Monday, June 25, 2012
Happiness is being a loser
This was brought to my attention by Tim. Oh my gosh, it's exactly what I've been feeling lately. Just what I needed to hear. Ahhhh. I'm so glad I'm depressed. (I LOL as I say it.)
David Suzuki on why the "Market-Based Solutions to Global Warming" people are dead wrong
This just in from Democracy Now! What he says about the so-called "green economy" is clear as a bell and true as a Zen arrow.
Why I've been out of touch for a while; Martial arts and Speculative Realism; Watch out for culty weirdos and don't make the same mistakes I did
It's very hard for me to make any promises these days, but I am going to try to start blogging regularly again. The reason why I stopped (practically everything, including writing, gardening, cooking, playing music, and physical training) has a lot to do with the "kung fu" or general martial arts aspect of this blog, and since it might be somewhat cathartic (and perhaps instructive to other martial artists or those thinking of becoming one) for me to talk about it, this is as good a time as any.
For some years (about six) I was involved in a martial art that I will refrain from mentioning by name, but I was really involved in it, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many sacrifices of other personal aspects of my life. I had begun working for the school as an instructor, arranged my life totally around the school, and breathed, ate and drank the art. For my loyalty, about a week before my black belt test, I was fired without notice (and without, in fact, the requisite motivation for such action or any real, transparent investigation into claims that were made against me) in the middle of the worst recession in living memory, and at a time when all my extra money was funneling back into the art itself. The reason I was fired was because of a very easy (and actually quite trivial) mistake to make on my part, and a sort of fear-based feeding frenzy of the kind that sometimes occurs in groups of people who aren't communicating very well. It resulted in a year of all but suicidal depression for me and considerable emotional hardship for my wife Debra (who, if I haven't mentioned before, is absolutely the most golden-souled and happiness-deserving person I have ever known), to say little of the financial hardships suffered by we who were already having no easy time in that regard. So that's why my last blog post was about a year ago.
Anybody interested in devoting themselves to a cultish group of people for the sake of adding some meaning to their lives should be warned that there is no pension or retirement plan at the end of an experience of the kind I had. You're out on your ear at the end of the whole thing. If you don't fall into step exactly with the behavior patterns espoused by your superiors, you might very likely find that you are suddenly not "family" anymore. And staying in step might prove harder as you learn more.
Not that I have been barred from further training in the art. I could go back, my ex-teammates say, any time I want: it's in my hands. I accept that, although how I was to continue to do that with zero disposable income for a year escapes my understanding, and I would have had to forgive everything that was done to me and just continue my training without any effort being made at resolution (to my satisfaction, at any rate). But I could have gone back if I had really wanted to so self-abnegate, that's true. So now I'm going to talk about why I'm not going back, and why I will be very careful about what martial art I decide to practice next.
At this point I am actually very tempted to mention the name of the art so as to warn people away from a tremendous waste of time. But scathing indictments of the art have already been made in other fora easily located online (which is something I should have paid a lot more attention to earlier on), and I don't say that everyone would necessarily have the same experience as I have. I will simply keep referring to it as "the art" here, and hopefully I will be able to recommend a different art by name some time in the future rather than denigrating a bad one now. In fact, I should keep this as brief as possible, and get on with my life. There are just a few points I should really make for posterity.
1. Most importantly: Thoroughly investigate (google, research, etc.) any group endeavor you are considering participating in, particularly a martial art. Many schools are steeped in cultish authoritarianism, with beliefs and social structures that would never stand the light of day if they were known by people at novice rank and are only gradually learned (usually nonverbally) as one progresses to higher ranks. Lonely people who struggle to find meaning in their lives (a fair description of yours truly) are particularly vulnerable to this process, and cults are aware of this and foster it for the sake of the school, so a martial art that seems from the outside to be about exercise, fun, fulfillment, peace, and constructive activities for kids may actually have a very dark and scary inner core, in which quite a few people are really unhappy and insecure but are even more afraid of finding themselves on the "outside" again. This is true of many religions as well, as we see from the Catholic scandals in recent years, as well as others which easily come to mind.
Above all, I think everyone should recognize the philosophical meditation that there is no "inside". We are all strangers, and it's really best to get used to the idea as gracefully as possible. I believe that my failure to be a good speculative realist in this regard had the effect of prolonging my involvement in a situation where I really did not belong.
2. The above being said, and the fact accepted that not all martial arts schools are bad in this way: The "supreme high teacher" (a loose translation) of the art I trained in and those immediately around her at the top echelons of the art are really bad people to be involved with if you're a free thinker. They coerce obedience and conformity by instilling fear of exclusion and push a lot of very hokey metaphysical beliefs on students, who are then in many cases required to teach the same nonsense, and I know for a fact that many instructors have no real belief at all in what they're saying. This is a philosophical and somewhat subjective statement, but I think that those who do are foolish and misguided. I was one of these, but was starting to wake up long before the incident that cost me my job.
Martial arts should be about exercise and fun. That's it. Form is the only "content" anyone really needs. As with ecological gardening such as permaculture, if your form is correct (your basics and technique efficient, practical and beautiful) then any "content" ("energy", spirituality, etc.) happens by itself, without having to really even be talked about, much less deliberately instilled. As soon as anyone starts talking about any content-like thing (any "energy" or "force" other than the E=MCsquared variety), I would advise you to immediately ask yourself, "But what's wrong with just form? Why isn't form good enough?" If your teachers are not teaching form as the end-all-and-be-all of the art, then they are not focusing on what's really going to get you there. Form is beautiful, matter is great, and every bit as mysterious and wonderful as any idea of "god" or "spirit" or any such thing, with the added benefit of being actually REAL. Also, stay away from any situation in which you are not allowed to ask questions. In the art I trained in, if you asked questions you were said to be "stinkin' thinkin'", or "coming from ego" or "a know-it-all". (One of my favorite quotes is "What is is, what is isn't"; meaning, "anything the teacher tells you is always true until it's convenient for her to say otherwise".) You should always ask questions about anything you don't understand, don't let anyone tell you different: it's a universal entitlement. If they're going to throw you out for asking questions, they're doing you a favor, as you shouldn't be there in the first place, nor should anyone. Of course talking too much wastes time in class, but a good teacher who is really practicing the art of being at peace should know that some time was just meant to be wasted. Like Roy Batty said in Blade Runner: "like tears in rain".
3. Some people have criticized the art I trained in as being useless for dealing with real combat situations (see websites like bullshido.com). While I understand that there are many different kinds and degrees of martial arts training, I am a fighter, and I trained in the art long enough to have more experience with it than most (though not all) people who level this criticism. I do not share the opinion that the art is physically useless...far from it. Aside from being very dangerous on the fighting side (I have had many minor injuries and two near-maimings, for one of which I had to undergo ACL surgery, and these happened in training exercises, not tournaments or street fights), the art offers much competence in avoiding fights altogether. Also, the forms are so beautifully elaborate, fast and dance-like (and there are so many of them) that people who train in this art are grouped, as athletes, with people who go out for the triathlons and such: real high-endurance stuff. Therefore it offers unparalleled opportunity for physical fitness and a general sense of physical self-assuredness that would be very valuable to anybody, and without which the human body and psyche are sadly impoverished. For self-defense situations and others in which physical skill in combat might decide the outcome, I would say this art is not useless at all.
This makes it all the more tragic that its flaws are what they are. There is another avowed purpose the art has, separate from fighting, for which it is entirely useless, and that is "world peace". Like any martial art in a capitalist country, its membership dues are significant, and over time this has the effect of limiting membership to those with gradually more and more disproportionate wealth as the economy declines. (There is a "foundation" that purports to provide money for low-income students to train, but having worked on its board, I find it hard to call anything so inefficient and ineffective a "nonprofit" except in the sense that it is no profit to anyone at all, other than perhaps in some tax-related way.) So hardly anyone in the "world" (notice the W word; why do we want to identify with fake objects that we make up in our heads?) is probably going to hear of the art, much less be brought peace by it. In seminars students have talked about using "principles" of the art to climb the corporate ladder. I should have left as soon as I heard about that. It was a good thing I did soon after, despite how much it hurt. The "peace that begins with the individual and spreads out into the community" (I'm paraphrasing the lingo) is not fostered by such a social environment. It's really a joke to believe otherwise.
But what did I expect? It's a cult. As another person who trained in the art and got even higher in rank than I did (I won't mention his name) recently told me, "to expect reasonable behavior from people in cults is itself unreasonable". So why did I stay so long? Well, I'm not proud of it. An individual can be very smart, but groups of people are often not, and it often takes serious self-deception to continue to be part of a group. I only hope my experience can be of value to someone, and that I've gained some wisdom along with my sadness.
4. One more thing: Children. The art is full of people who are weird about kids, for personal reasons of their own on which I will not speculate. Kids are objectified and romanticized, and there is a schizophrenic juxtaposition in the art between teaching kids to be self-reliant on one hand and treating them like perfect little angels to be protected and hidden from anything "inappropriate" on the other. Of course, it's always one person sitting in a room and deciding what might be "inappropriate" for others, which brings several problems immediately to mind, but leave that aside for the moment. It is of course almost any martial arts school's bread and butter to have kids' classes, as many parents can no more afford not to have their kids in an activity after school than they can to take martial arts classes themselves (not a joke: believe me, I know)! But you can't teach that many kids the real martial art, for the simple reason that learning the real martial art is not why most of the kids are there. They are mostly there so that their parents don't have to stop working at 3:00 in the afternoon. Most of them would be better placed in an activity that suited their own actual interests, but it is an unfortunate reality that a great many parents similarly objectify their children and do not listen or pay attention to their children's interests, and many more who might can't afford to do much about them. So the result is that the school gets a huge influx of kids for whom the martial art has to be watered down. The school, in this respect, has become more of a daycare center than a martial arts school, and this is by no means an exaggeration.
I have trained with highly skilled, dedicated, formidable martial artists who happened to be as young as 12, 10, 8, and even 6 years old. At least two of them were stronger fighters (by which I mean they were simply better at it) than I was. But for every kid who seriously wants to train, there are about a hundred who are simply there to be babysat.
