Outside

Late in the evening the world puts on a spectacle and I happen to be there to see it.  As the day darkens, the wind that has been howling all day dies down and three hawks circle in the updraft above the mountain ridge, calling to each other as the mynahs swoop towards their night roosts in the bamboo patch, coming in fast and low in squadrons so as to evade the hawks.  A bat flutters against the deepening blue: I haven’t seen a bat for years, and feel, like the Chinese, that it is a good omen.  Sunset tints the clouds orange-gold -  unfurled across the sky with the awful majesty of nebulae. One hawk sinks through the air, its wings flashing grey and white, and the mynahs go silent in the bamboo for a moment as beautiful menace passes over them. A single ice-blue star shimmers between the clouds and the dark ridge. The puppies play at my feet.  It is a gift to be in the presence of so many lives

Don't say I didn't give you a recipe

Most blogs have recipes, and I've been incredibly remiss on this point.  It's a rainy afternoon so let's fix that.  Just in time for the holidays, too!

A Typically Australian Dish:

Camel Stew

3 medium sized camels

500 bushels potatoes

200 bushels carrots

1 ton salt

1 ton pepper

3000 springs parsley

2 small rabbits

Cut camels into bite size pieces. This should take about two months.  Cut vegetables into cubes (another two months) Place meat in pan and cover with 1000 gallons of brown gravy.  Simmer for 4 weeks.  Shovel in pepper and salt to taste.  When the meat is tender, add vegetables.  Simmer slowly for 4 weeks.  Garnish with parsley.  Will serve 3800 people.  If more are expected, add two rabbits.

From Trail Boss's Cowboy Cookbook - The Society for Ranch Management

Another bit

Speaking of the ranchers, farmers and fisherman profiled in her book:

All are conservationists because their livelihoods and communities will live or die with these ecosystems, but also because they love these land-and river- and seascapes where nature's elemental forces remain vivid in their beauty and danger; where lives of self-creation, self-reliance and liberty remain possible; where the idea of home and homeland remain strong.  All bear a sense of moral responsibility to both the future and the past, a determination to pass on to their children and grandchildren a heritage often generations deep: the family memories imprinted on this land, the season rhythms and traditions built around the bounty they reap.  Many acknowledge something sacred here -- larger than human understanding or will, a gift to be tended and revered.


xvi

A very good tidbit from Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman

Every region, even every farm within a region, differs in history and soil conditions, topography and climate - demanding the same close attention and responsiveness Justin brings to his own land. "It's never simple and it's always complex.  We have to think through how things interact in the local environment, and what's right here may not be right even down the road." That's why Justin never criticizes other farmers' choices, assuming they are based like his on hard-won knowledge and experience of their land.  Nor is he ever defensive about his own choices, but remains open to any question or challenge to his thinking, eager to see any research that might change his mind.  "I believe that we're created to be in a community and impact and learn from each other," he says.   "I really like John 1: 'In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was God...Through him all things are made.'"  That sacred presence throughout time and in every person means that all deserve a respectful hearing.  (119)

Rancher Farmer Fisherman

I'm reading an awesome book right now, haven't even finished it yet.   Rancher Farmer Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland.  I highly, highly recommend it; not only is it nuanced and complex, but it is extremely readable and beautifully written without being ostentatious about it.  Miriam Horn, a NYC-based writer, visits with people who are working hard and thinking hard out here in place where the physical demands of civilization meet the natural world and the "struggle is real."  Horn does not come from an agricultural background, so it is just beyond impressive how deeply she dives into the complexities of the subject.   How she stays out here, on the ground, talking to the farmers, ranchers, and fisherman from different angles, and doesn't retreat to quoting university experts.  She stays on the ground, in the war zone, with a generous heart and amazing curiosity. Here's a link to an interview with the author.  ** I know some of you reading this could be in this book, so go check it out and find heart to keep on doing all that beautiful stuff you do!

Hunting and Fishing

There are many old fishing boats parked in back yards around here. When I was a child it was possible to make a good living as a fisherman. These are rough, treacherous seas   where strong currents sweep the cliffs and fierce winds push higher the swells born in the deep ocean. It is a dangerous place to fish, but in the seventies, powerful, affordable marine engines made it possible for any able-bodied, high-couraged young man  to make a living fishing for yellowfin tuna. For a time. 

There was a fishing boom, that lasted about a dozen years, and then a long, slow bust.  When I was child the cliff mooring and the beach landing  were full of boats, some of them colorfully painted old wooden boats, some the gleaming white fiberglass boats.  Now there are no boats, the fish are nearly all gone, the big pelagic fish that used to run in the waters here at certain times of the year.  Now there are still runs but the fish are all small. When I was a child my father would catch yellow fin tuna that weighed over one hundred pounds; now the fisherman catch “rats “ - little ten pounders.  There are not enough of them to make a living anymore, except for a handful of hard-scrabble fishermen, who sell their small catches by the side of the road.

That is what resource depletion looks like, in microcosm, in a flicker of time, my life-time. Sunk costs, unsustainable yields, nostalgia for better days.   

My uncle has an old boat in his back yard, my father, too.  They all fished in the old days, and had their share of high adventure and close calls with our unforgiving waters.  There is no drug as intoxicating as the full use of our powers hunting in dangerous conditions or against a dangerous prey.  I know this from experience, not at sea but on land, hunting wild cattle.  It is an experience that few women get to have, and which we may not even experience as intensely as men, but even so nothing in life made my brain light up, sharpened my senses, called up the powers of body and mind, like hunting. There is no fear and no sense of time; hunter and hunted are immersed in that single enchanted, primal world beyond thought and beyond words.  

And then I had my baby, and though I long for those bright, wild, uncomplicated days, I gave it up on a level deeper than will and longing. The fierceness of hunting went into the fierceness of mothering.  It took everything in me to rise to the challenge of nurturing a child - making a world for that child to flourish in, protecting her, teaching her, understanding her. I know fear and I can no longer sink myself into the divine and timeless dangers of the chase.   I don’t have that luxury or that passion anymore; I am needed elsewhere.  Perhaps I’ll change again when my daughter’s flown; I'll become some other kind of being under the direction of another kind of Heaven.  

We can’t go back to the innocent, grand heroism of an un-depleted world.  That was our childhood; it’s gone now.  Our very passion for the world depleted it. No blame.  It’s just not there anymore.  And what we once hunted are the very things to be nurtured, in the way that a parent will empty out themselves for their child.  In the way that a true fisherman will die for the sea, in the sea, gladly.  

T.H. White's The Once and Future King

I finally got around to reading T.H. White's version of the Arthur myth and I'm kicking myself for not getting around to it sooner. Though it's just the thing I needed right now - White's good-hearted, riotous, animal-loving world has helped soothe my election anxieties.

Here's a pdf version, some OCR typos. Civilization is pretty cool sometimes. And funny. 
(The Wart is the kid nick-name for the young Arthur.  He gets lost in the forest early in the book.)

