Transcript: STEPHEN JENKINSON on Ancestry and Misanthropy /41
Ayana Young Hello, my name is Ayana Young and I welcome you to For The Wild Podcast.
Today we are speaking with Stephen Jenkinson. Stephen is an activist, teacher, author and farmer. He has a master's degree in theology from Harvard University and a master's degree in social work from the University of Toronto. Formerly a program director at a major Canadian hospital and medical school assistant professor, Jenkinson is now a sought after workshop leader, speaker and consultant to palliative care and hospice organizations. He is the founder of the Orphan Wisdom School in Canada and the subject of the documentary film Grief Walker.
Stephen, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. You write about some of the great unspoken questions we all face, but don't have the wherewithal to really investigate beyond the common knowledge of the culture we inherit. I admire your writing, and you're speaking so much for its clarity and candidness. As you challenge some of our deepest assumptions about our purpose, there's no tiptoeing around the indoctrination and taboos most of us hold around ancestry, life, death and dying—you know, really uncomfortable subjects to many people. It takes time and patience to open to these questions. So it's an honor to join you in this exploration and to direct that light of honesty on some of the shadowy regions some of us seldom stray to,
Stephen Jenkinson I've been credited with something that people have called brutal honesty, which I really don't take as a compliment. I don't think it's brutal, but I take what you're saying is very complimentary of what ended up there on the page.
Ayana Young Well, it could be jarring to a reader who has never begun to question their indoctrination.
Stephen Jenkinson I'm not a mama bird who's chewed it first.
Ayana Young No, definitely not, but that's part of why you're so sought after as a teacher, and why I have no hesitation in asking some of the more challenging questions that afflict my heart.
First, I want to begin with a quotation from this beautiful short film you made with Ian McKenzie, The Making of Humans, where you said quote, "The ultimate self-absorption of our age is the self-hatred of our age—the belief nothing we say or do can help but screw things up even worse," end quote. So before seeking out the guidance of teachers such as yourself, I was stuck in the misanthropy of feeling humanity is a cancer, which is a common perception very related to the shame of being non native.
Could you share some of your thoughts around how self hatred and its sibling, self glorification, limit us and impoverish us while the source of our shame—the murder of the planet—continues unchallenged.
Stephen Jenkinson You know, they're the swing arm of the same reflex—one goes one direction, one goes the opposite direction—but there's no achievement for swinging back and forth like a pendulum, not really. It's very much a kind of machine vision of what sorrow should actually be. I guess I would say that self-hatred and self-glorification are the shadow puppetry of self-absorption. That's how the absorption is articulated. I mean, it's in the nature of being self-absorbed to deny that you are or not to be alert to the fact that you are, and this is no solution.
I would say that sorrow is being preempted by self-hatred as if by some kind of torturous algebra—you know, one somehow gives rise to the other. Well, it doesn't at all. It's a shell game. Self-absorption, self-hatred, misanthropy, not to say that they're not understandable—man, I understand. I'm obliged to contend with it on the regular basis whenever I stand before people and respond to these things and others. The fact that it's understandable doesn't make it mandatory nor does it make it inevitable so it's not much of an achievement, really, to engage in the game of cursing. And, because it's yourself or your kind that you're cursing, it's no greater an achievement than if you were cursing another species or another era—human or otherwise—and sorrow has no place in those shenanigans.
I'd say sorrow is pleading for a seat at the table while all the haters are flinging food back and forth, and there's not much grace in that arrangement. The presence of sorrow among us in a time that's pleading for it could be the beginning of the grace that we're trying to accelerate towards by engaging in this misanthropy in the first place.
To characterize some people as non-native—the language itself is a pin through the sternum and it nails, for all time, the end of certain possibilities. And if anything, maybe the characterization of non-native contributes in its way to the appropriation and the plundering. I'm not saying that everybody's "magically native" or "magically indigenous." We know that history lends us a certain capacity for a recovering psyche, and it whispers to us, "You know, there were times when we looked exactly as we do now, when something like sanity may have prevailed. And that, when we both had an understanding of home and a capacity for home, we were as indigenously capable as the people we may now be plundering are.
If that's true, it's not a matter of going back any more than it's a matter of asking Indigenous people to be cooler than they are right now by living in teepees again, so that we can feel better about everything. And by the same token—I know that for myself who’s got sort of Irish-Scots ancestry more immediately—that there's nobody over there that's waiting for me to come back and testify to what became of them when they left. I mean, basically, the dominant culture of North America—if I can use a generalization—is a disowned thing. We abandoned by leaving, and the consequence of that is that we ourselves have been abandoned to a certain rootlessness. And I've come to say that we're now so confounded by the freedom that we sought that we seem to be willy-nilly to trade a kind of freedom that no longer seems free; that is a homelessness instead. We're willing to trade that for anyone else's home.
