First, I had no idea what an impact a photograph makes on a post. I thought I wrote a pretty good story my last time, but the photograph of myself, my son and grandson got way more attention than I ever imagined. Figuring out social media in terms of what works and what doesn’t, will likely simply remain a mystery to me. I am about to find out how well a cow resonates with all of you. It is actually part of the story I want to tell you this time.
A couple of days ago, I was reading one of my absolute favorite news sites, called Daily Chatter. They cover stories in countries like Burkina Faso and other ones you have likely never heard of either. The final piece is always some interesting tidbit of wonderfully, obscure information. This one dealt with scientists studying all the variations of “Moo”, the monosyllabic, one-word vocabulary of our popular, methane spewing bovines. I won’t bore you with the details, but the fact is, the varieties of this sound allow our future hamburgers to communicate all sorts of emotions and information to each other and each one is a unique fingerprint.
I realized that with all the attention we are paying to ourselves in terms of the climate emergency, we are not thinking about what life must be like for thousands and thousands of animal and plant species all over the world. Forget there are still morons, who don’t believe in the reality of the climate emergency. I am more interested in how the trees are sharing this devastating crisis amongst their own kind. We are so unbelievably human centric, we are not thinking how our animal brothers and sisters must feel. I can’t even begin to imagine how the loss of one billion, that is one thousand million animals was felt by the survivors in Australia and how it must have completely fractured their spirits. Imagine you are a badly burned koala, in some antiseptic animal hospital, with absolutely no one left that is familiar to you?
I spent the first forty plus years in NYC and being around animals, beyond an occasional dog or cat was about all I knew. For a couple of summers, I rented a house in Honesdale, PA, which sat on a family-run, dairy farm. Each morning I was there, I’d get up early and drag my ass out into the field, where I’d sit crossed legged, waiting for the sun to come up and embrace me. It was one of the influences that got me to head out of NYC and travel two-thirds of the way across the country to Santa Fe, NM. Native Americans out there had strong connections to animals, birds and virtually anything in their natural world, many totems with great power. The sudden presence of an owl would make the hair on my neck shoot out into space.
I think of nature as the most incredibly complex symphony imaginable. Its sounds are infinite, impossible for the human ear to distinguish one from the other. Even the loss of a chorus of one billion sounds can’t be heard. However, at some point, even if you have one million harps in perfect harmony, their gradual loss will eventually throw the entire symphony into some kind of ugly disharmony. It will cause our ears to bleed the life out of us and our souls to whither and die, because we are nothing without them.
In the midst of my Moo-ness, my son told me that tickets for Pearl Jam’s upcoming appearance at the Garden were sold out in a minute and were now being resold for over $500. I thought about how much Rock ’n Roll has meant to me for the past sixty-five years. It was this beautiful magic that belonged to all of us. I owned it and it owned me, it was perfect. In the beginning, no one had any idea how big it would become. It did whatever it wanted.
Before you say you liked the picture of the cow and leave me and my words behind you, give me a second to talk about the perversion of greed. The sounds of nature have been muted and my music long ago became a big business. Money decided that all sentient beings, other than ourselves, are merely here to serve its needs. Actually, money decided that most all of us are here for that same selfish purpose. We have huge industries, whose only job is to make money, with money and for money. Take the ticket bundlers for Pearl Jam shows. They are allowed to buy huge blocks of tickets and then sell them to you and I for a goddamn fortune. God forbid, I risk getting political, we have a health insurance scam in this country, whose only job is to make money for their share holders and CEO’s, which we are forced to pay for in order to get the medical care we desperately need. They get in between you and your doctor for no goddamn reason.
I am afraid we are so far gone into this miasma that you and I can’t get out of it. I think it is going to take the kids to take a look around and see that there are actually discordant sounds coming from the natural world, as it loses more and more of its members. They will actually begin to hear the voices as the choir becomes smaller. They are going to want access to their music on their terms. Greed will become more and more exposed for the soulless cancer it is. We need our children to take care of us.
OK, maybe the cow is not the most romantic beast to use as an example of our shared humanity, so to speak. We need everyone for the battles that lay ahead. The trees can see it all before it happens and all we have to do is listen.
I hear them.