It is my strong opinion that training in martial arts is not for babies. What babies need is parents who train, and who can do the fighting until the kids are old enough to be really apt and inclined for it. The schools should not have "kids' classes"; they should just have "classes", and allow individual kids with aptitude to train at the adult level. Anything that dilutes the seriousness of the martial art is potentially dangerous to its students, who might find themselves in a situation they think they can handle, but really can't. Also, anything that lumps individuals under a label like "kids" and assigns them special classes limits all the individuals' training to the lowest common denominator, which ruins prospects for kids who are actually serious. I have seen this happen more times than I like since the school started focusing on kids' classes so much, and there's nothing good about it. All of the new crop of junior-high age black belts that I've seen should never have been tested. They are irresponsible, disrespectful, boastful, and incapable, and as instructors they teach similar behavior to their peers in age.
That's it, I'm way out of time. I need to get back to writing my novel. Lance Shaw is standing around and tapping his feet at me in impatience. "I told you that martial arts bullhonkey was stupid," he says. "Any of those freaks come around here, I'll make them a broadhead shish kebab, toot sweet."
For some years (about six) I was involved in a martial art that I will refrain from mentioning by name, but I was really involved in it, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many sacrifices of other personal aspects of my life. I had begun working for the school as an instructor, arranged my life totally around the school, and breathed, ate and drank the art. For my loyalty, about a week before my black belt test, I was fired without notice (and without, in fact, the requisite motivation for such action or any real, transparent investigation into claims that were made against me) in the middle of the worst recession in living memory, and at a time when all my extra money was funneling back into the art itself. The reason I was fired was because of a very easy (and actually quite trivial) mistake to make on my part, and a sort of fear-based feeding frenzy of the kind that sometimes occurs in groups of people who aren't communicating very well. It resulted in a year of all but suicidal depression for me and considerable emotional hardship for my wife Debra (who, if I haven't mentioned before, is absolutely the most golden-souled and happiness-deserving person I have ever known), to say little of the financial hardships suffered by we who were already having no easy time in that regard. So that's why my last blog post was about a year ago.
Anybody interested in devoting themselves to a cultish group of people for the sake of adding some meaning to their lives should be warned that there is no pension or retirement plan at the end of an experience of the kind I had. You're out on your ear at the end of the whole thing. If you don't fall into step exactly with the behavior patterns espoused by your superiors, you might very likely find that you are suddenly not "family" anymore. And staying in step might prove harder as you learn more.
Not that I have been barred from further training in the art. I could go back, my ex-teammates say, any time I want: it's in my hands. I accept that, although how I was to continue to do that with zero disposable income for a year escapes my understanding, and I would have had to forgive everything that was done to me and just continue my training without any effort being made at resolution (to my satisfaction, at any rate). But I could have gone back if I had really wanted to so self-abnegate, that's true. So now I'm going to talk about why I'm not going back, and why I will be very careful about what martial art I decide to practice next.
At this point I am actually very tempted to mention the name of the art so as to warn people away from a tremendous waste of time. But scathing indictments of the art have already been made in other fora easily located online (which is something I should have paid a lot more attention to earlier on), and I don't say that everyone would necessarily have the same experience as I have. I will simply keep referring to it as "the art" here, and hopefully I will be able to recommend a different art by name some time in the future rather than denigrating a bad one now. In fact, I should keep this as brief as possible, and get on with my life. There are just a few points I should really make for posterity.
1. Most importantly: Thoroughly investigate (google, research, etc.) any group endeavor you are considering participating in, particularly a martial art. Many schools are steeped in cultish authoritarianism, with beliefs and social structures that would never stand the light of day if they were known by people at novice rank and are only gradually learned (usually nonverbally) as one progresses to higher ranks. Lonely people who struggle to find meaning in their lives (a fair description of yours truly) are particularly vulnerable to this process, and cults are aware of this and foster it for the sake of the school, so a martial art that seems from the outside to be about exercise, fun, fulfillment, peace, and constructive activities for kids may actually have a very dark and scary inner core, in which quite a few people are really unhappy and insecure but are even more afraid of finding themselves on the "outside" again. This is true of many religions as well, as we see from the Catholic scandals in recent years, as well as others which easily come to mind.
Above all, I think everyone should recognize the philosophical meditation that there is no "inside". We are all strangers, and it's really best to get used to the idea as gracefully as possible. I believe that my failure to be a good speculative realist in this regard had the effect of prolonging my involvement in a situation where I really did not belong.
2. The above being said, and the fact accepted that not all martial arts schools are bad in this way: The "supreme high teacher" (a loose translation) of the art I trained in and those immediately around her at the top echelons of the art are really bad people to be involved with if you're a free thinker. They coerce obedience and conformity by instilling fear of exclusion and push a lot of very hokey metaphysical beliefs on students, who are then in many cases required to teach the same nonsense, and I know for a fact that many instructors have no real belief at all in what they're saying. This is a philosophical and somewhat subjective statement, but I think that those who do are foolish and misguided. I was one of these, but was starting to wake up long before the incident that cost me my job.
Martial arts should be about exercise and fun. That's it. Form is the only "content" anyone really needs. As with ecological gardening such as permaculture, if your form is correct (your basics and technique efficient, practical and beautiful) then any "content" ("energy", spirituality, etc.) happens by itself, without having to really even be talked about, much less deliberately instilled. As soon as anyone starts talking about any content-like thing (any "energy" or "force" other than the E=MCsquared variety), I would advise you to immediately ask yourself, "But what's wrong with just form? Why isn't form good enough?" If your teachers are not teaching form as the end-all-and-be-all of the art, then they are not focusing on what's really going to get you there. Form is beautiful, matter is great, and every bit as mysterious and wonderful as any idea of "god" or "spirit" or any such thing, with the added benefit of being actually REAL. Also, stay away from any situation in which you are not allowed to ask questions. In the art I trained in, if you asked questions you were said to be "stinkin' thinkin'", or "coming from ego" or "a know-it-all". (One of my favorite quotes is "What is is, what is isn't"; meaning, "anything the teacher tells you is always true until it's convenient for her to say otherwise".) You should always ask questions about anything you don't understand, don't let anyone tell you different: it's a universal entitlement. If they're going to throw you out for asking questions, they're doing you a favor, as you shouldn't be there in the first place, nor should anyone. Of course talking too much wastes time in class, but a good teacher who is really practicing the art of being at peace should know that some time was just meant to be wasted. Like Roy Batty said in Blade Runner: "like tears in rain".
3. Some people have criticized the art I trained in as being useless for dealing with real combat situations (see websites like bullshido.com). While I understand that there are many different kinds and degrees of martial arts training, I am a fighter, and I trained in the art long enough to have more experience with it than most (though not all) people who level this criticism. I do not share the opinion that the art is physically useless...far from it. Aside from being very dangerous on the fighting side (I have had many minor injuries and two near-maimings, for one of which I had to undergo ACL surgery, and these happened in training exercises, not tournaments or street fights), the art offers much competence in avoiding fights altogether. Also, the forms are so beautifully elaborate, fast and dance-like (and there are so many of them) that people who train in this art are grouped, as athletes, with people who go out for the triathlons and such: real high-endurance stuff. Therefore it offers unparalleled opportunity for physical fitness and a general sense of physical self-assuredness that would be very valuable to anybody, and without which the human body and psyche are sadly impoverished. For self-defense situations and others in which physical skill in combat might decide the outcome, I would say this art is not useless at all.
This makes it all the more tragic that its flaws are what they are. There is another avowed purpose the art has, separate from fighting, for which it is entirely useless, and that is "world peace". Like any martial art in a capitalist country, its membership dues are significant, and over time this has the effect of limiting membership to those with gradually more and more disproportionate wealth as the economy declines. (There is a "foundation" that purports to provide money for low-income students to train, but having worked on its board, I find it hard to call anything so inefficient and ineffective a "nonprofit" except in the sense that it is no profit to anyone at all, other than perhaps in some tax-related way.) So hardly anyone in the "world" (notice the W word; why do we want to identify with fake objects that we make up in our heads?) is probably going to hear of the art, much less be brought peace by it. In seminars students have talked about using "principles" of the art to climb the corporate ladder. I should have left as soon as I heard about that. It was a good thing I did soon after, despite how much it hurt. The "peace that begins with the individual and spreads out into the community" (I'm paraphrasing the lingo) is not fostered by such a social environment. It's really a joke to believe otherwise.
But what did I expect? It's a cult. As another person who trained in the art and got even higher in rank than I did (I won't mention his name) recently told me, "to expect reasonable behavior from people in cults is itself unreasonable". So why did I stay so long? Well, I'm not proud of it. An individual can be very smart, but groups of people are often not, and it often takes serious self-deception to continue to be part of a group. I only hope my experience can be of value to someone, and that I've gained some wisdom along with my sadness.
4. One more thing: Children. The art is full of people who are weird about kids, for personal reasons of their own on which I will not speculate. Kids are objectified and romanticized, and there is a schizophrenic juxtaposition in the art between teaching kids to be self-reliant on one hand and treating them like perfect little angels to be protected and hidden from anything "inappropriate" on the other. Of course, it's always one person sitting in a room and deciding what might be "inappropriate" for others, which brings several problems immediately to mind, but leave that aside for the moment. It is of course almost any martial arts school's bread and butter to have kids' classes, as many parents can no more afford not to have their kids in an activity after school than they can to take martial arts classes themselves (not a joke: believe me, I know)! But you can't teach that many kids the real martial art, for the simple reason that learning the real martial art is not why most of the kids are there. They are mostly there so that their parents don't have to stop working at 3:00 in the afternoon. Most of them would be better placed in an activity that suited their own actual interests, but it is an unfortunate reality that a great many parents similarly objectify their children and do not listen or pay attention to their children's interests, and many more who might can't afford to do much about them. So the result is that the school gets a huge influx of kids for whom the martial art has to be watered down. The school, in this respect, has become more of a daycare center than a martial arts school, and this is by no means an exaggeration.
