A "Webbed Vision" - Toward a New World Story

                   A "Webbed Vision" - Toward a New World Story

By Lauren Raine MFA 

 

"What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? 

The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate

 as spider’s silk,   yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.” 

 

Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self  1

 

The quote above, from theologian Catherine Keller, has been deeply important to me.   I first read her book "From a Broken Web" in 2008, when I was pursuing my "Hands of the Spider Woman" Community Arts Projects.  The first project  was at the Midland Center for the Arts (with the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center) in Michigan, then at the Creative Spirit Center, also  in Midland (with Kathy Space),  and last when I was a Resident Artist at the Henry Luce Center for the Arts and Religion in Washington D.C. 

 

Perhaps because I live in the Southwest, the "legends of the Spider Woman" have always fascinated me as I encountered Her in Native American art.  Spider Woman is a ubiquitous Creatrix found throughout the Americas, with her earliest known origins among the Maya of South America.  Spider Woman manifests among the Navajo and the Pueblo Peoples of the Southwest as the "great Weaver".    Among the people of the Keresan Pueblo she is also called Tse Che Nako, the "Thought Woman" who weaves the worlds into being with the stories She tells.  Within this metaphor of the "great weaver", Spider Woman waits at the center of the Web of life, within which we are all connected, interwoven and co-creating.

 

Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman, the Spider is sitting in her room

 thinking of a story now:   I'm telling you the story  She is thinking.

 

Keresan Pueblo Proverb from Carol Patterson-Rudolph 2 

 

My path on the trail of Spider Woman has been fraught with synchronicities, which I have come to think of as touchstones along the way.  Synchronicities, to me, are a mystical part of the overlay (and the foundational "under") of the metaphor Dr. Keller writes of.  As I write about   "A Webbed Vision", for example, I note that for the past weeks a spider has made its home on the ceiling directly above the keyboard where I write.  I have come to think of that spider as my muse - perhaps, fancifully, she is Spider Woman's envoy, weaving its patient web just above my head, reminding me each day of a vision I want to hold.

In her 1989 book Dr. Keller does not speak of the Native American Goddess Spider Woman, but she often references the Greek myth of "Penelope".  Penelope is a name with ancient origins that derive from an archaic Greek word meaning "with a web on her face".   It is likely that Penelope was originally a Fate or Oracular Goddess before she was later demoted in patriarchal Greek mythology to the faithful wife of Odysseus, weaving and un-weaving a shroud to avoid her suitors (it's always  interesting the way myths are transformed to suit the evolving mythos and power base of different cultures).   Yet within the earlier context of a more egalitarian society, "Penelope" would be one who could "see" and "weave" the beginnings and the ends of a life.  She might have been personified with a loom before her, or spinning a thread.  Taking the metaphor further, such a Goddess would "see" the inter-dependencies between all things, the Great Web spreading out across the landscapes of life.   

 

 

Pueblo mythology tells that when each of the previous worlds ended in catastrophe, it was Spider Woman who led the people through the sipapu, the kiva (or birth canal) into the next world.  As such Spider Woman is the divine midwife for the birth of each new age. According to Hopi cosmology, we have now entered the "Fifth World".  It is interesting that, in contemporary Neo-Pagan practices, there are 5 Elements that symbolize the "great Circle".   The Fifth Element is called "Center", and is represented with the color white, the union of all colors.  It is the last Element, and symbolizes the universal force or Aether that unites all the other Elements.  

I cannot resist imagining that the World Wide Web might just be is Spider Woman's latest appearance!   

 

"Spider Woman's Cross" motif in Navajo rug

 

“In Hopi cosmology Spider Woman was the first to weave. Her techniques and patterns have stood the test of time, or more properly, the test of timelessness.…..…..

Weaving is not an act in which one creates something oneself – 

it is an act in which one uncovers a pattern that was already there.”

 

John Loftin 3

 

As we confront the universal catastrophe of climate change, it seems to me that this is a significant and appropriate metaphor.  Indeed, a significant Prophecy:  for what we now confront concerns not just a tribe or nation, but all beings upon planet Earth.  We must evolve a new, global paradigm for this Fifth Age if we are to survive.   Spider Woman, bringing a vision of the Great Web of life, once again must be the midwife as She makes visible the connections, the strands of the Web,  whether we speak of  ecology,  economy, quantum physics, or integral psychology.   In our essence, as Jungian psychologist Ann Baring has said, "We are one".

Petroglyph,  Southern New Mexico

 

"The new myth manifests through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field.  It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other.   In our essence, we are one."

 

Anne Baring, Awakening to the New Story   4

 

How indeed, as an evolving global society, would we think and act, if we saw, like Penelope (or Grandmother Spider Woman) "with a webbed vision"? Would we be able to change the catastrophic course of ecological destruction if we had such a theology based upon Relationship instead of Domination?  If our reasoning, and our way of seeing, was inclusive rather than dissectionist?  If instead of valuing competition and the "alpha" winner, we valued consensus? If instead of "fight and flight" in the face of danger, we instead pulled out the defense tactic found among female monkeys of "tend and befriend"?   If instead of renunciate, hierarchical religions that turn us away from nature and Earthly existence toward an abstract "heaven" or "nirvana", we saw ourselves as profoundly embedded in the sacred body and evolving soul of our living planet?

 

"The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as 

"What stories do I want to live?"

 

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 5

                      

 If each of us could, like Penelope, "see" ourselves holding a thread that originates with all of those who came before us - and touches all of those who will come after us - how indeed might we see, and act?

 

"The New Story coming into being is that the whole universe is a unified field. The world we experience is like a minute excitation on the surface of an infinite 

cosmic sea which sustains not only our world, but the entire Cosmos. 

We live within a cosmic web of life which underlies and connects all life forms in the universe and on our planet. Through a vast network of electro-magnetic fields We are connected to the earth,  the sun and the hundred billion galaxies.  

 So we are not separate from any aspect of planetary or cosmic life. "

 

Anne Baring, Awakening to the New Story 6

As I watch the ongoing corporate greed that is eroding not only democracy, but the very life of our planet,  and the unreasoned ideology of capitalism (as opposed to local free enterprise) that makes it  possible for this new monarchy of the 1% to arise, I wonder sometimes if there is any hope for the future at all.  If I am not my brother's and sister's keeper, and they mine - who is?  Monsanto?  Walmart?  A civilization, indeed the raising of a single child, is a grand collaboration among many, and it might be said from that "webbed vision" of societies that the exploiters and warlords pounding their chests and sitting like dragons on their stolen gold....... are the parasites of a civilization, rather than any appropriate leaders.

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create and envision expanding community, which can be simplified to a fundamental sense of belonging.   Beyond that, we need an ethos and mythos that supports the fundamental, and foundational, understanding of inter-dependency.    If America was not a culture that idealizes "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors"  what other kinds of values might enhance the quality of life for us (and perhaps the very survival of our species) along with an extended community of many other species we share our world with?

 

"The Rugged Individualist" cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, because this is "getting government off our backs.”

Philip Slater, the Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture 6

 

"Alpha male" individualism fails in every way to communicate that we live within a web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is unimaginably vast and also very intimate. This is the "Webbed Vision" that sees and recognizes the links that must be restored.   A successful adult is so because of parents, siblings, friends, teachers, community resources, the backdrop of nature and environment, global society.........and distant ancestors that enabled him or her to be born.  Without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into both the past and into future generations, human beings end up feeling alienated, disposable, and without a sense of purpose.   Which is what an unsustainable, insatiable consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.

 

In tribal societies, survival depended on cooperation, as well as the collective ability to adapt continually to new environmental challenges, be it drought, invaders, or the exhaustion of resources.  The mythic foundation of any tribe (or civilization) is ultimately the template upon which they stand; a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse.   Without a significant mythos of co-dependency in the face of global ecological crisis, the coming collapse of our civilization is apparent.  

