Elm Hill Farm, cont.

Father told me that when he was a little boy he loved to come down the ladder, - not the stairs, note - in the early morning from his bed in the loft of the log house to get into bed with his mother.  The fire in the great fireplace was always burning, so the room was at least dimly lighted.  One morning after a night of severe storm, he started down the ladder, and to his horror he saw a great big Indian stretched out on the floor in front of the fire.  The little boy scurried back to his own bed and pulled the covers over his head.  Later in the morning when he looked fearfully down, the Indian had gone.  

That loft in which the children, at least some of them, slept must have been well ventilated in spite of the fact that many people used to think the night air harmful.  In my youth when things were not so we would have them, and there was more or less grumbling, it was common to hear said, “Well, you ought to have seen how it was when I was a boy!  Why when we woke up in the morning in winter, often the snow would be drifted in on the bedclothes!”  Or remarks similar to fit the occasion.

At “Teed’s Corner,” a little way up the road, there stood Teed’s Tavern, a great big rambling house that I dimly remember.  In such a storm as drove the Indian into Grandfather’s cabin, Indians came into the bedroom of the Tavern-keeper, and stretched themselves on the floor.  Hearing a noise in the night, Mr. Teed started to get out of bed to find out what was going on.  He put his foot on a Indian lying on the floor beside his bed.  The Indian’s grunt told him what was “the noise.” He was not at all disturbed.  They all slept peacefully until morning.

I wonder how the women liked these invasions.  They had to get used to it of course.

When Father was born he got some kind of eye infection from the mid-wife or nurse who took care of him.  It gave him a good bit of trouble in his little boyhood.  One day a neighbor found him trudging down the road toward Moscow and asked him where he was going.  “I’m going to Moscow to buy me some new eyes” was the reply.  He outgrew the trouble and his blue eyes were one of his best features. 

One day he started out with a pail to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

As time passed the first pressure of things to be done passed too, and Thomas Dodge built his frame house on the knoll beside the barns.

Can’t you think what a pleasure it must have been to move from the log house to the frame house?  The log house must have cramped so large a family and made many unnecessary steps to do the chores.  Did the new house seem large and wonderful?  It really wasn’t.  It has grown to be a large house in the hundred years since it was built and from the first it was of good New England type. 

Why, oh why, didn’t we find definitely the year the family moved? Fred, the oldest member of the next generation said it was 1834.  Anyway it was about that time.

Coming Home

What does that mean: coming home? How is that even possible? Is there a home that one could come back to when everything has changed and we can never be the way we were?

 Isn’t it a shameful to have to return home - a defeat, a retreat, a regression? 

Is it possible for us to see coming home as a beginning rather than an end? 

Our great challenge is, in fact, to return to where we started and see it anew, as if for the first time.  How will we need to see differently, understand ourselves differently, live differently?

In this age of present and impending migrations of people from their ruined home countries, how is it possible to speak of “coming home?”  Or is it more critical now than ever?  Dark times may well be upon us but that does not mean that there are no remedies for our folly and hubris, our ignorance and arrogance.  

To be rich in a world where some suffer and die of hunger, of displacement, of powerlessness is criminal.  Our civilization is a civilization of criminals. 

It is not criminal to be a damaged soul and long for the security that being rich is supposed to confer.  That fearfulness is as old as our species, and perhaps older still. It is not criminal to dream big dreams and do great things.  To create and lead, to organize and coordinate, to excel. (Though one has to ask excel in comparison to what? Each other? Is that the only way we know who we are? By beating each other? By impoverishing and destroying the lives and livelihoods of other beings, both human and nonhuman?  In excelling, don’t we always have to ask: “what am I destroying, making worse by being ‘better than’?”)

I don’t have any answers, only evolving questions. 

The idea of coming home goes against the grain of the American/global capitalist myth of expansion, growth, exploration, displacement, tourism, exploitation.  It is embarrassing to have to go home, to be sent home, to live at home.  One is supposed to be out there conquering all the time.  Disrupting everything.  

Coming home means that one has accepted that there are limits, which is anathema to the American myth of conquest and limitlessness.  (Anathema, heresy, mental breakdown.)

If the myth of conquest and limitlessness is what is limiting us from growing up and seeing the world objectively then we would be wise to speak out against that myth when it is invoked.  If we can never come home because we are afraid - afraid of our mortality, of the idea of limits - then we ought to get over our fears. 

We all go out and return home everyday.  It is a little art-form that most of us spend a life-time learning - to balance work and home. To learn how to care for a home and a family.   We have larger cycles of exploration and return in our lives. As a global civilization, do we know how to come home; how to care for our home with commitment and passion?  Not yet. It is an art we have yet to learn together.  Our next renaissance - in which we build a culture of being at home: in this world, finite and infinite; with ourselves as mortal, gifted animals.  In which we make a richness of life and living things, because that is true wealth.  

Life and Spacetime - more Lynn Margulis

"So what is life?
Life is the representation, the "presencing" of past chemistries, a past environment of the early Earth that, because of life, remains on the modern Earth.  It is the watery, membrane-bound encapsulation of spacetime.  Death is part of life because even dying matter, once it reproduces, rescues complex chemical systems and budding dissipative structures from thermodynamic equilibrium.  Life is a nexus of increasing sensitivity and complexity in a universe of parent matter that seems stupid and unfeeling in comparison.  Life must maintain itself against the universal tendency of heat to dissipate with time.  This thermodynamic view explains, in a way, the determination, the purposefulness of life - for billions years it has been stuck in a pattern which, even if it wanted to, it can't get out of, of upping the stakes as it goes.  For life itself is - are - these patterns of chemical conservation in a universe tending towards heat loss and disintegration.  Preserving the past, making a difference between past and present, life binds time, expanding complexity and creating new problems for itself."