I have trained with highly skilled, dedicated, formidable martial artists who happened to be as young as 12, 10, 8, and even 6 years old. At least two of them were stronger fighters (by which I mean they were simply better at it) than I was. But for every kid who seriously wants to train, there are about a hundred who are simply there to be babysat.
It is my strong opinion that training in martial arts is not for babies. What babies need is parents who train, and who can do the fighting until the kids are old enough to be really apt and inclined for it. The schools should not have "kids' classes"; they should just have "classes", and allow individual kids with aptitude to train at the adult level. Anything that dilutes the seriousness of the martial art is potentially dangerous to its students, who might find themselves in a situation they think they can handle, but really can't. Also, anything that lumps individuals under a label like "kids" and assigns them special classes limits all the individuals' training to the lowest common denominator, which ruins prospects for kids who are actually serious. I have seen this happen more times than I like since the school started focusing on kids' classes so much, and there's nothing good about it. All of the new crop of junior-high age black belts that I've seen should never have been tested. They are irresponsible, disrespectful, boastful, and incapable, and as instructors they teach similar behavior to their peers in age.
That's it, I'm way out of time. I need to get back to writing my novel. Lance Shaw is standing around and tapping his feet at me in impatience. "I told you that martial arts bullhonkey was stupid," he says. "Any of those freaks come around here, I'll make them a broadhead shish kebab, toot sweet."
Friday, July 15, 2011
A Few Words from a mid-21st Century Deputy Sheriff
Okay, I really have to break in here. All this scribbling about "utopianism" is really scraping me off. As if folk shouldn't draw up ideas for a good future! As if Guetti doesn't do it himself, all the time...not that he ever does anything except talk and write about it!
Hi. My name is Lance Shaw. This is Nick Guetti's "blog", whatever that means, and I couldn't find my way around a computer if I had a manual, so he's typing this for me. I've had some schooling, and I can read and write okay, but I don't know how to type--I've never worked in the print shop in town. Otherwise, I'd be doing this myself. But Guetti's honest, I guess I can say...although he's the worst kind of hypocrite about some things.
I live in a small town called Homestead, a little over thirty miles--about six, seven hours' ride, more or less--northeast from Amherst, in the New England Commonwealth...south-central New England, right at the eastern feet of the Berkshire Hills. A lot's changed since your time, in case you're wondering about my geography. Trust me: I may not be a genius in that area, but I am a Deputy Sheriff, and you don't get that job without having a little data in your drive about where you live. I don't really get into all the politics of it, or the history--that's more Guetti's kind of thing--but I guess I know as much about where--and when--I'm from as I need to.
Homestead's been there for exactly as long as I have. It started off as a Rural Reclamation Community. The founding members of the Town Council--the Randalls and those--came there with some legal notes and a bunch of folk, including me and my foster family, back in 2034, when I was eight years old. That was eight or nine years ago, now, right after the end of the Civil Wars. I grew up watching it grow up, from pretty much nothing but a ten-acre plateau in a cove up on the side of a mountain--just a bare, rocky, wide ravine with a spring at the end of it--to a town of about nine hundred folk, now, not including children. Scrap, I don't even know everybody there anymore! Most of them came there to build it--and in eight years they carved another ten acres out of the side of that mountain--but there have been children born there since pretty much day one. I guess I know most of them, all right...and I think all the children know me. Well, everybody knows who I am, I guess: me, and Aidan Meecham and the Sheriff. Folk talk a lot about us.
My parents were killed in the last part of the Wars, and my sister Melissa and me ended up with their friends, the Meechams--Aidan's folk. We're from Amherst, which was pretty torn up at that time, but the Commonwealth was already getting their scrap together. A lot of the big families--the Founding Houses, they're called now, who helped folk during the Wars--got involved, and they had thousands of people building, farming, writing law...they got busy. The military top brass of the United American Rebellion were there too, of course--it was right after their victory--along with those of the Army of New England, and together they set up their big joint academy, Fort Wescott. We were already gone by then, out to Homestead. The Commonwealth needed RRCs like us out in the countryside to keep it inhabited by something other than bandits. I haven't been back to Amherst since, but I hear it's gotten pretty impressive in eight years. Freight caravans come through Homestead four, five, six times a year, to and from there. It's a big city, all right: sixteen and a half thousand people, now, I guess.
Guetti says nobody who reads this is going to call a community of that size a big city. Like I said, things have changed. They do that. Amherst is probably the biggest city in all the eastern provinces. They say the capital out in Pacifica is a lot bigger--more than twenty-five thousand, supposedly--but I don't know. That's way the hell out west, across the Waste and the Divide. Guetti says that's where he lives--where, not when. He's like you, from before...
Where was I? Okay, so anyway, I got into archery when I was about ten. To tell the truth, I don't really remember much before then, and I don't really like to. I guess I was having a lot of trouble before, but once I started shooting, things got better. I've never wanted to do much else. Giles Garrett, the merchant from North Adams, gave me my first bow and arrows at May Fair that year, and Sheriff Lambert got me pointing my arrows downrange at the tournament there. I started working with the bowyers and fletchers, and a little bit with the smiths, that same year, before and after school, and at night I'd go to the range if the Town Guard wasn't using all of it. Next May Fair, the year after, I won that tournament. After eighth grade I quit going to school and joined the militia, still working as a bowyer. Constable Chedsey--he's a big, smart, tough, grizzly old veteran--put me through weights and calisthenics, how to ride and handle a horse, along with all the other volunteers, and I got to shoot more often. Aidan had already been with them two years: his Dad's on the council, and pretty close with Sheriff Lambert, who taught Aidan how to use the big cutter--the hand-and-a-half sword, they call it. That's his thing; not too many folk know how to swing one of those...actually, him and the Sheriff, and that's it as far as I know. He's a pretty good archer himself, too...not as good as me, but he doesn't make it his life like I do. I'm not saying I'm the best shot in town or anything: there's a few around here who've trained at it a lot longer than I have. I'm only sixteen, after all.
Anyway, about a year and a half ago, a couple of jumpers came into town. That's what we call scraps who roam around rural communities like ours, looking for women to hurt. Or girls...or boys, for that matter. We'd had a lot of trouble with the Pit Vipers from the ruins southwest of there before that time (and I was too young to be involved in those fights), but these two were different: slickers from Amherst, I guess...I don't know; I never did ask about what their notes said, or where they came from. But me and Aidan were out in the south orchards after most of the pickers had already gone back one evening in late summer, looking for some rabbit or grouse or pheasant to shoot. I don't do much hunting, but I like some small game when I can get it. We fry it up and glaze it with preserves or syrup out there. Anyway, these two jumpers were out where we were, and they were hunting something else. Wanda Veeder, who was just thirteen, was cleaning up and gleaning a last few apples after the rest had gone, and they caught her. They didn't know we were there, and we saw what was going on, but not before they had her down on the ground with her skirt up. As soon as we figured out what we were seeing, we just killed them. I put a broadhead in the side of one and then gutted him with my cutter. Aidan shot the other in the leg, chased him down and about took his head off with that sword of his. We hacked those scum to pieces; I mean, we butchered them. We saved the girl, but she'd never seen that much blood in her life, and she got as scared of us as she'd been of them. She never talked to us after that.
Because they'd been citizens, with notes and everything, instead of bandits, it was manslaughter...at first. Most of the Council were horrified. Plenty of folk had been objecting to guys as young as me being given arms and turned into fighters, and when we turned up back home that night covered with blood and with a freaked-out girl in tow and told the Guard without batting an eyelid that we'd killed two guys we said were jumpers, they thought maybe the objections might have had something to them. We pointed out that a girl getting raped was kind of a big deal too, and Wanda Veeder finally remembered how to talk again and told them we weren't lying. That was a bad night. The Council questioned me and Aidan separately, and asked us all kinds of stupid questions about what we were thinking when we did it, what we were "feeling" afterwards, and did we know it was wrong to kill someone without a trial. Scrap, no one asks you how you feel about killing one of them Goddamned Pit Vipers when they come raiding and you're on the militia, and these two were no better, I don't care if they had notes from the freaking Prime Secretary's office! They may have, for all I wanted to know. The Sheriff stuck up for us, and one or two others did too. Paul Meecham, Aidan's Dad, didn't say anything: he just sat and listened. Me and Aidan both told them the same thing: we were just glad we'd been there, and that we'd just wanted Wanda Veeder safe. Even so, they were going to take us off the militia. Before they could, the Sheriff got us alone with some legal notes and, real quick, signed us in as full Deputy Sheriffs--leaders of the actual Town Guard: the police, not the militia. That way, we belonged to him and couldn't be charged with a crime or stripped of arms without a full consensus of everyone on the Council...including Sheriff Lambert himself.
They wanted his blood for that. They were roaring for it. He was in a closed session with the Council for all that night and all the next day, but when he came out, he was still the Sheriff and we were still his Deputies. He told us later what he'd said to the Council: that these times were not like before the Wars, and nice young men became killers some times, and that me and Aidan were good lads with a lot of martial aptitude, and you couldn't turn back the clock anyway. He said the town had two choices: let us go on being killers, with no more training, or else train us harder than before and make us into fighters who use our training to protect innocent lives, which is obviously what we wanted to do anyway. But, he said, he was going to train our asses off every day; this was going to make training in the militia look like picking blackberries.
He wasn't lying. But my notes had a lot more numbers on them after that--a lot more--and we started going out on patrol trainings, where he taught us how to use our eyes and ears to spot signs of potential threats. And he combat trained us personally from then on, too, which was no joke. He's been in the UAR...one of the Golden Eagles, the Rebellion's military elite--a Sergeant. He'd seen a lot of combat in the last few years of the Wars, before he "retired" and became a Sheriff. He taught us how to lead militia squads. And for everybody who thinks I'm too young to be doing this scrap, there's at least one other who appreciates it. I started getting a lot of respect. Children look up to me. I started my own elite archers' militia squad--trained them myself. They're mostly younger than me, and they can all outshoot me at long range already; I got them to teach themselves how to do that specifically, just to watch them do it. They can all hit a hay bale with a high volley from a hundred and seventy yards, over and over again, all day long, and rarely do they miss. The Council hates that I'm doing that, but they can't do scrap about it, except insist that my squad gets the best gear the town can afford when they're working, armor and so on, and they do. They all want to be like me, and they love to talk about how in some ways they can actually shoot better. Anyway, in a pretty short time, I could afford a little house for me and Melissa in the Residential area. It's a small earth-stone-and-timber, but it's got a garden, two stories, a good kitchen, a methane digester, water piped in from the storage tanks uphill, insulation's not bad. And it's ours. Melissa's working at the medical and veterinary clinics, mostly, but she's always helping everybody in her spare time. Somehow she finds time to paint, too. We're doing fine.
