papers

Why 'Methuselah papers'? OK, it's a joke. Methuselah is a biblical patriarch and figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, who lived to 969 years: the longest life of all human beings, in the line from Adam to Noah.

To have Methuselah pinned at the head of the page, as we write or read this paper here, is a persistent prompt to beware patriarchy, delusions of continuity or bloodline, clinging and craving, factionalism and essentialism, a Promised Land or a Chosen or any other kind of supremacy; mythologising, cultural hegemony and adherence to any Book and priesthood.

Methuselah offered himself as a (counter-) figure when I was hatching the scheme for this project of writing (a phase already half a year old and more). I'm in my #elder years, and unlike Methuselah I don't have that long left in which to write well. I'm hoping in the end to have lived and worked in some kind of #tradition that effectively promotes and facilitates better (more #skilful and gracious) living by better (more adapted but paradigmatically 'human') people, that yields a better (more #pluriversal, rich, generous, well-founded) frame for life in unborn generations, of humans and the other beings with whom we share ‘creation’.

But it’s only we human animals who do creation, in the particular, imaginatively deluded, profoundly problematic, materially impactful, busybody, short-sighted, de novo way that we do. ‘Methuselah’ here in this blog – as a space of reflecting on making a #LivingEconomy – is a prompt to try to write and act with moderation in #deeptime.