Let’s take a second to consider what we associate with the word practical. If we look for its etymology, we quickly run into notions like this:
Practical: from the Greek practikos via Latin to the French practique and finally to English. Practical is to move from theory to action, words to deeds. Pragmatic, reasoned, useful, applied, utilitarian.
Practical gets up from the table and goes to the toolshed when too many big words are used. It prides itself on a lack of sentimentality; it wants an idea to ‘get to the point’. It makes us feel secure in a woefully insecure time. That something can be solved. Practical seems to distrust words. It’s a lone rider with the big news. A big problem just needs a big idea. Get thee to thy laptop, measuring tape, bulldozer.
Practical seems the resolute end of whimsy, of nostalgia, of wistfulness. The end of the poet. It does not indulge prolonged bouts of uncertainty or paradox.
But here’s the problem. Absolutely the thing. We are utterly beset by both uncertainty and paradox.
Paradox and uncertainty are the acrid tang in the strangulated throat of our times, the very passport to entry, and a whispered, desperate currency amongst our youth. A tool belt can’t fix this. Paradox and uncertainty can’t be dismissed out of hand. They are the identifying brands of now, our hashtags, our tweets, our sat navs into the murk of consequence.
To a toxic practicality (I think I just invented a phrase) paradox and uncertainty are Scylla and Charybdis – challenges to be outdone (the serpent and whirlpool Odysseus has to navigate) – but to a mythic awareness they cajole new and inventive forms of thought. Please note, I didn’t say we enjoy the encounter.
So how’s ‘practical’ working out for us, and what is its relationship to climate change?
Significant, I’d say. Practical in the Western perspective of the word is riven catatonic with limit at this point. Let me just go ‘fix’ that forest. Improve it. The earth is weary of our practicality.
However, I’m not going to give up on the word entirely, rather view it from the slant.
What would practical look like to an Amijangal elder from the Northern Territory, an Evenk reindeer herder, a Haida stone carver? If the world is thick and credibly teeming with gods disguised as longhorn cattle, weather patterns, even occasionally secreted within conversation, surely a logical, methodical action would be to address them through the ordinary, unhysterical maintenance of prayer, ritual and story? And we know the world over that such beings have a soft spot for beauty.
Real, practical actions are entirely bound up with the business of manners. Yes, you guessed it, courtship. Humans, as a late form of flowering on the earth, have drained the very life force from the soil-banked world tree of which we are but only one tip. A tip committed to indecent, incessant, lunatic budding. And such a flowering is always the death-signal back to the seed of its origination. And oddly, government response to climate change seems like a tacit suicide bid. I wonder if there is a cultural, not even consciously personal, death wish in the West. Something inside us may simply have had enough. Be disgusted with ourselves. I’ll come back to this.
Vigorous industrialisation of countryside then swabbed deep with insecticides, guttering the earth for minerals, withholding vast stockpiles of food while others starve: all of this would have been seen as ‘practical actions’ to serve the shuffling beast of degraded-human-progress at one point or another. And so many of the diseases that now sluice through our bloodstream and kidneys, livers and guts are but the sorrowing companions of all writ large out there in the gape of lived experience.
Our insides and our outsides are in a face-off. Manners tend to come with the arrival of consequence to our actions. To something up close and likely bringing a little buckle to the knees.