I ran into Nick Guetti not long ago...although he says it's like five years ago, for him. I don't really understand that; this time travel thing is weird. He said he wanted to write a book about me, and about some big, mysterious change that's supposed to happen soon in my time. I finally said he could do it, though I don't know what his interest is in writing about me, of all people. I haven't known him that long, and I don't get him, and I'm pretty sure he really doesn't get me either. I don't like him that much, to tell you the truth. I think he romanticizes the lives of people like me, though he doesn't think he does. He says he really tries not to, and I guess I have to believe him, because he is honest, in a sketchy, inward, unaccountable kind of way. But he's also a hypocrite...or he would be, if he wasn't even harder on himself than he is on others. Like I say, I don't get him. I think he's manipulative: he puts people in really insanely intense situations just "to see how their characters develop", like he says, and I don't think he gives a scrap about the content of their lives, even though he writes it all down like a legal writer in the Commonwealth Attorney's copy shop. It's weird. Unsettling. He actually scares me that way sometimes. I think he knows something about the future--my future, I mean, not yours--and he won't say what it is. He just says it's going to be amazing. Whatever that's supposed to mean.
Whatever happens, I hope it helps Melissa stop having those nightmares. They've been getting worse...
But I didn't mean to talk about my life so much. All I really wanted to say is that you can't necessarily trust all that Guetti says. Like I say, I've got to hand it to him for being honest enough to let me dictate all this through him, but I think he's got weird ideas. He never really does anything, is what I think it is; he just practices his "martial arts", goes to work, comes home and spends his and his wife's money to pay other people to do most everything for him while he sits around and writes about real people who do real things! If he tried to use that kung-fu bullhonkey on me--and of course he never would, he's a decent guy--but if he did, I'd just send him running with one of my broadheads in his ass. Those fancy moves aren't scrap around here.
He once asked me how I felt about all the people a generation ago...people like you; about how you all could have made a difference, lived more wisely, left a smaller footprint, done more about the politics, and yatta yatta ya, maybe prevented the climate change, and the Wars. I have to ask, what kind of a freaking question is that? Why do some people seem so interested in how I feel about folk doing what folk freaking do?! And it's not as if anything you did rendered me helpless, is it? Like I said: me, and Melissa, and all the folk and the children and everything, here in Homestead...we're all right. You don't need to worry about us. We're sure better off than you: a whole lot of you are dead! I don't think two thirds of you in 2011 survived to see the United States surrender to the Rebellion in '38. That was a bloody twenty-three years we had, after '16. But it's over now, and the Union down south as been quiet; they seem to be living and letting live. The weather could be better: half the year, you can't even cross the Midwest, let alone live there, and the maple sugar harvests out here are supposed to be not as good as they used to be...I could handle a little more of that. It's a delicacy, and we don't export it.
Mostly, I'm too busy to think about the past. I don't know what to think about you; I don't have to live your lives, and I don't like to give people advice. But Guetti won't leave me alone until I do, so here it is. I hope you're not like him, just sitting around and noticing things that happen, and treating them like art in a museum or files in a video archive or books in a library. I hope you spend your time doing things that actually matter, and that when you notice something that needs to be dealt with, you just take care of it, without feeling like you need an invitation or authorization from someone else who isn't even there to help you. Beyond that, I guess...just do your job. Work for your community, and be happy with what they give you for it. Respect your leaders, and your elders...I mean, don't take everything they say like it's true, because often they're full of scrap, but at least listen to them.
And practice what you love! Say anything you want, it's what you love to do that's going to be most worth doing.
Me, I'm going to go get some dinner and go to bed! Guetti's kept me talking here for hours. Scrap, I don't think I've talked this much all year. It's cold tonight, and I've got to get up early tomorrow. Giles's caravan is coming in from North Adams, and I'm the Guardsman at Arms on that shift. We haven't had Viper trouble in a couple years, but you never know...
Anyway, I'm tired, and Melissa'll have stew on the table by now. She'll turn me into a freaking newt if I let it get cold. Goodnight.
Lance Shaw is a fictional character in the forthcoming fantasy novel Archer, by Nick Guetti, currently scheduled to be finished, re-drafted, edited and published by... Well, as soon as Guetti can get his lazy act together. As of January 2043, he serves as a Deputy Sheriff in the Rural Reclamation Community of Homestead in the New England Commonwealth, a sovereign province of the United American Restructuring (UAR). He resides with his younger sister, Melissa...and no, she can't actually turn people into newts...yet. He is destined to be a great hero in a time of change that not even someone of his era can yet imagine. To him, it will be nothing special, and no more than can be expected.
Hi. My name is Lance Shaw. This is Nick Guetti's "blog", whatever that means, and I couldn't find my way around a computer if I had a manual, so he's typing this for me. I've had some schooling, and I can read and write okay, but I don't know how to type--I've never worked in the print shop in town. Otherwise, I'd be doing this myself. But Guetti's honest, I guess I can say...although he's the worst kind of hypocrite about some things.
I live in a small town called Homestead, a little over thirty miles--about six, seven hours' ride, more or less--northeast from Amherst, in the New England Commonwealth...south-central New England, right at the eastern feet of the Berkshire Hills. A lot's changed since your time, in case you're wondering about my geography. Trust me: I may not be a genius in that area, but I am a Deputy Sheriff, and you don't get that job without having a little data in your drive about where you live. I don't really get into all the politics of it, or the history--that's more Guetti's kind of thing--but I guess I know as much about where--and when--I'm from as I need to.
Homestead's been there for exactly as long as I have. It started off as a Rural Reclamation Community. The founding members of the Town Council--the Randalls and those--came there with some legal notes and a bunch of folk, including me and my foster family, back in 2034, when I was eight years old. That was eight or nine years ago, now, right after the end of the Civil Wars. I grew up watching it grow up, from pretty much nothing but a ten-acre plateau in a cove up on the side of a mountain--just a bare, rocky, wide ravine with a spring at the end of it--to a town of about nine hundred folk, now, not including children. Scrap, I don't even know everybody there anymore! Most of them came there to build it--and in eight years they carved another ten acres out of the side of that mountain--but there have been children born there since pretty much day one. I guess I know most of them, all right...and I think all the children know me. Well, everybody knows who I am, I guess: me, and Aidan Meecham and the Sheriff. Folk talk a lot about us.
My parents were killed in the last part of the Wars, and my sister Melissa and me ended up with their friends, the Meechams--Aidan's folk. We're from Amherst, which was pretty torn up at that time, but the Commonwealth was already getting their scrap together. A lot of the big families--the Founding Houses, they're called now, who helped folk during the Wars--got involved, and they had thousands of people building, farming, writing law...they got busy. The military top brass of the United American Rebellion were there too, of course--it was right after their victory--along with those of the Army of New England, and together they set up their big joint academy, Fort Wescott. We were already gone by then, out to Homestead. The Commonwealth needed RRCs like us out in the countryside to keep it inhabited by something other than bandits. I haven't been back to Amherst since, but I hear it's gotten pretty impressive in eight years. Freight caravans come through Homestead four, five, six times a year, to and from there. It's a big city, all right: sixteen and a half thousand people, now, I guess.
Guetti says nobody who reads this is going to call a community of that size a big city. Like I said, things have changed. They do that. Amherst is probably the biggest city in all the eastern provinces. They say the capital out in Pacifica is a lot bigger--more than twenty-five thousand, supposedly--but I don't know. That's way the hell out west, across the Waste and the Divide. Guetti says that's where he lives--where, not when. He's like you, from before...
Where was I? Okay, so anyway, I got into archery when I was about ten. To tell the truth, I don't really remember much before then, and I don't really like to. I guess I was having a lot of trouble before, but once I started shooting, things got better. I've never wanted to do much else. Giles Garrett, the merchant from North Adams, gave me my first bow and arrows at May Fair that year, and Sheriff Lambert got me pointing my arrows downrange at the tournament there. I started working with the bowyers and fletchers, and a little bit with the smiths, that same year, before and after school, and at night I'd go to the range if the Town Guard wasn't using all of it. Next May Fair, the year after, I won that tournament. After eighth grade I quit going to school and joined the militia, still working as a bowyer. Constable Chedsey--he's a big, smart, tough, grizzly old veteran--put me through weights and calisthenics, how to ride and handle a horse, along with all the other volunteers, and I got to shoot more often. Aidan had already been with them two years: his Dad's on the council, and pretty close with Sheriff Lambert, who taught Aidan how to use the big cutter--the hand-and-a-half sword, they call it. That's his thing; not too many folk know how to swing one of those...actually, him and the Sheriff, and that's it as far as I know. He's a pretty good archer himself, too...not as good as me, but he doesn't make it his life like I do. I'm not saying I'm the best shot in town or anything: there's a few around here who've trained at it a lot longer than I have. I'm only sixteen, after all.
Anyway, about a year and a half ago, a couple of jumpers came into town. That's what we call scraps who roam around rural communities like ours, looking for women to hurt. Or girls...or boys, for that matter. We'd had a lot of trouble with the Pit Vipers from the ruins southwest of there before that time (and I was too young to be involved in those fights), but these two were different: slickers from Amherst, I guess...I don't know; I never did ask about what their notes said, or where they came from. But me and Aidan were out in the south orchards after most of the pickers had already gone back one evening in late summer, looking for some rabbit or grouse or pheasant to shoot. I don't do much hunting, but I like some small game when I can get it. We fry it up and glaze it with preserves or syrup out there. Anyway, these two jumpers were out where we were, and they were hunting something else. Wanda Veeder, who was just thirteen, was cleaning up and gleaning a last few apples after the rest had gone, and they caught her. They didn't know we were there, and we saw what was going on, but not before they had her down on the ground with her skirt up. As soon as we figured out what we were seeing, we just killed them. I put a broadhead in the side of one and then gutted him with my cutter. Aidan shot the other in the leg, chased him down and about took his head off with that sword of his. We hacked those scum to pieces; I mean, we butchered them. We saved the girl, but she'd never seen that much blood in her life, and she got as scared of us as she'd been of them. She never talked to us after that.