"Please," said the Wart, "I am a boy whose guardian is Sir Ector." 
"Charming fellah," said the Knight. "Never met him in me life." 
"Can you tell me the way back to his castle?"
"Faintest idea. Stranger in these parts meself."
"I am lost," said the Wart.
"Funny thing that. Now I have been lost for seventeen years.
"Name of King Pellinore," continued the Knight. "May have heard of me, what?" The visor shut with a pop, like an echo to the What, but was opened again immediately. "Seventeen years ago, come Michaelmas, and been after the Questing Beast ever since. Boring, very."
"I should think it would be," said the Wart, who had never heard of King Pellinore, nor of the Questing Beast, but he felt that this was the safest thing to say in the circumstances.
"It is the Burden of the Pellinores," said the King proudly. "Only a Pellinore can catch it— that is, of course, or his next of kin. Train all the Pellinores with that idea in mind. Limited eddication, rather. Fewmets, and all that."
"I know what fewmets are," said the boy with interest. "They are the droppings of the beast pursued. The harborer keeps them in his horn, to show to his master, and can tell by them whether it is a warrantable beast or otherwise, and what state it is in."
"Intelligent child," remarked the King. "Very. Now I carry fewmets about with me practically all the time.
"Insanitary habit," he added, beginning to look dejected, "and quite pointless. Only one Questing Beast, you know, so there can't be any question whether she is warrantable or not." 

The Making of Names

We've been doing agriculture for some time now.   So long that we've forgotten what it is.  We think it's just one form of business rather than the mother of all businesses, social endeavors, and civilizational achievements.  Agriculture is there invisibly undergirding art and software engineering, fashion and nanotechnology, every big and little thing about civilization. And agriculture is short hand for the enslavement of animals and plants by humans.  That's the cold hard truth of it.

One of the first rules of agriculture is: if you intend to eat it, do not give it a name. Naming something creates a personal relationship. Responsibility.  Ethical quandaries.  Emotional complexities. The opposite of naming something is quantifying it.  This erases the personal relationship.  Thing becomes number, an abstraction, a percentage, a ratio.   Agriculture, as a form of science and technology, is all about quantification.  Big Data is what we're all supposed to be worshipping these days.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Oregon I crashed a graduate seminar in the Comparative Literature department on Critical Theory.  I immediately got outed as an interloper when the professor had everyone introduce themselves and all the grad students had something marvelously intricate to say except for me, who had no idea what Critical Theory was, at all.   But the professor was welcoming and amused at my enthusiasm.  He proceeded to give a talk about names and naming in a way that made my hair stand on end in sheer intellectual excitement.  He talked about how a name is not just a label that you put on things but that there is a story behind and within the name, a field of meanings and emotions, desires, politics, histories, loves and pains.  (For instance, if you have a brother or a childhood friend named John, you'll never meet anyone named John without  some traces of predetermined feelings.)

This is where I have an argument with agriculture and science and technology. I want to name the world rather than quantify it. And I don't mean the scientific name, which is just another way of quantifying.  What I am interested is the name that you use with another person like "John" or "Amy," or the name that you give your dog or cat that binds the two of you together or the name of a place where you have lived and evokes an entire period of your life that is gone forever and yet latent in you as your history and memory.  I am interested in names that are filled with some tenderness and regard, names that doesn't even pretend to be objective.  These are the kinds of names that structure our lives even though we, for the most part, are unconscious of their subtle shaping.

The kind of agriculture that I am interested in makes names rather numbers.  Which is to say I'm not going to make a very good businesswoman.  My attention tends to wander. I can barely rationalize what I do for a living; it is at best the most honest way to make a living that I know of.  It is a seeking.  I try to enact an emotionally complex agriculture that takes the risk of naming the world.

Can we name a corn-field as well as a city?  Can we name a steer that we know we will kill, and honor it as a being with a name?  Could we bear that pain?  Can we name each individual chicken, each row of broccoli?  The wild tree, the landscaping shrubs? Could we respect every living thing as if it had a name? Probably not.  But it would do us good to try.   It would make us better people - more honest, more humble, more heedful.

Addictions

I came home yesterday after dark, after a day in the city, and one of the month-old puppies had climbed into a bucket of water and drowned.  His mother had pulled him out, it seemed, because I found him dead next to the bucket, but she was too late. I tried to revive his limp, chill body, but I was too late as well. My sleep was haunted by guilt, sorrow, and inchoate terrors. 

The mom dog slept by her baby all night, chasing her other pups away.  I wonder if she too, amid the misery of loss, also feels the mystery of it - death - that sense of passings and transformation that tinges the horror and pain with a kind of wonder. As if another kind of time operates there at the edge, but one is helpless to grasp its significance. Perhaps she knows its significance better than I do.  All night she slept by her baby where I had placed him in the grass, periodically licking his face and body.  In the morning I dug a very small hole and buried the puppy on the hillside where his grandfather and great grandparents also lie.   

Losing the puppy is just this week’s knife edge of sorrow, unexpected in its particulars but familiar in its raw exposure.  I live and work on a cattle ranch, which means that I make a direct living on the life and death of animals. There are the joyful, anxious months of calving, where the pastures are dotted with fresh and shiny babies, and there are the years of overseeing their growth to maturity, and then the day when they are shipped off to be slaughtered, where I send them to their death.  I don’t like the death part, no, I don’t like to think about it, but there is a very big part of me that needs it, like an addictive drug or an obsessive cause.  I need death to be there lurking in my life, or I would have to find something else to substitute for it, like alcoholism or jihad.  

This could just be a defect of my personality, as I’ve always had an above-average fixation with altered states of consciousness, intensities, extremes, and other sorts of follies and ridiculousness. I do a decent impression of solid citizen these days, when necessary, but I’m always a bit ragged around the edges on closer inspection.  I live too far out there to not be marked by a certain awkwardness.  Out there - out here - is where I can feel the systole and diastole of death and life rolling through me without impediment.  It is my secret drug, my secret well of renewal.  An open secret, secret only because I can’t explain it at all well or pass it on, as one is supposed to do with human culture.   

So, this is just another story of addiction, which is to say a story of quiet rebellion against the social order, or capitalism, or repressive standards of behavior, or civilization itself.  I don’t know anymore - perhaps it is the kind of rebellion that just makes order stronger, and I’m OK with that.  Social cohesion is something to be treasured; that is one of the lessons that we must very reluctantly learn from the Arab Spring and its aftermath: that even a repressive order might be preferable to the free-for-all of destruction and murder that can take its place.  

But I think my addiction has deeper roots and is the most conservative kind of rebellion possible.  I want what we always had until not too long ago: that atavistic world, so unjust by liberal humanist standards, but absolutely just along longer ecological timelines.   I want my life entwined with the lives and plants and animals because their lives are a truth deeper founded than the tangles of philosophy.  

Those are luxuries I have claimed for myself, the luxuries of sharp-edged experience and open spaces; they are unpopular, nearly free for the taking, however strenuous that taking might be. Digging the hole into which to put the puppy I weep inside for all of us, that we might die, that we have to die, that we must go on, and that it is so hard to hang on to what is essential.

