Always one to keep up with the latest trends and happenings, I recently revisited the movie 'Avatar'. Well, it was only released in 2009. I enjoyed it so much this time round that I watched it again.
OK, it's mainstream blockbuster. Parts of it are a bit naff, others cheesey. Even some of the deep ecology stuff is presented a bit clumsily, tending towards cliche and being hackneyed. All the same, all the same......
On release, 'Avatar' broke all box office records. Then slipped away into oblivion. I find this interesting: no mass Avatar fan clubs, no Neytiri party costumes. As pointed out ad nauseam on Pale Green Vortex, things don't just happen. So this is no coincidence, either. Despite the surface cheesiness, the underlying world-view of the Na'vi, the Blue People inhabiting Pandora in the film, is not easily disneyfied (though apparently they are trying). Taken seriously, it is downright dangerous. The deep shamanism of the Na'vi is shown as what deep shamanism properly is: not just an idea about ecology or the environment; not just scientific analysis of life, the world, and similar bullshit; not jumping onto pseudo-ecological political bandwagons. No. Real, direct, visceral experience. Becoming a different kind of being, with different kind of experience, really. And you can't have a whole generation of kids going around spouting about the interconnectedness of everything, and how the trees in this part of the forest know what the trees in the other part are up to, and how Eywa (Gaia-Sophia in the film) raises up in support if only you know how to call her. It's not going to help the cause of Empire one little bit. Best leave it alone to slip away quietly.
A fascinating spin-off from Avatar was the incidence of 'Avatar depression' - thoughts of 'Avatar suicide' even - that was reported. People who had watched the film and absorbed the luminous beauty of Pandora, the world of the Na'vi, found leaving the cinema and returning to grey, boring, often nasty everyday world extremely difficult. These are people, I submit, who sadly rather missed the point. They cannot have not done their deep shamanic work and practice, otherwise they would realise differently....
Another fascinating snippet is the deleted scene 'the Dreamhunt'. Search this out and the whole film hangs together far better. Watch this, too, and you'll see why it wasn't included in the final 'product'. It involves our hero Jake Sully's initiation: when he becomes a man and truly one of 'the People'. It is explicitly psychedelic/entheogenic. In the context of ritual, he swallows a worm and is bitten by a scorpion, and goes off onto a lone journey, during which he sees various elements that will appear in his future. That funny 'little bits missing' feeling while watching the film disappears once you have found Dreamhunt. And, again, it's something else which is not going to be blasted across big screens the world over.
Part Two
I haven't written for a while about windfarms. That doesn't mean they've gone away. Far from it, in fact. While in England, that green and pleasant land apparently, onshore windfarm construction has been terminated by government, here in Scotland it proceeds apace. Incredibly. Some parts of Scotland have been changed beyond recognition over no more than a decade. It's awful. I recently took the train from Carlisle, through the Southern Uplands and across some of the Central Belt, to Edinburgh. What much of this trip now entails beggars belief. It consists largely of a journey through a newly industrialised landscape, an almost continuous parade of windfarms plastered across hills, moors, farmland. A land compromised, degraded, devastated.
Just down the road from where I live, a monster windfarm is now under construction in the Monadhliath Mountains. It is called Stronelairg. We are not talking a few little windmills fluttering in the breeze: it is an enormous project, laying to waste vast areas of moor and peatland. All, of course, given approval by the Scottish authorities, despite challenge, protest, and the rest. Viva democracy.
Part Three
A while ago I was on a walk with a friend. I was extemporising on the subject of windfarms, and how the nature spirits would not be happy with the destruction of their habitat for these giant concrete-and-metal flapping structures. At that moment we were passing the edge of a new-build of bungalows on the fringe of town. "Don't you think these are worse?" my friend asked me. "They cover up everything; destroy the entire ground." I found this an extremely interesting question; I had no answer, except for "I don't know." The question went into my shamanic bag and we walked on. And thus things remained, until I took my recent gander at Avatar.
At one hour twenty minutes into the film, the bulldozers go in. Enormous, surreal, metal machine monsters march forwards, scrunching and trampling everything in their wake. Forest trees snap like twigs; animals flee screaming in all directions; Blue People run for their life. Pandora is under seige. It is truly awesome.
As I watched the bulldozers and their entourage laying waste to all and sundry, my mind flashed back to my friend and her question. "This is it!" an inner voice shrieked out loud and clear. "This is it, precisely." This is the image to capture the windfarm tragedy, more completely, more perfectly, than words can ever hope to do. I have written plenty on windfarms, but sometimes words just fall short. It is in their nature. And no word could compare to this.
On the Scottish hillsides, the bulldozers also continue to go in. The machinery is slightly less grandiose, but only just; and the archetypal configuration, as we may call it, is identical. Mile upon mile of access roads, gouged out of the heather, peat and rock; tons of concrete poured deep into holes sunk into the mountain. Then they arrive, the metal monsters themselves. carried on the backs of enormous lorries, so heavy that the earth quivers to announce their arrival. The spirits, the gods, the goddesses, are angry. I insist this is so.
No prayers of apology, atonement, redemption, are offered up. No conversation with the mountain, its spirits, the birds, the plants, the animals. No asking for a sign, an omen. 'Windfarm plan shelved due to omen': I have yet to read the headline. "We received a message from sister wind," project chief explained. "We're going home." No. As they say in the film, 'It's science.'
Most of the humans in 'Avatar' aren't on that alien world Pandora for the science. They are there for the richest mineral known to them: unobtanium. And the best deposits of all just happen to be found directly beneath a place most sacred to the Na'vi, their dwelling place, known as Hometree. The humans go for the jugular: cue further destruction of the forest and protracted battle scenes between humans and Blue People.
To the Na'vi, all the forest is sacred: their own energies are inextricably linked with those of everything that exists there. At the same time, some places are more sacred than others. Certain locations act as focal points, magnets, for connection, for energy, for healing even. Places such as the Tree of Voices, trashed by the bulldozers; Hometree; and the Tree of Souls, where uplink to the greater community, the community of ancestors, the field of magical healing, and to Eywa herself, takes place.
As it is on Pandora, so is it on Earth today. There is something special about the hill places, the mountain places, the upland places; and of these some are more special, more sacred, than others. This is not personal projection, to be unravelled on a Freudian therapy couch. It is more than that. Our distant ancestors knew this knowledge for sure. As, in my own vague, half-baked, and vaporous civilised way, do I.
The British Isles are tiny. For the most part they are crowded by humans, their spaces intensively utilised by humanity. So be it. But, as a result, its few remaining pockets of relatively untouched land possess value beyond scientific measure. Here - just, and with a struggle - can be accessed that vital connection with the rest of the natural world; the Power of the Land, if you will. It is this which is being sundered by the march of the windfarms.
The Power of the Land: in Britain, it is nearly gone. Its best chance is probably in the Highland areas of Scotland. Or at least it was until very recently. Remove this link and we are as good as dead. It is possible to get conspiratorial about the whole thing. It is not far-fetched to surmise that the severance of this connection by the devastation wrought by the upland windfarms is not an accident, but is deliberate, designed as a matter of disempowerment. While a person maintains a contact with the Power of the Land, they cannot be completely contained, corralled. One part of their soul remains free - which, more esoterically, is the one thing most threatening to the System that would control us all.
In this article, I have written from the heart; blood runs through the words in this piece. Yes, there are windfarms on Pandora.
Appendix
Down here at Pale Green Vortex, we're not always over the moon over happenings at infowars. Alex Jones jumping up and down on his chair, ranting and raving about something or other, sending our blood pressure through the roof, can sometimes be a bit much. Having said that.......
Below is a link to a very recent programme that infowars produced on windfarms. It is set in the USA, where people tend to be a bit more proactive about things than is often the case in tired, worn-down, resigned-to-our-fate, Europe. It's well worth watching; and everything in Scotland is the same, except that it's worse, since Scotland is such a small place so the effects are that more dramatic.
Infowars, thanks for that. And remember, folks: you heard about it first on Pale Green Vortex.
https://www.infowars.com/exclusive-wind-energy-war-on-the-high-plains/
Images:
Top: At the Tree of Voices
Middle: The Tree of Voices, after the bulldozers
Below: Stronelairg construction. Amazingly, SSE put up this photo as a sign of progress, as a good thing! It is at this point that, should further proof be needed, I recognise that 'humanity' is not a unified species, but a collection of varying offshoots, with actually very little in common.
