Into The Wild.
It’s interesting to pursue the pure moment that you can actually feel alive. Not just an intellectual idea of being mortal, being a creature that is part of the earth, and has grown from & is nourished by the earth; without it we are nothing. Our higher minded pursuits whittle to the function of the lungs, and the cravings of the stomach. It is only with that basis that all of history and culture can have meaning. So growing up in a civilized world that is so far distant to our beastly roots, you can get lost. That is getting lost to what our evolution has made of us, because getting back to nature is harking back to an inner instinct that is inherent in us all, yet also needed in a world where vegetables are found in one building that is a supermarket. Most of us hide the beastly instinct, but for some young men it is just too powerful to ignore, and the lights of civilization just don’t provide the instinctual fulfilment of survival. For some the need to survive is too powerful to drown out television & telephones. I am not one of these people that seek power & refuge from survival in the wild, pitting oneself against the brutality of a nature that cares not if you live. So as we all sit around with our liqueurs and coffees pontificating over the nature of man, the only way to truly feel in the absolute moment—to actually experience a connection with what is real—is with survival.
Chris McCandles or his monikan Alexander Supertramp, is one of those young men who I speak of. He has stepped forward and embraced what I could only imagine doing for no more than two weeks with a safety-net and all. I could not trust my life to my own hands. I could not drift around the country dependant on my own wits as to my survival. I dream of an escape, as do most of us from time to time, but the comfort and security of a sometimes numbing society overwhelms the ancient and instinctual urge to return to the Earth that my body has risen from. So I admire those who make the leap and actually live-out what most young men only fantasize over when things feel overwhelming. For the majority of us our societal censorship seems to kick in and say ‘no that is not a good idea’.
I write about this now because of the movie ‘Into the Wild’. I have read the book and have watched the movie, and I just find the whole idea of seeking that basic humanity—in a way similar to a tribe-like existence—but surely I also realize how harsh and hardening such a way of life is. So I choose not to make the jump into nature, but I am fascinated with those very few men who do...
‘Today I shot and killed a moose... one of the greatest tragedies of my life.’ This scene where he fails to process the meat of his kill is one of the most powerful moments that I have witnessed in cinema. As a heightened form of reality, cinema can induce those moments in life that come around only a few times in one’s lifetime. I remember such an occasion—one of those times where you actually sit still for a moment and take stock of your life—the moment that comes to mind is when I was about sixteen and was waiting at a bus stop outside East Maitland Video Ezy. I have no idea why I was there, because I’ve never caught a bus in Maitland; but anyway there was an old guy who told me some pretty gruesome tales about World War Two. These tales included stuff like hiding in a fox-hole while his friend was being blown away. At the time I sensed that it was Real, but like any heroic or cowardly tale, if it’s not experienced by yourself, no matter how profound & life-changing the experience, it will always seem distant, as though viewed in a cinema. Now these experiences/tales were actually lived by an old guy, yet even to me a second person observer they are a distant memory. So anyway what I remember most from this odd & Forrest Gump film-type moment of my life is how when the old guy had told me some of his crazy fox-hole WW2 tales he said ‘well I’ve pissed on for long enough, I’ll c you later.’
The guy is probably dead now, and even on the brink of death, he trivialized his crazy WW2 life/death encounters to entertain a punk kid like me at a bus stop. Even though he fought to keep my freedom alive, so I don’t have to answer to Hitler or any other crazy cult. But we all take that for granted and perhaps he told me the tales as a way of his own acceptance of a distant past.
