Notes from Running on Emptiness John Zerzan

Why do modern societies have such a hard time producing adults capable of intimacy, work, enjoyment, and ethical living? Signs of damaged life are so prevalent. Chronic pain and depression, often linked and occasionally regarded as a single disorder, constitute an immense crises in postmodern life.

Freud predicted that the fullness of civilization would mean universal neurotic unhappiness.

Contemporary society exerts a ban on living in favour of its representations; images now in the saddle, riding life.

Symbolic culture inhibits human communication by blocking and otherwise suppressing channels of sensory awareness. An increasingly technological existence compels us to tune out most of what we could experience.

A "future primitive" is called for, where a living involvement with the world, and fluid intimate participation in nature will replace the thingified reign of symbolic civilisation.

1623 William Drummond, "what sweet contentments doth the soul enjoy by the senses. They are the gates and windows of its knowledge, the organs of its delight."

Emotional desolation comes from a severe restriction of the sensual.

Rainer Rilke: Now from America empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life. Meanwhile the whole natural world has become an object."

Tommy cried out in the Who's rock opera, "see me, feel me, touch me, heal me.."
The senses have come to be isolated and subdued.

Aristotle once declared, "each sense has its proper sphere." An alienated counter-world driven to estrangement by ever-greater division of labour, humbles one's own somatic sensations and fundamentally distracts from the basic rhythm's of one's life.

It is all about the environment

For weeks now, I've felt as though I've been constipated and constrained by the famished, noisy environment. The sky has refused to bestow upon us the 'blessings' of the winter, and now it seems it is gushing with a vengeance. When I discovered upon waking up, the smooth, silent falling flakes, I wanted to jump up and down jubilantly in the manner of a child.

Just as a famished, super technosized (perhaps I've invented a new word) environment can bring me down to my knees from intense pain and anguish, snow has the uncanny ability to placate my frazzled nerves. It is akin to shooting valium up my veins, only without the horrific side-effects. Snow washes away the dust of everyday living; the anguish of having to endure a mechanical, inorganic environs. By blanketing the unnatural world around me in powder white, it takes away decades of world-weariness and cynicism.

Simply put: I love the snow. I could spend an eternity in it. Canada, when will you claim as one of your own?