-from What is Life, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Eve and the Tree of Life

When Eve looked at the Tree of Life what did she see?  Did she see its roots deep in the earth, and its branches among the stars? Did she see its cellular structure, its layers of living tissue, its pores that breathe out oxygen?  Did she see her equal among beings?  

Or did she see a thing, a green thing with a grey-brown bark, with fruit that was her right to pick and wood that was her right to take? Did she see a natural resource, a product, so many board-feet?

But Eve is a mythical figure.  No one knows what she saw. She said to Adam, “Eat!” and Adam did,  and God became afraid, and sent them away from the Garden to make a living on their own, which they did.  

If Eve was a smart girl, and I think she was, she took the Garden with her, however, and God could not stop her, because he has never understood Eve. The Tree of Life was already planted in her mind.  And she will share it with Adam, just as she did the apple of knowledge, whenever Adam stops worshipping God.  Which is to say whenever he stops provoking wars, building monuments to himself and God, and generally idolizing power.  So it might be a while. 

The Tree of Life is everywhere, if you can see it with the eyes of Eve.

Elm Hill Farm, continued

Live must have been very “real” and very “earnest” to those growing children in a time when the land had to be cleared and the stumps of trees disposed of, many of them in that section were used to make fences and more still in existence in my young womanhood, picturesque, but using a lot of land.  The barns were built on the knoll, their present site, where Grandfather planned to build his frame house.  This meant crossing the creek, on a log at first or fording it, every time they went to the barn.  

One of Father’s early memories is of falling off the log into the creek at time of spring flood.  Grandmother had said, “Jimmy, don’t cross the log, the water is too high for you, and you are a little boy.”

Probably being a “little boy” didn’t set very well, and he wanted to go across to the barn.  He would show them he was bigger than they thought he was.  he started bravely over, but the water rushed and the roared right around his feet and he didn't feel big at all, and suddenly he fell.  The water rushed him down the stream near enough to the bank so he could grasp some willow branches.  He yelled lustily and Jote rushed down and pulled him to shore and up the bank.  Of course they all were scared and glad that he was safe, but little papa got a switching.

Grandmother had the endless task that falls to the home-maker in a new country.  Her flax wheel, and spinning wheel and swift, I can remember upstairs in what was the carriage house when I was home.  There was plenty to do both in doors and out.  But I’ve no doubt the children were happy; fun and play meant something and were the sweeter for being earned.

Father said he could remember how his mother used to put her work basket away and have everything ready to begin the Sabbath on Saturday at sundown - and on Sunday at sundown the Sabbath was over.  When they went to church they had to go to York. 

I wonder if on Jotham, the oldest son, the heaviest work fell.  I gather from remarks and vague impressions that Jotham was not as keen mentally as the others.  I wonder.  He never married and was only fifty-one when he died. 

District school of pioneer times was where school education began, and for Jotham and James was all they had.  The school house stood at the top of “Teed Hill” on the right side and was red.  Father told terrible tales of how discipline was maintained.  The teacher seemed always to be a man.  Perhaps it was necessary to have a man to deal with the pupils, for some of them were young men and women.  

Poor James! why didn’t someone teach him how to spell.  He never mastered the trick, nor have some of his children and grandchildren.  It just doesn’t seem to come to some of us, and even with a college education there is room for vast improvement.  I shed tears over misspelled words in my childhood  — and my son should have.  Brother Bob got through the Regents exam in spelling after trying many times, because his principal wrote on his 74 paper: “For Heaven’s sake let this fellow pass!” They did. 

Up the creek and back of the house was “The Gulf”, a beautiful deep ravine, a lovely place for anyone to wander through, and a most fascinating place for each generation of children as they came along.  In Father’s day, as in mine, the school children often came home down the “Gulf”.  Father told me that one day as he was coming home, barefoot of course, probably dreaming with this head in the clouds, he stepped squarely on a dead rattle snake, which a boy going before him had killed and, in retaliation for some quarrel, had stretched across the rocks, hoping that Jim Dodge would step on it.  Jim did, and leaped high, bringing his head back to earth.

Indians were still about.  The remnant of the Seneca tribe, who had remained in the loved valley after the terrible raid of Sullivan’s army.  “Friendly” they were called, but poor things, they couldn’t have felt very friendly.  They must have felt subdued and, I fancy, sullen when they thought of their lost lands and homes, and their scattered tribes.  However, they became attached to certain individuals and families.

The Memoirs of my Great Grandmother, Bertha Dodge Nellis (in installments)

I got to re-read this memoir at my Aunt Nancy's house this summer, and asked her to send me a copy of the mimeographed type-script, which she was kind enough to do.  The document is getting faded and a little difficult to read, so I thought I would transcribe it, so that hopefully it will continue on.  Bertha, as you will see, was not without literary style...

----

Elm Hill Farm As I Knew It

Bertha Dodge Nellis

1935

Introduction

The day that I finished reading Louis Bromfield’s The Farm, I remarked to my daughter Eleanor, “Why I could write a story of our family that to the family would be as interesting as The Farm . (That was written primarily for some members of the Bromfield family.) On the instant Eleanor was fired with enthusiasm and exclaimed - “You should, O do, do”. And she has never forgotten, but has constantly reminded me and urged me to make the attempt; So because I love to think of Elm Hill Farm as I knew it and the people who have lived on it, and rather expect to get real pleasure from the reminiscence: I rush in where angels perhaps might fear to tread.

