I saw a Facebook meme today where a professor at the University of Calcutta estimated a tree to be worth $193,250. This was broken down into the various values stemming from various uses by various species. This is the calculus of capitalism -- everything can be translated into a monetary value, even a robin building a nest and laying her eggs. Contrarily, I submit that a life is priceless, regardless of what form it takes. One squashes a bug is if it is of no consequence, but it's nevertheless a life like any other. The human brain will not like this formulation and will race to provide a justification as to why the human is worth more than the bug; indeed, why some humans are worth more than others. This is the path to the capitalist calculus. From the perspective of All Creation, there is no difference between the life of a water beetle and that of a human being or of a tree -- all represent a brief span of consciousness that is quickly extinguished in one way or another. From this perspective, Earth can be seen as billions of life forms opening (birth) and closing (death) their eyes over the course, from the human perspective, of eons.
We have lost the sense that what we eat -- animal or plant -- is a life that has been taken (with exceptions that the reader can work out) and is an act of profound significance that needs to be acknowledged as such. Not to do so seems, well, to be living in a circle of hell. Indigenous peoples typically acknowledged the profound act of taking a life for survival, whether it was killing a deer or harvesting the corn. "Other-than-human persons" were equals to be respected and honored. Modernity has jettisoned this as wasteful sentiment, with a correlating decline in awareness.
The fact that lives are a commodity makes this society one bereft of meaningful connection to what I like to call the "Eternal Now." One cannot put values on things in the totality of the Eternal Now, the reality underneath the temporal rounds of life and death. Society concerns itself with the ever-fleeting linear equation of time; indeed, we keep track of it and fill our libraries with this keeping track. The Eternal Now just is. Always and constantly.
Placing the temporal in the foreground while ignoring or denying the Eternal Now is, for me, a completely unacceptable way of traveling through the brief span of time with which we have been gifted. To think the realization of the timelessness of the winds pushing the clouds across the sky through the force of the earth's rotation -- in itself a cosmic story of incredible orders of magnitude -- should be outside one's basic awareness . . . again, it seems a circle of hell. To drive past a rock outcrop or bluff without a sense of wonder about the eons represented by this phenomenon, and that one might go through life without a sense of such wonder . . . also a circle of hell. Awareness of the Eternal Now and finding the wonder in what this society calls "mundane" seems the proper way of being in one's skin for as many seconds per day as possible.
To be fully human is to nurture the inner language of the timeless Eternal Now and bring it into the temporal realm. But, as the comparative mythologist and all 'round wise man Joseph Campbell used to say, "The function of society is to confound the mystic." To be thus confounded is to find oneself in . . . a circle of hell.
Putting a monetary figure on a life is what capitalist economics is. Lives that don't produce a surplus value to be harvested like the Grim Reaper are worthless. Roadkill -- non-surplus-value-producing lives -- are irrelevant and to be ignored (unless, of course, they serve some use-value). Nevertheless, there lies the remains of a life -- the "final track," as tracker Tom Brown, Jr. would say. Another window into the Eternal Now that has closed and will not open again. And the human realm cares not a wit other than to clear the remains out of the way and forget it as soon as possible. Because we have things to do, places to go, people to see, paychecks to garner, profits to take; all the while missing the Eternal Now that gives life its magic.
Life is art -- incorporating the Eternal Now into this fleeting life so that our awareness, our compassion, and our joy might be maximized. This can be found under such headings as "social welfare" or "quality of life," although capitalism isn't, as a rule, interested in these things insofar as they can't be bought. Society is not particularly interested in your life art unless your incorporation is salable and, through "marketing," profitable. To pursue this art for its own sake is, in capitalist society's eyes, a fool's errand.
So -- fool that I am, I shall carry on as best as I can from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute, second-to-second trying to appreciate this fleeting gift of being awake in the world. Not easy given the potentially derailing distractions of society, but possible. Getting knocked off the tracks is normal, as is getting back on. And I may be a fool to find quality of life somewhere besides the size of my portfolio or paycheck, and society may consider my life to be some kind of joke. But I think, in the end, as the song by Blue Oyster Cult, "Flaming Telepaths" says: "the joke's on you." Too bad it's not funny. And, to return to our tree, does the calculus include what it might be worth to climb to the top of said tree, swaying in a gentle breeze in the night, watching the stars glowing in the Eternal Now?
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