Miniver Cheevy

Imagine the world of human experience as a swamp. The swamp has a varied terrain: sandbars, reedy marshy bits, outcroppings of land, shallow rivers, muddy riverbanks, and so forth. Full of interesting stuff, but not entirely hospitable.

Most people live in castles in the swamp. A castle has a controlled environment, defined by the people who live there. It typically has windows and parapets from which the residents can view the swamp, though a few castles are completely sealed off. People who live in castles may communicate with the residents of other castles by semaphore; when they do, they tend to get into arguments about what the swamp is like. "They keep insisting the swamp is full of vines and trees, when any fool can look out the window and see that it's a reed-filled marsh!"

Living in a castle is usually safe and comfortable ... except that castles have a tendency to sink into the swamp. A castle may gradually lose a level at a time, sometimes so slowly that its residents do not realize it is happening. If the residents keep working at building the castle, they can stay ahead of the sinking ... at least for a time, since a castle will tend to sink faster as it gets heavier. Occasionally, a castle may sink suddenly because of a flaw in the foundations. On rare occasion, entire castles full of people can vanish without survivors when the castles had no windows, or when no one bothered to look out of what windows there were.

A few very independent people travel around the swamp in one of those swamp boats with the big fans. They get to see a lot of the swamp, though they don't get a close look at much as it whizzes past them. Many people riding in swamp boats are more interested in the excitement of movement than in seeing the swamp itself. That can be dangerous; the faster you go, the more likely you are to hit a sandbar or other obstacle, and the harder you'll hit it. Wrecking a swamp boat can leave you stranded or dead.

OK, you can probably see where this is going. The castles are a metaphor for ideologies, meant in a pretty broad sense. This can mean obvious political ideologies like Bolshevism or fascist nationalism, but it can also refer to the kinds of things that we classically refer to as religions, or to humanist materialism, to conspiracy theory paranoia, to positivist rationalism, and so forth. The sort of folks who read my blog may take that as a knock on ideology castles, but it isn't necessarily. Ideology is an effective solution to the swampiness of human experience. Certainly not everyone is cut out for life on a speedy swamp boat.

The swamp boat is a metaphor for people living the artistic life. That means not necessarily artists in the classical sense, but also the iconoclasts and libertines and rebels who drink deep draughts of human experience. They live thrilling lives, and often have amazing tales to tell, but it's a dangerous life, and many of them suffer terrible misadventures sooner or later.

There are two other classic ways of living in the swamp.

One is to pick a spot in the swamp and just build and build and build on that spot. When these folks succeed, they rest at the top of lofty poles rising into the clear cool air high above the waters of the swamp. Pole sitters may climb a pole that has already been planted in the swamp, and such a pole may have several people at various heights in the process of climbing their way up it. Some poles are easier to climb than others, but climbing any pole is hard work. A few people do the even harder work of constructing new poles. Occasionally people even get grabbed at random by great birds and deposited on poles, much to everyone's surprise.

From their vantage point, pole sitters can see the whole of the swamp, and will call down to the people down below, describing what they see. For the most part, the people living down at the surface level have a hard time making sense of what the pole-sitters see. "What's all this about green carpets and silvery ground? The world is made of green reeds and brown mud and gray water!" Most baffling, they have a hard time understanding why one pole sitter planted over here describes something so similar to what a pole sitter describes seeing from way over there. "Aren't those two places completely different?" As a result, pole sitters have a hard time talking to most folks at the surface, though they often have a lovely time calling across to other pole sitters on other poles.

The air at the top of the poles is so clear and invigorating and the view of the swamp is so spectacular that pole sitters tend not to climb back down into the muck of the swamp. Occasionally they do, and those folks tend to amaze the other swamp denizens with their ability to navigate the swamp, as a result of having seen it from a high vantage point. And while pole sitting does lift one above the viccitudes of life in the swamp, pole sitting is not without risk. One can slip and fall, and the higher one has climbed, the more dangerous that can be. Occasionally a pole may topple, pitching its sitters into the swamp.

Pole sitters are a metaphor for mystics. This is what I think Yezida is talking about when she refers to transcendence. She doesn't want to climb up a pole and be separated from the ordinary human experience of the swamp; she is interested in yet another way of living in the swamp.

This last way is to wander through the swamp on foot. Folks who do this carry a bit of lightweight gear to help them handle the challenges of moving through the treacherous ground: poles and swamp boots and bits of rope and so forth. When they run into one another they tend to exchange a little lore about useful tools: "If you make yourself a little platform like this, you can drag some more things with you in the drier patches, have a dry place to sleep in the muddy patches, and use it as a skiff to get across the shallows." They're constantly picking things up and casting things off, changing their kit to match the changing conditions in the swamp.

Most swamp travellers try to keep maps of the swamp, made from the painstaking work of other swamp walkers, or from pole-sitter's descriptions. They generally update and annotate their maps while they wander, and often the first thing two swamp walkers will do when they meet one another is look at each others' maps.

Swamp travellers are interested in the swamp, and often are also interested in the different swamp denizens. They may stop in to visit folks in the various castles, carrying news and information around the swamp, picking up supplies, and occasionally deciding to settle down in one for a while, or even forever. They also tend to know the locations of ruined castles where a few eccentric holdouts are living and working. They might hitch a ride on a swamp boat for a while. They also like to stop at the bases of poles to talk to the pole sitters, and many swamp walkers say that it's important for them to take time out to to climb at least partway up one of the poles to get a good look around the swamp, rather than just relying on maps drawn by others. Others figure it's better to build up their own map the hard way, walking around at ground level.

The swamp walkers are a metaphor for magickians. (The silly extra k indicates that you're talking about occultists, not stage performers.) But this includes not just folks doing hooky spooky ritual, but also other people who engage with their experience in a spirit of exploration and experiment. This includes many designers, doctors, computer programmers, entertainers, therapists, detectives, con artists, athletes, and other people in professions that involve a mix of creative thinking and pragmatism. (Which actually does include most stage magicians, now that I think about it.)

When taken as a spiritual path, swamp walking is what I think Yezida is talking about when she cautions against transcendence. She is advocating intimate engagement with the muck of human experience and effectiveness in the material realm, rather than climbing a pole up to a transcendent escape into nirvana.