of, well, there's, there's monstrosity, as a kind of idea, whether it's kind of Frankensteinian, or whether it's macro economic, but it's an idea. There's not an actual physical form with a metabolism and eyeballs and malevolence is there? Clearly, that's not what I meant, was it?
But that's exactly what I meant. That's what I was asking. And people had an extremely hard time crediting the possibility that there's such a thing as monsters, and they don't belong unnecessarily in children's storybooks. So as you read there, what I've come up with as a way of understanding the presence of monstrosity, is to suggest it's a consequence of abandonment, principally, not a consequence of malevolence, principally.
There's a scene in Beowulf, where there's a monster who's seeking admission to the merriment in the feast hall that the hero and the other characters are engaged in at the moment. And he places his hand upon the door, as a kind of supplication or seeking entry. We find out in a couple of lines later, that he's more than capable of destroying the place and getting in just as he sees fit, or she. But in that moment, the monster doesn't do so. The monster pleads for entry, pleads for inclusion, and because of the merriment, they literally don't hear the sound at the door, and the story is often running now, with the monster, properly--how should I put this? I'm trying to make a verb out of monster—monsterfied, I suppose, and implacable from there on in for the rest of the story.
So the simple question was, how did the monsters get so badly humored? Is that just part of the deal? Or? Or is there some way of understanding the possibility that monsters aren't born that way? They're a consequence of something that subsequently ensues or fails to take, or something of that kind. And my suggestion was, absolutely, it's a consequence of, among other things, the regime of the various monotheisms that have washed across the world over the last, what, 3500 years or thereabouts, and have reduced the local deities, the local gods of place in time and to symbolic, metaphorical, pseudo presences.
And I suppose you could run a parallel that goes something like this. Do you think if there's such a thing as your ancestry, in the present tense, not in the past, in the present tense, if there is such a thing and although they're, they're not alive, as you and I are, but they have their presence? And in that sense, may have their ways? Do you think there's any consequence at all, to you living the fullness of your life with virtually no regard or reference to them, except when you're in some kind of peak experience moment, hallucinogenically-induced or otherwise? Or you're in a desperate kind of straight and involuntarily, you just invoke the notion of ancestor? And could there be a consequence to your generalized neglect? That's not punishment. It's just consequence—the failure to maintain them in some fashion. Could it not have the consequence of rendering them unable to respond to you, when you call? Well, if that's true for ancestry, I submit to you, it's probably true for spirits of place or gods of place as well. And there's such a thing as a starving god I suppose, as well as a homeless one. And modernity may be looked upon in time to come as a particular consequence of our inability to live as if they are so.
Ayana Young I'm glad you brought up ancestry because I have definitely been sitting in a bit of confusion around it recently, I, of course, am seeing people's draw to understanding their ancestry more, going to ancestry.com getting, their blood work, trying to understand where they come from, who they come from. And when I think about people coming back with their results, and they're going, I'm 50%, German, I'm 30%, French, or whatever, you know, whatever that graph tells them, I think to myself, well, who decided the date of when your ancestors are? I guess, I feel skeptical about who's deciding the formulation of our ancestry. And then we attach on to these things, and of course, there's beauty to it, and importance and, and then there's real tangible realities, like land claims. And so I, I'm not trying to judge it so severely, but I'm definitely not comfortable with how we're coming to who we are, and what we're leaving out. And what we're grasping onto. So I'm not sure if you have thoughts on that?
Stephen Jenkinson Well, you, you can be pretty sure that I've likely thought about it, and you're right. And I appreciate the sort of, it's not confusion, that what you've just said indicates it's a certain number of dead ends in the current understanding of what constitutes ancestry perhaps. But I mean, in no particular order, here's the first thing you mentioned— French and German. Most of these nation states are very modern apparitions. They didn't exist as we understand them today, even a couple of 100 years ago, a number of them. And they are a consequence of standardization across a wide range of local diversities, and linguistic diversities, and so on. So the homogeneity that allows us to use the word German or French, is executed at a cost of considerable diminishment of localities and peculiarities and the intense version of what it means to speak a dialect that comes from a place. You know, all these languages come from places. They don't come from people. They're echoes of very specific places in time.