If we are willing to learn instead of be saved, if we're willing to put the enormous contemplative labor towards sorrow instead of away from it, maybe there's a chance to actually learn something of one's own dappled ancestry. I think that's an important word to use. We imagine ancestry. We imagine a vector that seems to get narrower as it goes away from us, and we claim some kind of single identity.
In actual fact, of course, it vectors in the opposite direction. As time articulates our ancestry, it widens not narrows. It widens to the point where the idea of, for example, white supremacy is so ludicrous as a historical reality. There's no such thing as the white homeland. There's no such thing as white people, for crying out loud.
So the willingness to think these thoughts and pursue this kind of unbidden contemplation that there was a time—well, I'll give you an example. I was interviewed recently by a fellow and halfway through the conversation, he said, “I have to confess to you something that when I first came in contact with what you were doing, I was really dismayed because I liked what I was hearing and then maybe I saw a picture, whatever, and it was like, Oh, another white guy trying to be an Indian.”
He was very dismayed by that and I had to say to him, “This is what happens if you don't cut your hair. It has nothing to do with trying to be something else. If you don't cut your hair—if you're lucky enough to have hair—it's long. And, you know, in the days before scissors,” I said to him, “probably a lot of people's hair was long.”
What throws you off the scent of the kind of varied majesty that you derive from, such that the whole thing now is shame—that if your appearance, if your language approximates anything that doesn't seem directly hereditary, then it's a shameful proposition?
Well, I think this can be countered by learning, first of all, imagining, and, then, that your imagination is tutored. It's never been easier in some respects to learn something about your own ancestry. It's never been more perplexing, perhaps, to approach such a thing. We have all the technology that we haven't had before thanks to the [unknown] and who knows what other kind of computer programs to know one thing and find out many things from it. But I wonder what the learning turns into if the whole thing is informed by a basic shame of secretly believing you come from nothing that has merit and that you are so reluctant to claim an ancestry that seems culpable that pillaging other people's actually looks like compassion, or looks like sanity or looks like something sort of culturally responsible and conscience driven. I think it's probably the absence of conscience.
So, you know, I've been involved for a long time in the death trade, and I can tell you that when people came to the dying time, no one imagined for themselves a conundrum, whereby, as they were dying—I don't mean the moments of death, I mean the months preceding it—where life was lived knowing that this is what was happening:
That the principal malady, the principal disfigurement, that ultimately resulted in dying people being the heaviest per capita users of sedation in the culture—which is a fact now; that the use of sedation was prompted by this complete blank in their imagination of what was to become of them subsequent to dying. And my way of saying it that has a kind of biblical sound, as opposed to it is, they had no sense of unto whom they were dying. And the terror that ensues is really fathomless, I have to tell you; hence the sedation, hence the antidepressants, hence the morphine. That's the largest single reason I saw people dying absolutely plowed under is because they had no sense of any continuity, no sense of anyone waiting for them, and no sense that there was any achieved status to the people who'd come before them who bequeathed to them their eye color and the shape of their chin and their skin tone you see. Well, that's a beginning of a response to what you've asked
[Musical break]
Ayana Young You've suggested an answer to the conundrum of this colonial orphan situation. Now there's been this thought process that's been lurking in my mind that I've never fully indulged—that we all have somewhere in us the capacity for home and to step into a line of ancestry upon our passing is that's such an essential part of the cycle we're being denied because we're instead lining up to pledge allegiance to a mechanical reality that has created a state of emergency in the natural world.
So my reaction to this homelessness is to rebel against an exclusively human ancestry and to rebel against the human supremacy that is so pervasive in this time. In this sense, it's dangerous to limit our sense of identity to a bloodline and a short term history. What if we identified instead with the wider web, with the plants and animals and fungi and bacteria, or how do you see it?
Stephen Jenkinson Well, it wouldn't be bad if people even did that, frankly, so I'm not sure that I'd use the word dangerous to describe it. I think if anything, if the question could be: “How does a dominant culture, non-aligned person ‘begin’ even a contemplative proposition?” You know your human ancestry is not a bad place to begin. I'd go further and, say, you start bringing in mushrooms, you're probably doing that so as not to have to go through the work of facing down the human ancestry that you do not necessarily welcome or feel kinship with or want to in any way be associated with. So, I don't think it's dangerous. I think it's mandatory.