Because they'd been citizens, with notes and everything, instead of bandits, it was manslaughter...at first. Most of the Council were horrified. Plenty of folk had been objecting to guys as young as me being given arms and turned into fighters, and when we turned up back home that night covered with blood and with a freaked-out girl in tow and told the Guard without batting an eyelid that we'd killed two guys we said were jumpers, they thought maybe the objections might have had something to them. We pointed out that a girl getting raped was kind of a big deal too, and Wanda Veeder finally remembered how to talk again and told them we weren't lying. That was a bad night. The Council questioned me and Aidan separately, and asked us all kinds of stupid questions about what we were thinking when we did it, what we were "feeling" afterwards, and did we know it was wrong to kill someone without a trial. Scrap, no one asks you how you feel about killing one of them Goddamned Pit Vipers when they come raiding and you're on the militia, and these two were no better, I don't care if they had notes from the freaking Prime Secretary's office! They may have, for all I wanted to know. The Sheriff stuck up for us, and one or two others did too. Paul Meecham, Aidan's Dad, didn't say anything: he just sat and listened. Me and Aidan both told them the same thing: we were just glad we'd been there, and that we'd just wanted Wanda Veeder safe. Even so, they were going to take us off the militia. Before they could, the Sheriff got us alone with some legal notes and, real quick, signed us in as full Deputy Sheriffs--leaders of the actual Town Guard: the police, not the militia. That way, we belonged to him and couldn't be charged with a crime or stripped of arms without a full consensus of everyone on the Council...including Sheriff Lambert himself.
They wanted his blood for that. They were roaring for it. He was in a closed session with the Council for all that night and all the next day, but when he came out, he was still the Sheriff and we were still his Deputies. He told us later what he'd said to the Council: that these times were not like before the Wars, and nice young men became killers some times, and that me and Aidan were good lads with a lot of martial aptitude, and you couldn't turn back the clock anyway. He said the town had two choices: let us go on being killers, with no more training, or else train us harder than before and make us into fighters who use our training to protect innocent lives, which is obviously what we wanted to do anyway. But, he said, he was going to train our asses off every day; this was going to make training in the militia look like picking blackberries.
He wasn't lying. But my notes had a lot more numbers on them after that--a lot more--and we started going out on patrol trainings, where he taught us how to use our eyes and ears to spot signs of potential threats. And he combat trained us personally from then on, too, which was no joke. He's been in the UAR...one of the Golden Eagles, the Rebellion's military elite--a Sergeant. He'd seen a lot of combat in the last few years of the Wars, before he "retired" and became a Sheriff. He taught us how to lead militia squads. And for everybody who thinks I'm too young to be doing this scrap, there's at least one other who appreciates it. I started getting a lot of respect. Children look up to me. I started my own elite archers' militia squad--trained them myself. They're mostly younger than me, and they can all outshoot me at long range already; I got them to teach themselves how to do that specifically, just to watch them do it. They can all hit a hay bale with a high volley from a hundred and seventy yards, over and over again, all day long, and rarely do they miss. The Council hates that I'm doing that, but they can't do scrap about it, except insist that my squad gets the best gear the town can afford when they're working, armor and so on, and they do. They all want to be like me, and they love to talk about how in some ways they can actually shoot better. Anyway, in a pretty short time, I could afford a little house for me and Melissa in the Residential area. It's a small earth-stone-and-timber, but it's got a garden, two stories, a good kitchen, a methane digester, water piped in from the storage tanks uphill, insulation's not bad. And it's ours. Melissa's working at the medical and veterinary clinics, mostly, but she's always helping everybody in her spare time. Somehow she finds time to paint, too. We're doing fine.
I ran into Nick Guetti not long ago...although he says it's like five years ago, for him. I don't really understand that; this time travel thing is weird. He said he wanted to write a book about me, and about some big, mysterious change that's supposed to happen soon in my time. I finally said he could do it, though I don't know what his interest is in writing about me, of all people. I haven't known him that long, and I don't get him, and I'm pretty sure he really doesn't get me either. I don't like him that much, to tell you the truth. I think he romanticizes the lives of people like me, though he doesn't think he does. He says he really tries not to, and I guess I have to believe him, because he is honest, in a sketchy, inward, unaccountable kind of way. But he's also a hypocrite...or he would be, if he wasn't even harder on himself than he is on others. Like I say, I don't get him. I think he's manipulative: he puts people in really insanely intense situations just "to see how their characters develop", like he says, and I don't think he gives a scrap about the content of their lives, even though he writes it all down like a legal writer in the Commonwealth Attorney's copy shop. It's weird. Unsettling. He actually scares me that way sometimes. I think he knows something about the future--my future, I mean, not yours--and he won't say what it is. He just says it's going to be amazing. Whatever that's supposed to mean.
Whatever happens, I hope it helps Melissa stop having those nightmares. They've been getting worse...
But I didn't mean to talk about my life so much. All I really wanted to say is that you can't necessarily trust all that Guetti says. Like I say, I've got to hand it to him for being honest enough to let me dictate all this through him, but I think he's got weird ideas. He never really does anything, is what I think it is; he just practices his "martial arts", goes to work, comes home and spends his and his wife's money to pay other people to do most everything for him while he sits around and writes about real people who do real things! If he tried to use that kung-fu bullhonkey on me--and of course he never would, he's a decent guy--but if he did, I'd just send him running with one of my broadheads in his ass. Those fancy moves aren't scrap around here.
He once asked me how I felt about all the people a generation ago...people like you; about how you all could have made a difference, lived more wisely, left a smaller footprint, done more about the politics, and yatta yatta ya, maybe prevented the climate change, and the Wars. I have to ask, what kind of a freaking question is that? Why do some people seem so interested in how I feel about folk doing what folk freaking do?! And it's not as if anything you did rendered me helpless, is it? Like I said: me, and Melissa, and all the folk and the children and everything, here in Homestead...we're all right. You don't need to worry about us. We're sure better off than you: a whole lot of you are dead! I don't think two thirds of you in 2011 survived to see the United States surrender to the Rebellion in '38. That was a bloody twenty-three years we had, after '16. But it's over now, and the Union down south as been quiet; they seem to be living and letting live. The weather could be better: half the year, you can't even cross the Midwest, let alone live there, and the maple sugar harvests out here are supposed to be not as good as they used to be...I could handle a little more of that. It's a delicacy, and we don't export it.
Mostly, I'm too busy to think about the past. I don't know what to think about you; I don't have to live your lives, and I don't like to give people advice. But Guetti won't leave me alone until I do, so here it is. I hope you're not like him, just sitting around and noticing things that happen, and treating them like art in a museum or files in a video archive or books in a library. I hope you spend your time doing things that actually matter, and that when you notice something that needs to be dealt with, you just take care of it, without feeling like you need an invitation or authorization from someone else who isn't even there to help you. Beyond that, I guess...just do your job. Work for your community, and be happy with what they give you for it. Respect your leaders, and your elders...I mean, don't take everything they say like it's true, because often they're full of scrap, but at least listen to them.
And practice what you love! Say anything you want, it's what you love to do that's going to be most worth doing.
Me, I'm going to go get some dinner and go to bed! Guetti's kept me talking here for hours. Scrap, I don't think I've talked this much all year. It's cold tonight, and I've got to get up early tomorrow. Giles's caravan is coming in from North Adams, and I'm the Guardsman at Arms on that shift. We haven't had Viper trouble in a couple years, but you never know...
Anyway, I'm tired, and Melissa'll have stew on the table by now. She'll turn me into a freaking newt if I let it get cold. Goodnight.
Lance Shaw is a fictional character in the forthcoming fantasy novel Archer, by Nick Guetti, currently scheduled to be finished, re-drafted, edited and published by... Well, as soon as Guetti can get his lazy act together. As of January 2043, he serves as a Deputy Sheriff in the Rural Reclamation Community of Homestead in the New England Commonwealth, a sovereign province of the United American Restructuring (UAR). He resides with his younger sister, Melissa...and no, she can't actually turn people into newts...yet. He is destined to be a great hero in a time of change that not even someone of his era can yet imagine. To him, it will be nothing special, and no more than can be expected.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Ecocalypse Now: Neo-Utopianism vs. Ecology; OR the Theory of the Un-Bad Person, part 1: "Island" by Aldous Huxley; Arlo Guthrie vs. Bob Dylan
"You can't have a light, without havin' a dark to stick it in," Arlo Guthrie once said, and proceeded to put forth one of the greatest stupid jokey ideas of the 20th century: the Theory of the Un-Neutron Bomb.
The theory goes thus: Since you can't have an object without its opposite object (for example, alternate universe Spock with a beard), then it should be possible to construct something called the un-neutron bomb. This, Guthrie explained, would be a weapon that could be deployed against any national threat (presumably including domestic tyranny). On detonation, buildings, weapons and other infrastructure would disintegrate, and clothing would also vanish, leaving naked people inhabiting, as Guthrie evoked, a landscape of flowers, trees and butterflies (presumably the UN-bomb has some sort of bio-generative properties opposite to the degenerative effects of nuclear fallout on DNA).
Even at age twelve or whatever I was when I heard this, I didn't take it seriously. Yes, I had a pre-teen Doctor Who fan's concept of what radiation actually is. Yes, I was already an aspiring fantasy author (and now, nearly 30 years later, still aspiring to be published). Yes, I half-believed in the premise of the UN-bomb theory, namely that there are "opposites" in that sense (and by reduction, the pre-premise: that there are "objects"). Still, there was something about it (I mean besides the fact that it was a joke) that didn't seem quite plausible.