It is to be a simple account of some of the important or interesting incidents told me by older members of the family and of my own memories and viewpoint.  It is written for the next generation, for I realize that there are some things that I am the only one of my generation left in the family to recall.  But it is due to Eleanor’s enthusiasm and encouragement, that I have been mulling over in my mind things to tell about, and that I am making the attempt to pass them on.

Part I.

There are certain people greatly interested in just about anybody’s genealogy, who find a real pleasure in tracing back ancestry.  Such an one was our dear friend, Mrs Moxley.  For our sister Minnie, Mrs Moxley, who had at her command the material of the  Boston libraries, looked up the beginnings of the Dodge family in America.  

Mrs Moxley wrote out the information she acquired and gave it to Minnie, but through some inadvertence, Minnie lost the paper.  I have seen the same statement made in an obituary of one Daniel Dodge of Rockland, Sullivan County, New York and I understand they have been published in books concerning the early history of the Dodge family.

This is the beginning of the Dodge family in America.  In 1646, one Tristram Dodge and his three sons came from England to Block Island in a sloop “with their women, their servants, and their cattle.” There they settled.  Later some members of the family moved to New London, Connecticut.  From New London I suppose the families scattered through parts of New England. 

The first member of our family whom I can speak of with certainty is Silas Dodge, my great grandfather.  He owned a farm in or near Henly, Massachusetts.  When I was a little girl of five Father and Mother “took a trip” to New York City and New England visiting relatives.  They took me with them, and I vividly remember being lifted up onto the top of a great granite boulder that was in the brick yard of the house where great-grandfather Silas used to live - he was long dead then - and being told that Grandfather used to play on this rock when he was a little boy.  The house was unpainted, I very dimly remember it.  It did not seem large, even to my child’s eyes.  I fancy a living was hard to wrest from the stony fields and steep hillsides. 

If great grandfather had any daughters I do not remember hearing them mentioned nor do I know whom he married.  He had four sons: Eben, Thomas, Charles, and Luther.  There were descendants of Eben living in Syracuse by the name of Diefendorf.  Charles and Luther “went west” - one to Detroit, I think Luther, and one to Ohio.

What a pity that when there are with us who might tell of a day gone by and the people who lived in it, we are so absorbed in the present, or so full of dreams of the future that the past is “over and gone”, and we do not think to “remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask thy father and he will show thee; thy elders and they will tell thee.”  I have information about Silas’ family from my Father’s lips, but even he did not seem to know much about his father’s family.  If now I could ask him, I might find he know more than I can remember his telling us.

When one is clearing land, and building a shelter, and marrying a wife, and rearing a family, it is pretty absorbing business.  So I fancy Grandfather Thomas who did all these things may not have told a great deal of his old home and family in Hawley, and Father was like many for the rest of us - eager about his own life and busy in its duties and pleasures. 

In 1816 young Thomas Dodge settled in what was then the town of York, Livingston Co. by the side of Wolf Creek.  He had served in the war of 1812.  I can see in my mind’s eye the blue army coat with big round silver, at least silver-colored, buttons which Mother, at house cleaning time, took out of the chest in the kitchen chamber, shook and aired against the depredations of moths, and put back.  I suppose as the years went by the moths conquered , and Mother didn’t see why anyone would be interested in an old moth-eaten coat, or even the buttons.  How I wish she had saved the buttons!

When young Thomas came home from the war he must have reached man’s estate - he was born in 1792.  The family was large and it was time for him to look out for himself.  What lead him to the beautiful Genesee Valley?  Was it even then “Young man go west”? Some one must have told him about it, or did he see it as he served in the war?  Where he served I do not know; I wonder.

After the Revolution, and following the Clinton-Sullivan expedition, the Genesee Valley become a promised land to many.  When Thomas made his claim or bought the land, the great flats of the river were owned by the Eadsworths, and he settled just over the first rise of ground, about 10 miles north of Moscow, now called Leicester. 

He build his log house on the north side of the Creek, about opposite the barn of the McKercher-McLean-Dodge-place.  Until recent years the great maple tree which stood in the brick yard was still standing.  Father told me many times how they used to play in its shade.  The creek has changed its course somewhat, and the floods and erosion of many years have washed away the back yard, the tree, and, I fancy, even the site of Grandfather’s log house.  What a pity!

Soon after Grandfather established himself, he must have become interested in Phoebe Forbes, for Dec. 11th 1817 they were married. 

Phoebe Forbes was the daughter of Jotham Forbes, one time fifer in the Revolution (see the pension record I have in my possession.)  I do not know when the family came from Upton, Mass. to New York State.  I have been told that Phoebe rode on a pillion behind her father.  The home they lived in was about three miles from where Grandfather settled, up the Teed Hill road and beyond the Ira Whelk place across the rod.  The house was still shading the last I knew, but in sad disrepair.

What heavy and almost endless tasks must have been the lot of young Thomas and Phoebe - I hope the log house was completed.  However I'm sure they were full of courage and ambition - they had to be to accomplish what they did, they were young and well, and love was there.

The next year, 1818, Nov. 4, the first baby came, and died the day it was born.  A family record in a Bible is a cold thing.  The November fourth must have been a tragic day.  It was a real pioneer life they had to live, not much medical or surgical skill at hand.

Those were the days of large families.  Om May 31, 1820 Jotham Forbes Dodge was born.  He had such an odd nickname, "Jote." He died before I was born, but I heard others int eh family talk about 'Uncle Jote, and I never could see how "Jote" came from Jotham.

