If Spring comes, can Autumn be far behind?

We are all in a way, Romanticists, and as much dispassion, disinterestedness, and stoic reservation we muster, we cannot divorce thoughts and concepts with feelings. They can be either feelings of transcendence which cannot be specified into any category, or of distinct colours which we intertwine events with. Perhaps no example is as fundamental as the seasons most of us encounter every year.

 Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter

Universally Spring is associated with life, growth, happiness, virility. Summer associated with ripening and peakedness, a maturity, with activity. Autumn is the contrary of spring, associated with preparation of winter, a decay, the waning of life, and finally, winter is associated with harshness, death and anti-life, the contrary of summer.

But we are too much of reductionists, for there is more than meets the eye. We somehow want to believe that Nature behaves with some kind of human exceptionalism, but that is what we attribute to it, and not it to us.

Imagine a lush garden with booming flowers, the archetypal image of spring. Within the lush green grass, Nature goes on as usual, perhaps laughing at our childish desire for it to succumb to our imagery. There is one maxim with which Nature works, and it is this

Life feeds on itself.

And for spring to be possible, a transaction must be made, and on magnification, the leaves have all sorts of muck, with flytraps catching up on insects, and ants decomposing dead caracasses.

Only when survival is not at hand does Nature seem beautiful and motherly, in more primal times, Nature was the all mighty God, and not a loving one at that. It needed to be made happy so as to bless us with rains, provide us seasons without plagues, pests or locusts, and more often that not, it demanded a sacrifice of us. And that is what was Nature as such, not an aesthetic beauty or an abstract concept, but the sheer Reality-Sublime because our fates were wholly dependent upon its moods. It thus shaped our character, for the character in this primal stage can be shaped by only one fact – Survival

The Paradox of the Innocent Violent Primitive Man, and the Cunning Cultured Modern Person : Spring in Autumn, Autumn in Spring.

Stage I – The Dawn

As much as we can make cartoons of the primitive man, of a Fred Flinstone, with their cartoonish ape like behavior, Encountering a stranger human of those times would probably get you killed instantly, no questions asked. But this kind of evil is not what we associate with the kinds we are now accustomed to, of the Hitlers and Stalins of the world, but an innocence in this evil, just like a predator is not evil when it hunts or scavenges its prey, and is as innocent as all are in nature, this violence in the primal man rather stems from confusion and fear.

Superstitions can cause evil and violence with the best of intentions, and any modern ethical civilization would necessarily have roots in acts of barbarism which are not from cunning, but only natural. This spring corresponds to then the beginning of human civilization, barbarous from our lens, but in reality the most innocent of all stages, closest to our animal brethren, guided by ritual sacrifices as offerings to God.

Stage II: The Noon

The next stage of human civilization again represents a new kind of spring, a more mature one. Though the evolution of culture via agriculture and rise of towns reduce this primordial dependance on mother earth, in this nascent stage, we are still as helpless to the vagaries of nature. The essence of that primal man though doesn’t go away, the rituals and witches of the earlier times are simply replaced by priests and organized violence via warfare. Even the scale of victims from violence then increases with a certain indifference towards the reality of it. Violence in warfare is now abstracted into concepts of glory, and innocence is maintained under the veneer of civilization.

Stage III: Dusk

The next stage of human spring is of maturation of culture and industry. In fact, in this pre-pubescant industry, war leads the economy, the growth to which we have attributed to this age is a spring of suffering. We tend to casually ignore the fact that economic growth and development historically has been stimulated through warfare, even in our current age that being the case, yet we ignore the fact to not confront the reality of human decadence, for we are now much more moral than the primitive and medieval people surely, as the zeitgeist would like you to believe.

The spring of the age of mass warfare, peace is established with blood. The workers now have overlords, and spring becomes a tradition to celebrate, not a blossoming of the fruits of nature, rather the idea of it,  enjoyed now as a festival in urban centres, divorced of the earlier, rural modes of life. Wars are now normalised and a fact of indifference, which leads to a detached ignorance towards grossly significant acts like mass-murder, now at most being a cause for a shock and awe, of course if it is heinous enough to catch our attention spans. The collective consciousness is now twisted enough, that the destruction of warfare is abstracted and glorified. The connection with the primal man is now severed, the age of innocence is gone, but spring remains, in an artificial construct of civilization.