But yeah, I absolutely take your point too. We have a word. The Indigenous people where I live understand themselves to be Anishinaabe—which most people listening would know is probably as Algonquin locally, and the language group more in the direction of Ojibwe or Chippewa—have a word that is vectored out into the greater English language, and it's mistaken as an English word now. I'm talking to you from the West Coast of Canada right now where they have a thing called ‘totem’ poles. And most people don't know that that word, 'totem,' is actually this Anishinaabe word I'm referring to. It's 'doodem.’ It's a 'D.' It's a softer pronunciation, and it's an Eastern woodland word. And the word 'doodem' is too briefly translated as something like ‘clan.’ The gist of it is this: The word is, if I could put it this way, a contemplation. It's a complex contemplation on ancestry. The proposition it delivers is people have this doodem when they're in ceremonial circumstances. They introduce themselves not by their standard street name that is on their birth certificate, typically, but they have another sequence of names that appears, and right after their name is their clan affiliation, and they'll just say whoever it is doodem. And without exception, where I live, all the doodems are animal. Which is to say, the sequence of your clan kinship is not exhausted by the human, that the ancestor of your first human ancestor is an animal.
Now in its withered form, we have this mascot thing all over the place, and that's a deeply misapprehended form of it, but it's actually what you owe allegiance to fundamentally as one who nurtured, who kept alive, and who enabled your first human ancestor. So it's a larger scale kinship than the human story would ordinarily allow, but it doesn't cultivate a kind of non–human identity. It cultivates an understanding that life is, by definition, not self-sufficient; that all life forms don't have self-sufficiency, which makes them life forms. And you know, human is very much part of that sequence. So whatever sustained your first ancestor functions—spiritually and ecologically and metabolically and biodynamically and even in the sequence of your memory as an ancestor—when you come to that realization, there's no such thing as first ancestor. There are first ancestors. That's always plural to begin, and then it often collapses into single lines for quite a long time and then you awaken to the poverty of that, and the plurality of it begins to reappear. So these things ultimately involve understanding things mineral and things atmospheric and then you ultimately realize, perhaps the deep mother of all our ancestry is something like terrain. It's something like weather. It's something like evaporation and condensation. I mean, it's something like grass.
There's quite a fine book—they tell me it's been made into a movie recently called Wolf Totem, translated from Chinese—and there's an old Mongolian man who's trying to educate a younger Chinese fellow about what he calls the 'big story.' And he says, you know, "The big story is not the wolf that we have to contend with out here all the time, certainly not the horse that you rode to come and meet me, certainly not the yurt that you live in, certainly not ourselves or each other. The big story," he says, "is the grass."
So it doesn't come down through that that's the teacher. You could say that the reliance, the failure of the quest for self-sufficiency, even when it comes to ancestry, is really the redemptive vision. because I can tell you, I certainly saw that in the death trade up, down, and sideways. I'm not going to call it failure for the moment—simply the lack of any sense of either obligation or mandate to learn this ancestry. What has been the consequence?
This is not that hypothetical anymore because the North Americans have lived quite a period of time, minus deep—I'm going to say—lived ancestry. It's one thing to have something on the mantelpiece that somehow stands in for all of this. You know about that. You've got the sequence of photographs back to the grandparent generation, but this is family. Family, you could say by definition, is all the people whose voices you heard, whose names you know, or at least everyone you know now knew them and at some point that sequence, that unbroken transmission, is broken. And basically anybody who looks like me, who's standing on this continent in North America right now is a consequence of that break just as much as we are a consequence of whatever continuity we may be longing for.
You could look at the consequences of not doing so as the real tutor of this arrangement, and not turn it into a got to or a must or a new ten commandments, but you could turn it into a sorrow over realizing that no one intended for themselves, or for their heirs, homelessness. I'm quite certain that's true. But when people leapt across the Atlantic—speaking my own sort of ancestral angle—when they were driven across the Atlantic the cover story is they're seeking sanity and health and freedom and worship and all of that. That's still taught in school, but you simply can't make the case that that's true by tracing their behavior once they got here. Their behavior once they got here established the foundation of what's come to be the dominant culture of North America. So we're unwilling even to learn how it started over here, and it did start. You know, for people who look like me, there actually is a start in time. It's not a fabrication. Of course, America began fundamentally in Europe, which is to say that America is a European fantasy. It's come from a certain era of Europe when there wasn't such thing as Europe as we know it today, certainly not the European Union, but not even those countries existed. They were small principalities and all the rest. The people who could afford to stay, I believe, are the ones who stayed. The ones who made America were the ones who couldn't afford to stay, who were driven, who were fleeing beyond any ability we have to understand it—fleeing something so horrendous and so in extinguished that they fantasized a kind of virgin territory. And even when they got here and they found that it wasn't virgin, the fantasy did not suffer. The fantasy was reinforced by removing those humans that they found here who messed with their idea of a “New World,” you see?
