WHEN DID IT START? A SHORT GENEALOGY OF FEAR

At what point did we become disbelievers and decided to disparage the rest of creation? When did we abandon  respect, love and compassion to fall  into the hands of greed, when did we start to deny  land, sea, clouds and stars their existence in order to exploit  natural resources for an economic balance? When did we start killing more animals  than we could eat, to steal territories that weren’t ours and to believe us to be more important than the land that sustains us? When did we become an embarrassment to the world? When did we first have the arrogance to say this land is mine?

Yeah, right. Man is a being endowed with spiritual capacities, capable of performing mystical feats, but look at the landscape: Man is also an unfortunate accident. If man wasn’t here,  our planet would a be garden in perfect balance or at worst it might be left to natural forces.People are born,  grow, live, die. But if we interact within our sick society without knowing anything about the past or about other cultures, we cannot be aware of the deep levels of rotting that we have reached as human beings. We think what we know is all  there is and the here and now all there ever was. If instead we take a look at early societies such as those of the Palaeolithic, with habits that span to our present day, this mirror will show us what we have become.

 

Reading The voices of the desert is what  prompted me to write this post, but I already knew these facts  ever since I read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee on the destruction of the culture of American Indians. I was also inspired by the Seattle Indian’s letter to the President of the United States, that famous text that proclaims that the land does not belong to men, but men belong to the land. The beautiful film Apocalypto  has only confirmed what I already thought.
Do you understand the meaning of the word greed? If we filter the details and go back to the remote causes, there is no other law than greed. Examine human behaviour: It is about greed. This feeling of greed has been instilled onto us since the womb where we still were trusting to see the light in a fair and beautiful world.
Rousseau says that private ownership of land started when someone placed four markers on a piece of land, proclaimed that space belonged to him and  others were naive enough to believe and respect it. It is a similar phenomenon to selling plots on the Moon: a predatory mindset led by the beast of greed,  which nobody even think of trying to stop because it is the motor of the system and it keeps it running.
I am not idealising the Paleolithic man, but he had none or our miseries. He lived a different life with different values. He inhabited what anthropologists call the ecotone, the edge of the forest, and did not permit clans to grow beyond  the necessary balance of life that was the ration between mouths to feed and  pieces to be hunt. I think they were superior to us in a spiritual aspect because they were submissive to nature and lived in harmony with it and their peers, and it is absolutely true that they were superior to us physically as well, since Palaeolithic skeletons show their considerable size and strong bones. And one day, emotions of degradation, loss of wisdom and physical degeneration began to take place amongst men. Men evolved to become smaller (both spiritually and physically ) and petty, and they turned into the enemies of the world.
It all started to happen in the town of Jericho, in the eighth millennium BC., in the  Natufian culture, in the Epipaleolithic . There we find the first evidence of cultivated wheat and domesticated animals and earlier lifestyles were  over. For the first time  man could rear animals and grow crops and he was able to say this is mine.  But then a misleading surplus and abundance happened and something called a sense of production too. This led  early societies to have a government and even priests. That is,  man was so foolish as to manufacture himself his own tyrants.

This way the Neolithic period was born, where innocence was swept away and  fear was sown into the heart of man. Yeah, I mean fear. Along with arrogance, ambition and conquest, fear was also born. Look at the village of Chatal Huyuk, in the eighth millennium in Anatolia: A Neolithic city with terrace houses solidly attached to each other  in order to have no streets where  the enemy could ride.

This way was born the Neolithic to sweep the world innocence and sow fear into the heart of man. Yeah, I mean fear. Along with arrogance, ambition and conquest also fear was born. Look at the village of Chatal Huyuk, in that same eighth millennium in Anatolia: A Neolithic city with houses attached to each other only in order to have no streets by which the enemy can pass.This way was born the Neolithic to sweep the world innocence and sow fear into the heart of man. Yeah, I mean fear. Along with arrogance, ambition and conquest also fear was born. Look at the village of Chatal Huyuk, in that same eighth millennium in Anatolia: A Neolithic city with houses attached to each other only in order to have no streets by which the enemy can pass.

