WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.340 I'm the chair of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas Advisory Committee, 2 00:00:04.160 --> 00:00:07.860 and I congratulate you on your intelligence 3 00:00:07.860 --> 00:00:09.820 in choosing what's going to be the best afternoon session. 4 00:00:11.880 --> 00:00:12.940 Oh, which is wild. 5 00:00:14.080 --> 00:00:16.240 That is, the word for this afternoon is wild. 6 00:00:16.880 --> 00:00:18.740 Let me begin with serendipity. 7 00:00:20.280 --> 00:00:23.160 People often ask me about how it is that we come to choose 8 00:00:23.620 --> 00:00:25.440 the particular speakers that we invite. 9 00:00:25.520 --> 00:00:27.900 Often the speakers themselves say, in a rather bemused way, 10 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:29.200 why am I here? 11 00:00:30.900 --> 00:00:31.860 So, Jay's story. 12 00:00:32.780 --> 00:00:35.400 I was driving between Canberra and Sydney 13 00:00:35.860 --> 00:00:38.360 in an idling kind of fashion a few years ago, 14 00:00:38.820 --> 00:00:40.700 and I was on the edge of the Southern Highlands, 15 00:00:40.800 --> 00:00:42.620 and there's this cute little town there, 16 00:00:42.660 --> 00:00:45.240 a 19th century village, really, 17 00:00:45.720 --> 00:00:47.180 a bit sleepy, called Berrima. 18 00:00:47.380 --> 00:00:49.400 And on the edge of Berrima is a very big barn, 19 00:00:49.880 --> 00:00:52.880 and the very big barn houses a bookshop, 20 00:00:52.980 --> 00:00:54.620 a second-hand bookshop called Berkelows, 21 00:00:54.740 --> 00:00:57.280 which is Australia's largest second-hand bookshop, I believe. 22 00:00:58.460 --> 00:00:59.840 So, naturally, I stopped for a brown. 23 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:01.780 I was a bit confused, and I picked up this book, 24 00:01:02.420 --> 00:01:05.280 Pip Pip, A Sideways Look at Time. 25 00:01:06.240 --> 00:01:08.640 I couldn't resist the lure of the title. 26 00:01:10.500 --> 00:01:11.840 I'm an economist by background, 27 00:01:11.960 --> 00:01:14.400 and I often read a lot of books about time. 28 00:01:14.920 --> 00:01:16.820 And the books that I read talk about time 29 00:01:16.820 --> 00:01:18.220 as kind of productive efficiency, 30 00:01:18.600 --> 00:01:21.060 and even Marx wrote about it like that. 31 00:01:21.440 --> 00:01:23.720 Or they talk about it as something that people optimise, 32 00:01:23.720 --> 00:01:25.920 a choice between work and play. 33 00:01:26.300 --> 00:01:28.420 And I picked up the book and started reading it, 34 00:01:28.460 --> 00:01:29.760 and I took it home, 35 00:01:29.760 --> 00:01:32.480 and I must say it offended almost everything I'd been taught. 36 00:01:34.220 --> 00:01:35.780 I was completely enthralled. 37 00:01:36.480 --> 00:01:38.860 I wanted to argue with Jay on every single page, 38 00:01:39.540 --> 00:01:41.580 and I feared I'd come off much the worse for it. 39 00:01:42.960 --> 00:01:45.040 The book spoke to me and stuck with me, 40 00:01:45.140 --> 00:01:46.900 and I trusted my instinct, 41 00:01:46.960 --> 00:01:48.740 and at one of our committee meetings I said, 42 00:01:48.780 --> 00:01:51.720 we must have Jay Griffiths come along to the next festival. 43 00:01:52.040 --> 00:01:53.240 So I'm very pleased that I did, 44 00:01:53.840 --> 00:01:55.440 and I'm very pleased that she accepted. 45 00:01:56.920 --> 00:01:57.960 Last word on time. 46 00:01:58.540 --> 00:01:59.120 Timing's everything. 47 00:02:00.500 --> 00:02:01.740 Back to serendipity. 48 00:02:01.800 --> 00:02:05.540 Jay's new book, Wild, An Elemental Journey, 49 00:02:05.760 --> 00:02:07.520 was published just in time, 50 00:02:07.600 --> 00:02:09.120 just in time for this festival, 51 00:02:09.200 --> 00:02:10.640 for her to come and talk about it to us today. 52 00:02:11.100 --> 00:02:12.700 And my brief perusal of it, 53 00:02:13.240 --> 00:02:15.680 it's completely and wildly intoxicating. 54 00:02:18.080 --> 00:02:20.440 One last word before we get on to Wild, which is brave. 55 00:02:20.780 --> 00:02:24.960 And I think what characterises Jay's writing is its braveness. 56 00:02:25.060 --> 00:02:28.280 She's politically brave and personally brave. 57 00:02:28.340 --> 00:02:29.460 She's politically brave by, 58 00:02:30.020 --> 00:02:31.380 questioning the orthodoxy, 59 00:02:31.880 --> 00:02:33.820 but she's personally brave because she lives it. 60 00:02:34.300 --> 00:02:36.780 Lives her politics, and I think in doing so, 61 00:02:36.820 --> 00:02:39.600 consciously shunning the kind of material wards 62 00:02:39.600 --> 00:02:40.620 that would surely have come her way 63 00:02:40.620 --> 00:02:41.900 if she'd gone a more conventional path. 64 00:02:42.440 --> 00:02:45.080 I think it's liberated her, that braveness, 65 00:02:45.120 --> 00:02:47.660 and given us this wildly liberating book. 66 00:02:48.440 --> 00:02:50.940 Jay, I want you to speak to us about what it means to be wild. 67 00:02:52.760 --> 00:02:53.160 . 68 00:03:03.640 --> 00:03:04.320 . 69 00:03:11.740 --> 00:03:13.140 . 70 00:03:13.140 --> 00:03:13.260 . 71 00:03:13.260 --> 00:03:13.280 . 72 00:03:13.280 --> 00:03:13.300 . 73 00:03:13.300 --> 00:03:13.340 . 74 00:03:25.600 --> 00:03:27.000 . 75 00:03:27.000 --> 00:03:29.740 . 76 00:03:29.760 --> 00:03:35.040 I wanted to go to places that Europeans have visited and termed a wilderness, a wasteland, 77 00:03:35.240 --> 00:03:39.340 and I wanted to ask the people who actually lived there how they saw it. 78 00:03:40.020 --> 00:03:44.440 Usually, of course, they said, of course this isn't a wasteland, it's our home. 79 00:03:45.480 --> 00:03:49.100 I went to shamans in the Amazon, to Inuit people in the Arctic, 80 00:03:49.420 --> 00:03:54.540 Aboriginal communities in Central Australia, and to the freedom fighters of West Papua. 81 00:03:55.600 --> 00:04:01.740 I was looking for the wildness of nature, but not in the conceit of the dominant culture 82 00:04:01.740 --> 00:04:06.460 that wild nature is savage and cruel, but actually rather the reverse, 83 00:04:07.160 --> 00:04:14.740 to see the inherent law in wild nature and how what is most wild is actually most kind. 84 00:04:15.600 --> 00:04:19.020 If you want to make any animal cruel, put it in a cage. 85 00:04:19.700 --> 00:04:23.840 From the etymology of the word kind in Anglo-Saxon, 86 00:04:23.940 --> 00:04:24.520 you have, 87 00:04:24.540 --> 00:04:25.340 you have natural. 88 00:04:25.660 --> 00:04:31.760 And so what is most natural, most wild, is actually in the root of language, most kind. 89 00:04:34.080 --> 00:04:37.020 I was looking for the will of the wild. 90 00:04:37.840 --> 00:04:43.820 I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. 91 00:04:45.020 --> 00:04:47.160 Wildness is resolute for life. 92 00:04:47.220 --> 00:04:48.260 It cannot be otherwise. 93 00:04:48.300 --> 00:04:49.640 It will die in captivity. 94 00:04:50.280 --> 00:04:54.360 It is elemental, pure freedom, pure passion. 95 00:04:54.540 --> 00:04:55.300 Pure hunger. 96 00:04:55.480 --> 00:04:57.620 It is its own manifesto. 97 00:04:59.080 --> 00:05:05.260 Some writers on wilderness see humans as a kind of blot on the landscape of pristine nature. 98 00:05:05.780 --> 00:05:11.420 And it's an argument which has been used to justify throwing native people off their lands, 99 00:05:11.480 --> 00:05:15.980 to create wilderness areas, kind of giant parks for white people to play in. 100 00:05:17.120 --> 00:05:18.500 I don't see it like that. 101 00:05:18.860 --> 00:05:22.400 To me, the human spirit is not a stain on the land, 102 00:05:22.520 --> 00:05:23.980 but rather we. 103 00:05:24.540 --> 00:05:28.380 We are one of the most exquisite realizations of wildness. 104 00:05:28.960 --> 00:05:33.420 For us all, every dawn, the lucky skies and the pipes, 105 00:05:34.300 --> 00:05:35.900 and anyone can hear them if they listen. 106 00:05:36.460 --> 00:05:39.560 Because we are, every one of us, a force of nature. 107 00:05:39.780 --> 00:05:45.500 Though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never quite forgotten. 108 00:05:46.220 --> 00:05:48.920 The truant art, the nomad heart. 109 00:05:50.280 --> 00:05:54.460 Because the human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness. 110 00:05:54.540 --> 00:05:55.920 To really live. 111 00:05:56.080 --> 00:05:58.180 To snatch the fruit and suck it. 112 00:05:58.280 --> 00:05:59.400 To spill the juice. 113 00:05:59.880 --> 00:06:01.500 And this is the first command. 114 00:06:01.620 --> 00:06:04.340 To live in fealty to the feral angel. 115 00:06:05.260 --> 00:06:07.620 We may think we're domesticated. 116 00:06:07.940 --> 00:06:09.040 But we are not. 117 00:06:09.740 --> 00:06:11.800 Feral in pheromone and intuition. 118 00:06:12.120 --> 00:06:14.000 Feral in our sweat and fear. 119 00:06:14.160 --> 00:06:16.480 Feral in tongue and language. 120 00:06:16.800 --> 00:06:19.180 Feral in cock and cunt. 121 00:06:20.580 --> 00:06:24.260 There is to me a deep relationship between wildness and sense, 122 00:06:24.340 --> 00:06:24.520 who we are, and who we are not. 123 00:06:24.540 --> 00:06:28.260 The relationship between humans and wildness is erotic. 