The Undomestication of Being: An Introduction

What does it mean to say that our modern being is domesticated? To say, "our modern being is, has become, is in a state of being domesticated."

How does that sound? What do those sounds mean? If, indeed we have been changed--exchanged our gods for troughs, and our wilds for fences--what of us is wolf, what pekingese ?

“The strong, the supremely intelligent domesticate the things beneath them.” I hear you say. “We are wolf.” You say, hoping that it's true.

What is lost is that there is an iteration that exists between us and the world around us. Even if that were true as you so mistakenly say, hoping that you are strong, that you are the domesticator not the domesticated, it would not change the fact that when the strong among us have domesticated the weak, they have succeeded in domesticating even themselves--the strongest among them suffering the most from their domesticating prowess. Great Gilgamesh, great Eve, and Socrates and all his philosophic ilk. Kings have built walls, fences I call them. Priests have written holy books at which we have all drunk deep, forgetting the thirst we have for divine waters. We baptize no longer with spirit, but hydrogen and oxygen; for gods are wild, and have no place in our domesticated bodies.

How has our being become domesticated? The same way anything has suffered estrangement from self-same identity: having one myopic eye on the future, the other on the past, having senses that can genuinely lie, and a mind that can spin that lie into coherent dogma, then pass it down through the generations as culture--we have been taught to swaddle the world and the self with it. Thusly we have been told, fear the wild. Wild brings death. We don’t like death. So what does any creative, adaptive, creature do? It mitigates its discomfort. Thus we have said domesticate--no, we have shouted it from the roof tops.

“Domesticate up, domesticate down, domesticate all around,” dialogue captured by Raphael, relaying with all the skill of the Renaissance the forms of Plato and Aristotle on those famous steps. Great blasphemer, Plato, deigning to domesticate even the heavens. And Aristotle codifying the means to domesticate the world. Would they have stopped the domesticating iteration if they could? Putting aside for a moment the impossibility of that question, let us assume a stance of optimism. How else could we have known the silliness of the distance between pekingese and wolf? How else could we have said undomesticate--no, rather shouted it from the roof tops?

It is necessary to realize that by fearing death (dying), our great ancestors feared life (living). It should be feared, but not abandoned as it has been. For I have seen life, whole and unified, and beheld its bifurcated source: order and chaos. And all its manifestations have presented themselves to our minds in untold number and symbol: insight and concealedness, conscious and unconscious, yang and yin, individual and collective, Apollo and Dionysis.

Tame the world? God forbid it! But that is what Eve and Adam did. Tame, tame, tame. It is what we would have done coming into consciousness like they did, knowing good and evil in a flash--with god-like minds in this creature-like flesh--instantly knowing death as concept. What else is there but to tame the killer? To domesticate the wild world, to domesticate the mirrored wildness that was found inside as well as out. To muzzle our unconscious being and steal its vital power. This has been the object of our fear, to order and tame world and self, and so to be immortal. But in our myopic haste we have failed to see that our fear of wild is a misappropriated fear of death, and this misappropriated, domesticating fear tragically creates a fear of life.

Still, how has this domesticating iteration changed us? What does it mean to say that we have exchanged gods for troughs? Simply this, that our life denying culture has precluded divinities. We have learned to equate gods with death, because gods are far too wild for our domesticated flesh. Again, to say it simply, we prefer comfort to truth. YHWH is violent and jealous, give us Augustine instead, a City of God. We prefer fences to open fields, and houses to our natural habitat.

Thus we meet the domus of our domesticate. For these three things we have built taming houses: mind, body, world. Everything from our psyche to our culture, religion to DNA, architecture to narrative, has been tamed--has suffered from the taming that domestication brings. It would seem that hope is lost.

But the pulse, the barest rush of life, still flows. In the wiliest of dreams, the hint of seemingly impossible heights of being have been felt by each of us. And ever so keenly, we feel also the loss of something we can’t even name, the hope for the re-integration of self with self, situated so far from what we think of as mind that we almost can’t think of it at all. Up till now, its substance has remained nameless, but we know the lack of it. Yet I have learned its name, and its name is wild, and at the same time, self. Abandon the de-natured halls of Dante’s forested paradise. For, what he called trees, we have better names; we have built the city of god, brick by domesticated brick, and it has left us wanting the real wilderness of real gods.

And so, if we are to understand the undomestication of being, it is necessary to understand the domestication of being. That story begins with the concept death, and the fear of it, and extends to the irony that the pursuit of immortality only increases death and its anxiety. Such is the domesticating story, namely the human story, the story of human being played out through symbol and poetry in the lines of Genesis three, and the Gilgamesh epic. It is there that we begin to unravel the threads of domestication, and hopefully follow them out of the labrynth.