So you realize it's a kind of mania that masquerades as a kind of identity. And the founding in Canada—we don't have the phrase Founding Fathers…The founding refugees of our current regime lived almost immediately in the absence of what they had abandoned, what they left behind, and what they had lost. And the poverty of that, I don't think, has ever surfaced deep enough to inform us in our current living. And for all of that, the consequence to the Indigenous people that we found here has come to this: We live every day in the absence of what we lost. They have been obliged to live every day in the presence of what they lost.
I'm not sure whose hell is more profound.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young Growing up in a society of individuals, it's difficult to even define, let alone grasp village-mindedness. And since many of us in North America have never belonged to a village or a real community, we'd be hard pressed to reclaim that way of life.
Stephen Jenkinson No, no, we gotta lose all those prefixes—re-claim, re-this, re-that, “back to the land;” all of that mantra that somehow it's waiting for us to return to; that it's somehow some kind of unsullied time before we went crazy; that we have the capacity to find it or to recognize it should we find it; and, that it did not go as crazy as we did.
Just for starters, all of this language that automatically gives us an opportunity to visit what we've clearly abandoned, this is a spell unto itself that has to be challenged by a change in language. There's some consequence to that abandonment that North Americans have engaged in for a long time and the consequence we could call inducing something a feral quality to what once stood beside you and was willing to know you and you know it as some kind of kin relation. 'Feral' is a very good word here. Really, our ancestry, I believe, has gone feral—our deep ancestry, not only the human, as we said. And by feral, I do not mean a failed wild thing.
There is no such thing as a failed wild thing. It's in the nature of wild that this is its only option. No, feral is a failed domestication. The most dangerous thing in the woods close to where I live in my farm are those house cats that people slow down their car long enough to drop out the window and keep driving. That's the most dangerous thing there is. I'm saying that what we abandon and then what we disowned and then, finally, what we find totally irrelevant to our days may be the most abandoned and, subsequently, the most dangerous part of us because when we reacquaint ourselves with it, it's not a benign sequence of consequences to have abandoned the maintenance and the care of that which was entrusted to us in the form of ancestry.
That's what I think is happening now, to be honest. I think the kind of marauding the countryside looking for meaningful, symbolic ceremonies and taking them from wherever you can get them, and this kind of strange syncretism of borrowing a little here and a little there and calling it you or imagining that it's all of this cultural patrimony somehow in the world to fill the hole that you don't want to learn as a dominant culture, that's American. You just want not to feel it anymore—as if the feeling is the real conundrum. It's the real affliction. And I'm saying, of course, it's not the real affliction at all. It's the unwillingness to learn the whole that's the principal affliction.
You know one more thing, if I'm not taking up too much room here…I have a school. It's called the Orphan Wisdom School. If you're interested in why it's called that, I could tell you. But one of the things I've done is I've declared certain patron saints and matron saints that are what oversees—I hope—our enterprise and one of them is the character who's known to contemporary history as Doubting Thomas, who is one of Jesus' disciples. I love this guy and hold him in very high esteem in the school when I'm teaching. First of all, he's horrendously misnamed, but it would be very much a sign of our time that we would misapprehend what he did as him being doubting.
In fact, what he did was, very briefly: Jesus appears out of the tomb. There's eleven remaining good guys and ten of them say, "That's him, that's him, that's him," and they bow in whatever they do. And Thomas is going the equivalent of, "I'm not sure," and they'll look to him like his faith is failing. And I would say to you, "Absolutely." His faith is failing in its cowardly apparition. His faith is failing because he has a love instead, and his love for that man and for the time they had together, and for the dreams that they must have nourished, and all the contemplations that they must have engaged in in the downtime in between all the public events, all of that cached out in that moment as his willingness to lean forward and touch the wound that is a sure sign that the man beloved by him is dead. He learned his death. That's love, and faith is preemptive in this regard. Faith makes sure that you don't learn the ragged edge of what you long for. You don't learn how things came to be as they are; that you just extinguish the longing by taking somebody else's something.
