INTRODUCTION TO MY BOOK: “Message in a Bottle“
If You Are Reading This, then you, and hopefully others, have survived. It was quite the storm! But I knew it was coming. I had endured a rather personal version of this storm. Some called my version a “spiritual emergency” at the time (1980’s-90’s). This label was in keeping with a minority view in the mental health community that some individuals, although they could sound crazy at times from the outside, were more like the canaries in the mine. They had been the early harbingers of the global catastrophe to come—yes, the catastrophe that swallowed up the generation before you, i.e., my generation, and all that we had built.
How did we let things get to that tipping point, you may ask? I fully expect you are very angry at the way we left things for you and your generation but maybe your desire to understand runs deeper than anger and so I want to try to answer this question, not knowing if you care about it or not. Maybe your concerns are far removed from all this. Perhaps your interest could be historical. But learning from the past seems not to be a strong point for our species, at least up until now.
So, as with any account of the past, a starting point is needed. There have been many “canaries in the mine” throughout the centuries. By the way, do you know that expression? It comes from a time when men went down deep into the earth to mine for coal, by hand really. We needed it for heating and for driving huge electric generators. There were deadly gases down there in cramped spaces, without much ventilation. The deadliest gas was carbon monoxide, an odourless killer. So they took a little bird called a canary down with them and kept an eye on him. He would be the first to succumb to the gas and that would alert the miners to get out as quickly as possible. The canary was a harbinger of the danger to come! Human canaries, warning us of the storm to come, were our artists, sculptors, poets, writers, dancers, story tellers, musicians—all those individuals who privileged the imagination.
Look, to be honest, I don’t even know if that word “imagination” is available to you now. Let’s see if I can say something about it here. Hopefully you have seen some evidence amongst the wreckage of our civilisation, of activities we engaged in that were not for the sake of mere survival. We called these cultural activities. And all cultural activities were expressions of the imagination. You can best get a sense of the imagination if you go somewhere quiet and somewhat dark. Wait there in that darkness and see if something stirs. It may very well disappear if you turn on a light, but if you wait a bit longer it may appear to you more clearly, may even speak to you in a kind of “unspoken” way, if you know what I mean. Sometimes if you wake up, you may have memory of such a “speaking” or “seeing”. It’s the same thing—the imagination is starting to come alive for you. I hope you will cultivate this capacity if you haven’t discovered its supreme value yet. Our civilisation succeeded in destroying our connection to the imagination and this murder, to use another phrase, is the cause of bringing our way of life down, along with everything else. But I am jumping ahead…
So, our human canaries produced artistic or cultural forms that presented what the imagination was up to, behind the scenes, as it were. However, because of the murder that I spoke of, we could no longer read the messages that our canaries were desperately warning us about. Instead, we paid a lot of money to hang the artwork on a wall somewhere, or we seduced particular canary artists into the lure of fame and money, entirely forgetting what they were shouting at us through their art. Some canaries, like myself, avoided these traps of fame, money or power, and were consigned to oblivion by our culture. We were forced to the edges of our society and mostly ignored. I’m not complaining mind you, because this imposed isolation, no, solitude, left me and many others to our own paths, which privileged the imagination—that human capacity our culture had killed off. Sometimes, tragically, the artist was also literally killed off when he or she was thought to challenge the unholy trinity of fame, money, and power.
For all those canaries the imagination was still alive and pressing its claim on the artist. Connection with the imagination brought with it a felt mandate to express its reality! The task of the canary was simply to “bring forth” the activity of the imagination, or at least some aspect of that activity they were exposed to. It’s a formidable mandate and, coupled with a hardened resistance in the greater community to its beauty, supreme value, truth, and numinosity, the canary was often crushed by the conflict. I almost was, but that’s another story, too much to tell here, in my little message to you.
