"Well, This is the Forest of Arden"

That's Rosalind's comment to Touchstone in Act 2, Scene 4, in Shakespeare's "As You Like It."  The Forest of Arden was the setting for this comedy.  I haven't read Shakespeare since I was a sophomore in college, but Jack Kerouac penned this quote on the front of one his writing journals for 1947-48.  Why, one might ask?  

According to biographer Gerald Nicosia, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, longtime buddies and co-progenitors of the Beat Generation's most pertinent literature ("On the Road" and "Howl" successively ) seriously discussed the metaphorical meaning of this apparently meaningless line and often used it jokingly in conversation as their own kind of touchstone, as in "Well, this is the Forest of Manhattan," while they knocked around Gotham City in the Forties and Fifties.

It turns out there's quite a bit of critical commentary about the setting of the Forest of Arden and its imagined significance as an alternative environment to society and the supposed effect that change might work on human behavior.  In Shakespeare's day, "society" meant the Court, which, one presumes, was the site of myriad mendacious power plays, constant conniving, false fronts, back stabs, and the impassive wall of a trenchant and rigid hierarchy of nobility. 

The idea was that, removed from society and cast into a pastoral setting, one could or would return to one's own original nature.  Quite a Taoist notion, that.  But even within the play, Shakespeare had characters disputing this view and presenting nature as wild and utterly without concern for human beings, much like Thoreau's stark realization on the rocky summit of Maine's Mt. Katahdin.

The play also has the delightful conundrum of Rosalind, a part that would have been played by a boy or man in Elizabethan England, pretending to be a man while in the Forest of Arden.  So you had a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man, and thus able to speak her truths for once and be heard.  And we thought the blurring of sexual identity and the politics of gender to be utterly modern!  But then Shakespeare, with perhaps the possible exception of Montaigne, was the first fully modern man.

But why am I bringing all this up?  Well, for two reasons.  One is that I said I'd write about Kerouac again, and secondly, in my prior post about him I made a brazen statement.  I said that all cultures lie.  I knew that comment would need further vetting.  And for some reason, this comical aside that Kerouac and Ginsberg used, and which Kerouac often resorts to in his journals, seemed like a way into this topic.

It feels to me like Kerouac and Ginsberg's reference to this quote had a sly context.  I get the sense that the Forest of Arden, in their parlance, suggests a kind of illusion in which people haplessly bumble about trying both to find their way through life, and hopefully find themselves in the process.  That's my point of entry for this discussion.

As I've written earlier, I had decided in my childhood that the adult world and all its values were false and insane.  Okay, fine.  But then, what are real values?  And how does one discover them?

I had another moment of awakening in August of 1970, when I was 17.  Although I was reading Thoreau's Walden at the time, and that had begun to crack my head open, I also had a brief encounter with an image, a face on a poster of someone whom I didn't know, but whose face was instantly recognizable to me.  It was in a film.  The moment passed, the face gone, but a revolution had begun in my mind. 

 In the few weeks following, it felt as though my mind was being turned inside out.  At the end of that two week period I was no longer the boy I had always been.  I was who I am now.  That is, the broad outline of who I would become had been sketched.  I've merely been filling in the empty spaces of that template for the past fifty years.

This new person -- me -- was no longer only interested in the world I had inhabited up until then -- sports and athletics.  Now, I was interested in philosophy, poetry, and the spiritual heritage of other cultures and other times.  My real life had truly begun.  I had begun my search for alternative values.

The Sixties were a rebellion, but rebellion is simply a reaction to existing values.  Its point of reference is still those same values.  It still measures itself in relation to them.  As long as you are in reaction or rebellion to a certain set of values, you are as chained to them as when you were crushed by their weight.  You have to get entirely outside of yourself -- and outside of your own cultural conditioning -- in order to discover something fresh and new.

I identified, from about the age of twenty, with what I thought of as spiritual values.  In short, unselfishness.  That is of course an uphill battle.  And if one doesn't keep one's wits about one, you quickly become everyone's doormat.  But luckily, there is still within us all an instinctual voice which says, "Get the hell off of me!"  That's actually a healthy voice.  Usually it is buried under social conditioning and has to be re-unearthed.  So, how to be skillfully unselfish in a selfish world?  In other words, how to not just be "out for yourself," without losing yourself in the process?

Human nature proceeds most often down the path of least resistance.  In effect, everyone tries with all their might toward "the good life," i.e., pleasure, and tries with all their might to avoid the attendant suffering.  As many a sage will tell you, you can't have one without the other.  It's a dual universe.  Up, down; positive, negative.  It's polar.  Pleasure, suffering.  All these contrarieties go hand in hand.  Thus sayeth I, after having looked into the matter for all these years.  Here's my individual take:  it's okay to want what you want; just don't expect it to be free.

In the big picture, cultures are merely collective incarnations of their constituent members.  Right?  There is usually a cultural imperative or paradigm which guides the people en masse.  For many thousands of years, religion has played the dominant role.  Sometimes it's a political structure like Rome.  As any sociologist will tell you, and as the past four years in America have proven, it's easier to marshall people around negative values than positive ones.  Mob psychology.  People will do things in a mob that they might not do otherwise.  Their selfish nature is emboldened and magnified.  Our country is currently a perfect example of this dynamic.

As a child, I dismissed the Semitic cultures and religions out of hand. Ergo, I dismissed my own culture.  Why?  Well, because they had all only led up to this -- the madness of the world as I knew it -- or so I reasoned.  Why then would I believe that any of them had the answer?  I always loved Gandhi's response to a western journalist's question, "What do you think of western civilization?"  Said Gandhi, "I think it would be a good idea."

What I discovered by my readings from other times and other cultures is that all civilizations have a life span.  They're born, they grow, they mature, and they die.  They have guiding principles or values, but those values are always partial, incomplete, somewhat servile to the powers that be.  In other words, they're all the Forest of Arden -- illusory. But one wonders whether we happen to be at the end of the life span of all the cultures on earth, all at once.  

What comes next?  Don't look to the historical past.  You won't find values that will light the way and fire the heart there.  Don't dream up another model society, because Utopia doesn't exist.  A pastoral sojourn through the Forest of Arden won't suffice.  The indigenous cultures that have survived have a genuine way forward but that door might be shut to those of us not born into such a culture.  What we need is an entirely new vision, an entirely new culture.  Nothing else will work.

I haven't found that vision, myself.  I'm still working out my own individual path.  I don't know from where the new vision will come.  It's easy to be nihilistic nowadays.  But I find I still have faith.  I don't know in who or in what -- maybe just in Life itself.  I have faith that we won't entirely destroy ourselves or the world we inhabit, all evidence to the contrary.

In my reading of other times and cultures, I came to a few simple conclusions.  

If you were placed anywhere on earth, at any time in history, whether in a massive cultural construct, or within a small clan or tribe -- be it now or 40,000 years ago -- what human values would be universal?  What would you find within any grouping of human beings, at any place, at any time?  This is what I believe you would find:

Some form of love.  Some form of honor.  Some form of humor.  An appreciation of some form(s) of beauty.  Some form of awe or reverence, if only for life and Creation itself.  And care and concern for one's children.

These are the basics.  These are the core values that make human life bearable.  I believe you would find some variation upon those values no matter where you found yourself, no matter at what point in human history.  Those are our universally human, and humane, values.  And they're not too bad, are they?  All cultures are merely variations upon those themes, albeit with their own peculiar, untimely, and unseemly aberrations thrown in. That durned Forest of Arden.

I  hope we can get back down to the basics again.