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.