An Interview with the Urban Hermit: A Nobody for Our Time Part II

By Henry David Toro

“My instinct tells me my head is an organ for burrowing; as some creatures use their snout and forepaws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.” H.D. Thoreau, Walden

HTD: After the last interview, I have some understanding of why you call yourself a hermit. But why “urban?” That doesn’t seem to go with the tradition of hermits at all.

UH: Yes, hermits are usually in the forest or out in the desert, like St. Anthony facing down his demons, not living in the middle of Utica. The hermit archetype we’re familiar with is associated with wilderness for a good reason: the hermit’s “job” is Self-knowledge, and wilderness is a good metaphor for the Unconscious, or the Soul. One answer is, I designate my hermit self as urban because that’s where I am, here in Utica, and since the wilderness of the hermit is also an inner experience, why not here as well as anywhere? If I imagine I need to be out in Nature, I’m done for, since that’s not in the cards for me. And it isn’t in the cards for many people who lack the means or the freedom from responsibility to just up and take themselves off to the mountain or the ashram or the desert.

HTD: But isn’t that a mistake to impose limits on yourself as to where you can go, as well as to what you can be? Isn’t it true that one’s intention, at least to an extent, allows the unforeseen to happen in one’s life? So isn’t it self-limiting to say “I can’t do such and so because I can’t afford it?” What about dreams and visions?

UH: I am a major proponent of following dreams and having a vision. But even dreams have to stand up to some standard of the common good, or what is good for the community, first of all. Not that all dreams are held to such standards, of course. No independent council of community elders checked out Henry Ford’s dream and its consequences down the line, or the development of atomic weapons, or Monsanto’s seed technologies before they went on line. Some “good” is always served by these innovative dreams, but who is looking at the larger good? With the earth being destroyed at an ever increasing rate, with social structures in shambles, the welfare of children down the tubes, dreams have to refer to the context of the world we are in, and to an ethic of compassion and justice. Living in the city, with its strong essences and real diversity, I can never abstract too much, or get too ”spiritual” and lost in my own head. I am frequently annoyed, frustrated, and even depressed by the reality around me. But my job is to remain awake, no matter what my surroundings: if I can’t “bloom” here, what am I saying about myself? That I have to have a $250,000 house in the suburbs or I cannot be happy? In a way, living here forces me to go against a tendency in me to seek a kind of undisturbed gated peace. There is a part of me that really wants badly to go to sleep. I’d rather be awake, no matter what it is I am awake to.

So, really, like Booker T. Washington famously said, “Cast down your buckets where you are.” These words have been misinterpreted to mean “make the best with what you have and things will get better by and by.” Spoken to former slaves who faced a futile competition for industrial employment with white laborers and even immigrants, Washington was counseling a kind of self-reliance; rather than continuing to run futilely after the white man’s economy, black men and women should establish their own, from the bottom up. Today, the advice seems prescient, for what has running after the white man’s economy done for any of us? If we wish to “carve and paint the very medium through which we look,” and “keep ourselves awake,” first we must see that where we are, the limitations that bind us, are our allies in some way. The tasks of consciousness are great enough if you are in one place, married to one person, as Thoreau eloquently pointed out to us. This is a limitation I have chosen to live within. In these momentous times calling for us to change our way of life, this is something I have wrestled with in fine St. Anthony fashion: that is, how to be “stuck-in-place” (Utica or wherever) and prepared to find that “richest vein” at the same time. The answer to this conundrum might save a lot of marriages, as well as slow down the destruction of the planet.

In a well-known Russian fairy tale, The Maiden Czar, the boy Ivan finds himself at the Baba Yaga’s terrifying cottage in the middle of the deep woods. He is asked by the crafty Baba, Have you come here by compulsion or of your own free will? Ivan is no slouch in terms of cunning, either. He answers her in a way that keeps him out of being eaten and his skull added to the other trophies lined up along the Baba Yaga’s picket fence: “Largely by my own free will and twice as much by compulsion,” he replies.