Let's forget, for a moment, that the physical science of such an idea is nonexistent: that's sort of irrelevant here, because what I'm trying to get to is the motivation behind the development of such a theory. Who wants the un-neutron bomb, and why? Is such an idea compatible with ecology? Would it be a good thing if there were an un-neutron bomb?
I think Derrick Jensen would welcome it. The fact that such an infrastructural holocaust as a global un-thermonuclear war would undoubtedly result in the slow, painful and brutal extermination by attrition and cannibalism of at least 90% of the human population might, I dare credit his soul, give him pause. Still, in the end I suspect that, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, Jensen would arrive at the final solution. "Drop the UN-bomb! Exterminate all the brutes!"
I find Arlo Guthrie sometimes pleasant to listen to. Hippies in general tend to be fun to look at, as a sort of aesthetically inspiring eye-candy--just as long as you don't look too closely, too deep or for too long.
"Dude," said a guy I met at the Cal Expo Grateful Dead shows in the summer of 1990, "like, I got four different kinds of bugs in my hair. They're part of me, man. Look, see? Like, I got red ones, 'n' I got black ones, 'n' I got brown ones, 'n' I got white ones. They're part of me, man. Hey, Kind Rainbow Brother, can I get a ride to Ohio in your bus? I can totally kick you down some gas money...like, after we get there, 'cause there's this Kind Brother who owes me a sack, and I'm pretty sure he's gonna be there, but I'm not, like, totally sure he's gonna be there, so I might not be able to kick down right away, but..."
Dude, shut up. First of all, I'm not going to Ohio. Second of all, if you so much as come near my vehicle with all your beloved Kind Rainbow Vermin, they will soon have need of something else to be "part of".
I consider myself reasonably compassionate, but am not above the use of Draculian terrorism in the cause of self-preservation from lice. For "Kind Rainbow Brother", read "Beautiful Soul".
I also have a soft spot, even as a post-OOO thinker, for utopian literature, especially the neo-utopian fantasies of the deep ecology and ecofeminist movements. One day, I'd like to write a paper (or maybe just a bunch of electrons, since the "paperless" method is supposed to save trees...though it doesn't do much for Africans) on this sub-multi-genre of literature. What would I call that, in the first place? Leave that for later.
Without a doubt, my absolute favorite of these books is the granddaddy of them all, the great eco-socialist fantasy Island, by the great Aldous Huxley. If you haven't read this, I don't want to talk to you. I used to buy all the copies of this I could find and hand them out for free. The story is of a journalist-cum-spy named Will Farnaby who travels to the fictional South Pacific island of Pala, home to a nation of democratic village-socialist syndicalist Mahayanists of Native-Tibetan-Indian-Scottish heritage. Never yet conquered by a more powerful state due to a lack of anything to motivate such conquest prior to the discovery of oil, Pala has been allowed to develop pretty much as it chooses, accepting such foreign influences as can be of use (sustainable agriculture from Rothamsted in the UK, spiritual practices from Tibet, secular humanism from the only Westerners who chose to go and live there, concrete and hydroelectricity for refrigeration, biology labs, etc.) while eschewing those which they deemed destructive (sports cars, mass media, physics labs and other unaffordable toys). Farnaby's mission, unknown to the Palanese, is to make contact with elements in the island nation's government who wish to exploit Pala's rich and largely unused oil reserves and broker a deal between them and Farnaby's boss, an unscrupulous and disgusting petroleum tycoon who owns several newspapers. But in the act of sneaking onto the island (journalists are not normally given Palanese visas), Farnaby is injured in a shipwreck and scared half out of his wits. He is rescued, as luck would have it, by the Scots-Palanese physician Dr. Robert MacPhail, an influential man on the island. Farnaby's injuries--both superficially physical and deep-seated, long-term psychological--are very effectively treated by the holistic Palanese medical system, and he is soon able to explore the island's various facilities and talk to its people. He meets the greedy government officials and brokers the deal, knowing full well that his actions are odious, but justifying it to himself through the cynical assertion that Pala's seemingly ideal way of life can not possibly be real, and that even if it were real, it can not possibly last with the world being what it is. He soon finds, however, that Pala is no ideal, but a reality, and that he loves the island and wants to stay. The message of Island, finally, is that despite the observable realities of war, conquest and the repetitive, savage idiocy of human history, there is nevertheless the equally observable "fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion". (Quote taken from the book.)
I did not intend this post to be a review of Island, but it looks like that's what it's going to be this time. I had intended to cover the multi-sub-genre of eco-utopian fantasy more generally, but I now see that this is beyond the scope of my ability to fit a finished blog post into a reasonable amount of time. Whatever. On with it.
I don't really want to talk about Brave New World; we are dealing with utopias in this genre, not dystopias, and as dystopian novels go, BNW is not Huxley's best, in my opinion. That distinction belongs to a later work, the post-nuclear Ape And Essence, which I will review at another time, as it is extremely relevant to what I'm trying to get to in this blog series on eco-utopian literature. Nevertheless, you can't really talk about Island as a novel without mentioning BNW, because the former was intended by Huxley to be a sort of antithesis to the latter...the Un-Dystopian Novel, I will call it here. Here are the specific antitheses of the two novels: 1) In BNW, hallucinogens and opiates are used for pacification of individuals and the masses, whle in Island, psychoactive entheogens are used for enlightenment and self-knowledge; 2) In BNW, the political system encourages group living for the sake of eliminating destructive individuality (totalitarianism), while in Island, group living is also encouraged, but mainly in the form of "Mutual Adoption Clubs", so that children will have alternatives other than compulsory exposure to their parents neuroses; 3) In BNW, trance states (research into which Huxley was passionately interested) are technologically induced for the purpose of indoctrination of individuals into the sociopolitical monoculture, while in Island, trance is a technique taught to those with the natural aptitude, for the purpose of accelerated learning (from which follows that those who generally become programmed followers in Western society would become leaders and innovative problem-solvers in Pala); 4) In BNW, reproduction is universally assisted and everyone grows from a high-tech test-tube baby, while in Island, assisted reproduction is not compulsory, but is common in the form of low-tech artificial insemination (reproduction being highly intentional in Pala, much more so than most of us would be used to); 5) In BNW, contraception is mandatory, and sex itself is mandated to be promiscuous and purely recreational, while in Island, contraception is not mandated, but made freely available to enable reproductive choice, and Tantric sex is made part of the school curriculum as a means of promoting physical and mental health; 6) In BNW, people are given monthly doses of adrenalin to provide them with their ration of fear and rage without having to act on it, while in Island, stress is diffused through dangerous sports such as rock-climbing; 7) In BNW, ubiquitous disembodied mechanical voices lull people into conformity, while in Island, mynah birds whose ancestors were trained by the originators of Pala's social system fly and perch freely about the island, uttering "Attention!" and "Karuna!" to remind people to attend to the moment and to have compassion (a non-technological and non-stupefying form of mass-media).
Wow. Every time I read Huxley (and I've read Island more times than Bob Marley read the Bible, and transcribed it, and even tried to adapt it for film), I learn something new. These seven factors are a really good summary of the elements of a society relative to human health and ecology. Let's briefly summarize them: 1) use of psychoactive substances; 2) emphasis of the importance of the society or the individual; 3) use of the abilities of exceptionally impressionable individuals; 4) policies on reproduction; 5) policies on sex (NOT the same as reproduction, unless reproduction is allowed to be totally unintentional); 6) policies on the diffusion of human emotional stress; and 7) the psychological use of mass media (in whatever form). Let's call these the Seven Huxleyan Principles of an Intentional Nation. SHPIN? We'll work on it.
These seven principles, I will argue, will have to be dealt with in any society that attempts to be ecologically--or in any other way--sustainable. Drugs exist. Individuals and groups exist. A substantial proportion of the population will always be easy to hypnotize or educate in one way or another. If we want to survive as a species, we must reproduce, and so must everything else. Sex exists, and tends to be less hygienic the less it is intentionally dealt with. Stress happens. There will always be mass media in one form or another, even without TV, radio or the internet. These things are all facts, and can not be deconstructed; furthermore, they all tend to become problems if they are not dealt with in a very intentional way...exercised, to put it one way.
It will take a lot more than an Un-Neutron Bomb to create a world that Huxley, or I, would consider worth living in; namely, it will take intention and responsibility. To the extent that people idealize holocaust or disaster, we fail in our aspiration to ecology and are reduced to a kind of selective nihilism. Each neo-utopian self-styled "ecologist" probably sees the only survivors of the blessed disaster as people with the same ideas and priorities as themselves: Good People. This is a manifestation of what Timothy Morton calls "Beautiful Soul Syndrome". But ecology, by definition, must include the realization that there is no "other", no object "over there" that is different, separate from or opposite to that which perceives it. There is no Un-Neutron Bomb, and there is no Un-Bad Person. So if you find yourself thinking how ideal it would be to erase the civilization we have for the sake of seeing the rise of one that you think would be better, just remember that somewhere--probably somewhere fairly close by--someone else is imagining a utopia of their own, and you are very likely not in it.
"Half of the people can be part right all of the time, and some of the people can be all right part of the time, but all of the people can't all be right all of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that. I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."
Bob Dylan said that.
The theory goes thus: Since you can't have an object without its opposite object (for example, alternate universe Spock with a beard), then it should be possible to construct something called the un-neutron bomb. This, Guthrie explained, would be a weapon that could be deployed against any national threat (presumably including domestic tyranny). On detonation, buildings, weapons and other infrastructure would disintegrate, and clothing would also vanish, leaving naked people inhabiting, as Guthrie evoked, a landscape of flowers, trees and butterflies (presumably the UN-bomb has some sort of bio-generative properties opposite to the degenerative effects of nuclear fallout on DNA).
Even at age twelve or whatever I was when I heard this, I didn't take it seriously. Yes, I had a pre-teen Doctor Who fan's concept of what radiation actually is. Yes, I was already an aspiring fantasy author (and now, nearly 30 years later, still aspiring to be published). Yes, I half-believed in the premise of the UN-bomb theory, namely that there are "opposites" in that sense (and by reduction, the pre-premise: that there are "objects"). Still, there was something about it (I mean besides the fact that it was a joke) that didn't seem quite plausible.