Look at the walled towns of Jericho in Palestine, or Sesklo and Dimini in Greece. Look at the great fortified city of Los Millares in Almeria, in the first Bronze Age. All enclaves of the culture called the Iberian First Bronze Age (half of the third millennium BC) are fortified villages situated on top of hills. There was fear.

medidas: 2558 x 3821tamaño: 28 MB formato: TIFF

Like black birds, fanatical doctrines and theories came to men  sanctifying the concept of  conquest because “I’m better than you and my god is real while yours is a false idol”. When the Pilgrims of  the Mayflower landed in North America, they were  carrying rifles, shovels, seeds and Bibles. It was inevitable that they would regard theirselves as The Chosen to whom a male white-bearded god had given paradise. This paradise, though, happened to be the land of the blessed nomadic aborigines who still lived by hunting and gathering, who loved and respected the world, animals, plants and who trusted  other men. They even received the cruel conquerors with great smiles, but they  were ready to humiliate them and rob them of their dignity and their freedom. These conquerors who, when they first brought the railway about, they entertained themselves by shooting bisons  just for the fun of killing and they would let them rot in the sun.
Just as in the Old Testament  the God of the Jews ordered them to enter Jericho and leave nothing alive, neither women nor children, so did those beasts who prayed every night to their white god and above all eager to pronounce the phrase this land is mine.
I write this from a planet revolving and rotating  with muck-oozing rivers, oceans turned into  sewers, air gravid with heavy metals, mountains without a single tree, fountains dried out a long time ago, beaches turned black due to hydrocarbons and an  intoxicated nature that turns you off . Everything began to rot in Jericho in 8000 BC, at the time when someone came up with an idea that seemed good, like cultivating crops instead of gathering and rearing cattle instead of hunting. This good idea was misused by those with a less good heart, those associated with  greed, property, domination and conquest, which have led us here where we are now and they have turned us into a shipwrecked in an impure world.
The tragic death of the hunter and the birth of the farmer led to astonishing arrogant ideologies that would be used as a tool to devastate not only land, sea and air, but also the human soul, which no longer knows what it is , or where it comes from or who it belongs to, and which  is lost in whirlwinds  of false ideologies and above all remains plagued by suspicion.
Once we made our own tyrants, the fear was born within us.  Behind our security doors, security locks and two-metre-thick walls, we have become used to living with fear to the extend we believe it is a natural thing.
Don’t you know? They want us to be afraid. They are the same tyrants that we manufactured all those years ago in Jericho so that we would be dominated and have their discipline imposed on us  and be told what to think. In creating them, we gave them a licence to give orders, establish prisons, fix boundaries, create ideologies , invent gods, inflict punishment and make us slaves.
They are still working to sow the seed of  fear that keeps us apart.
My friends,  no revolution can succeed unless it starts with a great inward change. This change requires that  we leave our ten-thousand-year-old fear, open the locks and embrace each other before walking together to crush the tyrants.

José Ortega

Writer & lawyer & anthropologist

MY TEARS

You said:
– What is the sign of the way, O dervish?
– Listen to what I say
and when you hear, Meditate!
This is the sign to you:
the that although advances,
You’ll increase your suffering.

In a May 1990 edition of the newspaper La Verdad de Murcia you can find can find the following:
“The Hero’s Journey par excellence is the journey to the kingdom of hell”
Jose Ortega.