Then there was Amelia Louise, born March 17, 1823 - more about her later - and Father, who was James Lloyd, born July 25, 1825, and Thomas Augustus born October 27, 1827, and Catherine Lydia born Dec. 25, 1829.  So to Thomas and Phoebe cam six children.

They had good taste in names, for all have both beauty and dignity with is something to be desired when conferring on a baby a thing he must carry with him through life.  

(TBC)

Quotes from Lynn Margulis' "What is Life?"

"Bacterial tenacity should not be underestimated.  This entire planet is bacterial. Human technologies and philosophies are permutations of the bacteria.  Eating, infecting, and irreversibly merging with one another, bacteria spun off powerful new prodigies: the protoctists, fungi, plants and animals - all of which keep alive the metabolism and movement of the bacteria from which they derived."

"Death is illusory in quite a real sense.  As sheer persistence of biochemistry, "we" have never died during the passage of three thousand million years.  Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone, but we have persisted."

"In the normal waking state, human bodies burn sugars aerobically, using oxygen atoms drawn from the air.  But in strenuous activity the body reverts to a distinct metabolism; muscles ferment sugars in the same anaerobic way invented by early bacteria.  Such physiological flashbacks re-present past environmental conditions and the bodies that evolved to live in them.   In a very real sense, all beings today retain traces of Earth's earliest biosphere."

"Life cannot be understood ignoring the sentient observer.  If not for mind, no one would care that life is a certain kind of sunlight-energized cosmic debris.  But it is, and we do."

It's refreshing to think of us all as just a bunch of bacteria, dreaming our bacterial dreams...

iPhone

So I finally got an iPhone - well, 2 iPhones actually, because I killed the first one within a week, further blackening my name with Asurion, the cell phone insurance company - and I've decided that the iPhone (and by extension all smartphones) are complicated little boxes that are designed to retard and distract from actually having thought processes and experiences.  You're just supposed to just exchange photos and emoji messages.  Perhaps someday the usefulness of a smartphone will become apparent to me ("you have to download more apps, Mom" is my daughter's advice), but for now my position is that the whole phenom is extremely over-rated, and causes brain function erosion even before you get actual brain cancer from the actual micro-waves.  And I'm not even all that grouchy this morning...

Severe Mental Incarceration

A friend of mine said about the NextEra-HELCO docket (the proposed purchase of our local electrical utility by a large corporation based in Florida), as he looked at my t-shirt supporting a co-op alternative to that power transfer, “Oh, I see you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.  I agree with Mina Morita.  She said this decision is about economics and physics and that’s all, you know.”  

I was ashamed of him for being such a simple-minded reductionist. I was even slightly ashamed of Mina Morita, as much as I admire her.  (Mina Morita is prominent locally, having held important state-level political positions in energy and the environment, and known for her thoughtful pragmatism.)

There is a sense in which I could agree with him, it is just about “economics” and “physics,” if we were to take “economics” and “physics” in their fullest meanings.  If by “economics,” we would be talking about the most effective and carefully considered use of our limited physical resources so as to minimize further environmental degradation of our island and global commons, the distribution of costs and benefits fairly and appropriately among energy users, and the continuing work on our system of symbolic exchange so that it helps us to move us towards our social goals, and if by “physics” we would be talking about the attempt to discern the nature of physical reality and how it relates to our symbolic systems, then yes, of course, this decision is about economics and physics.  

I know that’s not what he meant though.  What he meant by economics was whether NextEra (the name by itself says it all) could provide a projected lower cost of energy per a kilowatt based on their “purchasing power” and “economies of scale.”  And by “physics” he meant, basically, burning stuff to turn it into electricity and running it down wires.   All important, practical considerations, of course, which can be reduced to boxes and functions in Excel, and therefore must be true and real and  logical, right?  But nine spreadsheets out of ten are as fantastical as a Maxfield Parrish painting. I hope that this civilization is about more than spreadsheets, because if that’s what our mental abilities have devolved to, then we have put ourselves into a prison of little black Excel boxes.   That will be impressively logical but truly pathetic of us.  

I, for one, am not going to back myself into that corner. Which doesn’t mean I’ve drunk any kind of Kool-Aid.  Especially not the kind that turns you into someone that only sees the world as economics and physics. 

Language games

I've also been trashing "science" pretty regularly, especially as its become the religion of modernity, but the core idea of science, as I understand it, is a language game that is democratic in its power structure and transparent in its methods and rules, i.e. any scientific claim should be potentially verifiable by anyone.  This is the source of any authority or credibility a scientific claim may have.  This is valuable mode of speaking, writing,  and thinking together. But it is just that and no more.   Generally speaking it's a better language game than pontifical announcements (even if our current pontiff seems inspired by all kinds of goodness). "The economy" is another language game, played with money as well as words. Language games are necessary for anyone who is not the last person left on earth or a desert island. The rules and conventions by which we structure our language games determine everything about human society and how we even perceive our individual selves.  But they still are only language games.

There are language games and then there is primary production and extraction of the physical necessities of life.  Most people work at various kinds of language games - politics, administration, marketing, etc. - and a lesser number of people actually produce or extract the raw materials from which we maintain human life and construct civilization. (In between these two are various sorts of middlemen, processors, and "service-providers." Then there are those that refuse to play by the rules of the language games currently popular - criminals, rebels, gypsies.) Production is shaped by language games of course, just as the continued possibility of engaging in language games depends on production and extraction.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding in our society because so few people have experience of, or even really recognize the work of production and extraction that goes on quietly supporting civilization.  Urban populations live almost entirely within the framework of language games - "the economy," national politics, academia, etc. Production and extraction has been moved off-stage, outsourced to other countries or to the country.  Language games shape production and extraction (the methods of production which are socially acceptable, for instance) but there are limits to this shaping beyond which a language game can prevent production and extraction from happening, and thereby undermine the conditions - of physical survival - necessary for the language games to exist at all.  Likewise there are limits to pure practicality, beyond which production and extraction falters, over-produces, or produces the wrong things, for lack of a framework to guide communal effort.

