What the heck is this all about?

Part Two

So, back to Van Morrison again.

By the way, if you don't know "Dweller on the Threshold," there's a good performance of it here.

So, the other reason the song spoke to me was because it seemed to articulate, in a rather roundabout way, some of my concerns about a wide variety of current issues. As I said in my first post, I'm trying to think about how these issues and changes are going to work within my academic life. But I think the idea of the dweller on the threshold also speaks to peak oil, climate change, food security, and a whole host of other issues in a more general way, and one that's probably relatable to a bunch of people beyond me.

Now, clearly the song doesn't deal specifically with these issues. It's a song, after all, and a bit of an older one, and I'm sure Van likes to sell his records and not depress his fans too much. I am, however, about to go vaguely literature interpretation on you with some of the lyrics, thanks to that BA in English, but I'll try not to get to heavy,

In any case, the song deals with a lot of similar themes - waiting in darkness, moving from darkness into light, having to move through doors, the loss of illusion, and seeing without perceiving. These are all issues I think we're having to face now. Our world is changing rapidly, and we're having to come to a lot of really difficult conclusions about the impact that we're having on a whole host of things we depend on - weather, the environment, oil, water, food, travel, and how we fundamentally live our lives. We're losing the illusions that we've held onto for years and being, in at least some cases, forced through the door and into the light.

In some ways, I feel like we're talking about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" on a grand scale (good grief, I hope this works, since it just came to me now). For those unfamiliar with this work, it's essentially a tale of a number of people chained in a cave, facing the back wall, and lit from behind. All they know of the world is the shadows that are projected on the wall that they face, sinc ethat's all that they can see. But eventually, one of these people is dragged away from the cave, so he can see the actual world, and not just the shadows. And it hurts. The sunlight hurts his eyes (and, if we're talking post-ozone, might even burn his skin). He has a difficult time equating the shadows of the cave with what he can now see of the real world. Everything is new and strange and damn scary.

Again, we've got a dark to light transition, a movement from one way of being to another. And we also have a sense of the pain that maybe, just maybe, comes up in "Dweller" in the ideas of crossing the burning ground, and then of drowning. Now, we too are being hauled out of the cave, en masse. I certainly feel like I've been dragged out, especially with regard to issues around peak oil and food security. For some, I'm sure it's a more difficult transition than others.

But, there can be a happy ending. In Plato's allegory, the person who is dragged away from the cave adjust, and even returns to the cave to try to convince ther others how wonderful non-cave life is. They, of course, do not believe him, since they need to experience it themselves and work through their own fears and deal with the changes themselves. But it is possible to grow used to it.

I think there are a lot of reasons that we've lived so long in what only now seems to be the darkness. It's been comfortable and, until now, has been relatively easy to go along with. In addition, it's been even easier because the powers that be - those who have a vested interest in keeping us working, buying, and living in particular ways that tend to support capitalism - have led us to believe that this is the best way. That's not to say that we're dupes. I think that far too often the tendency is to assume that people are dupes of the system. But, we're talking about a system that's been around for awhile, and one that's so normalized and expected that it's just plain difficult to get away from enough that it can be questioned and confronted on any large scale. But, we're being pulled far enough away now that we can begin to see these things - sadly, it seems to be much easier to question the system when it's difficult to afford fuel, or food, or housing. As a result, we're being forced into a position where not only our ways of life our changing, but our assumptions and illusions about them are as well. And so, we're all, in a sense, dwellers on a threshold, whether we know it or not yet, and we need to figure out how this transition is going to work for us.

This turned out a bit more general than I wanted it too. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm the only one who feels like Van's dweller on the threshold, or the guy hauled out of Plato's cave into the glimmering and shiny world. But I suspect a lot of us feel like this. That a lot of us are making this transition and trying to manage the pain and shock and confusion of moving past the dark and into this new light. I know it's not always a picnic over here, and so I'm going to write about it. Yeah, I want to think about integrating my domestic life a little better with my academic life, but I also think these issues and means of dealing with them are worth thinking about on their own.