But longing has an immense teaching capacity for us, I think now. Let me distinguish it from desire. Desire is that thing that is a stranger to none of us, whereby in its pursuit, you're trying to extinguish it. You're trying to end desire to get to satisfaction. It's not just sexual, it's at every realm of desire. That's the project of desire—is to find its end, which, of course, is a phantom and temporary end; but still, that's the project.
The project of longing is too long. It's not trying to stop. It is in the nature of longing that it somehow has its own song to sing, and when you're really singing, you're not trying to get the song over with to get to the last word. Just as when you're really dancing, you're not trying to get to the end of the dance, you're dancing instead. When you're loving, it's the same thing. When you're longing for ancestry, when you're longing for real depth to your days, you're not longing to learn everything so that you don't have to long for that anymore. That, in fact, your longing is one of the manifestations of your ancestry and the fact that it's not a one way street, this longing—that you may actually also be longed for.
And the consequence of this abandonment is that you've lost all sense that it's reciprocal. You've lost all sense that your own ancestry, human and otherwise, could actually have some longing for you, and that your longing comes from there, and that it's a kind of love song that a time before you is singing to you, which you mistake for affliction or for emptiness.
Ayana Young I'm trying very hard not to revert to an attitude of seeking direct answers, and listening to you speak this beautiful, poetic prose, you seem to be inviting us to break that habit. So Stephen, for us fledglings just learning to sing and trying to answer this love song of our ancestors, yearning for guidance, is there any you could give us, as far as a method or initial steps to start along this journey of remembrance?
Stephen Jenkinson To practice what I'm preaching, I'm not sure that there are steps, and probably that's not the best characterization for what you're asking about, at least not in my answer, it wouldn't be. There's no program. You know, that program mind comes from the thing that we're trying to do something about. It's pretty hard to cure the addiction of why you're still drinking, and it is in the nature of addiction to prescribe a solution for the addiction, which includes continuing to use. That's a hallmark of the addictive mind, right? And man, we are deeply addicted to misanthropy, and we're deeply addicted to the thing that got us here, which is a stratagem for relief, right? So how do you contend with that and try to get to sanity without invoking the versions of sanity and the prescription for sanity that comes from the craziness?
Maybe this is a way, it's not a beginning any more than you can jump into the beginning of a river, but it's some kind of initial move just at the beginning of you trying. It could be this: Rather than fill the hole, rather than stopping the hurt, rather than seeking relief from the loneliness, rather than trying to arbitrarily and in a lazy way, begin with an assumption of some kind of regal root that is somehow still informing you, we could begin with a lot more humility at a much smaller scale than the trumpets and the angels, and say something like, If we are willing to inhabit the poverty that we are trying to get away from, this willingness itself becomes the love song that we keep trying to hear—that we sing it first and the singing takes the form of the willingness to know in a deep way the time that we're in.
If I could use a slightly different vision of it, I love the idea of the rosary. I wasn't born in that tradition. I've never had one, but I love the idea of it anyhow. It's like I've never drank coffee in my life, but I strangely love the smell of those roasted beans. As if loving it will do, you know? So it's the same with rosary, and the thing I've been thinking about rosary lately is: “What's happening as we're thumbing that through our fingers?” And maybe one of the things that's going on there is it's a memory that's being staged rather than being involuntary; that it becomes a deliberate scheme for remembering. What in particular? Well, what constitutes your good fortune? But it needs a steep reassessment of good fortune to include heartache, to include many of the things you and I have been talking about for the last while; that good fortune doesn't mean everything that you'd seek for yourself to solve, to soothe; that maybe good fortune includes whatever prompted you to begin that search, which, of course, is the longing for the absence of.
So you could begin to put up your little tent in the crater of what happened—in the crater of the ancestral flight from the old country, all those things—that you set it up there, and that you don't mistake that for an ages-old valley that somehow the gods themselves crafted; that it's more recent, at least half of it is humanly wrought. And if you're willing to learn the place where these kinds of deep losses and poverties detonated, it's the beginning of your willingness to proceed as if it's so. And self hatred or misanthropy is not an inevitable consequence of this realization because I think these realizations are both midwife and also the parent of sorrow. That's the strange thing of it—the willingness to really see these things in the way that I've been talking about them doesn't seem to give way to anger, to hostilities, to finding the bad guys and things of that kind nor do they go to paralysis or impotence. They go to a certain mandatory sorrow that people of our time must have as a consequence of their awakening, of their becoming alert, of their emerging into an inarticulate adulthood.