Producers, in disgust at the ignorance of actual objects,  of "reality," that those who trade in language games betray, can forget that what they do, the often silent work of production, is non-sensical without the language games it supports.  On the other hand, urban consumers are puzzled and frustrated by the recalcitrance of producers to change their production methods to conform with changing economic circumstances or consumer preferences, when all too often  these circumstances
and preferences are part of language games formed far away from the practicalities of production.

Ultimately, language game and raw material are no different from each other.  But we have a dangerous disconnect presently between the two, which traces back to our venerable tradition of de-coupling, in the current trendy phrase, mind from matter, and allowing our language games to enforce that distinction and de-coupling.  Any means that we might have to tie the two together again will do us good, I think, including science, carefully used as one mode, among others, of speaking together about the world we live in and that we make with our words.

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Lila

She said, "I don't know what started me talking like this.  I don't want to go on with it, I truly don't."
"That's fine.  I just want to say one thing, though. If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine, and I'm sure He is, then your Doll and a whole lot of people are safe, and warm, and very happy.  And probably a little bit surprised. If there is no Lord, then things are just the way they look to us.  Which is really hard to accept.  I mean, it doesn't feel right.  There has to be more to it all, I believe. 
"Well, but that's what you want to believe, ain't it?"
"That doesn't mean it isn't true."

Firstly, it's hard for me to express my respect and admiration for Marilynne Robinson's writing.  I don't think there's any novelist living that comes close to her in depth and daring.  Despite the fact that I am writing about God in a mostly negative fashion lately - as a notion that has led us into some habits of thought about matter and the world that are maladaptive, I also see that the concept of God within the Christian tradition is more profound and more affirmative than philosophy.  Philosophy should never forget that, though it usually does.  And then along comes Marilynne Robinson and she's on a whole other level.

Philosophical Nonsense

Of course, the last post really doesn't resolve anything philosophically, strictly speaking.  To make any statement one needs a transcendent position, logically, to make that statement.  Or this statement about that statement. And so on, in an infinite regression of transcendent positions.  This is one of the many reasons that God is such a popular concept. God stops the infinite regress and fills the existential gap and provides for us, on the days when the sun is shining and everything sings, with the  grand unity behind all of this lavishness.  But God is the lazy way out, which is not to say that I don't think that the concept of God has been way, way over-engineered, as well as used for some fairly energetic but lamentable purposes (like the Inquisition).  Rather than taking cover behind God, and his recent successor deity, Science, it's much harder to just live with the gap and the infinite regress, to live with things just as they are. Subsumed and, in our best moments responsible, rather than transcendent.   Unexplained gaps, dark spots: the very idea that we can't know everything makes us anxious.  Anxious, and sometimes happy.

x=x

I was a troubled teen. “Reality,” by which I mean the social reality of the US in the late 70’s and 80’s, didn’t feel right. It seemed to be missing something, some depth of feeling or significance. There was a flatness to the social world, an ir-reality, a woundedness, as if something had been amputated. When I was very little I experienced this as an actual spatial distortion and disequilibrium.  As I got older this changed into an emotional distance, an enduring alienation.  I think this is a common experience. As the years passed this got “better,” I got along, by which I mean that I probably internalized the tension of alienation, like everyone else.

And yet I did not get along. I could not commit to either “reality” or to some kind of “alternative,” artistic escape into the world of fiction, representation, aestheticism.  Neither felt real or whole or honest.  Eventually my search for a way of life that  ‘felt right’ led me to join my family in the project of building a cattle ranch from scratch.  I discovered, in this endeavor,  a life that satisfied my yearnings for engagement.

Still, I want to understand where that alienation came from, what it meant and to articulate what the missing dimension is that makes the difference between a flattened existence and a deeply felt life.  The process of being educated, of joining the world of adults is one of gradually increasing  pressure to conform, compete, succeed and fight for dominance.  Jobs, money, economic security, social prestige.  That is what we learn to focus on. That is what we spend our strength  and time on accumulating.  But this social/economic realm is only a very small cut-out portion of what actually exists in the world, a small circle into which we have mentally corralled ourselves.  We have gradually cut almost everything our of our consciousness but what might be considered part of the economic machinery of civilization

I’ve come to believe that what assuages alienation is quite a simple thing — a slight change in what one focuses on and values - a refocusing that brings back into the picture what we cut out from it.  A change at the level of what, in the old days, used to be called soul, thereby to indicate something that was both immaterial and deeply tied to the body, to material particularity.  

To be clear, the “soul” I am interested in is not the Christian soul, it is the older concept that has ties to the sea and the wind in the trees.  To be further clear, I don’t think that one “has” a soul, or “is” a soul. I am interested in “the soul” as a disruption - a question mark in the shape of the evening sky or the morning light, of mountains or waving grasses.  “The soul” is Pandora’s box, where we buried it all - all of the impediments to “reason” and “law,” everything that was inefficient, wayward, and un-scientific.   “The soul” is the whole of our human story, from Zhou dynasty dragon bones to Victorian steam engines to Brazilian favelas, from Rumi to Las Meninas to The Matrix.   And it is all that we cut out of our human story in our impatience for some kind of glory.  “The soul” is also a reminder of mortality and extinction, of the intimacy with all other life that our death enforces.  A thought, a word, a possibility, only, which, if it does not help us see more clearly, is worthless.

