Skip to main content

Lemming anxiety

I remember a cartoon of a small furry animal sitting on a psychtherapist's couch, looking anxious, and saying to the therapist seated behind him, 'Depressed, depressed, of course, I am depressed, I am a lemming'!
I was sitting watching the people throng the streets need Grand Central Station, New York, enjoying the first real sun of Spring and the opportunity of sitting out on the pavement (as I was) talking, eating and drinking. It was a vibrant city scene.

But I had a jaundiced day, was feeling confused and uncertain, and so had come out to relax and brought my current book for company, that and the opportunities to people watch, over a glass of wine.

Mistake! The book, Gavin Francis' 'True North', which is excellent, was 'now' in Greenland and he had reached a point where he touched on 'the canary in the cage' - Greenland's retreating glaciers, sliding ever more energetically into the sea, the Artic's signaling of climate change; and, his own complicities in this very journey reliant on plane (not for him, probably wisely, St Brendan's calf-skin boat, one of the explorer's whose lives he vividly recreates).

Suddenly this stark reminder, and my own mood, reminded me of the cartoon and now we were all lemmings slowly massing to our own collapse!

If there was a moment in the day that captured it, it was a casual remark from my companion that yesterday the building we were in had been pouring out heat, today they had switched up the volume on the air-conditioning - anything but design a world that sustainably responds to its environment, anything but perhaps be sensitive to our environment.

And the canary keeps warbling and we march on mostly obliviously and even  when you pay attention, as I do, you find surrendering your hypocrises remarkably difficult - the lemming is fated (according more to legend than biology, I think), we are not but we do behave as if we are! Beyond collapse making it necessary, I do not know how to shift my own pattern let alone anyone else's!!!

No wonder I am depressed, I am a lemming!


On a brighter note, there are always smart lemmings!

Comments

  1. Perhaps the saddest feature of the new 'climate' of environmental concern, is the extent to which people still pretend to know answers...

    I know of a local environmental agency, who two years ago moved into a splendid new building, converted for 'maximum environmental sustainability and responsiveness' (as I think the architects called it).

    They have discovered that it is achingly cold in the winter (for which they have bought a fine set of electric heaters) and punishingly hot in the summer (hence, the response of a bevy of huge electric fans). It is, if anything, rather worse than the concrete 1960s edifice they inhabited previously.

    I would prefer to believe the architects were monumentally incompetent rather than dishonest. But I guess the world's lemming tendency is only enhanced by 'sustainability experts' who don't really know their trade.....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev