For those who have wondered about this domain name, wildwolff.com
Ah, you are thinking wild is crazy, irresponsible, uncontrollable?
But that is not the kind of 'wild' that is meant here. This 'wild' is the wild of beasts and plants that grow wild, they have not been domesticated. Not long ago -- perhaps only 10,000 years ago -- all plants and animals were wild. Even humans were wild, we roamed the earth, hunting and gathering (and more gathering than hunting, from what I know).
My Webster's New American Dictionary says of wild: 1) "living in a state of nature and not ordinarily tamed," 2)" growing or produced without aid or care," 3) "waste, desolate," 4) "uncontrolled, unrestrained, unruly," 5) "turbulent, stormy," 6) "extravagant, fantastic, crazy," 7) "indicative of strong passion, desire or emotion," 8) "uncivilized, savage" 9) "deviating from the natural or expected course, erratic," and 10) is "wild, as in wild card".
The first two of these definitions are printed in lower case letters (like this), all the other kinds of wild are printed in small caps, like this, except no 10, which again is in lower case. The dictionary does not say what that means (perhaps it does, but I have not found it yet).
The first two meanings of 'wild' are my kind of definitions. I particularly like "not ordinarily tamed".
All the other explanations are modern meanings of the word 'wild', they reflect the values and the point of view of today's civilization. Wild has come to mean something or someone uncontrolled (untamed). Wild has come to mean behavior that is not expected (someone might do something unique, creative, different &emdash; Heaven forbid!).
One of the great turning points in my life came when I met and fell in love with some extremely primitive people, aboriginal people. There was an almost immediate affinity despite the fact that I did not speak a word of their language. Their smiles were as innocent as a child's but they were fierce hunterswhen they had to find food; they used poison arrows. The popular media calls them a "Stone Age People". That is probably an exaggeration, but they did survive longer than all our civilizations together. They were poor in our eyes, but they very consciously chose not to burden themselves with 'things'. They were nomads, it was important that they not have to carry much when they moved their camp, which they did frequently. All aboriginal peoples, all over the world, were nomads, I learned later.
Many aboriginal peoples survived until the middle of the twentieth century.
The little people I met survived by moving, by hiding in virgin jungle, by avoiding confrontations. But the jungle was eaten up by 'development' when civilized people cut the jungle in order to plant rubber trees. Now almost all aboriginal peoples are extinct, or merged into the larger population around them, which is the same thing.
It took me a long time to understand my fascination with these people. On the face of it there was nothing much they could teach me, or do for me. Oh, I could have written scientific articles about them, but I did not. I could not. I felt that would have been a betrayal. But over the years, whenever I felt particularly squeezed by rules and regulations, when I felt deep in my gut somewhere that I had to have living things around me, not plastic, I dreamed about the aborigines. I saw them again in their unbelievably simple lives &emdash; truly 'unbelievable' for a Westerner: how can they survive without electricity, without television, without telephones, without our medicine…? Yet their lives seemed so real, so 'right' somehow.
The more I identified with aboriginal and other First People, as they like to be known now, the more I began to see our world differently. I began to notice the many things that did not seem quite 'right'. I no longer accepted the world as we, humans, have made it. I began to observe as if from the outside &emdash; quite a trick, that!
The media make much of our miraculous medical system, by far the most expensive in the world, relying on machines that cost as much as a house, drugs that cost a week's pay for one pill. But the media rarely mention that it is not available even to all Americans, let alone the rest of the world. The number of people dying from diseases that can easily be cured by western medicine runs in the millions. Is it 40% of the American population that has no health insurance?
Aboriginal peoples have no western trained doctors, no pharmaceutical companies that invent new drugs daily; until recently they did not need them.
We take for granted that 'everyone' has television and watches the news that is selected by a few companies. We have forgotten that much of the function of the media has become to reinforce our taming. Of course we are tamed. We must be, in order to live in a modern world, which makes a thousand new rules a day we have to obey, or else.
We tell ourselves that all these rules are for our own good, and hardly anybody ever thinks about whether that is true. As we also tell ourselves that it is we who elect the people who govern us and make those rules. But do we? There are rumors that many laws are made not by legislators, but by 'special interest' groups.
Today even television shows stories about how things go awry in the world &emdash; often somewhere else in the world, so we do not need to worry too much. Yet sometimes things go wrong next door. But fortunately there is a happy program right after that, and we can forget. Truth is, we do not want to know. We are asleep and do not want to be awakened &emdash; perhaps because then we have to 'do' something about it, and we have long been given the idea that the world is so complex and strange and difficult to grasp that we are helpless, powerless to do much of anything to change the world.