124 00:06:29.020 --> 00:06:33.280 In the western tradition, Dionysus was the god of having a wild time. 125 00:06:33.420 --> 00:06:35.340 Also the god of forest orgies. 126 00:06:35.560 --> 00:06:40.540 And the priapic Pan is lightfoot with a restless, truculent horniness. 127 00:06:42.720 --> 00:06:45.740 In the Amazon, meanwhile, the master of animals, 128 00:06:46.360 --> 00:06:51.200 a figure which is peculiarly like the figure of Pan in the western tradition. 129 00:06:51.360 --> 00:06:54.520 The master of animals is associated with the fertility of animals. 130 00:06:54.520 --> 00:06:55.140 The master of animals is associated with the fertility of game. 131 00:06:55.280 --> 00:06:57.800 And rainbows represent his ejaculation. 132 00:06:59.060 --> 00:07:02.280 The Amazon, like the forests of Europe used to do, 133 00:07:02.380 --> 00:07:04.920 throbs with an unmistakable pulse. 134 00:07:05.140 --> 00:07:08.000 The grinning green man with a hooded wink. 135 00:07:08.280 --> 00:07:12.720 His green wand in one hand and his other bolt upright in the other. 136 00:07:14.060 --> 00:07:15.740 Nature swells with sex. 137 00:07:16.360 --> 00:07:21.380 Cooing, licking, flighting, courting, hinting, mating and intimating. 138 00:07:21.640 --> 00:07:24.360 Carnal knowledge, knowing, kenning, cunning. 139 00:07:24.440 --> 00:07:24.500 The nature of the world is a 140 00:07:23.520 --> 00:07:24.520 ! 141 00:07:25.340 --> 00:07:26.500 Nothing unthrust. 142 00:07:26.860 --> 00:07:28.360 Nothing unfecund. 143 00:07:29.820 --> 00:07:31.720 Ripeness lusts till it rots. 144 00:07:31.760 --> 00:07:37.240 And then its very rottenness makes a dank warm bed for the next tight tip to poke through. 145 00:07:37.760 --> 00:07:41.520 For nudging deep down in the chthonic nub of things, 146 00:07:41.620 --> 00:07:45.060 in the sweet and musky smell of a warm rotting log, 147 00:07:45.720 --> 00:07:48.000 aortha begins the cycle again. 148 00:07:49.660 --> 00:07:54.100 If you had to choose part of the human anatomy as an analogy for wilderness, 149 00:07:54.520 --> 00:07:56.100 you'd have to go for the loins. 150 00:07:56.340 --> 00:08:02.620 And humans lose an acute and vital part of our sensuality when we ignore the wild world. 151 00:08:02.860 --> 00:08:05.780 The grinding of shoots thrusting up into the light. 152 00:08:06.280 --> 00:08:10.760 Birds flightily dipping as they twang one in between wingbeats. 153 00:08:11.300 --> 00:08:15.340 Because this is the longest love affair we humans have ever known. 154 00:08:15.420 --> 00:08:18.180 The lifelong intoxication of the senses. 155 00:08:18.440 --> 00:08:21.980 Which is why even in the modern western world, for many people, 156 00:08:21.980 --> 00:08:26.500 their most lasting sensual satisfaction comes from their gardens. 157 00:08:31.180 --> 00:08:37.240 The dominant culture has tried for centuries to portray nature as mindless. 158 00:08:37.880 --> 00:08:40.020 Indigenous people don't see it that way. 159 00:08:40.240 --> 00:08:43.880 For every indigenous culture I've known, it's a minded world. 160 00:08:44.600 --> 00:08:50.920 An Inuk woman told me that for the Inuit, all the surroundings have spirit and are aware. 161 00:08:50.920 --> 00:08:55.480 Even ideas such as sleep or weather are alive. 162 00:08:56.580 --> 00:09:00.660 Elders stress that no animal should be killed unnecessarily or made to suffer, 163 00:09:00.780 --> 00:09:02.420 or be mocked or made fun of. 164 00:09:02.660 --> 00:09:06.060 Everything, even vegetation, should be treated with care. 165 00:09:06.920 --> 00:09:09.240 Even bees or spiders have minds. 166 00:09:09.920 --> 00:09:13.120 And in their own kind, they say, in their own kind they are adults. 167 00:09:14.100 --> 00:09:17.720 One Iglulik elder said, that is why you do not mistreat them. 168 00:09:17.800 --> 00:09:19.500 Because they can think too. 169 00:09:19.680 --> 00:09:20.520 Subtitles by the Amara.org community 170 00:09:20.920 --> 00:09:25.500 Indigenous people perceive the wild epistemology of jaguar, of parrot, 171 00:09:25.620 --> 00:09:26.760 their own ways of knowing. 172 00:09:26.980 --> 00:09:29.800 They understand that a tapir has its way of thinking 173 00:09:29.800 --> 00:09:34.380 and that some plants, called plant teachers, can actually teach humans. 174 00:09:35.440 --> 00:09:39.820 And in perhaps the most extraordinary example of knowledge coming through nature, 175 00:09:40.160 --> 00:09:43.680 indigenous people all over the world have practiced shape-shifting, 176 00:09:43.740 --> 00:09:47.340 that mysterious and entirely wild way of knowing. 177 00:09:50.920 --> 00:09:55.080 My journey for this book began by being lost in a wasteland of depression. 178 00:09:56.040 --> 00:10:01.040 I was invited by an anthropologist to meet shamans that he knew in the Peruvian Amazon 179 00:10:01.040 --> 00:10:08.980 and to drink ayahuasca, which is a very strong shamanic medicine used to treat a very wide variety of things, 180 00:10:09.060 --> 00:10:11.820 including divorce, diarrhea and depression. 181 00:10:12.260 --> 00:10:18.920 And as I thought at the time, I was very lucky I didn't have all three at once. 182 00:10:20.920 --> 00:10:24.100 The whole episode with the shamans was extraordinary to me, 183 00:10:24.140 --> 00:10:27.020 not only for the way that it lifted months of depression, 184 00:10:27.920 --> 00:10:29.520 which I had been prey to for many years, 185 00:10:29.720 --> 00:10:34.480 but also because it gave me a different way of understanding intelligence within nature. 186 00:10:36.180 --> 00:10:40.680 For shamans in particular perceive how animals have their own way of knowing, 187 00:10:40.840 --> 00:10:44.900 that a jaguar has its way of thinking, and that plants can teach humans. 188 00:10:45.520 --> 00:10:50.900 The West, though, by contrast, has long operated what I call an intellectual apartheid, 189 00:10:52.120 --> 00:10:56.900 arrogantly certain that its own expertise is the only knowledge worth a name. 190 00:10:57.040 --> 00:11:00.720 It cannot manage to respect other human societies' epistemologies, 191 00:11:00.860 --> 00:11:03.080 let alone accept that an animal could think. 192 00:11:03.380 --> 00:11:05.760 And as for a vegetable being a teacher, 193 00:11:05.960 --> 00:11:13.180 it's instructive to note that in the Amazon, a healer who uses plants is called a vegetalista, 194 00:11:13.920 --> 00:11:15.720 suggesting knowledge and wisdom. 195 00:11:16.920 --> 00:11:20.900 In English slang, though, to be a vegetable is a heartless tale. 196 00:11:20.920 --> 00:11:25.540 It's a term for someone in a coma, and vegging out means mindless laziness. 197 00:11:29.240 --> 00:11:34.060 In the days of empire, that single way of knowing invaded the wild world, 198 00:11:34.260 --> 00:11:40.940 and as it did so, it claimed that it was an age of discovery and an expansion of the known world. 199 00:11:41.540 --> 00:11:47.620 The false claims of European history that knowledge increased in that era, it did not. 200 00:11:47.740 --> 00:11:49.700 The truth was the opposite. 201 00:11:49.700 --> 00:11:53.400 For destroying human cultures and animals' habitats, 202 00:11:53.780 --> 00:11:57.500 there was in fact a net reduction in the world's knowledge. 203 00:11:58.520 --> 00:12:04.800 Jared Diamond remarks that the population decline among native people in the century or two following Columbus' arrival 204 00:12:04.800 --> 00:12:09.240 is thought to have been up to 95% a holocaust. 205 00:12:11.860 --> 00:12:15.180 Accepting that there are different ways of knowing, different ways of speaking, 206 00:12:15.340 --> 00:12:16.920 is the beginning of democracy, 207 00:12:16.920 --> 00:12:21.840 and forests are a model of a wild, tatterdemalian democracy, 208 00:12:22.080 --> 00:12:25.300 of seed pod, riverbank, wind, and caiman. 209 00:12:25.420 --> 00:12:29.100 As if pollen mattered, and a beetle had a vote, 210 00:12:29.280 --> 00:12:33.060 it's an ultimate parlement from the French, literally speaking, 211 00:12:33.400 --> 00:12:35.540 where all voices can be heard. 212 00:12:35.780 --> 00:12:40.100 For democracy is not only a matter of voting, but of talking and of discussion. 213 00:12:40.900 --> 00:12:46.900 The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore identified democratic pluralism and an ecosystem of 214 00:12:46.900 --> 00:12:50.860 ecological culture as the distinctive marks of Indian civilization. 215 00:12:52.100 --> 00:12:55.800 From the forests we learnt democracy, says Vandana Shiva, 216 00:12:56.100 --> 00:12:58.140 that every species has its place, 217 00:12:58.900 --> 00:13:03.680 because every species adds its voice to the wild conversation of world mind, 218 00:13:03.940 --> 00:13:06.520 not only democratic, but ecocratic. 219 00:13:08.060 --> 00:13:08.780 . 220 00:13:11.720 --> 00:13:12.440 . 221 00:13:15.680 --> 00:13:16.320 ! 222 00:13:16.320 --> 00:13:17.780 When I was in the Amazon, 223 00:13:18.040 --> 00:13:25.120 I met a missionary who was deliberately trying to contact so-called uncontacted people. 