This is the requirement. I don't know if it's the program, but it's the requirement. It's why we ache for some kind of programmatic, clearly-articulated, ceremonially-induced and recognized—as they call it these days—rite of passage that signals that our personal childhood is at an end. Well, I'm talking about something similar for the end of our cultural childhood, our cultural adolescence, which is still insisting on proceeding as if, That was then, this is now. You know, I didn't do that bad stuff 300 years ago, and Can't we all just get along? And the answer is, well, not without this poverty, we can't.
And I would say—though maybe I'm not in the position to say it, but probably it won't stop me from saying it now—that we may become slightly more trustworthy to people more at home than we are if we're willing to stop trying to get home and begin to live the depth of the poverties that are our roots. In so doing, being willing to align ourselves with an ancestry that doesn't seem very promising instead of trying to align ourselves through affect with people whose ancestry is still recognizable to them, we may become more trustworthy the more sorrowful we're willing to become. It doesn't sound like becoming more authentic, right on the surface of it, but I'm not sure it isn't.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young Well, it seemed that this denial and refusal to feel all of these things plague us. And you know, we refuse to feel the sorrow and the grief of our ancestry, of our brother and sister animals and plants that are going extinct. We refuse to feel the sorrow of our human family members that die, and even ourselves, and we're obsessed with youth and attached to a kind of immortality. Considering that death feeds life, what has caused us to fear this ultimate process so deeply?
Stephen Jenkinson I think it's absolutely a historical event. In trying to answer a question like yours, which is a very well wrought sorrow, the direction always seems to go intrapsychically, as if that's the only fundamental reality there is. But there's this thing called history, you know, and as Nick Cave so gorgeously said in one of his recent songs, he said, "Well, the past is the past, and it's here to stay." So we could take our cue from that and say, I think something happened. I don't think it happened all over the world. I don't think it happened to everybody. I don't think it's like a comet that impacted and everybody felt the tsunami. I don't think that's the way it was at all. I think in the particular case of the people who look like me on this continent, it would take the form of this:
There were times when we had a capacity for home—that's the way I'd like to say it— rather than we had a home. We had a capacity for home, over and above the particularities of place. It was those particularities that granted us this capacity for home; that we were able to somewhat travel with to the point where, in the context of a nomadic existence, no one was not at home because they moved from one place to another. Neither did they understand the entire Earth, all of creation, to be their home. It was still specific. It wasn't throttled down into you have to sit at this particular place, or you have no such capacity. And, how was that place recognizable? At the human level, I think this is what it was—that people congregated or returned to that place in sufficient numbers over a sufficient length of time that everyone knew that their principal lived relationship with that place was transacted through the fact they know where the bones of their people are.
I'm not sure that they had cemeteries as we understand them now because as traveling people, there wouldn't be a place where all the bones went to; that the bones would be strewn across the path of their wandering. As long as they knew where they were, they're the whisperings of home, not the taunts of home, not the absence of home.
Everywhere where the grass grew well—that the animals brought the pastoralists to, every one of those good grass places—the quality of their grass was partly underwritten by the fact that old family members and ancestors were buried in that very place which made the grass green. And, they followed the animals to their people. When they drank that milk and when they ate that meat from those animals, they were absolutely being fed by their ancestors in every physical and metaphysical way that I could ever have been understood, and that strikes me as ‘the warp’ and ‘the weft’ of home. That it's a combination of the specifics of place, which is why I mentioned topography and wind and current earlier. It's the dynamics of place—that's a warp—and the weft is memory. And those two things together weave the shelter that you live inside of. And this is true symbolically, spiritually. It's true psychologically. It's true mutually. Your lived life together is transacted in the context of what I just said.
Now, there are natural catastrophes that can eclipse the scenario just described, but by virtue of being natural catastrophes, they would never be understood as the annihilation of the scenario I just described. Sooner or later, they would be gathered into this understanding. What produced North America was not a natural disaster. What produced North America was a more or less spontaneous flight from what had already ruptured—badly ruptured—the scenario I've just described to you. And you know, economists can tell us aspects of it, and they're right. You know, the loss of the commons, the driving of people off the land towards urban centers, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution—these are important things to learn about because that's how the story I'm talking about took place.