Innovations without a city

Civilization has always been practiced in cities.  It's right there in the word itself.  But a city might not be fundamentally necessary for the practice of civilization anymore, what with the web and all.

The model of civilization has been city-centric for few millennia now.   As in, the produce of the countryside is sucked into the city, to fuel the business of civilization, in all its self-involved glory.  The cities have justified this by citing the innovations they produce: political, economic, scientific, technical innovations that raise the whole system up.  

But what if we've taken that pattern to its logistical and logical limit?  What if all of the innovations of the cities have run their course, and no longer produce any marginal returns for the whole?  What if the pattern of city-centrism has done everything it can do and now the places where the essential innovations need to happen are out in the country or even in the wilderness? Or in the urban gardens and other eruptions of the country within the city?  What if the essential innovations that we need to make as a civilization have nothing to do with concentrations of humans, but in a fundamental re-thinking of the relationship between human civilization and nature?

This kind of innovation doesn't even have a name yet.  It would be fundamental, as in changing the foundational pattern of civilization, from a strongly centripetal pattern to something more balanced.  Changing the economic relationship between the city and the country, and between civilization and nature has profound implications for the health of eco-systems, for the psychological and physical health of humans.

And there are a bunch of people already working on it, feeling their way towards innovations they can't even name, and might not work out. Innovations that build on the best that the cities produce but that question the assumption that only cities and its citizens can do civilization and innovation.

Everyday magic

The ability to perceive beauty in everyday life is a magic art that sets one free - free from the economic machine that corrupts one's desires to increase consumption.  And ever increasing consumption is necessary to keep profits flowing to service the debt and keep the whole highly leveraged Ponzi scheme rolling along towards total resource extraction.

Finding everyday, wild, humble beauty - a wildflower, a cloud, the sound of the wind in the trees - to sustain your heart is an act of rebellion.  And a survival skill.  And a key to the doorway out of the machine.  And therefore a magic art.   You didn't know you had magical skills, did you?

Trump, jihad, and eco-warriors

I actually feel some sympathy for the Trump fans and their rage at the machine.  The ironic thing is that it’s the same rage that fuels the jihadis of ISIS that we have all vowed to exterminate.  It’s also the same rage that any environmentalist has felt at least once, if not constantly.  

I’m not saying that I sympathize with the barely concealed racial resentments of the Trump mob, or the violence of the jihadis.  Or even the self-righteousness of the environmentalists.  

But with their rage at the cold, efficient extractions of Western civilization, I have some sympathy.  And can even find a bit of a silver lining in all of the ugliness that is emerging. That mote of dreaming for a better way that fuels the extremism is the strip of silver in all the darkness of violence and hate.  And it is in danger of being extinguished in the necessary victory of common decencies. 

If only all of this anger and energy can find a course to run that is not hateful, but constructive of radical but peaceful alternatives.  Towards a caliphate that governs kindly, towards a global economy that is not self-cannibalizing and oligarchic, towards an environmentalism that is self-critical. 

I know, that is seriously Pollyanna - naive about the role that American hegemony has played in bringing us to this pass and overly optimistic about human tendencies - but anything else will probably involve lots more mayhem. 

Civilization is what you do, not what you are.

We all live in a simulation created by language, art, and symbolic thought. We all live within the social systems that symbolic thought makes possible: agriculture, trade, politics, technology, etc. We all live in the matrix we call civilization.
Our Matrix is not created by aliens, AI, or future versions of ourselves; it is created by our ancestors and by all of us together, by our consent and by our not knowing any other way to live our lives. Our matrix is created by our parents, our education, ourselves. It is the project we all work on, the thing we were all trained to do.

What you are is both less than, and more, than civilization tells you. Civilization tells you that you are human and special amongst all creation. Civilization tells you stories about yourself so that you think only in words and pictures. So that you see only other humans. So that you learn to compete with other humans to build the walls and screens of civilization ever higher.

What.you are is an animal, amongst animals, a creature amongst creatures, a pool of proteins, a city of cells that walk on its back legs. What you are, as are all things, is the inheritor of stars and eternal, a continuity of life in its unceasing transformations, unseparte from the farthest reaches of the universe, vibrant with the traces of supernovas and black holes. You are, it all is, much bigger than the little box that civilization puts you in.

But civilization is very entertaining.

Constructing Human Reality

There are three phases of constructing reality among humans.

The first one is formed in the most basic human bonds to family members - mother, father, siblings.  That is where we develop our fundamental relationship to our bodies and emotions; where we develop a sense of self and the interplay between self and other humans, as well as the interplay between self, other humans and the non-human world (the development of this three-way relationship is something we don't pay enough attention to.)  This is when we learn the basics of human social rules as well.

The second phase is our more-or-less formal education where we are trained in the more specific social rules and technical skills of our society, such as the 3R's or memorizing sacred texts or craft skills or war-games. We develop our sense of self further and learn how to manipulate material and symbols to construct the shared reality called society or culture.  (Here, too, formal education in a conscious relationship to non-human reality is seriously underdeveloped.  We learn to do science but this art unfortunately has been warped into a technical exercise in maximizing human exploitation of "natural resources."  Needless to say this is a very limited and childish conception of the relationship.)

The third phase is the autonomy that comes after formal education ceases, where we get to become a constructive member of society (or not).   One is turned out in the big pasture, with the general population, to sink or swim.  And if we are lucky, we get to spend quite a bit of time at it.  This is when we really get to make our own lives: to choose what we do, who we spend time with, where we live, and what values we express in the jobs we take, the families we make, the life-worlds we build up.  This is also the phase of maximum responsibility, if we are brave enough to accept responsibility.

(There might be a fourth phase, saying good-bye, but I haven't got there yet.)

Within the phases there are very particular things that we do to construct reality.
I say phases, but really they are three faces because they happen simultaneously all through one's life,  but one face will be generally predominant during the different periods of a person's life.

Treebeard's comment

I spend way too much time reading stuff on the internet.  As a vice, it's only marginally better than watching television.  But I did come across this eloquent and fiery comment by "treebeard" as a response to an interview with some very earnest folks building an intentional tribe/community:


A Sign...

of cultural disintegration. It was good hear about a group of people in a committed community, and very important work that is being done, but very sad in a way that we have come to this. That we have had to completely reinvent our cultural structures, invoking tribe as a means to create community that has all but disappeared.

We are just starting to understand the violence that we have done to ourselves based on our current set of beliefs that currently masquerade as "facts", but are still clueless to the cause. I have railed against our current paradigm so often here that I am being to dislike the sound of my own voice. But alas, I cannot stop myself. Survival of the fittest, competition, monetization, all products of a twisted psyche, that projects our own disorder into the world and calls them natural, part of evolution, ecology, economics, and psychology. All facts, "markets are self regulating, therefore corruption is impossible".

We are not immoral but amoral. We have chosen the "rational" over the good, we are all Nazi experimenters on our future generations, fretting over our retirement savings and who did what to whom as the planet burns. So our souls starve as we fill our bank accounts and become more insane. Are we intimate with anything anymore, a friend, our own bodies, the earth beneath our feet, the wind on our face, the blue sky in the morning, a bumble bee resting in a flower as the sun sets, our own hunger, emptiness.

How far into the dark night have we come, have we lost our way altogether. In the darkness, even without sight we can feel the vast emptiness of the abyss yawning open before us. We wake in a sweat in the morning before we drop off the cliff, but we lead the same life, day after day, as if we had all the time in the world. The ultimate illusion.

Strangely, this is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read, minor typos and all.

the interview that this is a comment to

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

I was sitting by the window when I heard a bird screeching in distress, and looked up in time to see an 'io (a native hawk) implacably winging its way upward from my garden with a pink cardinal, crying piteously, clasped firmly in its talons.

That was painful, although there are not many things that I like to see more than an 'io balancing on the winds high above.

My own predation is so much more attenuated most of the time.

We had to euthanize a steer that had broken its leg a few weeks ago.  Our ranch-hand dropped the steer with one shot in the center of the forehead, just as one is supposed to, and cut his throat, but the steer still took a while to die.  Then we had to shackle the steer's hind legs to the forks of a front-end loader with a chain so that we could move the carcass out of the pen.  Our ranch-hand's dad and uncle came with a trailer to take the carcass home and butcher it.  Then we got back to work.

In the parking lot at the mall

I’m sitting in my truck at the mall waiting for my daughter and her friends to get out of a movie.  It’s a backwater mall in a minor city at the edge of the United States.  The mall consists of pale yellow concrete block rectangles set up as wings around a central corridor.  It is an older structure that has been minimally maintained, but as the only mall for hundreds of miles around it is still very popular wit h the teenagers.  Inside are the collection of chain stores that can be found in just aboutany city in the US, along with an equal number of local businesses.  And the whole thing is chock full of merchandise, mostly of questionable quality but astonishingly cheap, thanks to the globalization of labor and capitol.

Yesterday I was taking down a length of barbed wire fence at the edge of a bamboo thicket when I noticed some moss covered boulders half hidden by the bamboo. I hadn’t noticed them before although they’re just a hundred feet or so from my house, where the pasture turns to forested hillside.   They were beautiful in that Zen rock garden way.  It was clear that there was a relationship between the rocks and the bamboo thicket that allowed for such verdant mosses to grow, a kind of intimacy between the three. The quiet beauty of those moss-covered rocks stay with me. 

The scent of a joint being smoked trails through the truck window.  It’s what people do after work, young people anyway, and it’s becoming more socially acceptable every day, whether medical or recreational.  Something loosens up, there is a return to a less high-strung way of life as the young people get stoned in their cars.  Is that a good or bad thing?

I think of the “bellicose” young 17th century Dutchman, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who, in the service of the Dutch East India Company  wiped out the native people of the nutmeg-producing islands of Banda with a cruelty that the IS would have admired. He shaped the world for centuries to come with his “successes.” But was that a good thing?  I could talk about colonialism and capitalism but I won’t because we know all about it.  But we still worship the kind of success that transforms the world, most of the time for the worse in the long run. 

The Cheeseburger Parasites and the Pine Tree Investor: Reading the Middle East

When my daughter’s father was sent to Iraq with the National Guard I got books out of the library about the history of Iraq.  It wasn’t hard to see that we were in for difficulties there and so it has been.  Our invasion of Iraq has been a disaster compounded of problems of our own making and conflicts whose origins date back centuries, even millenia, all tangled together.  

Yesterday the New York Times published a long article about the Middle East, “Fractured Lands,” that documents the life stories of six ordinary people through the wars and upheavals of the last two decades. I also picked up My Journey into the Heart of Terror by the iconoclastic German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer that describes the ten days he was permitted to spend in Islamic State-controlled areas of Iraq.

Two details in these narratives stick in my mind today: one of the persons profiled in the NYT article is a young man from Libya, an air force cadet at the time of Libyan uprising, who, by good luck, good instincts and the support of his family manages to survive, despite being used as  pawn by the pro-government forces.  Trying to remake a normal life now, his passion is for planting pine trees.  

The other detail is from My Journey , a moment in which the IS officials and fighters who are “handling” the German journalists stop off for a cheeseburger, fries, and Pepsi in IS controlled Mosul.  (Funny that, even jihadis love cheeseburgers.)

Two little anchors of mundanity underlying the violent melodramas of the Middle East. Life goes on in even the most ferociously war-torn of places. The IS fighters are just like cheeseburger consumers everywhere - beneficiaries of a long chain of transactions and structures that allow for a cheeseburger to be produced on demand.  Intact in Mosul and its surroundings, it would seem, are beef and dairy cattle, wheat and corn and potato fields, slaughterhouse and cheese-making factory, mill and bakery and Pepsi plant, or at the very least a food distribution network robust enough to bring in from more distant places all of the items necessary to assemble those seemingly simple but actually quite complex edible artifacts.

There is an important difference between the two, however.  The Libyan man planting pine trees is actively trying to bring his world back to life, in however small a way.  That is a courageous act - an act of investment in the very best sense of that word.   And  simple-minded as it might seem, those are the kinds of investments that must be made over and over again, courageously and persistently,  not just in the Middle East but everywhere, if we are to pull that region and civilization out of the vicious cycles that we are all currently enacting.  

PS: check out something cool in (the former) Syria: Rojava

fragment of a practice

“What we do is very simple: we listen, we stay and we listen, sense what is in this moment.  That is all.  And yet what it opens up is not so simple because it cannot be comprehended with the mind alone, at least the mind that has to do with words and symbols; what we do leads back to color and light and birdsong, to our bodies just as they are, to the places beyond words.  Where small surprising things begin to happen...”

simpler

post-humanist

maybe we can't stand
being shut into little boxes anymore
house to car to office walls
maybe we want to live in the open
so
then we can feel
breeze playing on skin
more than anything
maybe we want to let it go
the buildings that reach into the sky
the highways filled with cars
the fear that drives us on and on
maybe we want to let it in
the breeze
the creeping tendrils
the buzzing insects
the dust of the plains

Sharing Suffering

Ways of living and dying matter: Which historically situated practices of multi species living and dying should flourish?  There is no outside from which to answer that mandatory question; we must give the best answers we come to know how to articulate, and take action, without the god-trick of self-certainty.  Companion species worlds are turtles all the way down.  Far from reducing everything to a soup of post- (or pre-) modern complexity in which anything ends up permitted, companion species approaches must actually engage in cosmopolitics, articulating bodies to some bodies and not others, nourishing some worlds and not others, and bearing the mortal consequences.  Respect is respecere  — looking back, holding in regard, understanding that meeting the look of the other is a condition of having face oneself.  All of this is what I am calling  “sharing suffering.”

donna haraway, when species meet,  88.

Honesty and Dishonesty at the County Livestock Show

I spent the weekend before last at our annual 4-H livestock show, helping my daughter, along with about thirty other teen-agers, to show their animals - their chickens, rabbits, pigs, goats, lambs, and cattle. There is a highly charged event: beyond the thrill of competing against each other, there is an emotional edge to the show that cuts deeper than the game of competition, because most of the animals that the kids bring to the show will be sent to slaughter directly afterwards.

