Like animals, like trees, as in beauty, human intelligence also has heart at its core, only we, unlike the others, have been forbidden, it seems, to know this but rather are continually urged, if not required, to think greedily and meanly.
At the overlook at Canyon de Chelly, the first time I was there, astounded by the miraculous beauty of Earth, I saw, “This beauty comes from a great heart.” I understood creation and it had taken 50 years to do so.
Science is neutral, and can even explore to the very end, or rather the very beginning of this universe, but it is a narrow vision, it is not kind. This is a deficiency like the one that is intrinsic to power. We are living, increasingly, in the mythos of the Tin Man. The pursuit of AI like the recent creation of a cell from chemistry that eats and divides – is this life? – is the fulfillment of the derangement. But it is a madness, not the essence of life. There are exceptional moments of course, where the violation proves the rule, but at its essence, life is relational, so life is kind, as is beauty, which left to its own devices is ever present and inevitable because it emerges from the great love of the divine.
This is the task of Literature of Restoration: to show the ways back to restoration, to assert the possibilities of restoration, to reveal the heartfelt and communal human and create the cultural affinity with restoration and the lives to be lived that bring us there.
Literature of Restoration began as a complex genre in these broken times intrinsically connected to spirit and earth and consequently determined not to lead, subtly or aggressively, unconsciously or consciously to extinction. Where does this story take us is a question a writer of LoR is always asking. Scrutiny and self-scrutiny on behalf of the future, of a future for all beings, LoR strives to contribute to such a future, unlike, sadly, so much of contemporary literature, which by its forms and obsessions is leading us to destruction. One way it takes us there is through the myriad sci-fi texts which may begin as warnings, like 1984, but fall into rhapsodies of technical accomplishment which may well have, beginning with Karel Capek’s R. U. R., imagined AI into existence. AI, again, it turns out will likely be only for itself and sooner than we know. Before us is the necessity of many antidotes. Literature of Restoration which in its fulfillment, not necessarily it’s content or focus, is kind. Is kind because it honors relations, relationship, interdependence, alliance, because it sees these as at the core of what is real as opposed to violence and conflict. Because LoR sees love, or heart, as a central elemental of life and the natural world. Because it sees heart everywhere, its possibility, its invariable presence because heart is nature, despite ubiquitous, culturally and Imperially created cruelties, ego, torture, the assumption of enemies, war, and the like.
Here is the task: Imagine, which means perceive, the ways we can, we will return to an inherent relationship with the natural world, to interactive and benevolent connections, to restoration of life at the center of all being. Imagine it, determinedly, convincingly and without sentimentality. Imagine it with rigor. Imagine a literature without murder at the core. Find life compelling as compelling as a forest is for trees, as plains are for grasses and bison, as oceans are for whales. They are of each other. And we are of them as well. Literature of Restoration is not dogmatic or orthodox or boring. But we no longer need to say that conflict is at the core of literature, or that violence is inevitable and most exciting.
Imagine then that we can change our minds. Imagine and perceive how we can do it. Imagine the complexity and multiplicities, the various forms and approaches, the myriad scenarios and stories that credibly, rationally, plausibly lead to or exist within or which premise restoration.
As Whitman says,
I am large, I contain multitudes.
Or as Whitman says,
What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
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Repeating here the images I posted in my previous essay before to emphasize the instinct for or intelligence of connection, relationship and love in the natural world.
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