“The soul” is a word that has been shaped by Christianity for so long that it is difficult to disentangle it from its history.  One thinks immediately of disembodied, immortal spirits, of God, of Heaven, of churches and religious ceremonies.  That history is essential, but it is also distracting if one would re-think the basis of  what we now call, in our flattened way, consciousness. “Anima” is a word with far less baggage and with its close kinship to “animal” is less coded for anthropocentrism.   But the word is not so important.  What is important is the displacement of the psychic barrier we have constructed between “our” consciousness and everything else, the platform that we made to separate our “selves” from everything else.  What is important is that we let go of the self-imposed delusion that we are distinct, separate, and superior to all other matter in the universe.  

By reserving the realm of spirit/mind/soul exclusively for ourselves and defining all else as dumb matter, we cut ourselves off from the actual reality that we come from somewhere and depend upon an environment that has as much claim to life and mind as we do. Our mistake in the West is that we defined this quality of soul/spirit/mind exclusively in terms of the human, in our image as it were, and as our exceptional privilege and endowment.  In that move, which is so closely tied to the doctrinal developments of the monotheisms (which then influenced our particular culture of science), we stepped into a delusion, which may have been useful, powerful even, for a time, but is, ultimately - like any delusion - maladaptive.   What is more, in denying mind  to all other creatures we came eventually to denying its existence even to ourselves, and to the despair and flattened existence that characterizes our late modern culture.

Unfortunately this mistake is ancient and is entangled with so much of what we consider normal that it is difficult to distinguish and correct the many paths of this delusion through our shared sense of reality.  But if we would be healthy again, if we are to have a techne of life, a reinvigoration of our relation to life, rather than an ever-increasing psychic reliance on the technology of machines composed of “dead” matter, then the difficulties are worth encountering, I believe.

What does it mean to make this shift in focus? How does one track the implications of our mistakes in overvaluing our human-ness - in our excessive humanism? What are the challenges one might face in making this change in perspective? Will this more accurate foundation provide the possibility of a less frantic civilization? Ultimately, how does one live, in practical terms, because that is the true measure, how does one live? 

Some might think that to let go of this delusion is suicidal and irresponsible, that it will mean that we relinquish our will to excel as a species.  That it will cause loss of control and therefore suffering and death.  It should be clear that this is the psychology of a messed-up adolescent, whose distorted, fragile identity must be defended by threats of suicide.  Perhaps,  it is time to take up the responsibilities of adulthood, with its burdens and its rewards.  Adulthood is a sadder, more humble state, it is true, but less destructive, self-centered, and frustrated.  Adulthood is also the time of making, of nurturing and giving, of a wider viewpoint and more varied pleasures. 

By thinking of ourselves as separate and superior we have put ourselves into a very small box.  We have limited our joys and pleasures - what “counts” as joys and pleasures - to a very short list: adornments, toys, food, houses, more toys, entertainment, vacations.  We have limited what “counts” as knowledge to that which is produced by a very small set of procedures and attitudes which we call science.  We have limited what “counts” to what can be quantified in some form or another.  We have the quantities but  lost everything else.  We have facts (scientific) but we find them difficult to understand, and we have intricate things (technology) but don’t have any framework to put them to a use greater than the most superficial amusement or the most atavistic destructiveness. 

In our Western tradition, the philosophy on which we have built our science is itself based on medieval politics/religion (one God, one king, one president, one true science).   “Truth”  or the true meaning of facts descends within that power structure.  It is a structure that is, of course,  out-dated but still operational. We replaced the warrior-God with a science-God, but it is still one separate, superior God and ruler that is the source of authority and truth.  

We missed something important in our intellectual development.  And we had our reasons for doing so quite deliberately.  We wanted to set ourselves free from death (what more emotionally compelling reason is there?) and our dependence on Nature (also an appealing idea on the surface.)   Childish fantasies, of course, but how were we to know that when our God himself seemed to endorse such ambitions?  

The perennial mind/body problem should have been a warning that we missed something  important in the foundation. That we have a block there; that there are unresolved issues.   Perhaps it is simple enough to resolve them.  Let us say that matter is mind, mind is matter.  Which doesn’t mean that one can dissect the brain to find “consciousness”  because “consciousness” is not just in the brain.  At the risk of sounding retarded:  x=x , x being “consciousness” and x being the Universe.   I know, it’s so simple it’s stupid, but we missed it all the same and we’ve been floundering about ever since, chasing childish fantasies of power and glory and deathlessness.  I am speaking of civilization here, of course: our Western civilization, taken as a whole.  (We’re terrified of this idea, of x=x, because it means we’re nothing special, and therefore don’t have a special license and dispensation to be masters of everything.) There have been and are instances of practice and thought on more solid foundations (and also therefore less spectacular, brilliant, neurotic, destructive, dominant.)  

What does it mean then if x=x, if mind equals matter and matter equals mind? Does it change how we educate ourselves? How we get our food, shelter - fragile, contingent creatures that we are? How to talk ourselves ( and each other) down from the tendency to delude ourselves - to ignore reality - in our lust for short-term dominance? How do we grow out of that (warrior) hero obsession that we have, which set loose in the world  makes life so difficult for everybody.

Yesterday I went for a walk in the evening.  Rain tinted pink by the sunset was falling onto the violet sea in the distance and the horses were grazing in lush grass.  Their way is so simple.  They are up to their knees in food, most of the time.  They don’t have much “ambition.”   They have beauty and the capacity for mobility in their own bodies. 