Let's forget, for a moment, that the physical science of such an idea is nonexistent: that's sort of irrelevant here, because what I'm trying to get to is the motivation behind the development of such a theory. Who wants the un-neutron bomb, and why? Is such an idea compatible with ecology? Would it be a good thing if there were an un-neutron bomb?
I think Derrick Jensen would welcome it. The fact that such an infrastructural holocaust as a global un-thermonuclear war would undoubtedly result in the slow, painful and brutal extermination by attrition and cannibalism of at least 90% of the human population might, I dare credit his soul, give him pause. Still, in the end I suspect that, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, Jensen would arrive at the final solution. "Drop the UN-bomb! Exterminate all the brutes!"
I find Arlo Guthrie sometimes pleasant to listen to. Hippies in general tend to be fun to look at, as a sort of aesthetically inspiring eye-candy--just as long as you don't look too closely, too deep or for too long.
"Dude," said a guy I met at the Cal Expo Grateful Dead shows in the summer of 1990, "like, I got four different kinds of bugs in my hair. They're part of me, man. Look, see? Like, I got red ones, 'n' I got black ones, 'n' I got brown ones, 'n' I got white ones. They're part of me, man. Hey, Kind Rainbow Brother, can I get a ride to Ohio in your bus? I can totally kick you down some gas money...like, after we get there, 'cause there's this Kind Brother who owes me a sack, and I'm pretty sure he's gonna be there, but I'm not, like, totally sure he's gonna be there, so I might not be able to kick down right away, but..."
Dude, shut up. First of all, I'm not going to Ohio. Second of all, if you so much as come near my vehicle with all your beloved Kind Rainbow Vermin, they will soon have need of something else to be "part of".
I consider myself reasonably compassionate, but am not above the use of Draculian terrorism in the cause of self-preservation from lice. For "Kind Rainbow Brother", read "Beautiful Soul".
I also have a soft spot, even as a post-OOO thinker, for utopian literature, especially the neo-utopian fantasies of the deep ecology and ecofeminist movements. One day, I'd like to write a paper (or maybe just a bunch of electrons, since the "paperless" method is supposed to save trees...though it doesn't do much for Africans) on this sub-multi-genre of literature. What would I call that, in the first place? Leave that for later.
Without a doubt, my absolute favorite of these books is the granddaddy of them all, the great eco-socialist fantasy Island, by the great Aldous Huxley. If you haven't read this, I don't want to talk to you. I used to buy all the copies of this I could find and hand them out for free. The story is of a journalist-cum-spy named Will Farnaby who travels to the fictional South Pacific island of Pala, home to a nation of democratic village-socialist syndicalist Mahayanists of Native-Tibetan-Indian-Scottish heritage. Never yet conquered by a more powerful state due to a lack of anything to motivate such conquest prior to the discovery of oil, Pala has been allowed to develop pretty much as it chooses, accepting such foreign influences as can be of use (sustainable agriculture from Rothamsted in the UK, spiritual practices from Tibet, secular humanism from the only Westerners who chose to go and live there, concrete and hydroelectricity for refrigeration, biology labs, etc.) while eschewing those which they deemed destructive (sports cars, mass media, physics labs and other unaffordable toys). Farnaby's mission, unknown to the Palanese, is to make contact with elements in the island nation's government who wish to exploit Pala's rich and largely unused oil reserves and broker a deal between them and Farnaby's boss, an unscrupulous and disgusting petroleum tycoon who owns several newspapers. But in the act of sneaking onto the island (journalists are not normally given Palanese visas), Farnaby is injured in a shipwreck and scared half out of his wits. He is rescued, as luck would have it, by the Scots-Palanese physician Dr. Robert MacPhail, an influential man on the island. Farnaby's injuries--both superficially physical and deep-seated, long-term psychological--are very effectively treated by the holistic Palanese medical system, and he is soon able to explore the island's various facilities and talk to its people. He meets the greedy government officials and brokers the deal, knowing full well that his actions are odious, but justifying it to himself through the cynical assertion that Pala's seemingly ideal way of life can not possibly be real, and that even if it were real, it can not possibly last with the world being what it is. He soon finds, however, that Pala is no ideal, but a reality, and that he loves the island and wants to stay. The message of Island, finally, is that despite the observable realities of war, conquest and the repetitive, savage idiocy of human history, there is nevertheless the equally observable "fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion". (Quote taken from the book.)
I did not intend this post to be a review of Island, but it looks like that's what it's going to be this time. I had intended to cover the multi-sub-genre of eco-utopian fantasy more generally, but I now see that this is beyond the scope of my ability to fit a finished blog post into a reasonable amount of time. Whatever. On with it.
I don't really want to talk about Brave New World; we are dealing with utopias in this genre, not dystopias, and as dystopian novels go, BNW is not Huxley's best, in my opinion. That distinction belongs to a later work, the post-nuclear Ape And Essence, which I will review at another time, as it is extremely relevant to what I'm trying to get to in this blog series on eco-utopian literature. Nevertheless, you can't really talk about Island as a novel without mentioning BNW, because the former was intended by Huxley to be a sort of antithesis to the latter...the Un-Dystopian Novel, I will call it here. Here are the specific antitheses of the two novels: 1) In BNW, hallucinogens and opiates are used for pacification of individuals and the masses, whle in Island, psychoactive entheogens are used for enlightenment and self-knowledge; 2) In BNW, the political system encourages group living for the sake of eliminating destructive individuality (totalitarianism), while in Island, group living is also encouraged, but mainly in the form of "Mutual Adoption Clubs", so that children will have alternatives other than compulsory exposure to their parents neuroses; 3) In BNW, trance states (research into which Huxley was passionately interested) are technologically induced for the purpose of indoctrination of individuals into the sociopolitical monoculture, while in Island, trance is a technique taught to those with the natural aptitude, for the purpose of accelerated learning (from which follows that those who generally become programmed followers in Western society would become leaders and innovative problem-solvers in Pala); 4) In BNW, reproduction is universally assisted and everyone grows from a high-tech test-tube baby, while in Island, assisted reproduction is not compulsory, but is common in the form of low-tech artificial insemination (reproduction being highly intentional in Pala, much more so than most of us would be used to); 5) In BNW, contraception is mandatory, and sex itself is mandated to be promiscuous and purely recreational, while in Island, contraception is not mandated, but made freely available to enable reproductive choice, and Tantric sex is made part of the school curriculum as a means of promoting physical and mental health; 6) In BNW, people are given monthly doses of adrenalin to provide them with their ration of fear and rage without having to act on it, while in Island, stress is diffused through dangerous sports such as rock-climbing; 7) In BNW, ubiquitous disembodied mechanical voices lull people into conformity, while in Island, mynah birds whose ancestors were trained by the originators of Pala's social system fly and perch freely about the island, uttering "Attention!" and "Karuna!" to remind people to attend to the moment and to have compassion (a non-technological and non-stupefying form of mass-media).
Wow. Every time I read Huxley (and I've read Island more times than Bob Marley read the Bible, and transcribed it, and even tried to adapt it for film), I learn something new. These seven factors are a really good summary of the elements of a society relative to human health and ecology. Let's briefly summarize them: 1) use of psychoactive substances; 2) emphasis of the importance of the society or the individual; 3) use of the abilities of exceptionally impressionable individuals; 4) policies on reproduction; 5) policies on sex (NOT the same as reproduction, unless reproduction is allowed to be totally unintentional); 6) policies on the diffusion of human emotional stress; and 7) the psychological use of mass media (in whatever form). Let's call these the Seven Huxleyan Principles of an Intentional Nation. SHPIN? We'll work on it.
These seven principles, I will argue, will have to be dealt with in any society that attempts to be ecologically--or in any other way--sustainable. Drugs exist. Individuals and groups exist. A substantial proportion of the population will always be easy to hypnotize or educate in one way or another. If we want to survive as a species, we must reproduce, and so must everything else. Sex exists, and tends to be less hygienic the less it is intentionally dealt with. Stress happens. There will always be mass media in one form or another, even without TV, radio or the internet. These things are all facts, and can not be deconstructed; furthermore, they all tend to become problems if they are not dealt with in a very intentional way...exercised, to put it one way.
It will take a lot more than an Un-Neutron Bomb to create a world that Huxley, or I, would consider worth living in; namely, it will take intention and responsibility. To the extent that people idealize holocaust or disaster, we fail in our aspiration to ecology and are reduced to a kind of selective nihilism. Each neo-utopian self-styled "ecologist" probably sees the only survivors of the blessed disaster as people with the same ideas and priorities as themselves: Good People. This is a manifestation of what Timothy Morton calls "Beautiful Soul Syndrome". But ecology, by definition, must include the realization that there is no "other", no object "over there" that is different, separate from or opposite to that which perceives it. There is no Un-Neutron Bomb, and there is no Un-Bad Person. So if you find yourself thinking how ideal it would be to erase the civilization we have for the sake of seeing the rise of one that you think would be better, just remember that somewhere--probably somewhere fairly close by--someone else is imagining a utopia of their own, and you are very likely not in it.
"Half of the people can be part right all of the time, and some of the people can be all right part of the time, but all of the people can't all be right all of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that. I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."
Bob Dylan said that.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
OK, Permaculture: Yes, I know what it is
I'm not going to say that I don't know what permaculture is, because I hate clichés. Let me say, however, that I might possibly be wrong about some things I think I know. My intention here is to put forward my take on permaculture, with which others may differ. I welcome any comments, as usual, and any designers, consultants, or permaculturists of any kind may feel welcome to weigh in on anything I say here. Just one rule: if you disagree, have an argument, not an "opinion". We don't do relativism here.
I am a Permaculture Design Consultant myself, and I've been familiarizing myself with this sprawlingly multidisciplinary composition of ethics and design principles since about 1993 or so. So far, the best literature on the subject, for my money, are Permaculture: A Designers' Manual by Bill Mollison and Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren. Mollison and Holmgren co-composed permaculture many years ago.