So you're right to wonder, you know, how far back ancestry.com goes? And the answer is all you're getting from stuff from the DNA testing, is the answer to what we've discovered about everybody else, but not you. That's what your results are telling you. And they're a consequence of how many people have contributed their core sample to the technology and the calculations, right. That's what it is. So I mean, it's something, it's more of Rorschach than it is a photograph perhaps.
And yet, and yet, there's something about it that wasn't there in the time between when these cultures started to become disassembled, as local and particular things, and took on this form of city state status or nation state status. And now, there's something available to us that wasn't there a couple 100 years ago. And it's kind of, you could call it overviews to the exclusion of a lot of particulars. These things are particularly important or provocative, I think, for people from the so-called New World, right for people who are Anglo North Americans, in a generic sort of way. For whom the Middle Passage or the you know, the passage of immigration from Europe to here to North America was, among other things, a consequence of a lot of flight, a lot of misery on the one side, and the vector for a lot of misery on this side. So there are people in there you see, that's what I'm trying to say here as well. There are people with genuine foibles, a genuine kind of good intention to some degree other, an awful lot of fear, and a misapprehension about what it means to no longer be where you once were, and the sense of automaticness that turns belonging into a place belonging to you. I mean, people did that. And those people have to show up in the DNA testing as well. And their deep misapprehension of the consequences of them appearing here has to show up in the DNA testing as well. And until it does, you know, we have little bits of information that somehow lend a three dimensionality to vote, not that distant origins, but I wonder what it evokes in terms of our sense of participation in the, in the inconvenient part of the story, as well as the honorable and even heroic part of the story that is unearthed by the testing.
Ayana Young Ah, thanks for sifting through that one with me a bit. I did want to touch on the pandemic plague, COVID-19 world we've been swimming through a bit and looking at our reaction to the pandemic, I am wondering, how did our desensitization towards death contribute to worsening realities during this time of grief and dread?
Stephen Jenkinson As a very good distinction you made between becoming numb to death on the one side and grief and dread on the other side. Yeah, it's a very, very useful distinction to make. Let me see if I can pull it a little bit. Now.
I didn't have much else to do, because I was decommissioned during those more or less three years—very little work to do. I'm not a fan of working on the internet so that kind of wasn't available. So I spent a lot of time trying to pay attention, which I'm glad I did, although it has its borders. And one of the things that occurred to me is that, you know, the principal dread that accompanied the arrangement was not really, for Anglo North Americans, at least, was not really mortal. In other words, the possibility of dying as a consequence of the plague, I don't think it was the big one, after all. Sad to say, because the simple possibility, in the early days, that legions of us could be dumped on the sidewalk, seemed to be real as a fear. It seemed legitimate and substantiated. And with a few local exceptions, it never came to pass. So if it was ever about ending up, you know, piles of bodies on the street, it wasn't that for very long.
And I think the greater dread by far, for people who are self-determination junkies, was the frustration of the ability to choose out your manner of defying the odds. I think the great dread that you pointed out, it's a beautiful word, by the way, has to do with the challenge to your self-determination that was real and I think I'm going to say necessary. And this is where my great lament comes to roost in the apropos of the COVID-19 days—is that we had a genuine opportunity to absolutely reconsider our addiction to mastery and self determination and I think we doubled down on it instead, generally speaking, across the dominant culture in North America, that's what's ensued from it. There's other things underneath that for sure and they haven't gone anywhere.
