Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa Is Tomorrow at Noon EST ~ Eulogy for the World's Loneliest Man?
Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa Is Tomorrow at Noon EST ~ Eulogy for the World's Loneliest Man?
Let's honor the life of someone no one really knew.
Dear Friends,
Tomorrow we will gather again for Cultural Embodiment at The Stoa. You can join us from 12-1pm EST here:
Cultural Embodiment is a practice of witnessing and sense-making what’s happening each week in the cultural zeitgeist. We gather, bring ourselves into a state of embodied presence, and then watch, read or look at a piece of culture that has some relevance. Our sharing is focused on the wisdom of the body, emotions, memories, and myth. We feel our way into meaning together. It can be cathartic and interesting to view the news together; to turn towards what is happening in the world with open-hearts rather than closed minds.
This Week ~ “Lonely” Men
A very strange “obituary” caught my eye this week (thank you, Ari Kuschnir). And no, it was not Gorby’s.
It was a BBC report on the death of “The Man of the Hole,” the last remaining member of an indigenous tribe in Brazil. He was found dead of natural causes on August 23 in a hammock outside his handmade straw hut, covered in Macaw feathers. He was estimated to be about 60 years old.
The article on BBC news described the man as “the loneliest man in the world” because he lived in total isolation for the last 26 years. The majority of his tribe were killed by ranchers in the 1970s and the last remaining members were killed by miners in 1995, making him the sole survivor. He has avoided contact with the outside world since.
As I read the article and watched an accompanying video, I wondered about the man’s life. I wondered if he really was lonely at all. I doubted it. He was surrounded by life.
I tried to put myself in his shoes…well, feet…and thought about loneliness. This was really hard to do without projecting Western and modern/post-modern ideas onto his experience. I soon realized I had no idea what his life might have been like. The sheer impossibility of this imagining was really appealing to me. It put me in touch with a lot of my assumptions about what life on the planet is like for people now. And it reminded me that this is still a very big world. The life this man was living and the one I am living might as well have been in different dimensions and very well might be.
The exercise of trying to imagine his life reminded me of a game I used to play when I was in 6th grade. That year, the school bus dropped me off a mile from my home. The long walk gave me time to think about what was in the air, and what was in the air in 1985 was the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was president and Gorbachev had just taken office. It was a tense time geopolitically (though we could not have imagined then how tense things would come to be).
Nuclear war was a very real threat to me at that time (to all of us, really) and I spent a lot of time worrying about it. Somehow I came to realize that I could turn my worry into something more interesting and constructive by making it into a survival game: what would I do if there was nuclear war and I was left alone, the last person on earth?
I began to look forward to playing the game each day. Not really knowing the horrors of nuclear fall-out, thank goodness, I imagined intriguing possibilities and all the delights a 12-year old mind can conjure: abundant abandoned sweets and favorite foods, learning to do things my ancestors had done, peaceful landscapes and interesting modes of travel, cool forts and well-furnished homes, wild animals as pets. I was never lonely in these daydreams. I think they answered a budding desire for independence arising in my pre-teen heart. They were also deeply soothing.
It’s interesting to me that this memory arose in response to the death of a presumed-lonely man in the Amazon on the day one of the world’s most famous men, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, died. It’s probably just a coincidence, but it did prompt me to think about who we eulogize and how, who is lonely and why, and what a wild array of possibilities there are still available in this human experience.
Join me tomorrow to watch a video of the World’s Loneliest Man. It was shot in 2018 when some Brazilian anthropologists ran across the man in the jungle chopping wood. We’ll feel into the implications of this man’s life and the news of his death. For me, I can already feel that it evokes curiosity, remorse, grief, and wonder. What will your embodied experience be? Come share in the news with us.
Beautifully said. Thank you for sharing your feelings.