 

"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic.  The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, dissectionist, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order to "have control". 

 

 Rafael Montanez Ortiz 7

 

The Latin origin of the word "religion", religios, means to "link back".  To rejoin with the greater and divine whole in some way.  In my opinion, many of today's religions, at least in their institutionalized forms, fail in communicating  this ultimate "webbed vision" - in fact, as tribal social control mechanisms with millennia of often mutually contradictory doctrines behind them, they do exactly the opposite.  They separate, create discord and fear, and damn those who do not share their cultural or philosophical constructs.  Religions are essentially concretized mythologies - concretized communal stories.  

                            

What stories are so many people and institutions telling about the world we live in, the 21st Century world of global civilization? How do these sacred stories - most of them with their origins in ancient tribal societies existing in a very different kind of world - serve, or fail, the world of today?

Returning to "religios", the "linking back" to what is sacred, patriarchal  Renunciate religions that teach us to renounce the world, the body, and the demands of relationships of every kind, either in service of some abstract "better place" (be it heaven, paradise, enlightenment or nirvana) or teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us.  More importantly, they certainly will not help those who must come after us to live in a diminished world.   In the established and unquestioned   systems systems of patriarchal religions, divinity is placed "elsewhere", be it the literally conceived paradise that awaits the faithful, or a more elegant grand abstraction that teaches us "this is not real" but fails to describe what actually "is real".  This is a prime theme to be found in patriarchal religions, religions that have their origins in warrior ideology and warrior lifestyles.  It might be said, for an example, that the Old Testament God Yahweh, with all his punishments and rules, is a classic example of an authoritarian, warrior "sky god".  

And more subtly, the  New Age message that "this experience  is not real" which drives devotees to seek "the real world"  found in  some divine, other-worldly, perfected  abstraction once we are "purified" or "surrender" in order to have consciousness is raised sufficiently:  too often this "must happen"  through an authoritarian Guru or leader, with many of the attendant social abuses.  

To speak of "oneness",  to address creating a cohesive vision of holism that is appropriate to the world we live in today,  mythic systems that include  creative diversity within that "oneness" are needed.   Myths and symbols that can include many gods and goddesses, many voices and languages, and many ways to the truth instead of simply eliminating the competition.  Further, our world myth can no longer be simply a human world myth - it must include many evolutions, many other beings within the intimacy of ecosystems.  If we're to survive into sustainability.   

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary" Philip Slater commented in his last book The Chrysalis Effect, “the polarization and chaos we see in the world are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis".  Slater's view was ultimately hopeful - that we are witnessing the chaos of a new evolution.   That metamorphosis he spoke of, I personally believe, is based on the realization of inter-dependency with all life.  In his view, this is humanity's childhood's end.  We are called now to the world, each other, and the miracle of life, with a "Webbed Vision". 

As the New Year approaches, I personally would like to call on artists, writers, musicians, storytellers, and all other "cultural creatives" to help to make a new mythology for the global tribe.   The writer Ursula Leguin called them "realists of a larger reality".  Among the Navajo (Dine`) infant girls still have a bit of spider web rubbed into their hands so they will "become good weavers".   May we all now rub a bit of spider web into our hands for the work ahead of us ..........and, like Penelope, may we all now see "with a web on our faces".

 

“Hope now lies in moving beyond our past in order to build together a sustainable future for all the interwoven and interdependent life on our planet, including the human element.  We will have to evolve now into a truly compassionate and tolerant world – because for the first time since the little tribes of humanity’s infancy, everyone’s well being is once again linked with cooperation for survival.  Our circle will have to include the entire world. 

 

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 8

 

1)   Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self,

       1988, Beacon Press

2)    Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, On the Trail of Spider Woman, 1997, Ancient City Press.

