My visit to Colorado (to see a friend) had an interesting set of circumstances. Most of the time I felt docile and passive and was content with taking in experiences, while embedded within these periods of complacency were intense episodes of feverish thought which were triggered by correspondingly intense external pressures, of which I'll briefly comment on. So! Pictures.
High above, coils of jetsmoke unravel silently:
The first hike consisted of a trail that rose up to Horsetooth, a large rock outside of Fort Collins. The trail provided nice variety with snowy, icy paths in the forests, which then warmed up as the paths opened up out on the ridge with exposed views of the landscape, which was bifurcated into desert and temperate climates on either side of the mountain. Here is a view from the summit of Horsetooth:
The fading light painted the rocks and trees, or well, the entire landscape; it was lovely:
A curious combination of flash and backlit horizon:
We went on a second hike the day before I left. Here is an icy river underneath the initial bridge to the Greyrock trail:
Water and ice:
The handsome face of Greyrock which rose high above the trail and caught the sun:
A flock passing over Greyrock:
Rock and ice at the edge of a frozen pond high up at the top of the trail.
Grass peeking up through the ice:
At the summit of Greyrock:
During the course of the two hikes, several things occurred to me. First, the nature and composition of my person binds me to civilized society by virtue of two major constraints: the possession of information for survival and the ability to act on that information. All of the information and abilities I currently have are only useful for survival in a civilized environment. I am bound to civilized society by the necessity to sustain myself, and that the nature of my person currently reflects the nature of civilized society itself. Also I need to be in proximity to others with access to their complementary survival skills that I haven't developed. This means I can only exist comfortably outside of a civilized environment for a brief period of time, that is before I run out of navigable light, preparable and digestible food and water, sources of warmth, and etc. So, basically a day. If I wished to live in this wilderness for an indefinite amount of time, I would have to radically alter the nature and function of my person, taking up a completely new set of skills and absorbing a completely different set of information, which would change the way I think and act. One's person is very much a part of one's environment.
Altering one's person takes work above and beyond merely sustaining oneself, so there is a resistance to radical change and a tendency towards subsisting in a familiar environment with sympathetic others, unless there is a great enough pressure which supersedes the tendencies of convention, such as if one's environment is no longer conducive to one's own subsistence.
Secondly, the struggle to navigate a landscape, reach a summit, and return to one's point of departure helped to elucidate more clearly some very crude concepts of masculinity and femininity. The masculine impulse seems to present itself in unfamiliar environments in which potential hostilities could manifest, and so one seeks to understand the environment as an object to master in order to sustain one's own ego within it. Sometimes it becomes difficult to separate the masculine and feminine concepts, as both impulses are necessary for the reality that we currently experience, and both impulses come naturally to us in various situations in our daily lives. What we call the masculine often consists of the formation of ego, or a differentiated and circumscribed entity which navigates the world and attempts to subsist as a distinct body which experiences. If the totality of our universe tends towards heat death, or the entropic evening out of energy, then any distinct lifeforms must do constant work to extract energy from their environment and concentrate it within the boundaries of their body, thus maintaining their separation from the cosmos, and their perceptive and self-relfective experience of the cosmos.
However this principle of separation has its limits. With a concentration of egos there arises competition for energy between those egos, and upon reaching a point of homeostasis when the ego is in mastery of its environment and secure, the competition becomes separated from the necessities of survival and becomes an end in itself, resulting in the disintegration of the cooperative social body, which brings us to the feminine impulse.
In contrast, the feminine impulse comes from a familiarity with an environment and one's fellow egos (as well as a love for them) in which one seeks to identify one's ends with the ends of those things in order to further oneself. Instead of external objects to be dominated, one sees fellow travelers to empower and to rely on. One seeks to join the surrounding cosmos, instead of separate oneself from it.
Like I said, crude. Hopefully I can get a better handle on these concepts later. Finally, I had an experience in the mountains that made me feel things I hadn't felt before, specifically having to do with death and survival.
Death in the mountains (when the light wanes):
It is not that I was in serious danger of dying - well, it was possible, but the circumstances were not as severe as they could have been - but that the possibility of dying was a psychological potential that carried subjective weight. A friend and I took a hike out in the mountains. We were running out of time, and thinking we could do the hike quickly, went late in the day with little supplies.
We became lost several times; the second time we lost the trail and it was getting dark fast. We were getting very hungry and very weak and had very little water. This set of circumstances produced a bad feeling, a rising panic that was suffocating, but which could be fought back with reassuring thoughts and positive actions. With fatigue and fear, the mind becomes confused. Thoughts race and one starts weighing out the best options given the energy expenditure: retrace one's steps back to the original trail? Follow the mountain down the grooves and look for running water? Continue in one's preferred direction and try to pick up the trail again?
In such a large area, any of these options could lead to disaster. There is no telling which way is the right way when you are disoriented and the light is dying. How far should you search out before you retrace your steps? What expenditure of energy is going to generate the best yield? Where would the rescue parties be more likely to search first?We tried calling 911 as a precaution and none of our phones could get reception. We ended up retracing our steps to the trail where we got lost to look for a better path. Turns out that was the right choice, as it usually is.
What surprised me about the affair was the experience of being lost. Instead of an expanding feeling of dread, of being lost in a wide, cold expanse to have one's ego devoured, there was an overwhelming claustrophobia, of the waning light leading to an enclosure of action, like within a sarcophagus.
Panic morphed into serene acceptance which morphed back into hope and then fear again and back. Death itself as a psychological possibility was not absolute, but an ideal, a potential hanging there which numerous lines of thought angled towards but then shot away from at the last moment. There was a competition of inner opinion which was at first flighty, which raced from possibility to possibility, only to settle into a homeostasis when external indicators overwhelmingly confirmed an opinion. If this inner consensus reaches agreement on death, the system shuts down and prepares itself; an inner tranquility passes over as one contemplates one's life and loved ones. Otherwise the mind switches from state to state as alliances of connections compete for universal representation within the mind.
Achievable ends generate vitality. As soon as we found our way back to the trail and discovered a way out, there was this surge of energy and the mind cleared, preparing the body for the 2 mile hike back in the dark.
Bare survival brings people together towards a common, clear goal, and though strategies for survival can diverge and lead to rifts between egos, the tasks required for survival are often highly motivating and unifying, while prosperity can have the paradoxical effect of social disintegration, as those competitive survival instincts continue to be discharged without proper outlet. The neoconservatives vaguely grasped this after World War 2 and attempted to administer the unifying effects of bare survival by creating existential threats to rally around: first the communists and then the fundamentalist Muslims. This can't be done in a sustainable manner artificially however; vitality can only come from the bottom up through authentic communion with one's reality and one's self.
I'm not one to fetishize primitive modes of survival however. Prosperity is one of the fruits of progress and should always be pursued. There is no reason to artificially induce the survival instinct in a social body; nature will always provide us with the impetus to evolve or die. No reason to increase the difficulty of living internally. Anyways, more vague ideas to digest and possibly expand upon later. Oh and happy holidays.