If we thought that x=x, perhaps we could lighten up on this immense project to make x not equal x, this immense effort - what amounts to a military operation by civilization - to maintain the inequality in our favor, to maintain this essential distinction between our selves as “higher consciousness” and everything else,  To make and get marginal returns  off of that inequality, which we insist is our birthright as a civilization.  On which birthright we’ve constructed our elaborate, highly leveraged lifestyles.  And we’re amazing, with our culture and civilization and all its toys. But not more amazing than anything else that gets along with x=x. 

Maybe what x=x might mean is not another thing to talk about or do something about, but simply to let that possibility be, maybe that’s enough for now.  Maybe x=x means that we can stop making things mean other things.  Perhaps it is exactly the first step  in un-meaning: in a process of un-peeling the layers of meaning that have accreted onto everything and that makes us confused and crazy.  I really don’t know at this point. 

Bruno Latour

Remember that soft spot I have for French philosophy? Ah, it has a new objet d'amour! I tried to like the Slovenian superstar, I really did, but all I can like is his name.  But Bruno Latour is not only as brutal as Foucault but he is funny, silly even!  "Contrary to Leibniz, in the movement of the watch there are also ponds full of fish and fish full of ponds."  That I just pulled out at random.  Or, "Interlude V: Where We Learn with Great Delight That There Is No Such Thing as a Modern World".
And it is a great delight to face the day with such cheerful knowledge.  This is all from The Pasteurization of France which subjects the great scientist and his followers to a Foucaultian undressing as a opening onslaught and then moves on to more fun things.

Revert to Last Known Good Configuration

The office computer keeps losing its mind.  I get it to work by ordering it to Revert to Last Known Good Configuration.  It probably has some malicious virus chewing through it.  Also the power supply is faulty.  Sound familiar?  My computer is Us.  Our operating system is faulty.  As long as we keep using the same operating system, that system will keep driving us on to Blue Screen of Death.  We need to revert to last known good configuration.  Unfortunately we’ve forgotten what that is.  

The name of our current operating system is Growth.  It makes sense.  Growth is good.  If you’re growing then you know that 1. you are alive, and 2. you're making a profit of some kind, whether it be money profit or energy profit.  Making a profit means you are fit, that you most likely winning the evolutionary game. I can understand why Growth has been a very popular operating systems for centuries. But, on a finite planet, it’s senseless to think one can grow indefinitely, at least in the material-intensive ways that we currently conceive of growth (housing, factories, stuff).  

It's a spectacularly complex operating system we live in, but the underlying premise is, well, idiotic.  Giving up all that complexity is going to be really, really hard.  But to have a non-idiotic operating system might be nice. It might feel very, very good. 

Herman Hesse

Hesse was my favorite writer as a teenager, and I find lately, that I've been thinking of his novels again.  Last week it was The Glass Bead Game, which is the narrative of a gifted young man being inducted into a mysterious but prestigious school in which students learn a way of holistic thinking or systems theory that supposedly encompasses all of human thought and practice: science, engineering, philosophy, art and everything else in between. Their training teaches them to solve problems or exercises  holistically by means of  this "glass bead game."  Such a way of drawing connections between the specialized fields of knowledge -the silos - of modern society would be an important tool to find our way out of the mess that we are in.  Hesse lived in most "interesting times," in Germany and Switzerland, through the world wars.  The social pressure to conform to conventions of nationalism must have been intense under the Nazis, even in Switzerland, and Hesse says that he lived through their ascendency by working, for those ten years, on The Glass Bead Game.
But the book of Hesse's that electrified me, that made my hair stand on end, really quite literally, was Steppenwolf.  And the reason it was so important to me at the time was that it described a man, a rather lonely, melancholy man admittedly,  that had the courage to defy conventions of success and live from the soul.  Fiercely. Quietly.  "Like a wolf of the steppes."  And I've come back around to the thought, more and more, that the existence of our souls is the secret in plain sight, ever-present but elusive, the inheritance that we lose over and over again, the compass in our pockets that we have forgotten even exists.

Ranch Poetry

After we get done bringing in the cattle, as we were eating lunch, someone mentioned that there was a funeral on the northern part of the island, and we talked about who that person was, who his friends had been, which brought Ryan, the ring-leader of the group of Japanese cowboys that help us out on weekends, to think of another man he had known, a guard at the minimum security prison where they had both worked.  

I didn’t get his name, this man who was, in Ryan’s description, “quiet and serious”, who “did things by the book” but if you were straight with him he was a good guy, solid, not one to “talk big and then duck out when things got rough," when a prison fight was brewing for instance and the guards needed to watch each other’s backs.  This quiet man, who never married and lived alone, found out that he had brain cancer and one day he spread a blue plastic tarp in his back yard, left a note to the emergency workers apologizing for the mess, and shot himself in the head.  Ryan told the story with obvious respect for this man who left the world with the courtesy and resolve of a samurai. 

Earlier that morning, we were all waiting in the pasture for the roundup to begin, scattered but within earshot of each other.  It was a clear morning in early spring: the mountains were golden and green, the ocean blue and purple, and we could see across the desert to the white billowing smoke of the fire-pit Halema’uma’u.  My nephew began to chant in his deep young voice.  I didn’t know what his chant meant but it floated through the morning air as naturally as if it had come out of the very rocks around us.

Later I asked my nephew what the chant was called and he said, “I don’t know, it’s just a chant I learned for when we go into class.  I was chanting because I saw some petroglyphs there in the rocks.”  

We are not a demonstrative, performing sort of family.  When my brother and I were growing up singing and dancing were not encouraged; we didn’t even tell a whole lot of jokes. So my nephew’s chant was a small piece of courage.  Of making something new.