But, the story is rarely told. If you look at the photographs of those immigrants that ended up in Ellis Island, United States, and Grosse Île in St Lawrence in Canada, you would expect to see a certain degree of distress or torment or despondency or trauma in the faces, perhaps, of the older people who never imagined that the latter third of their life would be lived in a place that they knew not. So you'd expect to see that, and you do see it in the pictures. But the thing that strikes me enormously is the babes in arms in these immigrant photographs have basically the same look on their faces as the grandparents and the parents that are holding them. Now, how to understand that? Because it's a record of an unfolding disaster that's not natural, and it's this loss, this compound loss of home, that's being miscast as a search for freedom. It's a freedom so confounding now that we're so confused by it, that we cannot distinguish freedom from an utter loneliness of no capacity to feel allegiance to the place that you're at.
Ayana Young I remember hearing you say in an interview that you can't just wait until the 11th hour to figure all this out. It's a life's work to prepare oneself for death. If we are able to do that work and remember these stories, but we're not able to give our heirs or the earth our bodies, potentially, because of the way the death—
Stephen Jenkinson Because of chemo and all kinds of things.
Ayana Young The chemo and the embalming and the caskets and the whole thing. Since we're not able to do that, what are we able to give back with our death?
Stephen Jenkinson It's our manner of dying. Our manner of dying is the gift that we have. You know, this is a very tricky question, this question of giving back. It goes in the direction of sacrifice. But sacrifice—frankly, it's a pernicious proposition—because the etymology of the second half of the word comes from a Latin word from which we get the English word 'to fashion' —"-fice," fashion, to make. And the prefix is, of course, 'sacred'—to make sacred; that sacred is a fashioned thing. I mean, what kind of bruised psyche and wounded ancestry gives rise to the idea that humans are in the sacred-making business? I'm not pretending I don't understand how it’s come to be that way, but the word itself gives us pause.
So we might rather say that rather in trying to ongoingly engage in sacrifice or kind of pound of flesh guilt offerings that are a consequence of us realizing how badly we've mangled what was entrusted to us, we might come to this thing that has a tone of redemption in it instead of a tone of kind of gross contrition in it. And it could be this—do we have anything to give to the world, to the life that has given us our life, to the people that will follow us, to the food sequence that has granted us our days, etc, that doesn't require us taking it from somewhere else in order to have it to give?
I mean, in the present moment. And my answer would be—there's a few things...One of them is your manner of dying. Your manner of dying, you do not steal from some other life form, from some other human, from some other era, from some other culture. It doesn't have to go that way. You can die understanding that your manner—I'm not talking about the cause of death now, I'm going to use the word style—that your style of death is the only thing you'd have to bequeath to the people who come after you, and to the place that your body is going to end up in; that will not prompt a family disagreement about who gets what; that will not send lawyers kids to private school; that will not end up on a sale table for quarters at a yard sale somewhere. It might be the only thing you have that won't end up in one of those three scenarios.
Your manner of dying is a gift beyond our understanding what constitutes value because it's a piece of meaning, strangely enough, that the people who come after you will either be afflicted by because your manner of dying was so involuntary and so encrusted by grievance; that the meaning of your death to the generations to come is "Whatever you do, don't friggin die," kind-of-tone or your manner of dying whispers to the people that come after you that, "Friends, this is a kind of an achievement that you'd never seek as an achieved thing."
So imagine that it's possible. Imagine that the time to come is written partly by how you die; that your understanding of what it means to die is not divorced from your understanding of what it means to be alive. And once you realize that you're going to die in the manner of your living, the next question becomes: "What are you waiting for?"
Are you waiting for a terminal diagnosis to become a contemplative genius? Is that what it is, do you honestly imagine that no matter how you lived that your dying will not bear the fingerprint of your manner of living, because it will. That's all it will be. Your manner of dying will bear faithfully all your convictions about life. So the kind of redemptive vision might be that everyone's death before our own is a chance to get a PhD in the way it is. And if that's the case, we can learn from them that it's our living that gives our death meaning, and that we have to begin now.
So there's a sense of too-lateness about it. If you want to have a full grown tree to sit under today, but you have not proceeded in the last 25 years as if that day would come when you'd want that tree shelter. So what's to be done? And the answer is, get planting. Why? Because there will be people 25 years from now who are going to ask the same question, and the miracle will be that you have been willing to proceed as if they will appear. You start tree planting as saplings now you're not going to see the fullness of that tree. No, you won't. And there's some real grief in that, and you're doing it on behalf of people you will not meet. And yes, there's some altruism, but there's the grief that informs the whole operation. And just when you think that this is a recipe for selflessness and for service to the future, here's the rest of the story:
You know, as someone who farms a lot, I'm often asked for agricultural advice. The question I get asked more than the other is: “When's the best time to plant a tree?” And I know they mean day or night or season or I don't know what phase of the moon and so on, but my answer is always the same. I say, "Best time to plant a tree about 25 years ago," and they look at me with the kind of visual equivalent of some of the tone that you've asked me your question in which is to say, That's beyond confounding. That's cruel because not only do you refuse to answer the question apparently, but that you're answering it in a way that makes life seem to be impossible and futile. You're encrusted by the past, basically.