3)    Loftin, John D., Religion and Hopi Life, 2003, Indiana University \

        Press (first published January 1st 1988)

4)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story", 2013, from her website: 

       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

 

5)   Loy, David R., The World is Made of Stories, 2010, Wisdom Publications

6)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story", 2013, from her website: 

       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

7)   Slater, Phillip, The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture, 2008, 

       Sussex Academic Press

8)   Ortiz, Rafael Montanez Ph.D., interview with Lauren Raine, unpublished manuscript 

     (1989)

9)  Alstead, Diana and Kramer, Joel, The Guru Papers:  Masks of Authoritarian Power, 

       1993, Frog Books  

"A Webbed Vision" ~ Reflections on Interdependency and Individualism

"What might we see, how might we act, 

if we saw with a webbed vision?  

The world seen through a web of relationships…

as delicate as spider’s silk, 

yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”  

Catherine Keller, "From a Broken Web"3

The quote above, from Theologian Catherine Keller, derives from the ancient and original root meaning of the name "Penelope", the "faithful wife of Ulysses".   It is likely that Penelope was originally a Fate or Oracular Goddess before she became demoted in patriarchal Greek mythology, and as such her name meant "with a web on Her face", one who "sees the connections".  I have never forgotten the significance of that.

It's been 5 years since the shooting of beloved Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  Because I lived close to her former office, I saw a candlelit altar develop for her, with so hundreds of  wishes for her recovery and for peace.   Having been witness to this  tragedy in my home town  of Tucson,  which took the lives of 6 people including a child, and remember so many other atrocities committed by men with guns since,  I' ve been  unable to think in terms that are too abstract.  When confronted with the horror of violence, and the heavy pall of grief, the need to experience  inter-dependence, with-in our bodies and with-in the refuge of our imaginations -  is very real and immanent.   We want to know we are not alone, we want to believe we can support each other.

I was struck by  the  way "Together We Thrive" became a  theme echoed throughout Tucson at that time, and a motto that headed healing activities, from President Obama's call for unity, to spontaneous Shrines created throughout Tucson.  Does any of that moment remain?  Congress is trying to end Obama Care, which will end health insurance for millions of people, and one of the most arrogant of exploitative capitalist  billionaires, Donald Trump, is running for President.   As I watch the ongoing corporate greed that is eroding not only our former democracy, but the very life of our planet, and the unreasoned ideology of capitalist "individualism" that in many ways makes that possible in this country.............I don't know.  If I am not my brother's and sister's keeper, and they mine - who is?  Monsanto?  Walmart?  

Altar for Gabrielle Gifford at her office, January 2011, after she was shot 

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create community in today's world.  Could a strong community  have prevented what happened?  Unbalanced individuals will always abound, and lethal weapons are readily available - the American gun culture, and easy access to lethal weapons, ensures the violent deaths continue year after year.  Yet even so, the failure of community speaks to this tragedy.  If we weren't in so many ways a culture of "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors", and our technology increasingly allows us to insulate ourselves from the so-called "outside world" ... would this young man have received the attention he needed before he erupted in catastrophic violence in 2011?

"The Rugged Individualist" writes sociologist Philip Slater,1 "cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, because this is "getting government off our backs. "   

This kind of thinking fails in every way to communicate that we live within a vast web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is also very intimate. This is my ultimate Iconic Image, the Great Web of Gaia, the "Webbed Vision" that sees and recognizes the sacred links, the archetype of Spider Woman.  I know my art seems obscure to many, but that is what it derives from, in one image after another.  I can't seem to stop making them, because the Web underlies every aspect of our life.   A successful adult is so because of parents, teachers, community resources, and distant ancestors  that enabled him or her to mature.  And without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into future generations,  human beings end up feeling alienated and ultimately without a sense of purpose. They feel disposable, and perceive others as equally disposible.

Which is what an unsustainable, insatiable corporate consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.  And by the way, local free enterprise is not the same as the kind of souless capitalism we now have.  Within a healthy free enterprise system the wealth circulates within the community - if the baker does well, the   pharmacy does well, if the dressmaker does well, so does the restaurant, and so on.  In what we now have the wealth is removed from the heart of the community to the mega stores, like Walmart, on the outskirts, and all the jobs imported to slave labor overseas, to the loss of all except the very, very wealthy exploiting the situation.  

