We Know This
“The human-animal relationship is deeply embedded in both our histories and our psyches and is lost at our peril.”
About a quarter of all adults in the U.S. suffer from some form of depression or anxiety: 40 million people, 1 in 4 adults - and that's just an average established before the pandemic, before the reality of climate collapse had begun to set in and before this most recent war. The real number is higher if we count all the children whose minds are now slipping.
But here's an odd turn of phrase - the Johns Hopkins website says it this way: Mental health disorders account for several of the top causes of disability in established market economies, such as the U.S., worldwide, and include: major depression (also called clinical depression), manic depression (also called bipolar disorder), schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. All this, plus PTSD and other names we use to say we're freaking out.
Let's connect the dots: mental illness occurs in 'established market economies' because of market economies: it's the madness of knowing that everything has a price, everything is for sale, regardless of the consequences.
So little of our undoing is personal: it seeps from the great cauldron of distress that we share, mostly the torment of the wronged and the dead, and the stories of tormented people doing tormented things. I think of my parents' friend, Edith, who lived up the street. One night, when I was a kid, she and her husband came over for dinner. My mother said, Edith, How are you? Edith sighed and replied, The world is too much with me. It's a quote from a Wordsworth poem that begins with these lines:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers...
The fancy word for our current state is dysthymia, from the ancient Greek dus, meaning 'bad' and thumos, meaning 'spirit' or 'soul'. That's exactly it, isn't it? Our souls have been spoiled by commerce.
And what about the continuous distress of animals, birds, insects and fish? The distress of trees, of water and soil? What are the names for the afflictions of the ones that were driven extinct? What words can describe what happens to the minds of the animals in laboratories tortured in the name of medicine; and the ones in factories of feeding and killing in order to wring eggs and flesh from chicken tenements, pig slums, cattle in fetid feedlots and salmon in floating prisons - their flesh encoded with memories of rivers that no longer exist? Surely the world tires of our noise and our cruel expediencies. Surely there are Earth-selves who think, The humans are too much with us. Torture cannot cure. Thing-lust cannot nourish.
Maybe epidemics are a chorus of distress - a microbial cri de coeur singing their woes through our bodies until we finally hear them. Maybe Corona is a collaborative effort - a vehement squawk in the language of virus from animals in cages stacked high in the wet markets of Wuhan, repeating Ebola's message from the undercooked fruit bats of Guinea, and all the living beings that must somehow communicate what clear-cut forests alone apparently could not. The human epidemic of violence bears the same message.
I still hear Edith's words, though she's long dead. Oh, Edith, I tell her, I feel it too. The world is, indeed, too much with us. And we are too much with the world, or, now that I think of it, not nearly enough. We have abandoned Earth, and so have abandoned ourselves. We are lonely unto death. Grief stands close and leans on our chests, waiting to hear us call its name.
We cannot fight extinction with things. Reconnection is the true work of repair.