A wild man is not asleep. He cannot afford to be asleep. Someone who sees through the eyes of a Stone Age person cannot sleep! If he cannot hide &emdash; and where is there to hide in today's world? &emdash; he can tell stories.
Everything I learned from the little people was told in stories. Often very short stories, but stories nevertheless. Once someone asked me whether I had come by a certain area of the country. "Is it true that there is a machine there that does the work of a hundred men?"
I guessed they meant a bulldozer. Yes, I said, that is quite true, and I tried to explain the marvels of modern technology &emdash; but was interrupted when someone asked simply, "And what do those hundred men do?"
I had never thought of that! Yes, what do those hundred men do who are now out of work?
Another time, somewhere else, someone told me this little story. We had been walking along a jungle path, not saying anything at all for at least an hour. Suddenly he said, "You do not have to worry. You are only the third (civilized man) who came to see us. The other two died very unpleasant deaths. One was eaten by a tiger, the other fell of a cliff and was impaled on a bamboo; it took him a long time to die. But you do not have to worry."
It is not easy to explain the idea of 'wild' to people who think wild means something bad, something uncontrolled and uncontrollable. But wild is what we all were, before we became civilized. We were wild only ten thousand years ago &emdash;not all that long ago, when you think that humans have lived on this planet for at least a hundred thousand years and probably much longer. Wild meant always being alert, always being aware of the environment we walked through. We knew how to smell the air. Around the next corner there could well be a huge tiger! Today of course we do not expect tigers around the next engineered curve of the highway, but a wild man still goes through life awake, always aware.
Today we learn, from the first day of life, that being civilized is the highest, the most advanced, the best achievement of humans on this earth. We think civilization means living in a world we, humans, have created for ourselves on top of this planet, using the planet as resource &emdash; and abusing the planet, using up its resources as we all should know by now. We also think that technology is the be-all and end-all, the pinnacle of what we call progress.
I remember seeing, now many years ago, one of those monster rockets leave for a turn around the planet. Even on the small screen and a tiny creaky speaker, it was obvious that the amount of energy expended to push that tube of steel up out of the atmosphere was completely out of proportion to what it was meant to accomplish. Enough energy to light a city, someone said later. I thought of all the children on this earth who do not have enough to eat.
Yes, I drive a car, I use gasoline, electricity. I have a phone and a computer. Those things put me in the top 5% of humans on this planet probably. I am not proud of that… But I also know that if I had to, I could live with those magical little people who own nothing, and owe nothing, who in their total humility are the freest people on earth.
I try to be like them, even if cannot live like them here and now.
After I met these wild little people, I studied books about other aboriginals, in Southern Africa, in the Amazon, in Australia, and was astonished to find there were great similarities. All aboriginals were nomads, so they did not own anything. They were hunters and gatherers, although they gathered a lot more than they hunted, but always they honored the life of the animal they caught for food . They never hunted for 'sport', nor did they kill more than they could eat. They all had that freedom that comes from not being tamed. They all felt part of the earth, animals were there brothers, plants their cousins. And what we today call 'spiritual' was how they lived their daily lives.
Probably all ancient cultures tell stories of what some call the Trickster: in Europe it is the fox (called Reynard), Native American tribes tell stories of the coyote, in Suriname I heard stories of Anansi, the spider, from a group of elusive people who live in the deep jungle, descendants of African slaves who ran away as soon they arrived and therefore were able to preserve a 17th century African culture. In Southeast Asia there are stories of butterflies, or little geckos, and even flies. What these story animals have in common is that they are small and thought to be harmless, yet they know how to survive by 'tricks'.
Of course what the stories tell are not really tricks, they tell of an endless variety of clever and always unexpected ways to escape danger. There are stories of avoiding confrontation, by moving fast or becoming 'invisible' (I imagine that most really ancient cultures survived by avoiding confrontation and being invisible).
And most trickster stories demonstrate that brute force does not always win.
These so-called tricksters also have in common that they stand outside of the norm, the ideas and thoughts that are held by 'everyone' without thought. Many of the ideas on which our civilization is based are such unquestioned and unquestionable ideas.
All trickster animals know how not to "play the game".
The wild man is a human trickster. He (or she) stands a little outside of the larger society; she (or he) knows how not to play games. That requires the wild man to be awake (which means aware) at all times, of course. And avoid confrontation, be invisible…
This wild man is an observer who sees civilization through the eyes of the untamed.
He is the wild card.
And that is the story of how my domain name came to be wildwolff (with two 'f's).