224 00:13:26.780 --> 00:13:31.020 He knew, because history told him that his contact could kill them, 225 00:13:31.120 --> 00:13:36.340 because he could be taking with him diseases that the people had no resistance to. 226 00:13:36.780 --> 00:13:41.500 Indigenous campaigners were begging him not to do this, but he was still doing it. 227 00:13:41.500 --> 00:13:48.360 He found it quite hard to answer which of the Ten Commandments authorizes that kind of action. 228 00:13:49.620 --> 00:13:53.860 In the Amazon, I was also told by indigenous people that I should go and talk to Tarzan, 229 00:13:55.640 --> 00:13:59.340 who's a Harakambut man in the Peruvian Amazon in his 90s, 230 00:13:59.340 --> 00:14:04.160 probably the only person in the world called Tarzan who's never seen a Tarzan film in his life. 231 00:14:05.580 --> 00:14:11.480 But he was old enough to remember what happened when the missionaries first came to his land, 232 00:14:11.480 --> 00:14:41.460 he said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said he also said 233 00:14:41.460 --> 00:14:43.920 to get that succinct a comment. 234 00:14:46.320 --> 00:14:49.240 But missionaries in the Amazon and elsewhere 235 00:14:49.240 --> 00:14:51.320 have been very well documented 236 00:14:51.920 --> 00:14:55.700 for greasing the paths for mining and logging industries 237 00:14:55.700 --> 00:14:58.180 as well as for their own work. 238 00:14:59.860 --> 00:15:02.240 The fundamentalist missionaries have axed 239 00:15:02.240 --> 00:15:04.960 not only the groves and life ways of the forest, 240 00:15:05.160 --> 00:15:07.620 but also the thought ways, the philosophies, 241 00:15:07.620 --> 00:15:09.160 the knowledges of forest people. 242 00:15:09.160 --> 00:15:11.900 A Shawi man I met in Peru said, 243 00:15:12.040 --> 00:15:15.180 the evangelical church extinguishes our knowledge, 244 00:15:15.380 --> 00:15:16.280 that richness. 245 00:15:17.260 --> 00:15:19.500 And I met one Aguaruna shaman 246 00:15:19.500 --> 00:15:22.020 who was too frightened to be known for what he was 247 00:15:22.020 --> 00:15:25.000 and he had good reasons because 10 to 15 years before, 248 00:15:25.760 --> 00:15:28.260 missionaries in his area had persuaded the Aguaruna 249 00:15:28.260 --> 00:15:30.220 to think that their shamans were harming them. 250 00:15:30.380 --> 00:15:33.300 So the Aguaruna killed their own wisest men. 251 00:15:34.140 --> 00:15:37.440 I make no apology for criticizing fundamentalist missionaries. 252 00:15:37.840 --> 00:15:38.840 Local people, 253 00:15:39.160 --> 00:15:40.100 in West Papua, 254 00:15:40.200 --> 00:15:42.720 have called them one of the four greatest threats 255 00:15:42.720 --> 00:15:45.180 to ecological and cultural survival. 256 00:15:46.220 --> 00:15:48.200 And when you consider that another threat 257 00:15:48.200 --> 00:15:50.900 is the genocidal Indonesian military invasion, 258 00:15:51.080 --> 00:15:54.320 you see that competition for that accolade is stiff. 259 00:15:57.700 --> 00:15:59.740 Forest law and shamanic knowledge 260 00:15:59.740 --> 00:16:01.800 is an entire way of knowing. 261 00:16:02.060 --> 00:16:05.020 It's as beautiful and as profound as any in the West. 262 00:16:05.480 --> 00:16:07.500 A curandero is a qualified doctor. 263 00:16:07.740 --> 00:16:09.140 A shaman is a professional. 264 00:16:09.140 --> 00:16:09.420 A professor. 265 00:16:09.420 --> 00:16:11.360 A grove is a university library. 266 00:16:11.820 --> 00:16:13.500 The Amazon has its artists. 267 00:16:13.620 --> 00:16:14.580 It's John Clare's. 268 00:16:14.680 --> 00:16:15.260 It's Mozart's. 269 00:16:15.540 --> 00:16:16.200 It's Plato's. 270 00:16:16.280 --> 00:16:17.020 It's Debussy's. 271 00:16:17.140 --> 00:16:17.740 It's Ovid's. 272 00:16:18.020 --> 00:16:21.300 Everywhere, a depth of art and curing, 273 00:16:21.300 --> 00:16:23.260 music, metaphor, and mind. 274 00:16:23.640 --> 00:16:25.920 The Amazon is a forest of knowing. 275 00:16:26.340 --> 00:16:28.240 But in deforesting the Amazon, 276 00:16:28.380 --> 00:16:29.600 the fundamentalist sects, 277 00:16:29.600 --> 00:16:31.520 together with the corporations and the states, 278 00:16:31.720 --> 00:16:33.960 are deforesting the human mind. 279 00:16:35.360 --> 00:16:36.920 So kill pity. 280 00:16:36.920 --> 00:16:37.000 Pity. 281 00:16:37.780 --> 00:16:39.420 Crack down on kindness. 282 00:16:40.520 --> 00:16:42.120 Pour mercury over metaphor. 283 00:16:42.740 --> 00:16:43.980 Burn their books. 284 00:16:44.120 --> 00:16:45.480 Hack down their languages. 285 00:16:45.640 --> 00:16:47.240 And axe their philosophies. 286 00:16:47.740 --> 00:16:51.240 Tip Agent Orange into the eyes of a forest Picasso. 287 00:16:52.220 --> 00:16:55.340 Tie a Shakespeare's hands behind his back 288 00:16:55.340 --> 00:16:56.880 with razor wire. 289 00:16:58.300 --> 00:17:00.160 Stamp on Fontaine's feet. 290 00:17:00.380 --> 00:17:02.400 Crack Joyce's head against a wall 291 00:17:02.400 --> 00:17:04.580 until the words whimper and fail him. 292 00:17:04.820 --> 00:17:06.900 Daub graffiti over an LBJ. 293 00:17:06.920 --> 00:17:07.260 Greco. 294 00:17:07.560 --> 00:17:09.520 Bulldoze the sculptures of Rodin. 295 00:17:09.620 --> 00:17:12.460 Burn the entire Oxford English Dictionary. 296 00:17:12.480 --> 00:17:14.860 Slash every copy of Jane Eyre. 297 00:17:15.480 --> 00:17:17.580 Napalm, the Berlin Philharmonic. 298 00:17:18.140 --> 00:17:19.840 And say amen to it all. 299 00:17:22.340 --> 00:17:25.280 All human mind is free and wild 300 00:17:25.280 --> 00:17:27.100 and needs wild land, 301 00:17:27.240 --> 00:17:28.600 its objective correlative. 302 00:17:29.640 --> 00:17:31.440 But societies which cage the mind, 303 00:17:31.660 --> 00:17:33.420 removing it from wild land, 304 00:17:33.540 --> 00:17:36.720 imprisoning it with clocks and enclosure and routine, 305 00:17:37.520 --> 00:17:39.480 pettifogging it with paperwork 306 00:17:39.480 --> 00:17:42.080 in a dreary, photocopied world, 307 00:17:42.840 --> 00:17:46.540 run the risk of creating dementia and misery. 308 00:17:46.680 --> 00:17:49.300 The human mind developed in wilderness 309 00:17:49.300 --> 00:17:50.580 and needs it still. 310 00:17:53.560 --> 00:17:55.420 In the West Papuan Highlands 311 00:17:55.420 --> 00:17:56.800 there's a tribe called the Dhani. 312 00:17:57.000 --> 00:17:59.980 The most important word in the Dhani language is 313 00:17:59.980 --> 00:18:00.800 wa. 314 00:18:01.740 --> 00:18:03.140 It means yes. 315 00:18:04.160 --> 00:18:06.060 It also means thank you. 316 00:18:06.220 --> 00:18:06.900 Thank you. 317 00:18:06.920 --> 00:18:07.880 And it means hello, 318 00:18:08.660 --> 00:18:09.860 as well as goodbye, 319 00:18:10.140 --> 00:18:11.660 and nice one, 320 00:18:11.780 --> 00:18:12.580 and I agree. 321 00:18:13.020 --> 00:18:14.880 So it's a very important word, wa. 322 00:18:15.800 --> 00:18:18.960 The second most important word to know in these highlands 323 00:18:18.960 --> 00:18:20.300 is madeka. 324 00:18:21.240 --> 00:18:23.400 It's the Indonesian word for freedom. 325 00:18:24.480 --> 00:18:27.060 Indonesia invaded in the early 60s 326 00:18:27.060 --> 00:18:29.860 and has been carrying out a genocide ever since, 327 00:18:29.960 --> 00:18:32.840 thought to number up to 100,000 deaths. 328 00:18:33.440 --> 00:18:36.520 And it's probably the most under-reported genocide 329 00:18:36.520 --> 00:18:37.360 in the world. 330 00:18:38.360 --> 00:18:41.200 And one which has been supported tacitly and actively 331 00:18:41.200 --> 00:18:43.580 by British and American governments and corporations, 332 00:18:44.020 --> 00:18:47.900 making huge financial profits from a genocide. 333 00:18:49.220 --> 00:18:51.240 There are many tribes in West Papua, 334 00:18:51.260 --> 00:18:52.140 many different languages, 335 00:18:52.360 --> 00:18:55.460 and Indonesian has been adopted as a kind of lingua franca 336 00:18:55.460 --> 00:18:56.940 between Papuan people. 337 00:18:57.800 --> 00:18:59.160 So, madeka, freedom. 338 00:19:01.100 --> 00:19:04.340 All mountains are profoundly associated with freedom 339 00:19:04.340 --> 00:19:05.560 in all its forms. 340 00:19:05.560 --> 00:19:08.200 Air, wind, the flight of birds, 341 00:19:08.420 --> 00:19:09.580 the wings of the mind, 342 00:19:09.640 --> 00:19:11.520 for thoughts have a quality of glide. 343 00:19:12.220 --> 00:19:14.320 And the human mind needs mountains 344 00:19:14.320 --> 00:19:15.800 as a mirror for its flight. 345 00:19:16.680 --> 00:19:19.100 One peak of Kilimanjaro is called Uhuru, 346 00:19:19.260 --> 00:19:19.960 meaning freedom, 347 00:19:20.140 --> 00:19:21.480 and it suits them all. 348 00:19:21.720 --> 00:19:23.800 But perhaps nowhere in the world 349 00:19:23.800 --> 00:19:25.180 is there a more poignant meeting 350 00:19:25.180 --> 00:19:28.320 of mountain and mind and freedom 351 00:19:28.320 --> 00:19:30.320 than in the West Papuan highlands, 352 00:19:30.440 --> 00:19:31.960 where everyone, I was told, 353 00:19:32.080 --> 00:19:33.560 man, woman, and child, 354 00:19:33.640 --> 00:19:34.720 is a freedom fighter. 355 00:19:35.560 --> 00:19:37.640 They die for freedom, willingly so. 356 00:19:38.440 --> 00:19:40.220 Their flag, called the Morning Star, 357 00:19:40.320 --> 00:19:41.400 is called the flag of freedom, 358 00:19:42.380 --> 00:19:45.300 and it's been banned by the invading Indonesian army. 359 00:19:45.600 --> 00:19:48.600 I met one man who was almost killed for raising it. 360 00:19:48.640 --> 00:19:50.080 Countless others have been murdered. 