What does it mean: to live, to eat?  This is what is experienced at the show in visceral emotional detail.  It is definitely not an activity for the faint of heart.  

To kill a plant is easy.  As the animal rights people point out, it has no face.  A plant, even a mighty tree, does not evoke our bodily sympathy.  We don’t identify with it, muscle to muscle, breath to breath.  We may love the beauty of a tree but we are not pierced by a tree’s gaze.  In witnessing a plant’s  death there may be dismay but there is no nausea, as there is with an animal, especially a fellow mammal. 

But doesn't a plant have just as much right to live as an animal? Resemblance to us humans is a shallow standard for determining what lives and what dies.
It’s just that we don’t want to go there.  Because if we recognized the lives of plants then there would be nothing that we could eat in presumed innocence.  

And claiming innocence is one of the most dishonest things that I know of.  Implicitly claiming innocence by demonizing others is doubly dishonest. If you are a human, you are not innocent.

Unfortunately innocence is what most people see when they see animals and kids together.  They want to see innocence.  Farm animals remind them of their youth, of story-books or of going to grandpa’s farm. Animals and children are cute; they absolutely are.  But the cuteness at the livestock show is a thin veneer. 

What the children are doing at a livestock show is not innocent.  What they are doing is serious. And painful.  And contradictory. It is an everyday, old-fashioned exercise in Isabelle Stenger's animistic science -  the county fair is a site of bodily engagement and risk, where the psyche is put in acute peril because of the contradictions it must hold and the pain that these contradictions cause.
The kids must honor the animals that they raise because an animal will not thrive if it is not honored.  And they must be complicit in the death of their animal without any comfortable distance from the particularities of that animal, that death. Fearing death and facing it requires a dangerous degree of honesty and an iron stomach.  Dangerous to the edge of brutal, this honesty, this experience of another being, this intimacy of bodies and the sharp edge where that intimacy is broken.  Under all of the ribbons and prizes that decorate the show, that is the true, serious, hard work that the children do.  I think it gets harder and more serious, instead of easier, as they get older.  

Some would say: why do it? Why go through all that pain, when one can just be a vegetarian? (Or, worse, a blissfully ignorant end consumer.)  Stop killing animals.  But it’s not that simple.  Animals will be killed, anyway, in order for us humans to eat, under the plow, for instance, under the wheels of the combine.  Animals may not even be born, which is also a kind of killing.  It certainly is a much easier, cleaner kind of killing.  But just because it is easier doesn't make it better.  In fact, it makes it worse because it makes us detached.   Better that there was life, and complicated intimacies and alliances between species at the livestock show, rather than a clean, uncomplicated innocence that never lets animals live - and be entangled with our lives - for fear of death and discomfort.   Better but not easier.

OK, We Need a Laugh, Right?

The sadness of farmers

Yesterday I went to visit Bonk Farm in Waimea, on the northern part of the island.  It was part of our agricultural career workshop for the teens that do 4-H livestock projects.  The farm was beautiful, but the farmer was sad.  I kept looking at his hands that were covered with the fine chalky dirt of the Mana plain. They were strong yet elegant hands, for all that they were caked in dirt and cracked with toil.  Mr. Bonk rubbed at the dirt on his fingers as he told of his many and increasing difficulties in being a farmer.  Partly this is to be expected: it is simply being honest about the heavy burden of toil and care that producing food for others imposes on a mortal human frame.  But he was sad in a way that seemed especially keen.  He said, more than once: "If you go into farming, don't expect anyone to help you, because they won't" 

And there it is, we don't help small farmers like Mr. Bonk nearly enough.  He should really be covered in honors.  He has a verdant, almost glowing organic farm and is clearly competent, persistent, resourceful and cares deeply about the health of his farm.  He deserves the full support of our society and community, but instead it is he that supports everyone else that does not raise their own food.   

There are farmers that do very well financially and see their farm almost purely as a business, there are those who make enough money and are happy with the life they lead with its many non-monetary rewards, and there are those that farm with passion and sadness, almost a kind of rage.  

Which of these are the most "successful" farmers I don't know. 

Animaholic

At the moment,  I have 6 dogs, 4 cows,  2 sheep and a goat in the immediate vicinity of the house, if not actually in the house (2 dogs). Around here, in the deep country, this is not out of the ordinary.
There are also the 16 horses which is an extravagant number.  I am in the 1% when it comes to horse ownership.
That is not to mention the other roughly 3000 cows on the actual cattle ranch.
We are all here because of the grass.  The grass that grows in the open fields, that for 100 years, produced pure white sugar and, when that became economically invalid, were too remote, too depleted, too steep, too rocky for anyone to want for anything else.  So we, the humans, made fences and ran water-lines and brought cattle to graze, and horses and dogs to herd them.
What is my relationship to these animals?  Predator? Slave-owner? Prison warden? Executive Director? Servant? God?  A little of each, depending on the day.
And what is their relationship to me?
All of them either work for/with me or are going to be eaten someday, by somebody.  We all bleed into each other, quite literally. The dogs bite the goat when I'm not careful and I must tend her wounds.  I castrate the calf and cut myself by accident.  We both bleed on the same knife.  I defend their world, this little bios of grassland that we have made together, all of us,  with every bit of stratagem, strength, and endurance I possess.  So that we can all keep bleeding into each other and into the landscape, for now, because its the most beautiful, vital thing I know.
Some humans argue that eating meat is kind of sin - that it is wasteful and cruel - and that all of this land should be converted to cropland or, if it is not suitable for that, left to go wild.  There is some merit to this argument, but it is too simplistic, too rational, too detached, too civilized.  Down that path, we will be growing all of our food in tanks and we will live in a world-city.  Down that path, other animals will be a distant memory, and all of the ways that we can live together will be lost.  All the ways in which we change each others minds and bodies will be lost.  We humans will shed no blood and we will be the worse for it.
It is very difficult to talk about this because our culture - Western civilization - is both too proud and too squeamish.  We are extremely violent but we are afraid of blood.  We are obsessed with food but don't like to get dirty.  We say we love nature but fear flies, mosquitos, maggots, diseases, rodents, and mud.  Not to mention any kind of excrement. Western civilization is about being clean, elegant, articulate, economically efficient and ruthless, preferably without having to see any blood.   That's why it's hard to talk about the unclean stuff.  That's why I need animals, so we can be unclean together.

Animistic Science/Scientific Animism

To elaborate a bit more on the science that Isabelle Stenger proposes - she defines good science by its willingness to be "at risk"

“…there exist constructions where the world and the scientist are both at risk.”  (Latour, in a preface for Stenger)

What is this “risk”?  

Instead of a science where the scientist exists separately from the object of study, in Stenger’s idea of science as a true and honest adventure the scientist (who could be anybody) will be changed, in perhaps uncomfortable ways, in the encounter with that which is being studied.   The object of study (that which is addressed by the experiment) will talk back and in that conversation, as in all true and dangerous conversations, what the scientist thinks he or she is - how she defines herself - is put at risk. 

