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Paul Shepard (1925-1996)
Dr. David Lavery English Department, Middle Tennessee State University |
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Paul Shepard (1925-1996)
Dr. David Lavery English Department, Middle Tennessee State University |
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___. "Five Green Thoughts." Massachusetts Review 21.2 (1980): 273-88. ___. "Homage to Heidegger." Deep Ecology. Ed. Michael Tobias. San Diego: Avant Books, 1985: 206-212. ___. Nature and Madness. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982. ___. Nature and Madness. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. ___. The Only World We've Got: A Paul Shepard Reader . San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996. ___. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Island Press, 1995. ___. The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. ___. Thinking Animals. Ed. Max Oelschlaeger. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. ___. Traces of an Omnivore. Ed. Jack Turner. Island Press, 1996. ___. Ed. Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature. ___. Ed. The Sacred Paw : The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature . ___. and Daniel McKinley, eds. The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1969. Oelschlaeger, Max, ed. The Company of Others : Essays in Celebration of Paul Shepard. Skyland, NC: Kivaki Press, 1995. |
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In our species, knowledge of who we are is linked to origins and beginnings, and it is communicated as a mythology. The first obligation to society by young men and women who are being initiated into adult status is acknowledgment and affirmation of the past, and of its living presence in them as the symbolic embodiment of their ancestors. Being inescapably human, we have not lost the capacity for that affirmation, but we have denied its central content. Because of the imminent extinction of the large primates, opportunity to renew that affirmation is vanishing. Let us protect our cousins from further human persecution, and go on from there to the whole of animate life, and so redeem our heritage. It is not our responsibility to do so because of some higher authority because we would be angels but a responsibility, first to ourselves, and second to the island earth and our fellow inhabitants in a vast and lonely cosmic sea. The anguish of our human tragedy is due more to a delusional system that insists on the exaltation of our species and failed myths of progress and history than to reality. There is a profound, inescapable need for animals that is in all people everywhere, an urgent requirement for which no substitute exists. It is no vague, romantic, or intangible yearning, no simple sop to our loneliness for Paradise. It is as hard and unavoidable as the compounds of our inner chemistry. It is universal but poorly recognized. It is the peculiar way that animals are used in the growth and development of the human person, in those most priceless qualities which we lump together as "mind" . . . Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from a series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense. Most people seem to agree that we cannot and do not want to go back to the past, but the reason given is often wrong. The truth is that we cannot go back to what we never left. Our home is the earth, our time the Pleistocene Ice Ages. The past is the formula for our being. . . . The attempt to revive our humanity and recover values and behavior does not mean giving up science, art, medicine, law, machines, music, or anything else. The history of Western man has been a progressive peeling back of the psyche, as if the earliest agriculture may have addressed itself to extenuation of adolescent concerns while the most modern era seeks to evoke in society at large some of the fixations of early natality rationalized, symbolized, and disguised as need be. The individual growth curve, as described by Bruno Bettelheim, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and others, is a biological heritage of the deep past. It is everyman's tree of life, now pruned by civic gardeners as the outer branches and twigs become incompatible with the landscaped order. The reader may extend that metaphor as he wishes, but I shall move to an animal image to suggest that the only society more frightful than one run by children, as in Golding's Lord of the Flies, might be one run by childish adults. In conventional history/progress thinking, the complexity and quality of music have steadily grown in the course of cultural evolution from something repetitive and simple like the Kalahari bushman's plucking his bowstring to the symphonies of the nineteenth century. But a very different view is possible. Suzanne Langer observes that "the great office of music is to . . . give us insight into . . . the subjective unity of experience" by using the principle of physical biology: rhythm. Its physiological effect is to reduce inner tensions by first making them symbolically manifest, then resolving and unifying them. . . . One interpretation is that the more complex the music, the more fundamental the problem; or, one might say, the more elaborate the music, the more fragmented the vision of the world. Composer and musician Paul Winter has said that we are now habituated to an overstructured format, especially in so-called classical music, from which we need to escape into a more informal extemporaneous performance and audition. But if, indeed, music is a kind of final refuge serving to hold things together, this might be impossible in modern life. Most people seem to agree that we cannot and do not want to go back to the past, but the reason given is often wrong; that time has moved on and what was can never be again. The truth is that we cannot go back to what we never left. Our home is the earth, our time the Pleistocene Ice Ages. The past is the formula for our being. |
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