361 00:19:50.340 --> 00:19:53.400 But still they raise it, still a shot for it. 362 00:19:53.840 --> 00:19:55.860 So a man, virtually naked, 363 00:19:55.900 --> 00:19:57.880 except for his courage and his defiance, 364 00:19:58.040 --> 00:19:59.760 runs the flag up the flagpole 365 00:19:59.760 --> 00:20:01.940 in the theater of the human soul. 366 00:20:02.180 --> 00:20:03.640 It's a soaring gesture, 367 00:20:03.960 --> 00:20:05.540 an arrow shot for the sky, 368 00:20:05.560 --> 00:20:08.920 and he's gunned down by a bully, 369 00:20:09.100 --> 00:20:10.920 armed with a British gun. 370 00:20:14.200 --> 00:20:17.440 Mountains are the quintessential site of political freedom. 371 00:20:17.740 --> 00:20:19.260 They're home of freedom fighters, 372 00:20:19.580 --> 00:20:20.600 independence movements, 373 00:20:20.780 --> 00:20:22.920 and political outlaws all over the world. 374 00:20:23.860 --> 00:20:24.820 Resisting the occupation, 375 00:20:25.360 --> 00:20:27.380 Papuans have fled to the hills for safety, 376 00:20:27.540 --> 00:20:30.060 and though the Indonesians have burnt the forests 377 00:20:30.060 --> 00:20:31.000 and bombed the villages, 378 00:20:31.120 --> 00:20:33.040 they cannot control the highlands. 379 00:20:34.240 --> 00:20:35.220 The Kelamuti volcano, 380 00:20:35.280 --> 00:20:35.540 which is the highest mountain in the world, 381 00:20:35.540 --> 00:20:35.640 is a symbol of the independence movement. 382 00:20:35.640 --> 00:20:36.880 The San Francisco and Flores near East Timor 383 00:20:36.880 --> 00:20:38.280 was adopted as a symbol 384 00:20:38.280 --> 00:20:40.420 of the East Timorese independence movement. 385 00:20:40.900 --> 00:20:43.720 Fidel Castro's fighters against the Batista dictatorship 386 00:20:43.720 --> 00:20:44.940 lived in the mountains, 387 00:20:45.200 --> 00:20:48.100 and of course the Zapatista freedom fighters 388 00:20:48.100 --> 00:20:50.740 operate from the mountains of Chiapas. 389 00:20:52.600 --> 00:20:56.540 The demand for freedom is universal and political, 390 00:20:56.840 --> 00:20:59.120 but also intensely personal, 391 00:20:59.380 --> 00:21:01.920 and one which can require courage to follow. 392 00:21:03.020 --> 00:21:05.260 Raw freedom hurls you terror and wonder, 393 00:21:05.340 --> 00:21:05.520 and it's a very important part of the freedom movement. 394 00:21:05.520 --> 00:21:07.740 it writes its ruthless poems in your life. 395 00:21:08.560 --> 00:21:10.440 Freedom, un-cathedral-able, 396 00:21:10.560 --> 00:21:12.620 despises any orthodoxy, 397 00:21:12.640 --> 00:21:15.640 for its path sweeps lonely to the summit. 398 00:21:15.900 --> 00:21:17.740 No map, no guide. 399 00:21:18.620 --> 00:21:20.480 Do you have the courage for it? 400 00:21:20.680 --> 00:21:21.440 Do I? 401 00:21:22.320 --> 00:21:24.900 For its pyrotechnics and its unforgiving, 402 00:21:24.960 --> 00:21:27.300 for its gambling, the peak or the crevasse, 403 00:21:27.980 --> 00:21:28.720 ace or two. 404 00:21:29.300 --> 00:21:30.820 If we wanted to play safe, 405 00:21:30.880 --> 00:21:32.120 we should never have come up here 406 00:21:32.120 --> 00:21:34.360 to the site of freedom for both political 407 00:21:34.360 --> 00:21:35.400 and social rebels, 408 00:21:35.520 --> 00:21:37.720 the freedom of the mad and the manic and the misunderstood, 409 00:21:38.200 --> 00:21:41.160 the misfits and artists, anarchists and poets. 410 00:21:42.400 --> 00:21:45.020 Freedom is not the opposite of necessity, 411 00:21:45.380 --> 00:21:49.280 but itself an implacable, electric and sudden necessity, 412 00:21:49.700 --> 00:21:50.800 an apparent paradox, 413 00:21:51.060 --> 00:21:54.340 but the only one which leaves the human spirit intact. 414 00:21:55.140 --> 00:21:56.040 There is no compromise. 415 00:21:56.580 --> 00:21:58.340 Freedom is not polite. 416 00:21:59.760 --> 00:22:01.820 It doesn't knock or telephone first. 417 00:22:01.820 --> 00:22:05.820 It slams its hand down on your desk and says, 418 00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:08.560 dance, as the mad fiddler, 419 00:22:08.640 --> 00:22:10.540 his fingers bleeding on the strings, 420 00:22:10.700 --> 00:22:13.200 plays an elegy at the speed of a reckless waltz 421 00:22:13.200 --> 00:22:14.960 till the sky breaks down in tears. 422 00:22:16.760 --> 00:22:18.460 Freedom is absolutist. 423 00:22:19.140 --> 00:22:21.980 I so love freedom, wrote Michel de Montaigne. 424 00:22:22.120 --> 00:22:24.760 I so love freedom that if someone forbade me 425 00:22:24.760 --> 00:22:27.260 access to the remotest corner of the Indies, 426 00:22:27.360 --> 00:22:29.260 I should feel myself a little hemmed in. 427 00:22:30.500 --> 00:22:31.800 But modern urbanism, 428 00:22:31.820 --> 00:22:33.240 urban work-oriented societies, 429 00:22:33.640 --> 00:22:36.040 teach people that freedom is something you outgrow, 430 00:22:36.300 --> 00:22:39.380 like Huckleberry Finn rafting down the river, 431 00:22:39.460 --> 00:22:43.120 shining fluent and free before he is damned by adulthood. 432 00:22:44.320 --> 00:22:48.040 Our innate freedom is dulled and dimmed, 433 00:22:48.760 --> 00:22:51.100 deadened and demeaned by deadline and detail 434 00:22:51.100 --> 00:22:52.360 and caution and clocks. 435 00:22:53.560 --> 00:22:55.260 But roaring underneath all this, 436 00:22:55.400 --> 00:22:58.920 still freedom growls in the dusk. 437 00:22:59.640 --> 00:23:01.320 Freedom is because life is. 438 00:23:01.820 --> 00:23:04.240 And to be most alive is to be most free. 439 00:23:07.360 --> 00:23:08.820 The dominant culture, 440 00:23:09.760 --> 00:23:11.020 wealthy, European descent, 441 00:23:11.400 --> 00:23:12.140 men of estate, 442 00:23:12.440 --> 00:23:15.000 heterosexual, Christian and adult, 443 00:23:15.980 --> 00:23:20.020 have long marked one hated characteristic in their other, 444 00:23:20.100 --> 00:23:23.320 the other for them being poor, non-European races, 445 00:23:23.440 --> 00:23:26.520 women, homosexuals, gypsies, Jews, hunter-gatherers, 446 00:23:26.540 --> 00:23:28.780 the supposed insane and children. 447 00:23:29.800 --> 00:23:31.760 Along all the strata of power, 448 00:23:31.820 --> 00:23:33.280 there's a common factor, 449 00:23:33.440 --> 00:23:36.260 a hatred of nomadism. 450 00:23:36.840 --> 00:23:40.040 So a woman who's sexually free is termed a tramp, 451 00:23:40.240 --> 00:23:43.140 and a loose woman is unfixed. 452 00:23:43.300 --> 00:23:44.480 She's liable to movement. 453 00:23:45.280 --> 00:23:47.520 According to a man in a sexist temper, 454 00:23:47.820 --> 00:23:50.000 women's conversation rambles, 455 00:23:50.000 --> 00:23:51.580 and we don't get to the point. 456 00:23:52.220 --> 00:23:56.900 I looked up wild women in Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable in 1978. 457 00:23:56.900 --> 00:23:58.780 It was first published in the 19th century. 458 00:23:58.920 --> 00:24:01.800 Wild women, it says, are those who go in for women, 459 00:24:01.820 --> 00:24:02.420 for women's rights. 460 00:24:02.560 --> 00:24:06.360 These wild women are runagates who would stump the country. 461 00:24:06.760 --> 00:24:08.940 Well, my grandmother was a Pankhurst, 462 00:24:09.060 --> 00:24:11.560 and I would love to think that she was loosely related 463 00:24:11.560 --> 00:24:15.040 to the runagate Pankhursts who stumped the country. 464 00:24:17.140 --> 00:24:19.980 The terms vagrant, vagabond, and tramp 465 00:24:19.980 --> 00:24:22.560 are all pejorative terms used of the very poor. 466 00:24:22.700 --> 00:24:24.460 All have nomadic overtones. 467 00:24:24.780 --> 00:24:27.800 A drifter or transient is a term of abuse. 468 00:24:28.540 --> 00:24:31.620 Adults speak disapprovingly of wayward children. 469 00:24:31.820 --> 00:24:34.140 And of teenagers being led astray. 470 00:24:35.080 --> 00:24:38.380 Insane people are called unsettled, disturbed, unstable. 471 00:24:38.980 --> 00:24:41.340 Their mental mobility is considered a sickness. 472 00:24:42.160 --> 00:24:44.540 The people most persecuted by the Nazis 473 00:24:44.540 --> 00:24:47.000 share the same loathed nomadic quality. 474 00:24:47.440 --> 00:24:49.900 Jews are wandering people and exiled people. 475 00:24:50.200 --> 00:24:52.920 The wandering gypsies and homosexuals 476 00:24:52.920 --> 00:24:55.220 who were wanderers across sexual bounds. 477 00:24:56.760 --> 00:25:01.500 In 1910 in Canada, the French missionary Father Leclerc commented that the 478 00:25:01.820 --> 00:25:05.260 wandering and vagabond life must be brought to an end 479 00:25:05.260 --> 00:25:09.080 so that he could render the savages sedentary. 480 00:25:09.700 --> 00:25:13.940 In 1888, the Aborigines Protection Association stated that 481 00:25:13.940 --> 00:25:16.360 any parent who roamed the country 482 00:25:16.360 --> 00:25:20.180 should have their children stolen from them by the mission. 483 00:25:21.680 --> 00:25:25.260 But most, if not all, culture heroes travel. 484 00:25:25.480 --> 00:25:29.420 The Aboriginal ancestors, Odysseus, Beowulf, Don Quixote. 