In tribal societies, survival depended utterly on cooperation, as well as the collective ability to  adapt continually to new environmental challenges, be it drought, invaders, or the exhaustion of resources.  The mythic foundation of any tribe (or civilization) is the template upon which they stand;  a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse. Without a theology of co-dependency, which we have lost in the advent of mega global capitalism and its "individualism" which benefits only a very, very few individuals, that collapse is apparent.  Because the system, ultimately, cannot adapt, cannot become sustainable, cannot become viable.

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary..........." Philip Slater  commented in his last book The Chrysalis Effect,  "the polarization and chaos we see in the world are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis".   But that metamorphosis, I believe, is based up the profound realization of our inter-dependency in every single way, the "Great Web", a Webbed Vision.  We need this vision, updated and evolving for the challenges of our time.  

I call on artists and other "cultural creatives" to help to make a new mythology for the global tribe. 

Renunciate theologies (and mythologies) that teach us to renounce the world, the body, and the demands of relationships of every kind, either in service of some abstract "better place" (be it heaven, paradise, enlightenment or nirvana) or in reaction to teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us, or those who must come after us.  If we're going to speak of "oneness", we need myths that include tremendous, creative diversity within that "oneness", that can include many gods and goddesses, many voices and languages, and many ways to the truth instead of simply eliminating the competition.  Further, our world myth can no longer be simply a human world myth - it must include many evolutions, many other beings within the intimacy of ecosystems.  If we're to survive into sustainability.

"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic." wrote artist Rafael Montanez Ortiz.  "The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, dissectionist, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order  to "have control".2  Ortiz maintains that if the logic of one's society is relational, you are in a construct that places you in  relation to all things, and thus, develop an  empathic response to all things.   In earlier societies, he believes,  the entire world mythos was about a living world, alive, entangled, conscious, animistic and full of Anima Mundi, the World Soul.  It's no coincidence that this "primitive"  worldview is very close to what science, from Gaia Theory to Quantum Entanglement, is discovering.

Myths, as the "narrative foundation" for  societies, become more meaningful through embodiment, through an actual enactment - through ritual that is engaging and potent.   Culturally in the West we have, by and large, lost our rituals, or they have become weakened through commercialism - witness the sad transformation of Solstice rituals into the meaningless commercialism of Christmas, or the diminishment of the important days of honoring the ancestors into "scary Halloween". 

Our minds aren't just in our skulls, but in  the entire body, which includes the aura and the etheric networks that exist between us and the rest of life.    Whether we're talking about a forest, or another person, abstractions can remove us from the  experience of communion, the immanent ability to sense what is going on.  Abstractions become what is going on.  I have experienced, and helped to create, rituals that were profoundly transformative.  My experiences of the Spiral Dance with Reclaiming, or with the Earth Spirit Community's Twilight Covening, or the Lighting of the Labyrinth at Sirius Rising......will always energize me when I remember them.  Within those magical circles, I entered mythic time and mythic space and mythic mind, and experienced, as Joseph Campbell put it, the "Thou" realm of existence.  That  does not end when you leave the circle.

In 2004, I directed "Restoring the Balance", a non-denominational event devoted to cross-cultural stories of the Great Mother.  Our cast wished to dramatize the need for healing the great Earth Mother.  We chose as our centerpiece the Inuit legend of Sedna, and the rituals of atonement and reciprocity the Inuit perform with their shaman when they believe they have fallen from balance with the life giving Ocean Mother.   Artist Katherine Josten (founder of the Global Art Project) danced the role of  Sedna.  In bringing up the event, she  observed that:

"The work of our group is not to re-enact the ancient goddess myths, but to take those myths to their next level of evolutionary unfolding.  Artists are the myth makers."