It is a science that does not require an ever greater distance between this sovereign subject, the Scientist, and the abject, controlled object of study. It is the possibility of learning about the world without having to kill it first - epistemologically at the very least, if not in an actual slaughter.  (To make it hold still, to make it safe for us to study)

This would be science where we remember ourselves as animals among animals, with all that implies about our subjectivity, our relatedness, our duty of care to that which is related to us, our capacity to feel pain and joy that is not just ours.   It would be a science in which what we ate for breakfast or what birds live in our yard or who our grandparents were would be related to our doctoral dissertation (or our resume or the standardized test we are giving the children.) It would be  learning from an un-immobilzed world and we would understand and honor the risks in that. 

Science that is not another godtrick.

Where I fall in love (with another version/vision of) science thanks to Isabelle Stengers

What experimental scientists call objectivity thus depends on a very particular creative art, and a very selective one, because it means that what is addressed must be successfully enrolled as a “partner” in a very unusual and entangled relation. Indeed, the role of this partner is not only to answer questions but also, and primordially so, to answer them in a way that tests the relevance of the question itself. Correlatively, the answers that follow from such achievements should never separate us from anything, because they always coincide with the creation of new questions, not with new authoritative answers to questions that already mattered for us.

We can only imagine the adventure of sciences that would have accepted such claims as obvious, which would have accepted the very specific challenge of addressing whatever they address only if the situation ensures that the addressee is enabled to “take a position” about the way it is addressed. What we should not imagine, however, is that science would then have verified animism.

We may well think instead that the term itself would not exist. Only a “belief” can receive such a global name. If the adventurous specificity of scientific practices has been acknowledged, no one would dream of addressing others in terms of the “beliefs” they would entertain about a “reality” to which scientists enjoy privileged access. Instead of the hierarchical figure of a tree, with Science as its trunk, what we call progress would perhaps have had the allure of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a rhizome, connecting heterogeneous practices, concerns, and ways of giving meaning to the inhabitants of this earth, with none being privileged and any being liable to connect with any other.

"Reclaiming Animism," e-flux.com, journal #36, 7/2012
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/reclaiming-animism/

Godtricks

Reading the post-humanist theorist Donna Haraway's When Species Meet, where she refers to refusing the temptation to play godtricks - I like this reduction of so many of our grand intellectual structures - the structures that justify human exceptionalism  - to various kinds of "godtricks." They are numerous enough - the most famous of them being the Christian/Cartesian cut between mind and matter that helped to lay the groundwork for science, technology, and general modernity.  Another is D.H. Lawrence's entertainment complex, a godtrick that, like most of them, is useful in the short-run and lethal in the long-run. Another, more prosaic, would be Western conceptions of property, by which we become the lord-gods of whatever bits of matter, even living matter, we can stake our claim to, generally by the exchange of bits of paper between our human selves,  irrespective of the prior independent existence of that piece of land or animal or lumber or metal.  It is ours, we are its god, and we have the legislation to prove that we can do whatever we will with it.  And of course there is that belief, that trick we have, of thinking that all of this, this world, is here for the one single purpose of providing us human with a living, that we are owed it, that we have a human right to food, shelter, gasoline and wi-fi.

Pishiboro

Imagine what it would be like to have a god like Pishiboro - a foolish god, a laughing god, a fallible god, a god whose body is our landscape, instead of the God that most of us have, more or less, inherited.   What a relief to have such a god! Not to have a world-conquering god, a god of purity and perfection and power, who knows all and is always watching.  What a relief to have a god that dies and gives back to the earth, a god that decomposes, a god that is dirty and subject to the stings of the smallest creature and that knows pain and death without making a big drama about it.  If we had a foolish god, perhaps we could acknowledge and forgive ourselves and each other for all of our foolishness.  If we had a god whose body went back to the earth perhaps we might be at peace with the naturalness of our own bodies.  Perhaps if we had a god that dug holes, we would remember him when we were digging holes.

A Story about Living and Dying (And Laughing and Sex)

This is another piece from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' The Harmless People; it is a story told by the old man Ukwane of the Gikwe  about their god Pishiboro.

Pishiboro was digging a hole.  When he had finished he told his wives to go to look at it while he went out hunting in a different direction, but instead the two wives went to get tsama melons.  They found one melon, brought it home, and, taking out the seeds, were grinding them to powder when Pishiboro arrived.  The two wives had taken their own genital organs and mixed those with the melon seeds which they were grinding.  Pishiboro ate the mixture, which he thought was very nice, and he jumped to his feet and asked his wives where they got such nice meat.
"Oh," They said, "we told you when you left that you were going in the wrong direction.  You should have come to the hole with us because when we got there we found a baby giraffe inside, but we could not get it out, so we cut pieces off its feet, and this was the meat you found so good."
They slept, and the next day they all went to the hole.  The two wives had, in the meantime, defecated into the hole until it was full.  When Pishiboro leaned over it to look for the giraffe, they toppled him in; then, laughing and shrieking, they ran away and climbed into a camel-thorn tree.
From the depth of his hole, Pishiboro looked up at his wives in the tree, and as he looked it came to him what wives were for, and he climbed up the tree and possessed them, and they conceived, and when the children were born they dropped from the tree like fruit.
Then the whole family came down, and as they were walking away Pishiboro found a night adder's home.  Only the baby snakes were there; the parents were gone out.  The Pishiboro family laughed at the baby snakes because they had such ugly faces, and when they had laughed all they could they went home to their scherm.  That night the baby snakes told their mother what had happened, and in the morning, when Pishiboro returned for another laugh, the baby snakes were dancing and the mother snake was hiding in a little hole she had made.  Pishiboro, too, began to dance, and when he danced by the hole the mother snake jumped out and bit him, and although he ran away the poison was working in him, and soon he was ill and in great pain.
The omarambas, the dry valleys in the land, are furrows that Pishiboro made on his way home because he suffered so much, and the hills at the sides of the omarambas were made by his kicking feet.
Pishiboro died from the snake bite, and now all the water that flows in the rivers in the north, all the rain, and all the water that collects in pools is the rottenness of Pishiboro, liquid made as his dead body began to decay.

Un-civilization - Butchering a Gemsbok in the Kalahari Desert with the Gikwe Bushpeople

"Next the two men removed the rumen, the first stomach of ruminant animals, where the grass they bolt hurriedly is kept in quantities to be coughed up and chewed thoroughly when the animal is lying in the shade.  Ukwane lifted the rumen out carefully, like a great water sack that might burst suddenly, and hurried with it to the pit lined with the skin.  There he slit it and water gushed out, every drop saved by the skin.  Ukwane and Gai removed handfuls of its contents, a yellow, pulpy mass of partially digested grass, and they squeezed each handful dry into bowls, tsama-melon rinds, and ostrich egg water containers that the women had brought forward.  They did not mind two great white worms that were discovered living in the rumen, for as soon as enough water was collected, the people all had a long, satisfying drink.  Some was pressed on me by Tsetchwe; I could not bring myself to drink it, but I did taste it and found that it was not too unpleasant, although it tasted strongly as intestines smell.  It was fresh, however, it was only the liquid from grass, and I thought that if I had no other water I too could drink the water of rumen."
From Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' The Harmless People about the ways of the Gikwe hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari who have no access to water for eight months out of the year.

