Wilderness Interface Zone

Last Saturday I attended a meeting of SE Utah writers that the Utah Arts Council held in Moab.  This meeting followed a reading that the Moab Poets and Writers—a group specializing in nature writing—sponsored the night before, a reading in which yours truly participated.  It was a pleasant and interesting series of events all around, but something happened during the meeting that I found especially interesting.  Guy Lebeda, the Literary Arts Programs Manager for the Utah Arts Council, remarked that he had taken the recent switch from analog television broadcasting to digital broadcasting ”as a sign from God” and quit watching broadcast TV.  His DVD player is hooked directly to his TV and he subscribes to a through-the-mail video and DVD rental service. 

Of the ten or thereabouts people in the room, half or more said that they had done the same thing—quit watching broadcast TV, many having made the choice some time ago.   A few had gone to renting DVDs, some of them choosing “movies only.”  I was among those who had departed from the broadcast path. Discovering the extent of the company I’d unknowingly been keeping surprised me.  I had no idea so many folks had decided they’d had enough of  the commercials, the programming, and, to my thinking, the broadly cast strip-mining language moneymaking entities employ in the process of quarrying the viewing landscape.

I wanted to know more about why others in the room had stopped watching TV but hadn’t time to ask.  My husband’s and my reasons include rising impatience with what I call “cattle chute” language, language meant to channel ”cows” in a particular direction in order to drive them to market.  Such language is essential to advertising flummery, but underlying messages in programs and network news have increasingly narrowed the perspective on humanity and the planet at large, relying on abusive storylines (abusive of their audiences) and often shocking (but called “honest”) dialogues and other controlled narrative surrounds to brand consumers.  The cattle baron tradition of the late 1800s and early 1900s now rides herd on commercial TV, radio, and newsprint.

I know I keep saying this, but human language influences this planet’s overall condition.  Whether you believe it arose in human beings in the course of evolutionary striving or was taught mankind by a loving Divine Parent, how we speak of other people, ourselves, the land, the animals and plants that over eons have trotted, crawled, slithered, swam, flown out of Creation’s horn of plenty forms the landscape of life’s prospects—the quo vadis of our conceptual expressions.  How we say forms, destroys, and reshapes what we are.  The wordscapes we produce create the field of play for what we will become.  Originally the outcome of the concerted movement of countless coincidences, accidents, explorations, revelations, creative outbursts, and living desires, the condition of this planet now depends heavily on the quality of human expression.   

The faddish, exploitative, limiting, abusive, shaming language so much programming lays out as “viewer choice” now renders television nearly useless as a medium for effecting meaningful change, for many reasons.   One of the most powerful ones: People want more; television programming offers little.  As Gabriel Marquez is purported to have said recently, “Everybody wants to live at the top of a mountain.”   Language that taps back into the creative drive of this planet, of the heavens, of the Divine Will (however you define it) to do and be more—a drive still alive and well, if not as portrayed on TV—will do better than merely restore things to what they were, to their pristine condition.  We’ll get ice cream sundaes beyond imagination.

Ice cream sundaes.  When I was a kid, I read a story, I think as part of my grade school curriculum, which in those days included a wide variety of folktales.  It was a story about a king that had grown bored with his lot and wanted something new.  So he ordered his wise men to invent something that had never before been.  But there was a catch: Whatever it was these wise guys came up with, it had to be warm as summer but cold as winter.  Faced with this contradiction in language—this confounding paradox—the wise men tried and failed repeatedly to satisfy the king’s desires.  Everything they came up with was either too wintery—too cold—or too summery—too hot.  Then one day a boy came to the court demanding to see the king.  He had heard of the king’s command and had created an innovation that met the stated terms. Through this cleverness and that, he gained audience and presented the king with his invention.  “What is it?” the king asked, taking it.  “What does it do?”  “You eat it,” the kid said.  “With a spoon.”

Of course, what the boy had done was invent the ice cream sundae, and the king, digging into it, found it was both hot as summer and cold as winter, thus meeting and probably exceeding his expectations.  Delighted with the boy’s invention (who wouldn’t be), he bestowed honor and riches on him, and now we all live with the benefit of having ice cream sundaes in the world, a benefit I personally have come to rely upon being there for me.

It’s a funny story, and I enjoy it as a tale suggestive of all the wonders and delights we have yet to bring into being, through good application (not grabby application) of our opposing thumbs and the creative vigor of our best language.   Everyone wants to live at the top of a mountain, and everyone wants ice cream sundaes and other yet unimagined concoctions that light up their awareness.  They might not know what it is exactly that they want, but when they get to the top of that mountain or taste that sundae, they know they’ve found it.

Language can do this for people, but not as currently portrayed on TV.  In fact, language can do more than “heal the world.”  It can open the world continually to new forms, new relationships, new movements through time and space.   Cattle chute language is the cheapest form of language, meant to widen the exploiting entity’s profit margins.  Plenty such language abounds in the environmental rhetoric currently at work in the field of public opinion over land and resource use policies and in the shaping of people’s behavior where questions arise about how best to live. 

So as far as I can see it, right now, where I’m standing—always a passing time and place—the most promising means for improving the condition of this world abides in increasing the energy efficiency of human language as well as expanding its diversity, or it’s ability to create possibilities from which others might choose according to their needs. 

It might seem presumptuous for me to say, but perhaps I might offer it as a possibility: this world doesn’t necessarily want to go back to what it was at any stage of its creation, except, perhaps, to start off once more in a better direction.  It doesn’t want mere restoration.  It wants more.  It wants to live at the top of creation’s numinous mountain, itself an ever-rising expression of desire.