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.