One gets the sense that certain people-when faced with the mysterious fact that the natural world without other people does in fact feel quite empty-turn angry and indignant, and refuse to believe that it is not secretly peopled by some kind of mythical beast whose face might make itself of branches and moonlight.
For all my years, I can assure you this is not the case. When you stand at a pulloff between towns and are faced with the silence of timber lands that makes you listen a little too intently for where all the bear and deer and king fischers are, and you simply see nothing but fallen trees and growing ones and bushes you don’t know and a whole creaking world where the wind “watches over nothing,” you are not looking at the surface but at the depth. A herd of buffalo of elk will cross a highway before they cross a place of high mountains no one has ever been. That’s just the way the world is laid out.
I think some people, facing this, feel the need to turn some thing into a monster that they can blame for the emptiness. It is too painful to look death in the face and see nothing at all recognizable-nothing more than when you find a coyote skeleton or a cicada shell clutching onto tree bark.
This mystery makes people miserable. The whole history of religion may be in trying to refute it. To take some tangled threads and weave together a dream world. But of too few and mismatched and irreperable remnants. And so anger becomes the next best thing to uncertainty.
Better to hunt forever the face of moonlight and branches in any form it takes than to accept that it was never there.
Religion doesn’t happen outside of people. The world is perfectly content without our songs and misery. There is nothing protecting us from the indifference of comets and ice ages and volcanoes in the anthropocene.
Some people simply feel better when there is less life to wonder at—perhaps they just feel crowded in some ephemeral way, like the forest is an oppressive overgrowth, hemming them in.
We should wrap them in a blanket and sit them on the cold and scorching vista of a plateau, so slowly they can rule out the conviction that there is something alive and unseen that is coming for them constantly.
This leads naturally to the roles of paranoia, projection, and personification in the anthropology and psychoanalysis of religion.
I will be adding a short series on the proposed role of effigy as a layer of semantic reflexivity within the cognitive evolution of symbolic consciousness—and analyzing some of its contemporary and historic forms, from amciemt stone madonnas to statuary to Barbie dolls (all equally profound in context).
While my own analysis would closely mirror Freud’s original work on totemism and fetish, I may take reverse approaches to the same conclusions that will no doubt inform logical pathways that verify or call into question the essence of his original claims.
But the “voice in the wilderness” is first and foremost our own voice, that we can not help but striving to hear.
