Walking home through the desolate and despairing parts of Dublin 8, a revelation visited me. Its blessed light compelled me to open my eyes, and I stood still, aghast at everything around me: the grey unyielding concrete, the smell of industrialisation, the litter, the cars, the noise, the dirty streets. I realised that I could take no more. I realised that I must take a flight to freedom; I must return to nature. Marching away from the city, I dreamed the speech I would deliver to those who failed to understand my actions. I would tell them that ever since the formation of the first societies, right through the expansion of industrialisation, and up to our the age of stooped heads transfixed on their smart phones, humans have been descending from our true way of life. Long ago, in a forgotten time, things were different. Our ancient ancestors knew a nobility and a fuller life about which we can only dream. The societies people initially formed were undoubtedly fairer and freer than ours, and they were made as enthusiastic, life-affirming projects — a creation from the fullness of life. The wheels and cogs of the system never sleep, however, and are they difficult to dismantle. Although we are now deeply and tragically locked in our corrupted lifestyles, we can make a stand and live as humans were intended to live.
So, I wandered into the wilderness from where I stood. I knew that had I hesitated, I would have invited doubts and perhaps cowered away from what I knew was right. My initial hurdle would be finding a place uncontaminated by humans. After three days of hiking through poxy-cold weather, taking shelter in warm public places, I settled in the wilds of rural Ireland, somewhere on the Longford-Westmeath border. For those of you unfamiliar with Irish geography, Longford is one of Ireland's forgotten counties, and Westmeath is a rural tumour cut off from the rest of County Meath. Sometime in the morning, I found a large, unkempt field of high grass and rocks, which sat quietly near a murky, brown bog. A stream flowed nearby, but I had to approach it at a certain angle, so my eyes would not see the distant electricity wire, which would ruin this boggy, midland Garden of Eden. Around midday, a tractor rumbled by in the distance. I imagined it was some beast of the wild, and I lay still against the grass, as my naive distant ancestors would have done. By evening time, the cold and hunger were beginning to weigh heavily on my sanity. I had last eaten in a chipper in Edgeworthstown, a meal so disgusting that it hastened my desire to abandon civilisation. Now, however, I had only a small frog to quell the pangs in my stomach (I'm so sorry, little fella!). I bent the rules of my return to nature, by allowing myself to return my clothes to my body.
After a night in the cruel, tragic damp of the midlands, I aborted my project. An insidious, ink-black revelation repealed the one from three days previously. I walked, stumbled, and crawled back to my bed in Dublin. Before I reached the womb of my pillows and duvet, I visited a natural food shop. Standing on a crate, with the rising and falling voice of a drunk Victorian parliamentarian, I delivered the following words:
I have grown weary of people who believe that a healthier life is one closer to nature. Such a belief is so demonstrably false. A simple look at the number of humans before and after industrialisation will quickly tell you how detrimental being closer to nature can be. Nature, as lovely as it may seem, is out to kill us. Land and sea predators would happily eat us; viruses are happy to occupy us until we die; the weather in most parts of the world would kill us without shelter; most things are inedible; the majority of our own planet is difficult to live on, never mind outside it; plants and bugs can poison us. The only upside of living in nature is the absence of proselytism [I tripped over this word a few times] from nature advocates about how wonderful and healthy nature is. Our ancient ancestors, who shivered and lived in fear, could never have dreamed of the high comfort we live in. The countless souls who died from disgusting and preventable diseases would consider our modern medicine miraculous.
[whiny voice]"But natural remedies, like Chinese medicine, have been around for centuries" I'm told reflexively by gullible people, consumed with an Orientalism as ethnocentric as nineteenth century colonials. "It's survived throughout centuries of unscientific times, along with sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, and geocentricity. 'Practical observations' of it working, I'm told, outdate the modern idolisation of contiguity as well as the most detrimental of social constructs — falsification. These arguments are obviously false, however. All is nature, and all is artifice. Our constructions all flow from our nature, and we utilise nature for all our products. Conversely, nothing escapes the constructs of our minds. To view nature, even in our idolised form, is to construct it and place it in our scheme of the world. That which benefits us and that which does not cannot be deliberated by an analysis that views the two sides of the same coin as different objects.