Anyway we seem to just have ‘ a few moments of awareness at some sort of true reality, and then the rest of the time it’s as though life takes over the basic needs of reality, as though our menial tasks of staying alive and which don’t inspire take up more unconsciousness time than those few moments of lucidity into our truly saddening lives of ignorance. Perhaps saddening is harsh, because trivial matters are what keep us alive, and anything else is a luxury. So thoughts concurrent with society that keep us feeling safe might be what life is about, and perhaps scratching beyond that veneer might only lead to trouble and deep ponderance about the general human condition. A condition which might be better lived and not thought about. We can also look at philistines who are in essence those who live for the trivialities of NOW, they lack any apparent depth, but seem completely happy to be engaged with the novelty of sports scores, the demagoguery of the news, and the subsequent documentaries that fill the gaps of the former media. For why not surely if you are so keen to establish your intellect on the Discovery channel, why not you first read a true scientific journal and see the perpetuation of advertising-controlled networks, before staking your main source of information against someone who reads books and scientific journals. Television albeit a brilliant media, is one for the masses, and the masses are no better than the television that entertains them. So to take as your main source of intellect the television and use it as a sort of intellectual tool, is the work of a philistine, and those who really appreciate and understand literature will nod in concurrence, while they themselves find tv-shows that are a novelty and entertaining to their minds. For the philistine, having to use those particular shows as a way to define their own personality—as a sort of pigeon-hole to the world: as in saying ‘ I only watch these particular channels’ is a little sad, but to them it is a badge of honour, but to others it is a way that they have limited themselves to everything that the world has to offer.
But in getting back to the idea of nature as the way of life we talk about that one way to experience a moment, and I will look at Chris Mc Candles who experienced a moment of life; of being a creature that is capable of much thought yet also a biological being that needs sustenance. Perhaps a merger of the two, first and foremost requires nutrients, yet also a minimal amount of nutrients gained—it is then that there is the possibility of deep thought about the pure nature of being. So in modern society where sustenance is readily available (at least in the west) then where is the deep thought? Where are the Prime Ministers’ of the world and the Presidents’ of the world asking the BIG questions. Where are the world leaders’ concerned with the former, and where is the movement to explore why we are here? For surely you would expect a world leader who has sufficient sustenance and a large voice, why then, why, do they only care about having everyone fed and growing in riches.... so at least the masses are fed, then why aren’t they up there on the world stage seeking meaning for their masses? It’s—to be presumptuous—because all your culture & what-not you think is real, such as music, movies etc... All of that is nothing but crap when it comes to staying alive and being a base (base as in the dirty subconscious that Freud coined) creative entity. Now as I assume, most of you reading up until now are quite apart from those who have no luxury for free-thought other than gaining sustenance—so where is your desire for what is real? And has society /civilization dampened what is real. Hence are those who are the ones who are rich in life. As Alex Supertramp says ‘Tramping is no fun with all the money you paid me.’
Anyway back to the moose, because I can’t possibly capture a moment that is felt so vividly and needs expressing through words that only scrape the surface of what is felt. So with the moose as a reader of the book and a viewer of the movie, I can get no closer to his/McCandles moment in life as YOU who reads this now can get close to the moment with the old man outside my local video shop. But I can watch it, that is the story that he told me, and this is the interesting part. I remember the old man outside the video-store just as much as if someone had told me the story... so if it didn’t happen to me, I could easily have heard the story and it would feel REAL, just as if I had experienced it myself. So if Chris McCandles was to watch the movie about his own life, he would see it as something outside himself. He would see it as something that is foreign to himself, yet because of his faulty/human memory what he was watching (that actually happened to himself) would seem vaguely familiar. So it seems that no matter how far society evolves, the simple issues of food/water/sanitation/ security issues... with only a handful of citizens such as Alexander Super tramp putting their hand up and saying ‘hey wait a minute, I want to see what is behind the veneer of this so-called society, and maybe there is more than just (cliché as it is) pleasing the Jones’—wearing the right clothes, having the right job and having a sufficient amount of intelligence. So Alex Super tramp is one of those few citizens who actually stands up and says ‘wait a minute, if I go against the flow what can I actually experience in this country (because you would expect that he couldn’t have the same experience in North Korea as the USA.) So Chris McCandles entered the wilderness in the wilderness in the hope of shunning any societal influence and experiencing the sheer base instinct of what it is to be a man. What McCandles found out in nature is one of those true moments of realization—the realization being that merely the task of surviving is brutal, as in the moose he kills, and that realization extends to the idea that the ‘higher culture such as books/literature/art are only existent because of such harsh reality that needs representing through those media in order to make sense to those seek a deeper meaning.
Anyway Chris McCandles says of nature when he is struggling ‘there was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man, it was a place of heathenism and superstitious rights, to be inhabited by men, mirror of kin to the rocks and to the wild animals in me’’
SO such a harsh reality I respect but cannot viscerally grasp what it is to be REAL, to skim the tops of what it is to be truly free, and dependant on a nature that expects you to die.