But the great sorrow, to me, is the missed opportunity to wonder about our habits of mastery and self-determination. And to wonder whether they're really what we imagined them to be. and do they really have the consequences that we attribute to them when we exercise them to the full. So I'm perhaps a minority in the minority of people, for whom COVID-19 was a close call. But perhaps, sadly, we're going to need an even closer one, to have us wonder about these fundaments that we hold dear. And I just wonder how much closer does it have to get? How many times can we have been on the receiving end of the lesson without a tremendous amount of collateral damage? Because that's where we are on the back end of this last three, three and a half years—a very close call, a very clear opportunity to learn and very little in the way of collateral damage to pay for the learning. At some point, it's got to be clear to everyone who's willing to think about it. That we are going to pay dearly for the lessons that we are going to have to learn in the near future that we could have got for a penny now.
Ayana Young Stephen, this has been such a beautiful conversation and I wish we had hours upon hours, but as we come to a close, there is one last thought I was sitting with which is making meaning. And even without the support structures of deeply embedded or connected communities, I still think finding and making meaning is vital to the human soul. And I'm wondering, how can we start finding meaning right where we are? Right in the present and all of our trouble and confusion and disconnection?
Stephen Jenkinson It's a great question to end with. Well, here's the first thing, I don't think meaning is that scarce, I think we should make a distinction here in the question between the meaning we want to be there, the meaning we want to sign off on, the meaning we want to associate ourselves with, and the rest of the muck in the mire that we imagined is, quote, meaningless. But I don't think it's meaningless. We disagree with the meaning, which is a completely different orientation. So no, meaning is not as scarce as we would make it out to be I think. We don't make meaning for our own lives. I would say this is what wakes are for, among other things, as long as you're around.
A lot of people my age are now insisting on being around for their own wake. You're hurrying up the process so that they have the wake before they die which is ludicrous, so ludicrous, in fact, that it almost beggars speech, but it's just another form of entitlement of getting what you want, while you still can. But a wake requires your absence. Clearly, clearly, that's what it requires. A wake needs you dead, in order to happen at all. So you're, you're gone from the fray, right, your voice is no more, and it's only now that the meaning of your life begins to be assembled, and considered, and disassembled and reassembled yet again. This is where your life is taking on its ballast, its valence, as the consequences of how it was lived by you are rolled out by the people who are your witnesses, faithful witnesses, or otherwise, you know, tangible witnesses or otherwise.
So this is who we are to each other. It seems to me ultimately, we're the architects of the meaning of other people's lives. And if we really understood the power and the consequence of that responsibility, we might not be so fast and loose with what we say. I'm not saying we would pass everything through the filter of everything that's agreeable. No, but authenticity minus your attitude about the person is kind of the order of the day. And the other side of gossip, I guess, is what I'm talking about. And that's real village mindedness at work, I think, is the willingness to attribute to a recently dead person, a layer of consequence among you, that they couldn't have entirely performed when they were alive because it was still, it was a project, wasn't it, the meaning the meaning of your life was the project. And now that you have nothing more to say about it, it's the chance for the rest of us to weigh in, and assign that to you.
Understanding, of course, that the day is coming, where your life will be similarly spoken of and spoken into existence. And that understanding could very likely have the consequence of moderating and evening out your instinct for recrimination or otherwise. And something about the authenticity of the times could actually survive your feelings about the dead person, such that even your feelings become a small part of the story instead of the authorized version of the story. You know, that's what I'd hoped for anybody listening is that, that they can live in such a way that such a time would come to the everybody around them that they claim to love and hold dear and hold in some kind of regard. And then you see this as a serial reality as an oncoming reality for you personally, and it governs your willingness to pass judgment. You know, and it doesn't mean close your eyes to things you found troubling, but it does mean that you include the capacity for a kind of merciful assessment that doesn't leave anything out. But it's not trying to retroactively cleanse something that shouldn't be cleansed. It should be understood instead.
Ayana Young Stephen, thank you. I really appreciate this time that we shared together and love the challenge. It's really good for me. So I'm sure others are feeling that too.
Stephen Jenkinson But you're very kind and I thank you very much for the invitation and say, I deeply welcome the exercise myself. And I welcome the challenge too. And you know, we're not trying to be right. We're trying to see if we can see, just trying to see things clearly.
Evan Tenenbaum Thanks for listening to For The Wild. The music you heard today is by Nights of Grief and Misery. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.