A skinny young woman with pale skin emerged from the shop and asked me to leave, threatening to call the Gardaí. I obliged her, unimpressed with her cult member perma-smile. I kept turning my head back as I walked away, knocking into some pedestrians and grumbling something about plastics.
So, I wandered into the wilderness from where I stood. I knew that had I hesitated, I would have invited doubts and perhaps cowered away from what I knew was right. My initial hurdle would be finding a place uncontaminated by humans. After three days of hiking through poxy-cold weather, taking shelter in warm public places, I settled in the wilds of rural Ireland, somewhere on the Longford-Westmeath border. For those of you unfamiliar with Irish geography, Longford is one of Ireland's forgotten counties, and Westmeath is a rural tumour cut off from the rest of County Meath. Sometime in the morning, I found a large, unkempt field of high grass and rocks, which sat quietly near a murky, brown bog. A stream flowed nearby, but I had to approach it at a certain angle, so my eyes would not see the distant electricity wire, which would ruin this boggy, midland Garden of Eden. Around midday, a tractor rumbled by in the distance. I imagined it was some beast of the wild, and I lay still against the grass, as my naive distant ancestors would have done. By evening time, the cold and hunger were beginning to weigh heavily on my sanity. I had last eaten in a chipper in Edgeworthstown, a meal so disgusting that it hastened my desire to abandon civilisation. Now, however, I had only a small frog to quell the pangs in my stomach (I'm so sorry, little fella!). I bent the rules of my return to nature, by allowing myself to return my clothes to my body.
After a night in the cruel, tragic damp of the midlands, I aborted my project. An insidious, ink-black revelation repealed the one from three days previously. I walked, stumbled, and crawled back to my bed in Dublin. Before I reached the womb of my pillows and duvet, I visited a natural food shop. Standing on a crate, with the rising and falling voice of a drunk Victorian parliamentarian, I delivered the following words:
I have grown weary of people who believe that a healthier life is one closer to nature. Such a belief is so demonstrably false. A simple look at the number of humans before and after industrialisation will quickly tell you how detrimental being closer to nature can be. Nature, as lovely as it may seem, is out to kill us. Land and sea predators would happily eat us; viruses are happy to occupy us until we die; the weather in most parts of the world would kill us without shelter; most things are inedible; the majority of our own planet is difficult to live on, never mind outside it; plants and bugs can poison us. The only upside of living in nature is the absence of proselytism [I tripped over this word a few times] from nature advocates about how wonderful and healthy nature is. Our ancient ancestors, who shivered and lived in fear, could never have dreamed of the high comfort we live in. The countless souls who died from disgusting and preventable diseases would consider our modern medicine miraculous.
[whiny voice]"But natural remedies, like Chinese medicine, have been around for centuries" I'm told reflexively by gullible people, consumed with an Orientalism as ethnocentric as nineteenth century colonials. "It's survived throughout centuries of unscientific times, along with sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, and geocentricity. 'Practical observations' of it working, I'm told, outdate the modern idolisation of contiguity as well as the most detrimental of social constructs — falsification. These arguments are obviously false, however. All is nature, and all is artifice. Our constructions all flow from our nature, and we utilise nature for all our products. Conversely, nothing escapes the constructs of our minds. To view nature, even in our idolised form, is to construct it and place it in our scheme of the world. That which benefits us and that which does not cannot be deliberated by an analysis that views the two sides of the same coin as different objects.
A skinny young woman with pale skin emerged from the shop and asked me to leave, threatening to call the Gardaí. I obliged her, unimpressed with her cult member perma-smile. I kept turning my head back as I walked away, knocking into some pedestrians and grumbling something about plastics.
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| Of course, the camera also ruined the natural effect. |
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