Civilization

How do we become un-imprisoned without rejecting a civilization that is all we know?

By turning the purpose of civilization around so that it gives back to nature rather than just taking everything (without so much as a thank you!) Or at least attempts to gives something back, conscious of the need for balance, and that the long term survival of ourselves - our own self-interest - require a more balanced way of living.

By turning all of the powerful capabilities of civilization away from ruthlessly exploiting all other life on this planet towards nurturing life and building habitats not just for ourselves but also for the incredible wealth of life that we are so fortunate to live together with and upon which we depend.   By coming to see ourselves truly and accurately - scientifically - as the primates that we are, primates in a living landscape, and not as the gods or children of gods that our religious traditions imply (valuable culturally and morally as these traditions are,) and in that seeing, coming to know that we can’t just keep on taking without contributing to the landscape in which we live.

We can’t so much reject civilization but work to re-direct it, to clarify the purpose of civilization, such that we may again be its participants, rather than its victims, as so many of us seem to be, even the most economically successful or celebrated.  

There is a a sacrifice to be made, a giving up, because that is necessary.  We can’t have it all, if we are to live honestly.  What we must give up: the sense of entitlement to infinite supplies of food, shelter, transportation, health-care, entertainment, security, and even information that is so common in the First World.  Mostly, what needs to be sacrificed are delusions - comfortable delusions, delusions of comfort - which are being ripped away anyway.

And in exchange for sacrificing these delusions, we might have a shot not just at a more accurate understanding of ourselves but also a more reasonable way of living.  A way of life with a future to it, and not that Blade Runner future. 

This is not to say that by sacrificing our delusions that we will be assured of a viable future.  This is not about bargaining with the destiny our current civilization has us set up to meet. There is nothing sure or certain in this world.   It is simply to say that there will be sacrifices to be made. The future is not cornucopian.  There are real limits which can’t be wished away.  But there are paths that are more viable than others, attitudes that are more or less constructive, perspective that are more or less useful.

Being a “doomer” is not particularly useful.  But trying to see ourselves and our predicament clearly and having a framework by which to act upon that clarity of vision is useful, a framework which is bigger than the common humanism/anthropocentrism, such that we act in ways that benefit not just our own species but other life-forms as well.  Also, useful is a framework that does not reject the countless generations worth of work that has gone into building the civilization that we more or less comfortably inhabit, but instead turns our best capabilities toward better goals and the profit, the excess that we generate back to where it belongs, the larger system of life.  

The New Question

What can we, as a species (or a nation or a state or town or a business or an individual), contribute to the community of life?

It's always been about what can we take, more efficiently than anyone else.  It's always been about EROI (Energy Return on Investment), and how much extra we can suck out of the system by all our cleverness, bunch of monkey grifters that we are.

Maybe it's time to have a little pride and think about giving back.  About making something that's good for everybody: microbes, rodents, coral reefs, elephants, and all everything in between.  Imagine what that might be like, just to think that way, and then start living the question.  

Of course there are many wonderful people who already are living the question, such as my friend Megan Lamson, who has been leading coastal beach-cleanups for years.  Cleaning up after ourselves is one step in growing up and towards giving something back to the community of life.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

One of the greatest barriers we have to understanding other life-forms is the burden of misinformation we carry in our heads.  - Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in The Hidden Life of Deer.

I don't know what I'm doing, but if there's one thing that I consider my job, my calling, the thing I'm supposed to do, it's trying to understand other life-forms.  That's why I'm a rancher, that's why I'm in agriculture, because I get to spend my days around other life-forms, and also because I don't think you can understand other life-forms without understanding how we are bound to each other in life and death, in feeding and in eating.  It's not enough to have some academic or intellectual or scientific or otherwise symbolic knowledge about the ways we are bound together as bodies, as matter.  It's necessary to be entangled and impure, in the middle of the struggle for survival, as close as possible to the transactions that keep us alive and to know, to see what that costs.  Otherwise it's too easy to forget and not see, to live in our entirely human world.

Here's another great writer to whom we will all be indebted if we are so lucky as to negotiate a way out of dystopian ruination that we seem to be headed towards so inexorably - the anthropologist-ethologist-novelist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

Entertainment

Every so often I like to pick up books at semi-random off the new books shelf in the library.    One of the serendipitous discoveries this round is a reprint of D.H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico (1934), a collection of essays from his time in Mexico and the Southwest of the US.  

I’ve never been able to get very far into Lawrence’s famous novels, but I’ve loved his wild, hypnotic poetry since I was a teen.  I think you could accuse Lawrence of various kinds of intellectual sins; his writing is both baroque and brutal: opinionated, patronizing, flat-out ridiculous half the time, but the rest of the time he’s more right than any careful, thoughtful, tactful writer could ever be.  So it is with the thinking of poets I suppose: for the most part indefensible but occasionally crucial. 

His most striking essay in the collection is “Indians and Entertainment” in which he compares the metaphysics of Western drama with the anti-metaphysics of Indian communal ceremonies.  

Lawrence says of the Western tradition of entertainment from classical Greek drama to Hollywood: “The secret of it all, is that we detach ourselves from the painful and always solid trammels of actual existence, and become creatures  of memory and of spirit-like consciousness.  We are the gods and there’s the machine, down below us.”  From drama we’ve progressed to the cinema and modern man’s passion for movies: “In the moving pictures he has detached himself even further from the solid stuff of earth.  There, the people are truly shadows; the shadow-pictures are thinkings of his mind.  They live in the rapid and kaleidoscopic realm of the abstract.  And the individual watching the shadow-spectacle sits a very god, in an orgy of abstraction, actually dissolved into delighted, watchful spirit.”

We have many vices in the West.  Some of our vices are ruthlessly destructive.  This vice, this addiction - our lust for entertainment - is the one that may well be self-destructive.  It is slowly luring us into an abstracted, distracted passivity.

Of the Native American/Indian idea of entertainment, Lawrence says, “ He hasn’t got one.”

He says that the consciousness of the Indian and the West are irreconcilable, fatal to each other: “That is, the life of the Indian, his stream of conscious being, is just death to the white man. And we can understand the consciousness of the Indian only in terms of the death of our consciousness.”  By this dichotomy, Lawrence tries to show up the dishonesty of well-meaning, enlightened Westerners who consume Indian communal performances as entertainment and spectacle.

“The Indians dance around the drum, singing”   Theirs is not an entertainment but an experience, a renewal, repetitive, wordless, meaning nothing but joining everything together, no beginning and no end.

“Yet perhaps it is the most stirring sight in the world, in the dark, near the fire, with the drums going, the pine-trees standing still, the everlasting darkness, and the strange lifting and dropping, surging, crowing, gurgling, aah-h-hing! of the male voices.”

The Indian ceremonial is a direct experience of the wonder of the world, in the deep places “of the blood” and shared life.

