Lilburn Tim - The Larger Conversation

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Copyright 2017 Tim Lilburn

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Lilburn, Tim, 1950, author

The larger conversation : contemplation and place / Tim Lilburn.

Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 9781772122992 (softcover).ISBN 9781772123609 (PDF).ISBN 9781772123586 (EPUB).ISBN 9781772123593 (Kindle)

1. Human ecologyPhilosophy. I. Title.

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Contemplata aliis tradere

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa Theologica , Part 2-2, question 188, article 6

Contents

Introduction

I TEACH A CLASS every few years called Settling the Mind in Wilderness: Nature Writing in Ancient Asia and Contemporary North America. Since the course focuses on writing about place, I sometimes will start the first session by asking students where we are. This question provokes some nervous stares, some eye-rolling, but then a few attempts at an answer, Victoria, Saanich, local political names. The university, in fact, lies in a Garry oak meadow, from which most of the oaks, camas lilies and native grasses have been removed, on the north slope of what municipal maps call Mt. Tolmie, the name borrowed from a nineteenth-century Hudsons Bay Company employee. The mountains name in SENOEN, the Indigenous language in much of the Saanich Peninsula, is W MIEEN (place of the deer); at its foot, in large pipes sunk under asphalt is Bowker Creek, a former salmon stream. The slope and all of the area around it are unceded territory. There are more geographically and historically close descriptions possible, I have no doubt, but I dont know them, or know them yet. A student once remarked that though shed lived in the city for many years and had driven past the mountain countless times, shed never really noticed it. She was stunned, in the weeks after the first class, to truly see it. This is what it is to be a colonial subjectyou move in a sort of daze in the place you call home.

This book represents a ragged beginning at a personal attempt at decolonization. This venture will strike some as peculiar, idiosyncratically marginal, though I see it as necessary work. I have no confidence the books ambition will be met, but hold a conviction that the effort it pursues must be taken up as a way of life. With this sort of undertaking, the notion of completion is foreign, but this inconclusivity is not cause to step aside from its challenge. The difficulty, if not futility, of this project, as I see it, is part of its charm and its durability.

In the work of Taiaiake Alfred, Glen Coulthard and others collected in Leanne Simpsons Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations , and in the thought of Neal McLeod and his collaborators in Indigenous Poetics in Canada , I read an account of a parallel, yet far more advanced, work taken up from a quite different point of view. Indeed, I received the notion of decolonization as an individual renovation, in the light of horrendous political pressures and amnesias, from the writings of Taiaiake Alfred, in particular his Was se: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom and his introduction to Lighting the Eighth Fire , and from others joining him at the University of Victoria and elsewhere in thinking about how to undo forms of thought and behaviour implanted by colonialism in First Nations communities. Alfred identifies this task as the work to undermine our disconnection from what it is to be Indigenous. This problem has been framed in many complicated ways, but really, what is colonization if not separation of our people from the land, the severance of the bonds of trust and love that held our people together so tightly in the not-so-distant past and the abandonment of our spiritual connection to the natural world? (Opening Words 910).

How to approach the work of autochthonicity from the side of settlers and their descendants, the supposed imperial victors? A certain form of rule, as Socrates makes clear in his exchanges with the disquietingly audacious Glaucon in the Republic , is itself a psychic illness, from which a score of additional maladies rapidly develop. The feverish city that arises in the dialogue as an expression of Glaucons unexamined desires is aggressively expansionist, violent within and without, just as it is luxurious and pleonexic. The presenting symptoms of the disease this sort of rule provokes are a breathtaking presumption and the appearance of behaviours that are more or less untouched by moral consideration. But there are deeper problems. I have long sensed, and recorded in previous books like Moosewood Sandhills and Living in the World As If It Were Home , that I was stuck in a deep cultural malaise marked by a sense of alienation from where I stood and a feeling of pronounced existential floating. This rootlessness is the capitalist psychic predicament, pointed out for me by George Grant in his prescient essay In Defence of North America in his book Technology and Empire . I float over the land, but also float in an intellectual tradition that offers no chthonic or sapiential mooring. The insight that my condition is, in significant part, the result of my occupying and deriving benefit from a colonial situation is, I am abashed to say, a relatively recent one. This account of my difficulties is deeper and more extensive than the epistemological connundra I have explored in earlier books, though I remain convinced these epistemological matters and their connections to politics remain central. Their remediation is crucial in undoing the imperial knot, in both its existential and political forms. For this reason, the decolonization project on the settler side, I believe, is foundationally contemplative and involves a psychic archeology and apokatastasis that are both philosophical and mystical theological, at least insofar as that latter pursuit is ascetical, because it is within these strata that the problems, the misalignments, that fashion the colonial appropriation of the world reside.