The root of the word “poetry”  is the Greek work “poiesis,” which means “to make”.  There is not much more beautiful and valuable in this world, to my mind, than these small, personal, communal offerings of words to each other.  I would call  that poetry.    Here we are, the common people, with our small moments of poetry.  

simple-minded

You have to show up
is
what it comes down to
always
whatever it is
that better world is not
going to make itself
and the path will be bitter
sometimes and merry others
and nothing is
certain

New Information

The title of this blog has changed, as you may have noticed.  New information came to light, as they say.   I named this blog after the one of the winds of Ka'u, whose name I got from a passing conversation with a friend who happens to be a great authority on all things native Hawaiian.  I thought she called the wind ehulepo but perhaps I misheard her, because it is called kuehu lepo in the song "Aloha No Ka'u."  My daughter Ua pointed this out to me.  And it makes more sense, linguistically.

Aia i ka lae hema o Keawe
P ā mai ana ka makani Kuehu Lepo

There at the southern tip of Keawe
The Kuehu Lepo wind blows

Wow, it's been more than a month since I've "blogged" or written anything of substance, really.

 I've read many interesting books, the meantime.  Most stimulating perhaps was "The Science of Interstellar" by the movie's consulting physicist Kip Thorne, with its discussions of wormholes, our universe as a four dimensional membrane ("the brane" in physics nerd-speak)within a five-plus dimensional "bulk" and, more prosaically, the politics and mechanics of how a movie gets made.

The most fun was reading Books Two and Three of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Phillip Pullman, which also involves worm holes of a sort, dark matter, and multiple universes interwoven with the grand Christian eschatological vision of John Milton, and lots of talking animals.  What's not to love about that!

And I've come to the conclusion that, pace Kip Thorne and the other techno-physicists that want to escape this planet for an interstellar destiny, there are only three physical dimensions.  And there are no wormholes, or ever will be, that will let us escape our three-dimensional physical bodies. (Except maybe death?)

There are however at least two other dimensions: Time and Meaning, but these are biological, rather than purely physical dimensions.   And that is where "the sciences" and "the humanities," in the current,  rather silly, division of knowledge, meet up, ineluctably - although we don't really know it yet, so wrapped up are we in the technology that a purely physical physics has delivered to us (at our peril.)  We have a ways to travel yet before we see ourselves clearly as minds within the larger mind of the world/universe/universes, if we ever do.

The Baby Oyster in the Coal Mine

I had one of those moments when you realize that we are in big trouble yesterday when, at a Board of Agriculture meeting,  a petitioner for a routine permit to import Kumamoto oysters mentioned that the reason he has a viable business hatching oysters here in Hawaii is that the sea-water on the West Coast has become too acidified to support healthy baby oysters.  Evidently the acidity interferes with the oyster hatchlingsʻ ability to form calcium into a structurally sound shell.    Itʻs a business opportunity for some aquaculturists in Hawaii, but thatʻs the silver lining on a big, black cloud that is looming over all of us. 

The Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Ten Thousand Galaxies

 

My daughter and I disagree on the Thirty Meter Telescope.
Construction was to begin a couple of weeks ago but the road was blocked by protestors, and the protests grew and then went viral on social media.  The TMT would be the largest telescope on earth (although they are supposedly building one of similar size in Chile) and would be the 14th telescope on Mauna Kea, our tallest, most beloved, and, yes, sacred mountain.  It will take ~10 years to build, will cost $1billion, and be 180 feet tall. The protestors say enough already.
Personally I am entranced by the above photo taken from the Hubble.  I want to know more about the origins of the universe and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.    Supposedly the TMT will allow our gaze to reach new edges of what is known and imaginable.
But my daughterʻs disapproval of the TMT troubles me.  If she, and most of they young people her age, donʻt want it on that mountain, then what is the point of building it?  It is more important that we honor their nascent sense of the wild and sacred than to build another machine, even one as relatively benign as a telescope.  Even one that could bring us more beautiful images than the one above. They will only be images after all, and we have lots of images already.   What we need more than images is  the ability to love the land and protect it from destruction by those who do not know how to love the land.  If the TMT must be sacrificed to nurturing that love, so be it.

What we prize and what we have built in Western civilization: edifices and expanses of stone, steel, concrete, intricate and globe-spanning machines (this here internet).  Our high arts - painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, video - all involve the manipulation of non-living materials to mimic or evoke life.  The mental arts that we value -  mathematics, logic, logos, the Word of God, books, poems - all depend upon a distancing of the mind, a translation of the world into symbols.  All of our paths lead us away from actual living life and into a place of clean, pure abstractions.

It is no little thing to turn that ship around.  I'm going to stop hating on Descartes and blame it on Plato instead, for a while.

Green grass and flitting birds, forests and wild pigs, gardens and pastures, fleas and earthworms  - those do not turn up in The Republic.  Why?  Big-time epistemological error, Plato. Socrates' verbal bullying skills are not really all that interesting.

Why do we have to  fall down in awe in front of Michelangelo and Da Vinci? Or Prada, for that matter.   The mountain that it is my privilege to see every day is a thousand times more beautiful and fascinating than even a Velasquez.   My horse has things to impart that are more profound than King Lear.  Seriously, but it's not in words.  A horse speaks in movements and in relationships that exist in the present.  As in Right Now.  A Right Now that is so big and so fast that I am barely able to comprehend it, but if I am really, really alert I catch a little bit.  A little bit about the relationship between the faint breeze and the distant mountain, maybe, before it changes and is gone and we are in another Right Now where I'm struggling to keep up with what is going on.