In this same spirit, another member of the cast chose to weave a web with the audience as  Grandmother Spider Woman.   Morgana Canady wove a web with 300 people.  In this performance biodegradable cords from “Spider Woman’s Web” were later distributed among cast members, and scattered throughout the desert, symbolically "extending our web".  As part of the Global Art Project an exchange was made with the AFEG-NEH-MABANG Traditional Dance Company, in Cameroon - a part of the weaving.  


 Among the Navajo, infant girls often have a bit of spider web rubbed into their hands so they will "become good weavers".  

May we all now rub a bit of spider web into our hands for the work ahead of us ..........and, like Penelope, may we all now see "with a web on our faces".

1) Phillip Slater, The Chrysalis Effectt (2007)

2) Rafael Montanez Ortiz Ph.D., interview with Lauren Raine for unpublished manuscript (1989)

3) Katherine Keller Ph.D., "From a Broken Web" (1989)

4) Katherine Josten M.F.A., The Global Art Project

Reflections on Loneliness and the Demise of Blockbuster...

 "Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the “Internet paradox................We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information."

"(Vickers’s) web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment...............Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation."

Stephen Marche **
"Is Facebook Making Us Lonelier?"

I feel very sad that the Blockbuster Video down the street, along with all Blockbuster Video stores, is closing.  I've had a relationship with them for years..........like going to a library, I knew the people there, would ask them about new arrivals, sometimes buy popcorn, and then settle down to enjoy a movie with my mother, who I visit at assisted living now.  I guess the internet, Netflix, and those obnoxious red boxes  in front of at every pharmacy were the end for this once ubiquitous business.

And I was also struck by the article I quote from above by Stephen Marche.  I don't know about others, but for myself, on a personal level, I have often found that the Internet has made me feel lonelier, certainly, more disposible.  I seem to be going through one of my "dancing on the table with a lampshade on my head" phases (again), and it's not even New Year's Eve.  I'm irritable, and know that I'm going through a kind of re-evaluation, and possible re-invention,  of my life.  But meanwhile,  I think it's a damn shame that Blockbuster is no more.  And I also think Americans have a deeply unconscious, buried,  "shadow" urge to feel interdependant and affiliated.  I hope.   More on this after my rant............

The video rental stores had real human beings behind the counter to talk to you about the movies you browsed for.  Unlike the "red boxes", which are similar in concept to the "self checkout" at grocery stores.   Not only is it another loss of many jobs, but it's yet another way in which Americans can, once again, avoid the messiness, eccentricities, and germs of  human contact with a click and a card.  What's next? Total virtual reality immersion?  

 "Individualism finds its roots in the attempt to deny the reality and importance of human interdependence.  One of the major goals  of technology in America is to "free" us from the necessity of relating to, submitting to, depending upon, or controlling other people.  Unfortunately, the more we have succeeded in doing this the more we have felt disconnected, bored, lonely, unprotected, unnecessary and unsafe."

Phillip Slater

In my mother's day the movies were a big deal - you went to the theatre,  which meant gathering with a bunch of friends, or dates, for a night out,  dinner as well.  A social occasion, which videos changed by making it a more private affair.  When she was a young working woman in Los Angeles in the 40's, even an  urban breakfast was less "private".   There was no "fast food" to speak of.  Breakfast meant a cafe, which had a cook, dishwasher, waitress and fellow breakfasters.  Every morning, a community of people was connected to  her eggs and coffee.  There were also no  disposable forks, spoons, cups, or plates - that idea, which we take so completely for granted, had not arrived yet, although it was looming just around the corner. 

And now we have the next evolutionary step:  Starbucks!  Instead of the inconvenience of a sit down restaurant and familiar breakfast faces, we have a lineup in our cars, greeted by a hand with a  paper cup, soon to end up in a landfill, and a universal litany of "welcome to Starbucks find everything you're looking for have a great day".  

I spent many personally evolutionary days in Cafe Society in the 60's and 70's in Berkeley and New York and other places, and have a great fondness for them.  They really aren't the same any more, or at least, I'm not.  Most of the Cafe's I can go to here in Tucson look  something like this:  

Now my true senior curmudgeon-ness is showing, along with my long winter underwear.  Because I remember Cafe Med, or Cafe Trieste, in pre-laptop days, as looking something like this:

 

or this:

Or this:   (ok, that's Alan Ginsburg and Company, and I wasn't there, but wish I had been....)
 