Lawrence says a great deal more about the Indian ceremonies and dances and a modern anthropologist would shudder at most of what he has to say.  He shamelessly projects his own artistic obsessions onto Indian ceremonials.   

And yet, there is the door he cracks open for us, we entertainment-besotted global consumers tethered to our smartphones, our Netflix and HBO.  

We could experience the world again, instead of succumbing to our entertainment.  If we experienced it, perhaps we would love it with the intensity we need to summon to nurture life as a conscious goal.  This would be a startling innovation within our civilization, which has always more or less taken life for granted.

To experience the world costs nothing, but we may have to die to everything we think we know about the world to walk away from entertainment.  Perhaps it is more dangerous than we can possibly imagine.  The abstractions in which we are enthralled, perhaps they protect us from the harsh realities of our own  voracious human nature.  We may have gone way past the possibility of experience as a chosen thing, and must make do with the virtual delights of civilized entertainment because there are simply too many of us humans.  Without the resource extraction efficiencies of the global economic machine we would not be able to keep ourselves fed, and without the entertainment complex we would see all too clearly our growing imprisonment in our own economic machine.  That may be the cold, hard truth of the next few decades, but I'll not stop acting as if we can choose otherwise.

What is a brain?

"Scientists" have built a map of how words activate the brain. (I wish we would stop doing that, conferring the mantle of the All-Powerful Oz that goes with the word "scientist" upon what amounts to some guys and girls who happen to have a certain kind of eduction and access to some fancy equipment; I'm imagining the headline "Literary Critics discover how words are organized" or "Ranchers build multispecies biomimetic symbiotic system")  This was done by putting some people in an MRI scan and reading stories to them.  So, it was a bit of a literary enterprise.  I wonder when, if ever, we will come to see our minds as bigger than our brains.  Or care that our brains are not only lit up by words and numbers but by our natural environment as well, and that those connections are more important to the brain, to the entire organism, than our relatively recently acquired verbal and symbolic skills.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/27/brain-atlas-showing-how-words-are-organised-neuroscience

Hominid

I've been reading:

which has been helping me with the aforementioned project of stripping away some of the human obsessions and seeing us for the hominid/primate animal that we are.  Tattersall, in fact, makes the point that the theoretical framework of the field of paleoanthropology (finding and interpreting hominid fossils) has been seriously skewed by a persistent insistence on seeing ourselves as the crowning glory of all creation (he calls it human exceptionalism), such that all hominid fossils lead to us, when in fact the fossil record may indicate a more complex family tree, in which we had cousins and distant hominid relatives.  Who might be around now but we pretty much ate them.  Okay, out-competed them, part of which might have involved eating them.  That explains a lot about us, about how we're so damn afraid of ourselves, and have a passion for depictions of hominid on hominid violence.  If you're a geek like me, Ian Tattersall's books, of which there are many, are a great read.  Especially after feminist quantum physics.   You'll not think about being human the same again.  

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

I bet you didn't know that there was such a thing as feminist quantum physics, but here you have it.  I love this illustration and the general argument of Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway which, like Bruno Latour's work, examines the social construction - the genealogy - of science and the ways of life that such science gives birth to.

In the hierarchy of human dream-worlds this is pretty stratospheric stuff - but it circles around to the foundations, to our most basic relationship with matter itself.  So it really isn't feminist, or it is, but the point being that feminism is not just for women or about women, but as it grows and deepens it has become about all of us, even non-human, non-living matter itself, and how our conception of matter can work itself free from certain cultural assumptions which could be summed up as 'might makes right'.  So we come to understand that we don't discover the universe - we being us mighty humans and the universe being particles that we have the right to experiment upon,  blow up, cause to collide, etc. - but that the kinds of instruments and apparatus that we build to measure the universe determines the universe that we find. And further that the kinds of instruments that we build are shaped by the social world in which we develop, with all of the assumptions encoded in that world.  So for instance a social world that has been set up to reward physical might (and males generally are bigger and stronger than females) will find a universe where physical power - a physics of force and leverage, a biology of competition -  are defining features.  But other possibilities are possible, and feminism helps offer that to everyone.

Quantum physics, in this illustration, looks a bit like one of Lynn Margulis' microbes, don't you think?

Elm Tree Farm (cont.)

My earliest memory is of coming downstairs in the morning in my red flannel nightie with white feather-stitching on it, and sitting in Grandfather’s lap in front of the dining room fireplace, until Mother was ready to dress me.  I was three or four.  I remember, too, following Grandfather about as he raked leaves in the yard and took them in the wheelbarrow to the barn for bedding.   I could ride in the wheelbarrow on the return trips.

I’ve been told that I tried to imitate him by planting my feet as he did and walking with my head bowed in deep thought, with my hands clasped behind me, and was mightily indignant at a burst  of laughter it caused.

Grandfather died when he was eighty-four, one April day, in some way I slipped into the room where he lay, and probably unnoticed, I saw and heard his labored breathing.  Pneumonia is too much for one of his years.

The funeral service was long.  As was the custom, I presume there was a sermon.  I remember kneeling at my small chair and also remember singing.  I sang myself; everybody sang.  One thing they sang, “Shall We Gather at the River”.  Perhaps none of you of a younger generation have ever heard it.  The music is sweet and has a note of triumph too. The words are so different from many hymns in use today, I’ll write down the first verse:

     “Shall we gather at the river

      Where bright angel feet have trod,

      With its crystal tide forever

      Flowing by the feet of God?

Chorus

      Yes we’ll gather at the river

      The beautiful, the beautiful river

      Gather with the saints at the river

      That flows by the throne of God.”

I was not taken to the grave, but I saw them put the coffin with Grandfather in it in the hearse.  Perhaps old pictures will give you youngsters an idea of the difference between a hearse of 1876, and the present day.  I remember that one, I was only three and one half years old.

Grandfather’s property was divided between Aunt Louise Goddard and Father.  Father had the farm, what else I do not know.

Of course remembrance of incidents at this tender age is somewhat sketchy.  It was probably later in the spring of the year Grandfather died that I had an adventure with, of all things, a summer yellow bird.

Out side one of the windows of the sitting room grew a beautiful honeysuckle bush, or tree.  The window was open and Mother sat by it sewing.  I was playing around outside and found the shell of a bird’s egg on the ground under the honeysuckle tree.  A pair of yellow birds had their nest in the tree and the shell had been pushed out.  Of course I was interested and picked up the shell.  Those birds were as brave as if they were big as elephants and flew screaming and scolding at me lighting on my head, and scaring me almost to death.  Of course Mother came to the rescue but by the time she arrived those birds had so tangled their feet in my curls that she had to cut away hair to free them.

Along about that time too, I got the scar on my arm.  Mother had gone to Genesee and left me with good, kind Mag Shaw who was helping her in the kitchen at the time.  Tom and the hired man got into some kind of frolic.  The hired man was chasing Tom with a corn knife in his hand.  I wanted to see the fun, but of course got in the way, and the man fell over me giving me a wicked cut.  I don’t remember this part of it, but I do remember being stood up on the kitchen table after Mother got home, and how she and Mag Shaw cried when they undid the bandage to look at the cut.