The Wolves of Eternity
Thoughts
It’s been a while since I’ve written here, and it may or may not be a while until I write here again. My list of reasons for this is long and nebulous and ever-mutating. I will spare you all the details, other than to say that I have been more interested lately in simply reading, contemplating, and trying to reduce my “self” to a primordial pulp, no different (or better or worse) from all the sacred shit that evolved to grow and run around outside, which is what I suggest to you that I am, and that you are, too. And anyway, it’s been going pretty well. The only hard part has been not writing. Not writing here, that is, not posting my thoughts to this sick husk of a reality that we call “the internet” or “online.” That part has taken significant resistance. But my resistance has been helped along by my growing knowledge that many of my thoughts about the world form from some dark membrane inside me. The world enters me via this membrane (and others), and therefore appears as it does to me only because I am me and have this particularly active dark membrane as of late (and maybe as of always). And anyway, who am I to tell you my thoughts about the modern world, many of which have taken a dismal turn over the past year or two or ten, when what I’m really, unavoidably telling you about is the dismal world inside me? No, the better, more constructive, and more practical thing to do, I think, is to focus on finding the stars in that dark membrane, and to then do what I can to turn their brightness up some. This will sound selfish. And maybe it is. I don’t really care about how I sound, as long as the sounds I make are as sincere as I can make them. But I don’t actually think it is selfish. Because as I already suggested, you and I are not separate from each other or any of the rest of the things in this life. More and brighter stars in my membrane are more and brighter stars in your membrane are more and brighter stars in the world. Full fucking stop.
Yesterday, I watched this sad and beautiful and moving documentary about nomads in Mongolia. It focuses mainly on a Mongolian shepherd named Purevjav, and follows his efforts to sustain his family and way of life as a pack of wolves threaten his flock (and therefore his family and way of life). All the while, there’s another looming threat from, as Purevjav puts it, “the two-legged man-wolf [that] devours his Mother Earth.”
The doc’s about 45 minutes. If it sounds at all interesting to you, I encourage you to watch it in full. But below are a few other quotes from Purevjav that struck me.
The first one, I think, speaks for itself.
When I enter town, it feels like I'm in a prison. We store our winter gear in this village. People now live behind fences and walls. No more cattle. Not even a horse to ride. How can people live like this?
The second one, I think says so much about human nature and our insatiable lot. When Purevjav’s son talks about leaving his family’s nine generations of nomadic life behind, and in doing so, accepting the “two-legged wolf’s” $30,000 payout for the pasture and moving to the city to get a job in a factory, Purevjav tries to talk him out of it, telling him he’ll just blow through it and come crawling back. And yet, this desire to always pursue something more is in Purevjav, too, just as it is in all of us. Earlier in the doc, Purevjav shares his dream:
After the fall of Communism, I bought a hundred sheep from the state farm. Today my herd has grown to almost 600. My dream is to have a thousand sheep. Still chasing that dream, to have a herd of a thousand means to retire like a prince among shepherds.
I hope he gets his thousand sheep, even though I know what will inevitably be waiting for him there if he does.
The doc ends (so, spoiler, sort of, I guess) with a brief dialogue between Purevjav and his grandson. The boy asks, “Is the wolf a devil or an angel, Grandpa?” To which Purevjav replies, “The wolf is both. Just like man.”
Book Recommendations
The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard1
The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia by Anya Bernstein
I’ve been obsessed with these books for weeks if not months now, and much of what I’ve written here today was inspired by the numerous (and numinous) themes in both. Both books have also done a lot to inspire much of what is at the top of my seemingly bottomless reading list right now. For a small taste of that list and a big taste of the books’ overall tenor, I suggest you spend some time at themorningstar.no.