485 00:25:29.420 --> 00:25:32.840 And arguably, leaving one's community to travel 486 00:25:32.840 --> 00:25:34.700 is a necessity for full development. 487 00:25:34.960 --> 00:25:40.680 For the lure of wild nomadic freedom has never left us, any of us. 488 00:25:40.880 --> 00:25:43.300 It is in our lungs, breathing in freedom. 489 00:25:43.440 --> 00:25:45.840 In our eyes, hungry for horizons. 490 00:25:45.840 --> 00:25:48.320 In our feet, itching for the open road. 491 00:25:48.900 --> 00:25:50.360 Put your boots on. 492 00:25:51.140 --> 00:25:55.440 To wander is the Taoist code word for becoming ecstatic. 493 00:25:55.740 --> 00:25:59.400 And roamers, farfarers and wayfarers know the analogy. 494 00:25:59.400 --> 00:25:59.560 For every step of the way, 495 00:25:59.560 --> 00:26:00.040 every step is a way of intoxication. 496 00:26:02.120 --> 00:26:04.900 Walk. The drum begins. Follow it. 497 00:26:05.180 --> 00:26:07.400 Follow the drums of thunder. Follow the sun. 498 00:26:07.600 --> 00:26:10.520 Follow the stars at night as they lean their long slant 499 00:26:10.520 --> 00:26:11.860 down the far side of the sky. 500 00:26:12.360 --> 00:26:14.220 Follow the lightning and the open road. 501 00:26:14.420 --> 00:26:16.340 Follow your compulsion. Follow your calling. 502 00:26:16.440 --> 00:26:18.860 Follow anything except orders and habit. 503 00:26:19.480 --> 00:26:22.020 Follow the farfarer forwards of life itself. 504 00:26:22.340 --> 00:26:24.900 Go where you will. Burn your bridges, if you must. 505 00:26:24.900 --> 00:26:28.920 Leave the paving stones smouldering, singe the gate as you leave, 506 00:26:29.120 --> 00:26:33.800 leave an incendiary device by the wall and scorch your way across the land. 507 00:26:34.940 --> 00:26:38.260 We were made to walk through our lives wildly awake, 508 00:26:38.520 --> 00:26:41.280 our minds mobile, quick, changeable. 509 00:26:41.880 --> 00:26:45.900 We all are mercurial, our minds as winged as our feet. 510 00:26:46.600 --> 00:26:48.900 And to be a nomad in one's mind is in our gift. 511 00:26:49.060 --> 00:26:53.320 To move and learn, to be a student always, to discover new lands. 512 00:26:53.320 --> 00:26:57.580 Because the mind let loose is a walking, asking, searching thing, 513 00:26:58.220 --> 00:27:02.640 an extra vagrant of mental journeys, questioning, questioning, 514 00:27:02.980 --> 00:27:06.740 whose route, of course, is to seek, to go on a quest. 515 00:27:08.060 --> 00:27:13.460 We are wild, but tamed by television, controlled by Captain Clock, 516 00:27:13.720 --> 00:27:16.720 hemmed in by routine and obedience to petty convention. 517 00:27:17.800 --> 00:27:19.820 And the more suffocatingly enclosed we are, 518 00:27:19.880 --> 00:27:22.700 the louder our wild genes scream in misery, 519 00:27:22.820 --> 00:27:23.160 aggression. 520 00:27:23.320 --> 00:27:24.200 Anger and despair. 521 00:27:25.540 --> 00:27:28.880 In wildness is our self-willed, self-governing freedom. 522 00:27:29.700 --> 00:27:32.440 And such wild freedom blossoms within us. 523 00:27:32.540 --> 00:27:36.980 It bubbles over with an anarchic evresse of feeling. 524 00:27:38.040 --> 00:27:40.560 For we glint when the wild light shines. 525 00:27:41.180 --> 00:27:44.180 We are animal in our blood and in our skin. 526 00:27:44.400 --> 00:27:49.180 We were not born for pavements and escalators, but for thunder and mud. 527 00:27:49.600 --> 00:27:53.220 More, we're animal, not only in body, but in spirit. 528 00:27:53.320 --> 00:27:58.200 Our minds are the minds of wild animals, sniffing a quick, wild scent in the air. 529 00:28:00.060 --> 00:28:05.160 What is wild cannot be bought or sold, cannot be borrowed or copied. 530 00:28:05.340 --> 00:28:10.960 It is unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental. 531 00:28:11.640 --> 00:28:13.500 In wildness, truth. 532 00:28:14.660 --> 00:28:18.520 Wildness is the universal song line, sung in green gold, 533 00:28:18.580 --> 00:28:21.040 which we recognize the moment we hear it. 534 00:28:21.280 --> 00:28:23.300 What is wild is what drives us. 535 00:28:23.320 --> 00:28:23.960 What wills the honey-suckle. 536 00:28:24.080 --> 00:28:25.320 What wills the dragon-fly. 537 00:28:25.440 --> 00:28:26.340 Shoves the wind. 538 00:28:26.500 --> 00:28:27.520 Compels the poem. 539 00:28:28.220 --> 00:28:30.480 Wildness is insatiable for life. 540 00:28:30.680 --> 00:28:33.540 And neither truly knows itself without the other. 541 00:28:34.360 --> 00:28:36.280 We come from its wild song. 542 00:28:36.680 --> 00:28:39.240 In music was the creation of the universe. 543 00:28:39.620 --> 00:28:44.440 And we are most fully alive, when we resonate to its wildest pitch, 544 00:28:44.620 --> 00:28:47.260 with intense and necessary love. 545 00:28:47.520 --> 00:28:51.900 In jaguar forests or deserts or mountains or in the lands of essential ice, 546 00:28:52.040 --> 00:28:53.300 or the water which flows. 547 00:28:53.300 --> 00:29:00.240 first coaxed the story. And humanity's highest purpose is to be fluent in the streaming cadences 548 00:29:00.240 --> 00:29:07.980 of all our world's languages, making our earth more vivid and realizing it in song. For that 549 00:29:07.980 --> 00:29:15.140 is how the spirit deep within all life leaves the unforgeable signature of its wild authenticity 550 00:29:15.140 --> 00:29:20.100 in the song lines of this wild world. Thank you. 551 00:29:40.540 --> 00:29:49.960 Jay, I think you've taken us to places that most of us have never been. We've got plenty 552 00:29:49.960 --> 00:29:53.280 of time for questions which will be answered in a few minutes. 553 00:29:53.300 --> 00:29:59.240 Hands popping up already. Not just questions but observations, responses, reflections, 554 00:30:01.620 --> 00:30:06.780 statements. The clock says we must be out of here at 3.15 but we've heard, bugger the clock. 555 00:30:10.300 --> 00:30:14.800 So we'll stay till we stay. Until we're forced out. 556 00:30:17.360 --> 00:30:23.280 We have a roving mic and I have to, I think, insist on a rule that it moves across the 557 00:30:23.280 --> 00:30:24.580 room so others can hear. 558 00:30:32.780 --> 00:30:41.240 Yes, I noticed in all the examples you gave of societies that they were nomadic, wild. 559 00:30:41.740 --> 00:30:48.100 Is it possible to be truly nomadic and wild in a complex society, in a civilization, if 560 00:30:48.100 --> 00:30:49.580 I can use that value-laden word? 561 00:30:50.100 --> 00:30:52.280 If so, which society? 562 00:30:53.280 --> 00:31:00.140 Which society, complex type of society, has come closest to that wild nomadic ideal in 563 00:31:00.140 --> 00:31:00.740 history? 564 00:31:06.620 --> 00:31:14.800 Well, I would have to preface my answer by saying that I'm not sure that I agree with 565 00:31:14.800 --> 00:31:21.600 the idea that there are complex societies and non-complex societies. Because every society 566 00:31:21.600 --> 00:31:23.260 that I've ever come across has been a complex society. 567 00:31:23.260 --> 00:31:25.460 And I think that the way that society has come across or known about is complex. So 568 00:31:25.460 --> 00:31:30.440 I'd have to say that first. But the other thing is that, you know, that I think that 569 00:31:30.440 --> 00:31:34.740 one of the things that I was trying to say about nomadism is that it is something which 570 00:31:35.260 --> 00:31:42.400 you can take on a physical level. You'd also take it on a mental level. Because I think 571 00:31:42.400 --> 00:31:51.820 that that attitude towards life which says go, learn, ask, move, can actually be seen 572 00:31:51.820 --> 00:31:53.240 just as much in the sense of being a nomad. 573 00:31:53.240 --> 00:31:56.000 But it is also a sense of like, you know, how you think your way through your life, 574 00:31:56.120 --> 00:32:01.160 as much as physically walking your way through a particular land. Although I do think that 575 00:32:01.160 --> 00:32:07.560 kind of, you know, that there is enormous wisdom to be found in the act of walking and 576 00:32:07.560 --> 00:32:12.180 in the knowledge that you get from travelling through land at that pace. 577 00:32:13.600 --> 00:32:18.380 If I can ask a supplementary question, would the difference be, what I'm getting at is 578 00:32:18.380 --> 00:32:23.220 one where, a society where we're surrounded by people, as to who is the leader, who is 579 00:32:23.220 --> 00:32:27.160 to one, the examples you gave, were surrounded by nature. 580 00:32:27.380 --> 00:32:30.860 So is it possible to be wild and nomadic in a society 581 00:32:30.860 --> 00:32:32.280 where we're surrounded by people? 582 00:32:35.540 --> 00:32:38.360 I don't think I was really trying to draw a distinction 583 00:32:38.360 --> 00:32:40.800 between nature on the one hand and people on the other, 584 00:32:40.820 --> 00:32:44.680 because to me it's like people are inherently part of nature 585 00:32:44.680 --> 00:32:47.000 and nature is inherently part of us. 586 00:32:47.340 --> 00:32:51.960 So it's a bit as if your question is resting on a presumption 587 00:32:51.960 --> 00:32:53.780 which is not one that I felt I made. 588 00:32:54.160 --> 00:32:58.180 Well, as I say, the examples you gave, they're all in nomadic wild societies. 