Woodsy

A quiet Sunday. The brief blow (100 kph) of last night drifted a lot of snow, but had died down to a quiet 20 or 30 by this morning. I had a restless night, but it was bright and sunny, and Brian (my host) suggested a walk. The temperature was pretty cold, -20C or so with a wind chill in the -40s, so it seemed like a good test of my new clothes. I bundled up pretty good, about as pretty good as I can, and we went out. Once we were in the trees and the wind was gone, I was actually overdressed a bit and sweating. Who knew you could sweat at -20C. Funny.

As we were walking I was thinking about karma, actually. It was quiet and I was thinking at first about how the trees manage to live with all the snow and cold, and the dogs who live their lives outside here. Fate and struggle. In part the focus on karma was a response to the death of the girl here, though not directly, and in part thinking about how my being here affects the people close to me. I’ll stick to the former. The story goes like this. We are putting together a focus group of young people. Fran is working on who to invite, and her initial list included some people directly touched by the tragedy, and so had to be revised. It would be unfair to invite them, obviously. They have enough on their plates, I said to myself. And it’s this idea, of having enough on their plates, that also made me think of karma.

I’m not particularly religious (actually not at all) and by no means an expert in eastern religions….but I’ve always thought of karma as that delicate intersection between conscience and the contingency of the events around us. We bear the marks of our acts (conscience), but so do those around us. And our awareness of how our own decisions and their accompanying fates affect those around rebounds back on that same consciousness. This isn’t quite the “super-ego” that Freud talked about--it isn’t about control or self control or internalization, all terms I think are particularly useless when applied to people. Rather, it is about the simultaneity of living with the effects of our acts and decisions as we simultaneously live with the waves that lift and move us, the accumulated effects of the events and decisions of people both close and far as they crash down on us, all that with the power to reflect on them and to redirect that karma to others, and the decision whether to do that or not.

In a sense, this is the kind of anthropology that I learned from Gerald Sider. And when I do anthropology well, it is because I am paying attention to this. “People everywhere think about the future…” Sider wrote at the beginning of the Newfoundland book, and he is right. At times I wonder if it is folly to think that there can be an objective science of karma in this sense, but actually I think that there can be--though I doubt very much it would look like science to most folks. Lately I am trying to think of it as a dialectical science, or a science that springs from a dialectical method, but that only muddies the water at this point (though I do think sociology, which I do about half the time…I’m only a part-time anthropologist...could be an objective approach to karma, to those waves, though it would have to take much more seriously the fact that people are aware of karma, and their ability to move it around). Althusser thought there could be an objective approach to this whole karma mess (I am putting words in his mouth), and I think I agree, though I’m still working out how to do that. Ordinary sociology has landed a bit far from the mark, I’m afraid to say.

But all of this is very far from the issue. The issue for people here and in places like this is how to live amid that sea of karma, how to know and get some handle on when and where they spread it around. Perhaps psychology is the attempt to see that, though it isn’t often phrased in that way, at least not since William James. And I’m not a psychologist, I suppose. Still I’ve always thought of myself as something of a good sink hole for other peoples’ bad karma, able to pull it out and down and let it gradually go away…which makes me particularly aware at times of how we depend on one another to cope with the accumulated crap of our lives.

There are people like that everywhere, and everyone does it a bit for everyone else. But what happens when the karmic load is too big, too much? In Alaska, it was always shocking to me to learn who committed suicide, at least among the young people. It wasn’t the down and outs or the trouble makers, not at all. It was usually those on the cusp of making it. They too came from troubled homes or lives, but quite often they were the ones who seemed to have the wherewithal to get out, to make the break, to float above the enormous sea of bad karma around them. And when they didn’t, the downward spiral was intense and sudden. I wondered today, as I was walking in the woods, whether those same abilities that made it possible for them to nearly break away—those abilities to sense the movements and currents of the karma around them, whether it was these same abilities that finally broke them. Perhaps it broke them because they couldn’t stop seeing iall that bad karma and taking it and using something like courage and patience to let it melt away, until it finally filled them up and they couldn't do it any more. I don’t know; I’m out of my depth here. I’ve never been in a situation like that, never got full, as it were. And I did get out of a bit of crummy place, rather than getting pulled back in. So I may be the least capable of understanding this sort of thing. But alas, this is what comes of cold walks in the woods…getting in over one’s head, so to speak.

Late in the day today my skis arrived and I hoofed it down to the airstrip to pick them up. I’m excited by the prospect of more time sloshing through the paths behind the town. It was amazing beautiful. Next time I’ll bring my camera, and lighten up this discussion with pictures of me in funny clothes.