To live within limitations such as place and marriage, for example – and don’t forget, life that is circumscribed between birth and death is the biggest limitation of them all - one has to be possessed of an alive imagination, and, not only that, one must be able to connect with the other realm - the spirit realm, which is the realm of true freedom. If we believe literally that either we must be able to escape a circumstance that has come to seem intolerable or we will be chained to misery the rest of our life, we are missing entirely the third way, the way of being in that circumstance consciously or imaginatively, and thereby transforming it. One cannot be a bliss-follower without learning this approach to the seemingly intractable problems that confront each of us during the course of a lifetime. Putting the problem out there, on the spouse, the environment, the neighbor, the crime-ridden city, means your answer to the Baba Yaga’s question is that you are here by compulsion. She’ll eat you for dinner.

If on the other hand, you insist that you are entirely a free agent, free to do or be whatever you want, she will eat you for dinner. Being brought up in the materialist American context, with its accompanying belief in free will, it is nearly impossible to answer the Baba Yaga’s question except with an answer that will get you eaten. That is why there is such a dearth of genuine aliveness and thoughtfulness in our modern culture, and so much addiction, numbing out, and escape. Many of our society’s adults have failed their encounter with the Baba Yaga. Or rather, they are unaware of that level in their being, and so simply pass from one sleep to another. We are taught not to believe in the invisible, spiritual realm, that if something cannot be empirically proven; if it does not meet with the criteria of rationalism, then it must not exist at all. This is a terrible and consequential narrowing of consciousness. The consequences of such a rigid materialist or secular view begin with unconsciousness on the part of adults toward the very real fears and sorrows of childhood, and their very real needs for intangibles like solitude, and unprogrammed experiences with nature.

Robbed of the inner realm, individuals are helpless to withstand the message coming from a society that has mysteriously become the Baba Yaga, out of control and devouring her young. If we ignore Nature, or if we refuse to learn what Nature teaches us through our bodies and souls, that does not make Her go away. On the contrary, it causes her to gain in destructive energy; in these times it is easy to picture the Baba Yaga having had to build multiple fences to hold all the skulls of her hapless visitors who have upgraded to their flat screen high-def TV and 500 channels on the cable, or who believe that being on Facebook is a good way to be a friend. So, for me, one part of my answer as to why I call myself an “urban” hermit is very much connected to this great lesson of learning to live within the given limitations, as consciously as possible, which is also, I must point out, not the path of deprivation but of desire.

HDT: You mean the Baba Yaga can be defeated by people following their desire?

UH: Well, yes. I hadn’t been thinking that, but it is true, and that’s in the fairy tale as well. In the fairy tale, Ivan is following the “maiden czar,” the awakener of his own spiritual longing for beauty, meaning, a relation to his own soul. Thoreau expressed it as the desire to not “live meanly.” Another way I have of picturing this is that we are called to live the artist’s life, even if we do not think of ourselves as artists.

Prophetic voices today are calling for contraction of our economy, and that means contracting our way of life as well as the whole idea of a global, ever-expanding-without-limits economy. As we can see, the engines of the economy are helpless to stop themselves. Only individuals who themselves can manage the contraction of their way of life – fundamentally a spiritual undertaking - can begin to withdraw themselves from the economy based upon ever increasing consumption. To me this simply means we have to learn once again to honor eros, or the longing of the soul for this adventure of meaning and purpose that we have tried as a society, and failed, to do without. Nothing else – other than our changing the “very medium and atmosphere through which we look –“can turn the sacrifice of contraction into a bountiful feast of a different kind - a feast of beauty, meaning and deep connectedness to Nature and all of life.

H.D. Toro: So an old rust belt town’s lack of illusions, pretense, or false purity can make it a good place to mine for Thoreau’s alternative wealth?

UH: Loss is always a good starting place to meet up with the soul.