589 00:32:58.300 --> 00:33:01.060 What sorts of things should we be doing in our sort of society 590 00:33:01.060 --> 00:33:02.280 that's wild and nomadic? 591 00:33:05.180 --> 00:33:09.620 I think that's sort of rather up to you. 592 00:33:11.380 --> 00:33:14.680 I'm very loathe to tell you what it is. 593 00:33:17.200 --> 00:33:17.920 Somebody else. 594 00:33:20.400 --> 00:33:21.360 A woman. 595 00:33:22.660 --> 00:33:23.720 Can you hear me? 596 00:33:24.380 --> 00:33:26.080 The mic is being passed through. 597 00:33:27.540 --> 00:33:29.280 I'll stay standing up, though. 598 00:33:29.340 --> 00:33:30.760 I prefer to speak that way. 599 00:33:32.520 --> 00:33:33.560 Two comments. 600 00:33:34.300 --> 00:33:35.080 Switch it on. 601 00:33:40.760 --> 00:33:41.280 Right. 602 00:33:41.520 --> 00:33:42.500 Can you hear me now? 603 00:33:47.360 --> 00:33:47.880 Hello. 604 00:33:49.780 --> 00:33:50.300 Right. 605 00:33:50.460 --> 00:33:51.740 Shove it in my gob. 606 00:33:53.040 --> 00:33:53.440 Shove it in my gob. 607 00:33:53.440 --> 00:33:53.640 Shove it in my gob. 608 00:33:56.020 --> 00:33:57.360 Shove it in my gob. 609 00:33:58.120 --> 00:33:59.360 Shove it in my gob. 610 00:34:01.140 --> 00:34:01.540 Shove it in my gob. 611 00:34:03.000 --> 00:34:04.320 Shove it in my gob. 612 00:34:05.540 --> 00:34:06.900 Shove it in my gob. 613 00:34:07.760 --> 00:34:08.540 Shove it in my gob. 614 00:34:08.540 --> 00:34:09.260 Shove it in my gob. 615 00:34:09.260 --> 00:34:09.660 Shove it in my gob. 616 00:34:09.660 --> 00:34:09.700 Shove it in my gob. 617 00:34:09.700 --> 00:34:10.240 Shove it in my gob. 618 00:34:10.240 --> 00:34:10.880 Shove it in my gob. 619 00:34:11.040 --> 00:34:11.640 Shove it in my gob. 620 00:34:12.700 --> 00:34:14.280 Shove it in my gob. 621 00:34:14.840 --> 00:34:15.900 Shove it in my gob. 622 00:34:18.160 --> 00:34:19.280 Shove it in my gob. 623 00:34:19.280 --> 00:34:27.380 that with the situation that we find ourselves in, in the modern world, in the Western world. 624 00:34:29.080 --> 00:34:36.980 As such, I found it quite inspirational and endeavoured to put it to practical purpose 625 00:34:36.980 --> 00:34:44.740 in my political work here in South Australia, and was treated abominably for trying to do 626 00:34:44.740 --> 00:34:47.200 so, but that's really a bit beside the point. 627 00:34:47.300 --> 00:34:54.060 That journal, since he's no longer at its helm, seems to me now to have completely lost 628 00:34:54.060 --> 00:35:00.220 its way, and is to me nothing more than an adjunct to the British Conservative Party. 629 00:35:00.460 --> 00:35:04.500 I just wondered, as a contributor to it on occasion, whether you have any views. 630 00:35:04.600 --> 00:35:06.260 That's one comment. 631 00:35:06.340 --> 00:35:12.740 The other one, more to do with what you've talked about today, with your emphasis on 632 00:35:12.740 --> 00:35:13.300 freedom. 633 00:35:14.740 --> 00:35:15.940 Indigenous peoples. 634 00:35:18.180 --> 00:35:26.780 My understanding of Indigenous peoples is the incredible importance of their law, their 635 00:35:26.780 --> 00:35:35.960 way, and very strict sanctions against people who break that, and it is something which 636 00:35:35.960 --> 00:35:40.880 I think a lot of Western people have trouble coming to terms with, especially people of 637 00:35:40.880 --> 00:35:44.680 my generation who were in their teenage and former... 638 00:35:44.740 --> 00:35:45.200 I think it's a very important point. 639 00:35:45.200 --> 00:35:55.500 ...in the so-called wild 60s, when freedom was the word, and very quickly taken on board 640 00:35:55.500 --> 00:36:02.180 by the market, and individualism was rampant, and has led to an even more rampant form of 641 00:36:02.180 --> 00:36:02.480 it now. 642 00:36:02.620 --> 00:36:08.580 So I just sort of would like you to elaborate a little bit on how you were using freedom 643 00:36:08.580 --> 00:36:14.160 and how I understand it in the context in which I've grown up with it, and what it's 644 00:36:14.160 --> 00:36:14.560 led to. 645 00:36:14.740 --> 00:36:15.880 Thank you. 646 00:36:16.840 --> 00:36:19.160 Yeah, no, I think that's two really good points. 647 00:36:19.260 --> 00:36:21.060 I think I'll answer them backwards. 648 00:36:22.460 --> 00:36:26.500 I think what you were saying about freedom in the negative sense is really important, 649 00:36:26.680 --> 00:36:31.540 because if freedom is just self-indulgent license, then I don't think that's freedom 650 00:36:31.540 --> 00:36:31.900 at all. 651 00:36:31.980 --> 00:36:36.560 I mean, I would see freedom as being something which really deeply respects other people's 652 00:36:36.560 --> 00:36:43.360 freedom, on the one hand, and also the kind of, you know, the will of, which is connected 653 00:36:43.360 --> 00:36:43.980 to wild. 654 00:36:44.040 --> 00:36:44.320 Right. 655 00:36:44.440 --> 00:36:44.460 Right. 656 00:36:44.460 --> 00:36:44.720 Right. 657 00:36:44.740 --> 00:36:48.980 And I'm quite interested in it as a sort of motive and a morality. 658 00:36:49.280 --> 00:36:54.820 It's like, you know, that if one person's will abuses another person's will, then that 659 00:36:54.820 --> 00:36:56.900 to me seems kind of, you know, an unethical position. 660 00:36:57.060 --> 00:37:02.400 But in terms of the environment, you could say the same, is that, you know, that if the 661 00:37:02.400 --> 00:37:07.420 will of one person, for the sake of their self-indulgent license in the way that you 662 00:37:07.420 --> 00:37:14.220 were describing it, if that is imposed on nature, then that will offend exactly the 663 00:37:14.220 --> 00:37:19.640 kind of laws that you're talking about and the kind of, you know, the necessary ethics 664 00:37:19.640 --> 00:37:23.240 of, you know, of all cultures who live close to nature. 665 00:37:24.200 --> 00:37:32.860 Your other comment about the ecologist, I should probably be fairly careful about what 666 00:37:32.860 --> 00:37:39.700 I say, but I will say that I have absolutely no respect whatsoever for Zach Goldsmith in 667 00:37:39.700 --> 00:37:41.200 his position as... 668 00:37:41.200 --> 00:37:42.060 Yeah. 669 00:37:50.860 --> 00:37:52.800 I don't know what you'd say if you weren't careful. 670 00:37:52.900 --> 00:37:53.200 Yeah. 671 00:37:53.200 --> 00:37:54.780 Well, I mean, you can probably imagine. 672 00:37:55.000 --> 00:37:56.280 There's a chap up the back. 673 00:38:04.460 --> 00:38:04.860 Thanks. 674 00:38:06.920 --> 00:38:08.740 It's a bit of a follow-on from the last question. 675 00:38:09.900 --> 00:38:13.700 As deeply evocative as your talk was... 676 00:38:14.260 --> 00:38:14.660 Yeah. 677 00:38:14.660 --> 00:38:19.740 ...about freedom, you didn't mention anything about responsibility, which has always been 678 00:38:19.740 --> 00:38:20.600 the contrast for me. 679 00:38:22.660 --> 00:38:23.800 How do they, yeah, interplay... 680 00:38:23.800 --> 00:38:24.620 Could you bring the mic closer? 681 00:38:24.620 --> 00:38:25.320 I couldn't hear that. 682 00:38:25.360 --> 00:38:25.700 Sorry. 683 00:38:26.040 --> 00:38:26.740 Can you hear now? 684 00:38:26.920 --> 00:38:27.320 Yes. 685 00:38:27.420 --> 00:38:27.500 Yeah. 686 00:38:27.760 --> 00:38:33.860 How freedom and responsibility interplay and how in our modern way of life we have so many 687 00:38:33.860 --> 00:38:38.720 commitments and responsibilities, which are so sort of regimentalized, you know, by the 688 00:38:38.720 --> 00:38:43.740 clock, by the fact that we need to earn a wage, all these things. 689 00:38:44.220 --> 00:38:44.340 Mm. 690 00:38:45.300 --> 00:38:47.140 How do you negotiate them? 691 00:38:48.080 --> 00:38:52.060 Because what you say about freedom and being wild, it's like, that is true. 692 00:38:52.740 --> 00:38:55.660 And it's a part of our nature that does need to be expressed. 693 00:38:55.740 --> 00:38:58.880 But yeah, how do you sort of negotiate the... 694 00:38:58.880 --> 00:39:04.240 Where we've come with our modern way of life, which we can't just sort of abandon. 695 00:39:04.960 --> 00:39:05.760 And yeah. 696 00:39:07.740 --> 00:39:09.300 I would say two things. 697 00:39:09.360 --> 00:39:13.720 I mean, one of them is that, as I understand it in Australia and certainly in Britain, 698 00:39:13.760 --> 00:39:14.200 that one is that we need to be more flexible. 