I think it’s something I had said during the presentation of my first novel. Gilgamesh and death.
Recently, during my participation in a Sufi dihkr, Yusuf, my friend and connoisseur of oriental literature (the term refers to the cuneiform texts of Mesopotamia) and the philosophy of all ages, said in reference to me, that a certain group of neighbors oppressed by a multinational was fortunate to have on its side the “warrior Lugalbanda” (a god mixed with men and king of the city of Uruk).
It s really nice that somebody say about you such a thing, and in fact my corporate logo is a war helmet with a slogan that says “to live is to fight”, but few truly know the sacrifice that the struggle for justice and dignity (pardon the bombast ) holds.
When I was in the Naval Military School, Iived in a world of discipline and a in a sense of physical adventure, and I liked its intensity. But when my friend Paco Casado died and was eaten by fishes while living one of those adventures, I saw the other side of risk, which is nothing more than the simple and powerful death. It is death that gives real value and authenticity to the adventure.
Something similar happens in my paper war, that by the by and in theory is a war without death in sight but where tears are secured. No the fake tears that can be seen in a film because they are written in the script, but of despair, even when my job is to give hope to others.
The terms injustice, humiliation and despair are no more that sounds not remotely able to describe what I am forced to live each day. You have no idea what lies out there, the perfect evil that drives above and the levels of corruption, baseness and arbitrariness that can reach a machinery that have the misfortune to know well. Perhaps these phrases sound too abstract and vague: It is intentional and I should not be more explicit if my desire is to continue earning the bread with an honest job, because I have already suffered several disciplinary files from the lawyers profesional organization (Colegio de Abogados) , one of them for alleged, non-existent and risible injury to the dignity of the profession (which encompasses behaviors such as substance abuse or chronic alcoholism) that demonstrate the dangers of staying free and independent. As a hint, I will repeat here my old phrase that believing in the existence of justice in Spain is like believing in the existence of Santa Claus. Everything is rotten, everything is a lie and false. However, this is not a speech against the system, but a simple description, rather sentimental, of how I feel.
As I stated in my lecture THERO’S JOURNEY AND PRIMITIVE SPIRITUALITY, the plan that life has in store for each of us, and our individual mission, is to become heroes. It sounds epic, it but the only real function of de here help the weak. To achieve this state you must pass through the dark forest of doubt and despair, but what I live every day goes beyond a forest, it features the true hell and there is no corridor leading kindly to the exit.

When we Minister is an immoral, the Director General an outlaw, the senior official a brigand and the provincial chief a pickpocket, and when you see so clearly s their crimes, you’ll tell the Prosecutor or the judge. And it is then, upon receiving the first sentence, when you realize the kind of world in which you are actually living. And when the courts and prosecutors continue spewing their decisions as the green mush of the little girl in THE EXORCIST, then simply you get the idea that there are no heroes, no Lugalbandas, nor place for romantic epic or stories of knights, because machinery grinds you whatever you say or do.

 

Amado Nervo, Mexican poet, wrote with great foresight that is lawful for us to expect everything from life, because life is a river full of possibilities and gives the same to fill a big or small r skin bottle. At the same time it can be said that the criminal machinery of the system is like an untreatable and full of impossibilities mill wheel, and therefore gives the same trample a big hero to a little hero. Those stories of film in which the boy tat seemed defeated rises and finally triumphs, does not correspond to my reality. All I can say in my favor is that I have trodden a hundred times and as many I have risen again, without hope but rage, knowing it was just to return to receive a new caning me to lie on the ground, face bruised and bleeding even in figurative language.
I took me several days of August to write a judicial complain to prevent a neighborhood of humble and good families go to the ground so that speculators secretly allied with the government can build in the spot a luxury development. Last night I finished very early and I slept three hours. I’ve gone over every nuance, every comma, every word, every phrase. I re-read a hundred times the thirty pages to make it perfect. The problem is that, at this same matter, I have already done with my first complain and with the appeal, which were resolved with sentences whose reading causes a mixture of disgust and shame.
The problem is to fight to exhaustion for a just cause, and take care of every hue, cross out and rewrite, just to see how these worthies who wear togas dictate those judgments that would deserve a zero on a first course practice. The problem is to spend the night writing, without even dinner, knowing or reasonably fearing that it will not help because big or little hero does not matter.
The situation is like that of a young poet who comes before his Lord and recites an exquisite, large and full of subtleties poem, and when awaiting approval the responds with a burp and terminating the audience. What turns tragic what is no more that a pure problem of law interpretation, s with the moral turpitude and arrogance of those who decide with a belch.
. Is this what moistens my eyes every time I get a sentence. To live is to fight, yes. The epic is beautiful, true. But these monsters are neither those of Disney, nor folktale nor medieval legends. They have no face or a stray flake on their steel skin where introduce the sword.

Another poet, Baudelaire wrote: “In life you must always be drunk. Of wine, poetry or virtue. At your will, but be drunken“. At this point I have no doubt what is my drunkenness. But the spirit of justice, or rather the craving for it, tastes worse than ash on my palate.

José Ortega

Lawyer & writer