We canaries were all too often forced to find some narrow bridge to the greater community across which we could transport our findings, our discoveries of what the imagination wished to tell us all. The messages were, for some reason, getting more and more urgently felt by our artists during the 19th and 20th centuries onto the 21st century. Out of that felt sense of urgency the canaries began to act more and more extreme, even bizarrely so, producing weirder and weirder cultural forms. You may see some these forms among the detritus that we left you. Still, we were ignored, as an accelerating rush to self-destruction was initiated. But the imagination’s mandate to express this urgency was unrelenting and we had to turn to any available “bridge” to the larger community, desperately trying to “get through” the urgency of the matter. We knew it had to do with “end times” or the “end of the world”, however we each may have interpreted that, and indeed, you and your generation now know exactly the final meaning of that phrase: “end of the world”.
As one of those canaries, I turned to a most unlikely bridge to the larger community, in order to convey the messages I had received from the imagination. It was called “Face Book”. I don’t know if it still exists or whether it was wiped out, along with our technological civilisation. But I can tell you a little about it here so that you know the bottle that held all the messages I and others wrote to a largely unhearing community, and from there to you and your generation.
We communicated with one another mainly through computers and the digital programs (software platforms) created for them as kind of computer language. Face Book was such a social platform where millions of people connected electronically with one another and shared their usually banal thoughts for the day. One very popular activity was to repeat what had been said somewhere else. This practice was called “sharing” and it became impossible to tell where the thoughts came from and equally impossible to establish the truth or falsity of the message. Well, we canaries cast our bottles holding the messages from the “beyond” into this maelstrom of meaningless verbiage and hoped for the best. Not unexpectedly, our messages were heard and understood by other canaries. We could thus say to one another, “yes it seems to be getting worse doesn’t it?” Meanwhile the greater community went on, oblivious to our calls, preferring to share video clips of cats and dogs annoying one another or some such. Face Book was a great way to actually get a strong picture of banality on the surface of life covering up a mood of horror below. This increasingly dark mood was never acknowledged except by, as I said, the canaries, as you will see in the messages I received and recorded for you.
Well, it’s too late now, of course. I don’t want to apologise to you and your generation, those who have to deal with all the unintended consequences. The canaries amongst us actually did their job: to receive and express, as best they can the urgent news from “beyond”, the mysterious source of everything that “speaks” to us all via the imagination. Those who destroyed this vehicle of communication DO have much to answer for.
Let me tell you in more detail about the means of destruction. It’s very simple. All you have to do is erase the language of the imagination from public discourse. The collapse of the world follows. Those among you who aspire to be historians may note that this “method” has been practised for a long time when one group wants to dominate and destroy another. It’s done by forcing the oppressed group to assimilate to the oppressor by “educating them”—learning the language of the conquerer and forbidding them to speak their own language. It’s a sure-fire method for wiping out an entire culture. Now we have done it globally by excising any language that points to the world of the imagination. Luckily, before the final dénouement, I was able to retrieve all my messages from Face Book, gather them together into this letter to you. At least you will get one account of how things managed to go so wrong, according one canary anyway. You probably have access to at least some others as well. I urge you to sift through the wreckage and look for books, art, sculptures, things that could only be made by human beings. There you will find what you need to get a fuller account of how we managed to get to the point of destroying our world in the face of the most dire warnings, such as the very air we breathe, the water we drink, the cry of animals filling the air on a daily basis. It goes on…
I will share with you, here in this “message in a bottle”, my posts (regular entries in this “electronic diary”) in Face Book in chronological order, so that you can see how the crisis deepens and worsens over a short period of years. Open a page at random if you like and read it as a short message from the past—like a meditation! You probably will notice, over time, a darkening of the mood as we approach our end. Also, you will notice two threads weaving throughout my account. One is an inner perspective, what we used to call a soul perspective, informed by the imagination, where I share my dreams or other inner experiences that are also recorded in my books and essays (if any survived). The other is an outer or historical thread, public commentary if you like. The two threads weave together more closely as the catastrophe deepens. It’s the best I can do, at least for now, as I see the storm clouds darkening to pitch black and the wind reaching a crescendo.
Yours in kinship, and in sorrow,
John (Canary) Woodcock.