699 00:39:14.220 --> 00:39:19.980 And I think one of the most sort of brutalizing of social conditions for everybody is house 700 00:39:19.980 --> 00:39:24.840 prices, for instance, that make people have to take two jobs, that make people who are 701 00:39:24.840 --> 00:39:28.220 parents who want to be with their children have to work instead of looking after their 702 00:39:28.220 --> 00:39:33.340 children, dah, dah, dah, and sort of borrow for kind of the next 80 years of their putative 703 00:39:33.340 --> 00:39:34.180 life. 704 00:39:34.460 --> 00:39:41.640 And in that sense, I think that there is a way in which freedom of everybody is kind 705 00:39:41.640 --> 00:39:44.200 of deliberately curtailed by people in order to be able to live a more comfortable life. 706 00:39:44.220 --> 00:39:49.040 And it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like 707 00:39:49.040 --> 00:39:56.880 it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like 708 00:39:56.880 --> 00:39:57.160 it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like 709 00:39:57.160 --> 00:39:57.260 like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds 710 00:39:57.260 --> 00:39:58.000 like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds 711 00:39:58.000 --> 00:39:58.020 like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds 712 00:39:58.020 --> 00:39:59.300 like it sounds like it sounds like it sounds 713 00:39:59.300 --> 00:39:59.540 like it sounds like it sounds sounds 714 00:39:59.540 --> 00:39:59.760 like it sounds 715 00:40:14.960 --> 00:40:18.800 which I chose, but yes, at an almost personal cost. 716 00:40:20.100 --> 00:40:25.280 I think that there's, you know, it does slightly relate back to what the previous questioner was asking, 717 00:40:25.380 --> 00:40:29.000 which is about, you know, freedom and kind of freedom and license. 718 00:40:29.880 --> 00:40:36.740 You know, because to me that kind of, the notion of freedom as it's abused by Bush and Blair 719 00:40:36.740 --> 00:40:40.700 is just this idea that on the one hand it's kind of endless consumer freedom, 720 00:40:40.700 --> 00:40:44.400 which actually isn't, it's endless consumer imprisonment. 721 00:40:45.760 --> 00:40:53.540 And on the other hand, you know, the sort of most vicious abuse of the word in Iraq, 722 00:40:53.820 --> 00:40:58.800 that, you know, we're fighting for so-called freedom, we're invading a sovereign nation, 723 00:40:59.060 --> 00:41:08.220 for, you know, for a word that we've abused to the point where it's actually quite hard to use it in a political context. 724 00:41:10.700 --> 00:41:11.640 Just to add one more thing. 725 00:41:12.420 --> 00:41:16.900 Do you think, given that this way of life is sort of like a sort of imprisonment in some way, 726 00:41:17.000 --> 00:41:20.900 is there any future in this way of life that we have? 727 00:41:22.480 --> 00:41:28.120 In the sense of a prosperous, like, psychologically, spiritually healthy... 728 00:41:28.120 --> 00:41:30.580 Well, I mean, in the biggest sense, and I wouldn't be the first person to say this, 729 00:41:30.640 --> 00:41:33.160 in the biggest sense, it's like it cannot possibly last. 730 00:41:33.460 --> 00:41:38.980 It's a very recent way of living, very, very recent in the whole history of humanity. 731 00:41:39.400 --> 00:41:40.680 And it's also not possible. 732 00:41:40.680 --> 00:41:47.140 It takes between three and six planet Earths to keep a society going in the way that this society goes. 733 00:41:47.240 --> 00:41:49.760 I mean, it's just not going to last. 734 00:41:49.900 --> 00:41:53.780 And I'm not saying that out of a sense of pessimism, because I'm actually quite an optimistic person. 735 00:41:54.140 --> 00:41:56.540 It's actually sort of just physically impossible. 736 00:41:57.720 --> 00:42:01.480 You know, and you can sort of do the maths as, you know, however you choose. 737 00:42:01.540 --> 00:42:02.260 It's not... 738 00:42:06.760 --> 00:42:07.300 Down here. 739 00:42:08.340 --> 00:42:09.760 The mic's going to travel down. 740 00:42:09.900 --> 00:42:10.480 Up the pit. 741 00:42:10.680 --> 00:42:12.320 The 3.15 is, if you want to leave. 742 00:42:12.460 --> 00:42:13.540 You can get up and go now. 743 00:42:14.620 --> 00:42:21.020 And otherwise we'll just keep going until we exhaust ourselves with questions while the mic's travelling down. 744 00:42:45.100 --> 00:42:46.140 Hello there. 745 00:42:46.300 --> 00:42:48.600 I think I'm speaking loud enough now. 746 00:42:49.500 --> 00:42:56.180 I'm just wondering if you can comment on lesbianism in the context of indigenous fecundity, please. 747 00:43:07.580 --> 00:43:10.320 I think that's probably the best question. 748 00:43:10.320 --> 00:43:12.120 I've ever been asked in my whole life. 749 00:43:12.420 --> 00:43:13.780 I'm in my old school, sure. 750 00:43:16.160 --> 00:43:17.780 Jake, Riffa says stump the words. 751 00:43:18.020 --> 00:43:18.380 Yes. 752 00:43:18.980 --> 00:43:20.500 Can you repeat the question? 753 00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:31.980 I just wondered if our speaker could comment on fecundity, on lesbianism in the context of indigenous fecundity. 754 00:43:32.840 --> 00:43:34.060 I didn't hear that. 755 00:43:35.600 --> 00:43:36.520 Still can't hear it? 756 00:43:36.660 --> 00:43:36.800 Okay. 757 00:43:37.000 --> 00:43:38.320 I'll try one more time. 758 00:43:38.500 --> 00:43:39.760 It's probably easier this way. 759 00:43:40.320 --> 00:43:46.260 I wondered if our speaker could comment on lesbianism in the context of indigenous fecundity. 760 00:43:49.180 --> 00:43:49.620 Fecundity. 761 00:43:52.460 --> 00:43:53.900 Well, I would say two things. 762 00:43:53.920 --> 00:43:57.000 One of them is I think that is probably the best question I've ever been asked in my life. 763 00:43:57.120 --> 00:44:03.220 And my second thing is I think perhaps it's a question that you should answer if it's something that you feel that you have something to say. 764 00:44:04.220 --> 00:44:04.660 Yes. 765 00:44:07.800 --> 00:44:09.160 Can I answer your own question? 766 00:44:10.320 --> 00:44:10.740 Just quickly. 767 00:44:11.200 --> 00:44:18.120 I've just found it very interesting considering Australian indigenous people and their response to indigenous fecundity. 768 00:44:18.320 --> 00:44:33.580 I ran into an indigenous woman in a lesbian nightclub who was actually saying that she'd become very separated from her community, her indigenous community, because her sexuality wasn't accepted as being part of her traditional lifestyle. 769 00:44:34.500 --> 00:44:38.940 So that was very sad to me, seeing her ripped away from the heart of her community. 770 00:44:42.060 --> 00:44:42.540 So I think that's a good question. 771 00:44:42.540 --> 00:44:43.040 Question over here. 772 00:44:44.660 --> 00:44:45.480 Or an observation. 773 00:44:55.000 --> 00:45:00.160 It's a comment and it's taking what you've said and just turning it around another way to see how you like this. 774 00:45:00.260 --> 00:45:05.160 But you actually said follow anything except orders and habit. 775 00:45:05.620 --> 00:45:10.300 And I would suggest that if we do that, then we get closer to the sense of being a lesbian. 776 00:45:11.040 --> 00:45:11.680 And I think that's a good question. 777 00:45:11.680 --> 00:45:17.240 Because we're not following orders or habits or preconceptions or stories we have in our mind. 778 00:45:17.340 --> 00:45:26.220 And through getting closer to the senses, we then get into something that's a much deeper sense of response ability, our ability to respond. 779 00:45:27.060 --> 00:45:28.400 I think that's beautiful. 780 00:45:33.420 --> 00:45:35.060 Down the front here. 781 00:45:42.300 --> 00:45:46.280 Just the observation that wildness is a state of mind. 782 00:45:46.380 --> 00:45:47.580 It's a state of being. 783 00:45:48.160 --> 00:45:55.760 And it should be just as possible to be wild in our present situation as it is in a more exotic location. 784 00:45:56.140 --> 00:46:03.040 And all we need to do is to dare to be wild and then things just change around us. 785 00:46:03.860 --> 00:46:05.120 I think that's really true. 786 00:46:05.200 --> 00:46:10.300 I think one of the things that, to me, one of the things I was trying to... 787 00:46:10.320 --> 00:46:16.540 to do in my book was not to say, you know, wildness is something that exists only in exotic locations. 788 00:46:16.740 --> 00:46:23.180 But partly to say, you know, for me, the best example is that wildness is in language. 789 00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:24.220 It's in every language. 790 00:46:24.400 --> 00:46:27.520 You know, is that no language is containable. 791 00:46:27.620 --> 00:46:29.940 It will just break every fence. 792 00:46:30.160 --> 00:46:33.500 You know, the moment that a dictionary tries, and I love dictionaries, 793 00:46:33.520 --> 00:46:36.660 but the moment a dictionary tries to kind of grab a word and keep it, you know, 794 00:46:36.660 --> 00:46:39.560 it's just kind of popped up a new meaning somewhere else. 795 00:46:39.600 --> 00:46:40.080 You know. 796 00:46:40.320 --> 00:46:43.160 And it's, you know, it's probably the kind of, you know, 797 00:46:43.180 --> 00:46:48.040 the most beautiful, unfensible landscape in the world. 798 00:46:48.100 --> 00:46:49.200 And we've all got it. 799 00:46:49.220 --> 00:46:50.900 As soon as we open our mouths, we're in it. 800 00:46:53.060 --> 00:46:53.900 Directly behind you. 801 00:46:55.420 --> 00:46:59.620 I wonder, could you just talk to us a little bit about wildness in relation to adolescence? 802 00:47:01.540 --> 00:47:02.820 You know, I mean... 803 00:47:03.780 --> 00:47:04.200 Yeah. 804 00:47:04.420 --> 00:47:09.980 I think I had a really interesting conversation with someone when I was in South Africa. 805 00:47:10.320 --> 00:47:12.700 A black guy who had been in the gangs in Soweto. 