Yes, I know.  There would have been obnoxious cigarette smoke in those days.  And sometimes obnoxious people.   But there were also poets, regulars, friends, bead sellers, spare changers...........all the color and texture of human beings.  

And another question, for 2013,  might be, why would I need  to go to a cafe in the first place, when I can make gourmet coffee and bagels at home?  Don't I have a French Press and a toaster?   Could it be I, like  a few others, enjoy the sense of mutually  breathing bodies around us, a chance to eavesdrop on an interesting conversation, maybe even get to talk to that person with the intriguing book, or flirt with the guy who looks like he might be a fellow artist?

But notice one thing in the photos above, from the '60's.  The people generally look like they're talking to each other, or looking at each other at least.  Now look at photos from a contemporary coffee shop with wifi.  What you will see predominently   is a row of laptops, each at separate small tables.     If you're hoping for human contact,  there is nothing more impregnable than a laptop.  The fellow in the first photo on the right even has his earplugs in - about the only way you could get his attention would be to spill coffee on him.  Now that's privacy.

(I do have to note here a great article from the Huffington Post about coffee shops in San Francisco that have intentionally dropped wifi as  "part of a growing trend among San Francisco restaurateurs to reclaim the coffee shop as a place for face-to-face conversation among caffeinated human beings instead of just being a remote office for people silently tapping away on their laptops."  Huzzah for them!)

Do we really need all this "privacy"?  As Philip Slater, author of  The Pursuit of Loneliness, wrote in 1970 (I was very sad to learn this visionary writer died this year) - all this privacy and pursuit of individualism is not only sometimes bad for our health and personal prospects of longevity, but it is now increasingly clear that it's very, very bad for our planet's health and longevity.

"It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which we attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based.  We seek a "private" house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind.  an enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business.  ..........we seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it.  What accidental contact we do have, furthermore, seem more intrusive, not only because they are unsought but because they are unconnected with any familiar pattern of interdependence."

I've been renting rooms at my house to make ends meet for a couple of years now, initially inspired by my experiences with B and B's in England, a tradition that goes way back there.  But this is not England, and it's also true that I live in a big Southwestern city,  and not a quaint tourist town.  Still, it's been interesting to observe that, although I've had some great interactions with a few of my guests,  even made a friend or two.........overall, the interactions are very impersonal.  And yet, I do find AIRBNB, and other such "share economy" ventures a real step forward, not only because they create much need small local businesses, but also because they promote more of a interchange economy.

"Our servility toward technology, however, is no more dangerous than our exaggerated moral commitment to the "virtues" of striving and individual achievement.  The mechanized disaster that surrounds us is in no small part a result of our having deluded ourselves that a motley scramble of people trying to get the better of one another is socially useful instead of something to be avoided at all costs.  It has taken us a long time to realize that seeking to surpass others might be pathological, and trying to enjoy and cooperate with others healthy, rather than the other way around."

Philip Slater

So.....having shared this, I would like to say that AIRBNB, and other "share economy" services, may be the fiscal end of the tip of an iceberg when it comes to the underlying realization many Americans are making that it's time to return to a more communal, more interdependent   relationship to each other, and to our environment.  I would like to remind myself in this journal that, like the broader implications of the archetype of "Spider Woman's Web", interdependency is the root of our problem now, and a "webbed vision" of interdependency is our solution as well. 

"The three variables we have been discussing - community, engagement, dependency - can all trace their suppression in American society to our commitment to individualism......We are so accustomed to living in a society that stresses individualism that we need to be reminded that "collectivism" in a broad sense has always been the more usual lot of mankind, as well as of of most other species. "

“What might we see, how might we act, if  we saw with a webbed vision? 
 The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, 
yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

Catherine Keller, Theologian

 From a Broken Web

**
"Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside." 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/