Collective Trauma: The Fallout 9

Our human history has not been pretty. We began, allegedly as treebound simians in Africa and some four or five million years ago it is said that our earliest hominid ancestors, who were rather more like chimps than humans, began to descend down from the trees to explore the savannah. In order to stay vigilant for the many roaming predators, they adopted an upright, bipedal stance so they could see over the tall grass. Well, though I am not one to dismiss Darwin outright, to me this account seems no more or less fanciful than the tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, as told in Genesis. But here I am not about to quibble about biblical tales and scientific theories, none of which, to me anyway, really have much to do with fact and more to do with ideas and theories. The thing is, despite all the circumstantial evidence, we don't really know for sure. And do you know why, Gentle Reader? That's right. It is because we weren't there. And no one else was there either to take selfies during the dawn of our humankind. What is clear is that along with ants, cockroaches, rats and bedbugs, we are one of the most successful species to roam this planet, and now we have approaching eight billions of our kind infesting our Mother Earth. So, we came down from the trees, and wandered around avoiding the jaws of lions and sabre tooth cats and eventually became meat-eaters and got in the habit of killing each other. We became more human, with bigger brains, less body hair, and faces that looked a little more, shall we say, modern? We began to leave the African continent, crossing the Middle East into Asia, then over to Europe, to Australia, eventually the Americas and the Pacific islands. We made tools, and to keep us warm in the colder climates, we wore clothing. We discovered how to use fire, and meat became delicious and digestible, making it much easier for an animal not biologically carnivorous to turn almost completely carnivorous. We continued to kill each other. And something else happened. We were making art: be they cave or rock and cliff paintings or jewelry, we were making art from the very beginning of our most modern human incarnation. That's right. We are an artistic species, and this in particular sets us apart from other animals. Despite our brutality. Despite our penchant for killing our own kind. It has been our way of telling our story, but it has also been our way to touch a certain essence of our humanity that transcends simple survival. Art, with spirituality and religion, betrays us as creatures of the Divine. This makes particularly poignant and troubling our huge history of evil and slaughter. Yet in our art and our art-making, the same themes are visited throughout the millennia, throughout the epochs: a reverence of nature, of a sense of the divine, an exploration of the human soul and spirit, a constant, if always changing and evolving sense of esthetic, of a perception however fleeting of a cosmic and divine order to the universe, our earth and our species. And this we express, generation after generation, with paint, pigment, rock, metal, hides and bones and tusks and feathers, textiles...the simplest elements transformed by the human hand and imagination into something beautiful and redolent of the wholeness and completeness that we have somehow lost and long to return to. There is a grace, a beauty and a spiritual essence to us as humans that not even we have been able to destroy, Gentle Reader. It is time to revisit this essence and to learn how to live there, if we wish to become truly whole. That's all for now. Thank you for reading. No comments, please.