806 00:47:12.920 --> 00:47:19.920 And he said it was so difficult for people growing up in that situation as adolescents 807 00:47:19.920 --> 00:47:22.920 because their wildness was... 808 00:47:23.740 --> 00:47:25.040 Oh, we're taking off. 809 00:47:27.980 --> 00:47:28.540 Because... 810 00:47:30.980 --> 00:47:38.440 Because it was as if their wildness was kind of skewed into something that was, you know, really violent, 811 00:47:39.840 --> 00:47:43.520 really, you know, literally murderous, very, very cruel. 812 00:47:44.260 --> 00:47:50.480 But what he was saying is that because apart from gang rituals in his society, 813 00:47:50.720 --> 00:47:55.600 there were no kind of rituals to contain adolescent wildness in the best sense. 814 00:47:55.740 --> 00:47:58.660 And so he had actually started rituals of... 815 00:47:58.660 --> 00:47:59.760 He ended up in prison. 816 00:47:59.880 --> 00:48:02.000 And then when he was in prison, he started just thinking, 817 00:48:02.060 --> 00:48:06.360 if he leaves prison with the same mindset and goes back to the gang culture, 818 00:48:06.960 --> 00:48:08.260 he's going to end up dead. 819 00:48:08.440 --> 00:48:09.180 Before he's 20. 820 00:48:09.460 --> 00:48:14.520 And so he left prison and he started setting up these amazing projects to take adolescents into, 821 00:48:15.260 --> 00:48:18.920 you know, basically out bush. 822 00:48:19.500 --> 00:48:24.540 And to organize rituals of the land so that people, adolescent people, 823 00:48:24.720 --> 00:48:29.440 would feel that they, you know, that when all that kind of rage and pandemonium was going on, 824 00:48:29.540 --> 00:48:33.840 that they weren't fighting the kind of petty authority of their parents. 825 00:48:33.940 --> 00:48:37.900 And I mean no disrespect to the role of the parent, but, you know, that essentially small authority. 826 00:48:37.900 --> 00:48:41.580 They were actually kind of dealing with the huge authority of nature, 827 00:48:41.720 --> 00:48:43.580 where they had to know who they were. 828 00:48:43.620 --> 00:48:44.880 They had to know their place, you know. 829 00:48:45.020 --> 00:48:49.200 And they actually, in a very profound sense, you know, on the one hand, 830 00:48:49.200 --> 00:48:52.860 they could let out their wildness safely knowing that it was contained. 831 00:48:53.000 --> 00:48:57.620 That they weren't, you know, if they wanted to shout and shout and shout, if they wanted to, you know, 832 00:48:57.620 --> 00:49:02.160 smash the earth with their fists, they weren't not going to do harm to somebody. 833 00:49:02.360 --> 00:49:07.400 But on the other hand, it was like, you know, that they, you know, they had to recognize, 834 00:49:07.900 --> 00:49:13.020 you know, the deepest laws within nature of sort of what actually had to be done and what couldn't be done. 835 00:49:13.180 --> 00:49:16.960 You know, and that to me was a really, really profound example. 836 00:49:24.320 --> 00:49:32.400 Regarding habit, I actually wonder perhaps if some of our difficulties is not in habit or custom, 837 00:49:32.720 --> 00:49:37.880 but in not thinking about the habits that we have and why we do, 838 00:49:37.900 --> 00:49:43.720 because we could make it a habit to love or make it a habit to look for moments of transcendence, 839 00:49:43.820 --> 00:49:46.200 where we're more than the sum of our parts. 840 00:49:46.320 --> 00:49:48.520 And I want those habits to stay with me. 841 00:49:48.580 --> 00:49:52.520 But where it can be a problem and linking with the last speaker who talked 842 00:49:52.520 --> 00:49:54.960 about keeping habits that restrict us. 843 00:49:55.260 --> 00:50:00.740 Perhaps it is in not examining and thinking about why we do those things so that we hang on to the good 844 00:50:00.740 --> 00:50:02.300 and throw away the things that are not good. 845 00:50:06.880 --> 00:50:07.880 Probably lost the mic. 846 00:50:12.580 --> 00:50:17.800 In our modern techno whiz-bang world, is it possible to be virtually wild? 847 00:50:19.120 --> 00:50:19.640 . 848 00:50:21.520 --> 00:50:22.040 . 849 00:50:23.140 --> 00:50:23.660 . 850 00:50:23.660 --> 00:50:23.920 . 851 00:50:23.920 --> 00:50:23.940 . 852 00:50:29.600 --> 00:50:30.120 . 853 00:50:30.120 --> 00:50:30.540 . 854 00:50:32.300 --> 00:50:32.820 . 855 00:50:32.820 --> 00:50:32.840 . 856 00:50:32.840 --> 00:50:32.880 . 857 00:50:32.880 --> 00:50:32.900 . 858 00:50:32.900 --> 00:50:32.920 . 859 00:50:32.920 --> 00:50:32.940 . 860 00:50:32.940 --> 00:50:33.000 . 861 00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:33.120 . 862 00:50:33.120 --> 00:50:33.200 . 863 00:50:33.200 --> 00:50:33.220 . 864 00:50:33.220 --> 00:50:33.720 . 865 00:50:33.720 --> 00:50:33.840 . 866 00:50:33.840 --> 00:50:34.040 . 867 00:50:34.040 --> 00:50:37.840 I thought it was a question and answer in one. 868 00:50:43.460 --> 00:50:45.400 You haven't visited the second life. 869 00:50:45.760 --> 00:50:47.220 No, I haven't. 870 00:50:47.240 --> 00:50:49.080 I do tend to stay away from that. 871 00:50:49.200 --> 00:50:51.060 I find emails very useful 872 00:50:51.060 --> 00:50:53.280 and I do love looking things up on the internet 873 00:50:53.280 --> 00:50:54.500 if it's facts and things, 874 00:50:54.600 --> 00:50:57.260 but I'm not that crazy about the sort of 875 00:50:59.480 --> 00:51:00.840 remaking of oneself. 876 00:51:01.900 --> 00:51:03.240 You've been up. 877 00:51:04.040 --> 00:51:04.300 Yeah. 878 00:51:06.460 --> 00:51:08.380 There's a question down at the front. 879 00:51:14.800 --> 00:51:17.900 Jay, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit 880 00:51:17.900 --> 00:51:21.140 about how you've integrated the awareness and reverence 881 00:51:21.140 --> 00:51:23.160 you've talked about into your everyday life. 882 00:51:26.560 --> 00:51:30.520 I think part of it, 883 00:51:30.540 --> 00:51:33.840 I would probably answer about my previous book, 884 00:51:33.880 --> 00:51:34.020 which is called 885 00:51:34.020 --> 00:51:34.540 About Time, 886 00:51:34.740 --> 00:51:36.260 which was about 887 00:51:39.060 --> 00:51:41.460 how time is a very political subject. 888 00:51:42.740 --> 00:51:44.840 Part of it was about 889 00:51:44.840 --> 00:51:46.820 the centrality of the present moment 890 00:51:46.820 --> 00:51:47.660 and part of it was about 891 00:51:47.660 --> 00:51:50.000 how too much speed is a bad thing, 892 00:51:50.800 --> 00:51:52.000 both in individual terms 893 00:51:52.000 --> 00:51:53.980 and also connected at, 894 00:51:54.180 --> 00:51:55.300 in its largest, 895 00:51:55.420 --> 00:51:56.960 connected to fascism. 896 00:51:58.000 --> 00:52:00.040 However, I personally am 897 00:52:00.040 --> 00:52:02.880 an absolute scandal in those terms 898 00:52:02.880 --> 00:52:03.620 because I, 899 00:52:04.320 --> 00:52:05.120 very often, 900 00:52:05.180 --> 00:52:06.420 do things too quickly. 901 00:52:06.440 --> 00:52:08.540 I kind of try and cram in too much in a day. 902 00:52:08.740 --> 00:52:11.680 I am one of those people that lives with one foot in the past 903 00:52:11.680 --> 00:52:13.180 and one foot in the future. 904 00:52:14.040 --> 00:52:14.840 So actually, 905 00:52:14.940 --> 00:52:16.920 it was very telling that even though, 906 00:52:16.940 --> 00:52:17.220 you know, 907 00:52:17.260 --> 00:52:19.100 it was like sort of writing something 908 00:52:19.100 --> 00:52:21.000 about exactly the kind of things 909 00:52:21.000 --> 00:52:22.780 that I can't do very well at all. 910 00:52:23.400 --> 00:52:23.800 So. 911 00:52:32.440 --> 00:52:35.380 I just wanted to say that I think it is possible 912 00:52:35.380 --> 00:52:36.640 to live wild. 913 00:52:37.100 --> 00:52:39.860 That it's possible to use the concepts of freedom 914 00:52:39.860 --> 00:52:42.700 in whatever realm of life you work in. 915 00:52:42.920 --> 00:52:45.280 So long as you notice the paradigms 916 00:52:45.280 --> 00:52:49.340 that hold the structures that you work in 917 00:52:49.340 --> 00:52:51.680 and notice them and think about, 918 00:52:52.320 --> 00:52:53.780 think outside those, 919 00:52:53.780 --> 00:52:54.540 those paradigms. 920 00:52:55.200 --> 00:52:57.820 And see if you can think of ways 921 00:52:57.820 --> 00:52:59.760 to make the system work better. 922 00:53:00.520 --> 00:53:02.820 Even the most conservative professions 923 00:53:04.920 --> 00:53:06.760 can benefit by, 924 00:53:08.260 --> 00:53:10.820 by being aware of those restrictions. 925 00:53:12.000 --> 00:53:13.480 There's always ways 926 00:53:13.480 --> 00:53:17.380 that you can bring novelty and freedom 927 00:53:17.380 --> 00:53:20.680 into any work that you do. 928 00:53:20.880 --> 00:53:23.680 And I think it's a really important concept. 929 00:53:23.780 --> 00:53:24.300 Wildness. 930 00:53:24.420 --> 00:53:25.360 I just love it. 931 00:53:28.980 --> 00:53:31.660 The sound guys are threatening to turn off the mic. 932 00:53:32.780 --> 00:53:34.420 So anybody want to have a last go? 933 00:53:35.220 --> 00:53:35.980 No, we're all done. 934 00:53:48.540 --> 00:53:49.400 Thank you, Jay. 935 00:53:49.460 --> 00:53:51.620 I think you've probably been the most seditious speaker 936 00:53:52.040 --> 00:53:53.220 we've ever had at the festival. 937 00:53:54.200 --> 00:53:54.720 Seditious. 938 00:53:55.160 --> 00:53:56.480 I like that word.