So I would say to you, “The reason I say 25 years ago is because I'm answering the question that they haven't quite articulated, but is absolutely there, which is, ‘How can I have a tree to sit under right now?’” That's where the question is really coming from, right now. And so that's why I say 25 years ago.
How did you know how to even ask for when's the best time to plant a tree? Answer is because you'd seen trees already. That means that whether you seek out this wisdom or whether you don't, the truth is that even in our blighted time, there have been people who have been willing to proceed as if we ourselves would be in the time and in the crazy sorrow that we're in and they planted. And if it wasn't trees, it was struggles. And if it wasn't struggles, it was approximations of wisdom. And if it wasn't that, you know, it was old tribal clothing that they somehow kept alive, just as an undershirt or whatever it is. You see, we are not operating in the absence of all these things. We are today operating in the abandonment of all these things. So the proper redress to this kind of abandonment and betrayal, frankly, is remembrance.
I think we're close to the end of our time here, and maybe you've gone over, but I'd offer you this as an understanding of remembrance vis-a-vis dying now.
I worked with a lot of people whose instinct was to make home movies. That was a big thing at their dying to make these movies. You know, we have the technology now. It's so simple, and they were dispensing wisdom and all of the rest. And if I were to ask them: “Why are you making this?” They would answer that, well, they're not going to live long enough to see their kids graduate from school or get married or whatever it is, or see their first grandchild, so they're making these things as a voice from the grave, so to speak. They could somehow triumph over the limitations of a lifespan. And I'd say, “Well, I understand that's what's prompting you to make them, but why are you making them? Not for whom, but why?” And no one ever answered, but my take on it is this:
Nobody makes a movie choreographing the way in which they hope to be remembered, if they really have faith that the future generation will remember them. And so all of these lunges are towards a kind of vague longing for just being remembered—not immortality, just some kind of endurance for a while. You know that you don't slip beneath the waves gone for all time with no consequence to your days. So rather than trying to choreograph the way which you will be remembered, which is basically the Hero's Journey.
One of the things I've been pleading for for years is to die not trying to get remembered, but die remembering because this you can still do on behalf of those people who died fundamentally not remembered. And this is why I answered you earlier about learning ancestry and not invoking someone else's as a kind of panhuman, kind of Walmart for the soul, that you can go into and choose an ancestry that more becomes you.
I mean, I'm 61. It's not ancient, but I can see it from here, and I can tell you I'm doing everything I'm doing for people your age. I don't know how old you are, but you have a young sounding voice, younger than I feel this morning anyway, and that's the allegiance I'm acting on. And I have deep apprehension about the world that people my age and older are handing over to you saying, "Well, good luck with that one." You know, while we're maximizing our income generating years and Monsanto continues on our watch.
And so, the very least, as any opportunity that you've granted me to wonder aloud about these things with you has to carry that sorrow in it too, you know. And there could be a lot of self hatred in there, but there isn't because neither one of us have the time, not at you at your age, not me, at mine; that this world needs something else of us; that something that looks human—not the betrayal of human, not the denial of it.
That it seems to me in a troubled time, humans are troubled, and maybe what we've achieved talking together this morning is that we've been willing to be troubled aloud together for a while, and maybe there's something there.
Ayana Young Well, thank you. Thank you for wondering aloud with me. I'm sure my my mind will continue to spin this around into many vortexes to come.
Stephen Jenkinson Believe me when I tell you it's an honor for you to ask me these things, as if I might have something useful to say back. Hopefully I kept at my end and thank you for honoring all the people that gave me a chance to learn all this stuff which is what you did with your questions.
Ayana Young That, my friends, was and is Stephen Jenkinson. Along the way, we heard some orphan sounds coming from Australia, a song called "Mosquito" by the Aussie band The Next followed by Niels Fromm from a piece called "Tristana" and Lou Reed with "Cremation." Rate us on iTunes, subscribe to the newsletter and help out the program by donating. We can be found at forthewild.world. Thank you so much.