Still, there was a reason to be upbeat with the onset of spring, despite the corruptions, the stage though goes lower, when this corruption makes the man realize some of it, and is not upbeat anymore. This is the start of spring in the modern era, an age of nihilism.

Stage IV: The Night

The government is now our overlords, ruling via direct oppression and collection of taxes which only goes into funding wars we don’t need. The farmers, artisans in the countryside are still in touch with the primal man, and hence there are still remnants of that primal innocence, but it is far away from the social consciousness of the times, as exhibited by the major centers of growth i.e. the cities. Still, even the farmers and artisans are not completely immune, for their innocence is now being replaced from joy to one of a prideful glory,  via the medium of money. For money increases power, and power is glory. War in this age is almost farcicial now, a mockery of what it once was, though as much as real, with a scale of destruction hitherto unimagined. It’s farcicial because there is no objective which legitimizes it, but abstract ideas which are of no relevance to anyone. The threshold of indifference is so high, that only crimes against the core human principles, of the scale of the holocaust or nuclear weapons invoke the same reactions it did earlier when villages were burnt or massacred, still for some the latter is more barbaric than the former. We are by now, at this stage, tired of this. How much more corruption can there be? Life becomes faster, the economy larger, and it ultimately leads to a revolt, and inevitably to the age of revolution.

Now there’s peace, the overlords have been done away with, and after a brief revival of innocence of that earlier spring, there is an eerie lull. For this silence is unnatural, being  seized upon by force, result of which there is a new equilibrium. Revolution leads to further revolutions. The revolutionary of the day past are the present incumbents, who have to now deal with the incoming revolts within discreet circles underground, Now the enemies of the state and its people, in a cruel taste of circularity. This spring is ironic, no? There are mild eruptions, but nothing significant, the new overlords are well trained in this battle art. One could say the continual revolutions carry the primal innocence of destruction which has been our nature And that’s why no era can do away with these, the young embedded with the genes of disorder, how are they to blame? The only difference is that rituals are not the rationalizations, but is now called justice. There are now moderates and extremists in every such discreet groups, who differ on the level of acceptable blood during play, and always try to undermine each other, allowing the Stalins of the world to keep afloat.

Stage V: The Twilight

The next spring arrives, and with it some necessary optimism, but where lies the joy, and the beauty? The fields are now no longer dependent on nature, Science has mastered it, and won. There is plenty, and still, despite all conveniences of technology, one fact remains constant and will always do so, for we can’t push away the source of philosophical problems inherent in this struggle of Man vs Nature. Any scientific conveniences  of life cannot be filled with the void of that single fact, that Life indeed is, and always be, an endeavour of suffering, and all desires can only strengthen our bondage to it. All remedies, positive experiences would only fail, the new ethics, the abstract concepts, the straightening of nature curves is counter current, and we still wonder why are we still sad, despite our security, our culture?

The decay, does it stem from trading off human nature, the innocent primality for peace and long lives? and when we are devoid of innocence in the age of extreme civilization, is how we return to the roots after all, through an orgy of carnage when bereft of innocence. Killing now is no longer an extreme reaction of revenge, and there is no pity. There is a zeal in it, almost like an explosion of those repressed urges since the first spring, this is spring in full blossom, the blood waters the soil for the renewing of the cycle. Even murder reflects nihilism, the threshold is now at the atomic level, nothing short of nuclear disasters can unite people. In this dionysian bloodbath, the cycle is completed, and the first spring of the next cycle carries on like the beginning. The answer of stopping this cycle is only through what the sages and the critics have prescribed –

Embrace that primal nature within the civilization.

One message, different translations ; Two thinkers and a sage that come to mind.

Nietzsche

The completeness of the Dionysian with Apollo

Jung

Embrace thy Shadow.

Lao Tse

The Dao that can be traversed is not the Eternal Dao.