Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Thanks to everyone that has commented on my blog either here or to me in person! I really appreciate it.

As my daughter would say (and she wasn't even around when it started): "That was the best decade ever!"

Here's to the beautiful and tough world we live in, to grief and joy, and all the blessings that befall us everyday.

The Magic Mountain

I picked up Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" (1924) in a really good translation by the unimaginatively named John E. Woods amidst the bodice-rippers on the twenty-five cent table at the Na'alehu Farmer's Market the other day. I came across this line last night: All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal - then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, the the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual's physical and organic life. To track that sentence down took great skill in hypotactic sentence construction, of course, but even more courage. Going there, to the place where we all measure ourselves against what the world secretly whispers to us and what we expect of ourselves, is to visit a place of great incoherence and vulnerability. Just to speak of such things sheds a little light and courage in the darkness where we all go fumbling to make a life. Thomas Mann's novels are vertiginous, often almost frightening reading experiences. Well, and to live in Germany through the first world war and its aftermath would give you a front-row seat on the catastrophic melt-down of a civilization.

Post global

We are, I'm thinking, moving into a post-global world.
It is, in some ways, a post-apocalyptic world.
The great global system crashed, and now we know that turning every place into every other place just isn't very smart. Because you lose too much of the particulars that add up to a reality worth living in and being passionate about.
We lost track of the basics - of how life and lives are sustained - because we made money the measure of all things. But we didn't measure everything in money, not the things like sanity and safety, breast-milk and soil fertility, coral reefs and fresh eggs. So we were making flawed calculations and flawed decisions, becoming more and more alienated.
We are going to need to learn how to assign value to particulars, without making these places, people, or things globally interchangeable. We are going to have to learn how to value what is most valuable, in some kind of common language like money. I'm not sure how this is going to happen but it will, because there is no other way.
And we could lead the way.

War

My daughter announced to me suddenly: "Today Samson (her aptly named classmate) and I agreed - the people in Afghanistan should stop fighting and we should just be friends." This startled me. It seemed so fresh and radical.
I said, "You and Samson are right, however...it's not quite so simple" So then I had to explain 9/11, the war on terror, Bush I & II, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and all kinds of human insanity and bad-ness. I felt like I was justifying it by making it comprehensible. It is all just so stupid and yet hasn't it always been like this?
Humans have this burning need to be important - to be on top of the food chain. It's a lot easier and faster to get important by being hard-hearted, selfish, and greedy than by being kind, humble, and generous. It all unrolls from that little kernel: all the wars, Wall Street, and most of history.
You'd think that being important would make people happy, since we desire it so ardently. Sure, being important does provide lots of adrenaline thrills and there is no greater drug than home-brewed adrenaline. It just never ever ever is enough.
Nope, it's the nurturing and generous people that are deeply happy, which is some kind of quiet justice.
But we've really got to get a handle on the adrenaline thing - if we're ever to have a sane world.