What is the Opposite of Deranged?
Like the animals who have fallen victim to human incursion, we have become deranged; meaning, our range has become diminished, despoiled, eroded, and sterile. We no longer fully inhabit ourselves, and so are deprived of the terrain of our own animal knowing. My friend, Nora Jamieson, wrote a holy book called Deranged, whose stories of grief and spirit are inextricable - as we used to be - from the terrain in which they unfold. How, then, to make sense of the landscapes of death and diminishment we have created?
Here is a sly question that I love: Amitav Ghosh, in his book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, asks, "if the contemporary trends in architecture, even in this period of accelerating carbon emissions, favor shiny glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask, What are the patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures?"
Since form follows function follows form, the questions we ask and avoid, and the words we use to shape those questions, matter a great deal. Here in the west, we have woven ourselves into a web of commodification that has become our suicide. We have exported that commodification, disguised as freedom, and it has made us into murderers.
If our desire is to shore up the myth that our current way of life is necessary and therefore justifiable, then we deliver ourselves to Trump's surreal logic that 'the cure' of economic transformation is 'worse than the disease' of extinction. And yet, as the pandemic wears on, we are forced by our captivity to witness the living koan of resurgence in response to ruin.
A few days ago, my daughter sent a photo of her sunflower starts. One sprout was looking spindly, so its neighbor curled itself around the weak one to hold it up. I said, "The Natural World is coming forward to teach us!" She said, "Or maybe it's been teaching us all along but we're just getting quiet enough to hear it." One of the fiercest blessings of this pandemic is the extended opportunity to listen.
Nomadic peoples of the desert never lost their way in the vast, horizonless expanse of sand; they learned to read the patterns of wind on the dunes. They taught their children how to find oases of life-giving water. Similarly, ancient mariners found subaquatic pathways between islands and continents. Some relied on women who would lay on their bellies in the bottom of a canoe in order to feel the currents and the tides. They had to quiet their fears in order to sense and to see.
I have been asking myself, What is the opposite of derangement? Last night I realized that even the act of framing the question as a contest between opposites is to succumb to the false narrative that this or any dilemma is a binary choice. Like the virus itself, an either-or mindset is suffocating. A former therapist used to say, "Write your question on a 3 x 5 card and slip it under the door of your subconscious." Today, I wonder, What heals derangement? Framed in that way, the question feels more spacious, making room for answers to come.
Interestingly, the word itself was coined in France in the 1790's, during the time of the French Revolution, which was triggered, in part, by the enormous financial crisis created by the 1776 American War of Independence. Its meaning, literally, is to pull asunder the prevailing rank. The Bastille was stormed; feudalism was abolished; the Bourbon monarchy was overthrown. Ironically, in this sense, the original derangement has a quality of sanity to it. But, over time, the word came to mean a frenzied disorientation, demented, bewildered, and of unsound mind. (Little need to speculate how that definition usurped the original one.) Either way, the insanity that characterized the process of change is distinct (though not disconnected) from the necessity of the change itself.
We are confronted by endless questions of survival and fear, and it's so easy to become stuck there. In this fraught journey of reclaiming the lost range of our wholeness, we must navigate from frenzied bewilderment to a state of calm and harmonized lucidity. The sunflowers, the desert and the sea will teach us.