I intend to go more deeply into the various aspects of permaculture in later posts. The titles of my two favorite permaculture books already say a lot: "design" and "beyond sustainability" are both significant concepts here. Permaculture is primarily an organized design science. Its multidisciplinary quality is due to the fact that what is being designed is our entire mode of existence, not anything in particular...or rather many particular things, but with the generalistic intention of a good life for all beings. The rampant lack of any design in the planning of human life as we know it is a prominent feature of modern life, but little noticed because we mostly see the circumstances of our life as features of the landcsape that "just happen" without our having to think about them. Nothing could be further from the truth, for a lot more than thinking has to be done in order to maintain this way of life: massive, intensive subsidies in energy go to support a way of life where one person leaves a carbon footprint the size of a blue whale or two. We have massive amounts of knowledge in physics, but we don't use it in our houses. We know a lot about ecology, but we don't use it in our gardens and we don't apply it to what we actually do.
If we actually applied all that we know to what we do, the results would seem miraculous.
Permaculture teaches that a person should account for one's home economy before going out and trying to fix political or broad-scale corporate ecological problems. Taking this advice and considering the home first, most modern homes are uninhabitable without electricity, creating a situation of unhealthy dependency on capital-intensive entities over which the customer has no control. Meanwhile, it is an utterly trivial matter to design and build houses so that they take care of themselves. If a house is positioned so that its long axis faces the sun (irrespective of where the road is), then very simple techniques of passive solar design can create a building that cools down as the weather heats up and vice versa. Then the garden may also be fairly simply designed to assist the house, providing for major percentages of a family's food needs. As for what food can't be grown at home, permaculture is equally applicable to agriculture serving whole communities...the point being to sustain communities, not "feed the world" in a way that has never worked for anyone except agribusiness.
Remember, there is no "world" anyway, right? It's all, as Levy Bryant says, a composition (see my last post, & links thereon).
Permaculture is a rational approach to living in a way that works. I have seen examples of permaculture design realized that surpass my own fantasies of the Garden of Eden for beauty, utility and livability. But my task here is not to describe the beauty of the places I have seen, but rather convey the beauty of permaculture itself, for even in scientific terms, permaculture is a truly wondrous composition in which may be applied any science, craft or art and find it interconnected with that which is already there. It is not immutable, and as design science is a changeable, evolving process, aspects of permaculture are non-dogmatic, and falsifiable where appropriate. For example, philosophies such as Object Oriented Ontology are eminently compatible with permaculture, despite its focus on "systems" and its sometimes teleological or nature-as-intent basis, for it is a simple matter to alter such language and still retain permaculture as a viable, pragmatic methodology.
In my own experience, the method is to "not do" at least as much as you do. As long as you do one basic thing right, everything else seems to happen almost by itself. Take good care of your soil and its biota, and abundant yields of good food and flowers just happen, almost as a by-product, like water flowing downhill is a by-product of gravity. And here we find perhaps the greatest challenge to us as designers: being able to let things go and happen as they will, once we have laid the groundwork. I find this personally daunting at times. It is a humbling experience to learn first-hand that although I can bring elements of what I might think is a "system" together, I can't actually connect them; one does not have the power to create, but only to assemble. But it is also a liberating experience to simply put the elements in the right spatial relationship to each other and watch in amazement as they form a composition, often in ways I did not expect.
Permaculture bridges the imaginary firewall between "human" and "nature" through physical practice. Unlike deep ecology, which sees a world separate from the human that should be left in its "pristine" state and untouched, permaculture designers see their job as the assembly of artificial ecosystems. There is no longer any question of the pristine: we have tampered with ecology across the whole face of the earth and cannot turn back the clock. If we simply allow things to continue the way they are, then we make a decision in favor of misery, poverty and destruction. We have ramped up such a massive extinction rate that there is now no choice but to assemble recombinant ecologies: edible landscapes, in which anything that adds to the diverse vitality and fits in a harmonious way should by all means be included. There are no "invasive" or "non-native" species (except ourselves, if we choose), and proscribed diets that eliminate animals from the edible landscape actually create unsustainable conditions. No one is advocating factory farms here (in fact, "farms" in general would look more like meadows, swamps or forests under permaculture), but an ecological community will obtain its food, irrigation water and fuel from where it lives, and vegetarian agriculture is simply not viable in every region under such low-impact circumstances. Enlightened omnivorousness seems, historically and anthropologically, to be the best dietary survival system for human populations.
There are many facets of permaculture design beyond building, energy and food. One may begin at any facet of the crystal and end up at any other. It is rooted in philosophy and ethics, chaos theory, pattern mathematics, climate, forests, issues of place, and even politics and economics. I will get into all of these at some point, and if readers have any specific areas of it they wish to know about, please feel free to ask. For now, suffice it to say that there are few things in life more worthwhile than permaculture.
Till next post, I leave you with some advice from Bill Mollison: "I would say, use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything. But if you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself."
Or, as I like to say: Follow your hunger.
I am a Permaculture Design Consultant myself, and I've been familiarizing myself with this sprawlingly multidisciplinary composition of ethics and design principles since about 1993 or so. So far, the best literature on the subject, for my money, are Permaculture: A Designers' Manual by Bill Mollison and Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren. Mollison and Holmgren co-composed permaculture many years ago.
I intend to go more deeply into the various aspects of permaculture in later posts. The titles of my two favorite permaculture books already say a lot: "design" and "beyond sustainability" are both significant concepts here. Permaculture is primarily an organized design science. Its multidisciplinary quality is due to the fact that what is being designed is our entire mode of existence, not anything in particular...or rather many particular things, but with the generalistic intention of a good life for all beings. The rampant lack of any design in the planning of human life as we know it is a prominent feature of modern life, but little noticed because we mostly see the circumstances of our life as features of the landcsape that "just happen" without our having to think about them. Nothing could be further from the truth, for a lot more than thinking has to be done in order to maintain this way of life: massive, intensive subsidies in energy go to support a way of life where one person leaves a carbon footprint the size of a blue whale or two. We have massive amounts of knowledge in physics, but we don't use it in our houses. We know a lot about ecology, but we don't use it in our gardens and we don't apply it to what we actually do.
If we actually applied all that we know to what we do, the results would seem miraculous.
Permaculture teaches that a person should account for one's home economy before going out and trying to fix political or broad-scale corporate ecological problems. Taking this advice and considering the home first, most modern homes are uninhabitable without electricity, creating a situation of unhealthy dependency on capital-intensive entities over which the customer has no control. Meanwhile, it is an utterly trivial matter to design and build houses so that they take care of themselves. If a house is positioned so that its long axis faces the sun (irrespective of where the road is), then very simple techniques of passive solar design can create a building that cools down as the weather heats up and vice versa. Then the garden may also be fairly simply designed to assist the house, providing for major percentages of a family's food needs. As for what food can't be grown at home, permaculture is equally applicable to agriculture serving whole communities...the point being to sustain communities, not "feed the world" in a way that has never worked for anyone except agribusiness.
Remember, there is no "world" anyway, right? It's all, as Levy Bryant says, a composition (see my last post, & links thereon).
Permaculture is a rational approach to living in a way that works. I have seen examples of permaculture design realized that surpass my own fantasies of the Garden of Eden for beauty, utility and livability. But my task here is not to describe the beauty of the places I have seen, but rather convey the beauty of permaculture itself, for even in scientific terms, permaculture is a truly wondrous composition in which may be applied any science, craft or art and find it interconnected with that which is already there. It is not immutable, and as design science is a changeable, evolving process, aspects of permaculture are non-dogmatic, and falsifiable where appropriate. For example, philosophies such as Object Oriented Ontology are eminently compatible with permaculture, despite its focus on "systems" and its sometimes teleological or nature-as-intent basis, for it is a simple matter to alter such language and still retain permaculture as a viable, pragmatic methodology.
In my own experience, the method is to "not do" at least as much as you do. As long as you do one basic thing right, everything else seems to happen almost by itself. Take good care of your soil and its biota, and abundant yields of good food and flowers just happen, almost as a by-product, like water flowing downhill is a by-product of gravity. And here we find perhaps the greatest challenge to us as designers: being able to let things go and happen as they will, once we have laid the groundwork. I find this personally daunting at times. It is a humbling experience to learn first-hand that although I can bring elements of what I might think is a "system" together, I can't actually connect them; one does not have the power to create, but only to assemble. But it is also a liberating experience to simply put the elements in the right spatial relationship to each other and watch in amazement as they form a composition, often in ways I did not expect.
Permaculture bridges the imaginary firewall between "human" and "nature" through physical practice. Unlike deep ecology, which sees a world separate from the human that should be left in its "pristine" state and untouched, permaculture designers see their job as the assembly of artificial ecosystems. There is no longer any question of the pristine: we have tampered with ecology across the whole face of the earth and cannot turn back the clock. If we simply allow things to continue the way they are, then we make a decision in favor of misery, poverty and destruction. We have ramped up such a massive extinction rate that there is now no choice but to assemble recombinant ecologies: edible landscapes, in which anything that adds to the diverse vitality and fits in a harmonious way should by all means be included. There are no "invasive" or "non-native" species (except ourselves, if we choose), and proscribed diets that eliminate animals from the edible landscape actually create unsustainable conditions. No one is advocating factory farms here (in fact, "farms" in general would look more like meadows, swamps or forests under permaculture), but an ecological community will obtain its food, irrigation water and fuel from where it lives, and vegetarian agriculture is simply not viable in every region under such low-impact circumstances. Enlightened omnivorousness seems, historically and anthropologically, to be the best dietary survival system for human populations.
There are many facets of permaculture design beyond building, energy and food. One may begin at any facet of the crystal and end up at any other. It is rooted in philosophy and ethics, chaos theory, pattern mathematics, climate, forests, issues of place, and even politics and economics. I will get into all of these at some point, and if readers have any specific areas of it they wish to know about, please feel free to ask. For now, suffice it to say that there are few things in life more worthwhile than permaculture.
Till next post, I leave you with some advice from Bill Mollison: "I would say, use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything. But if you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself."
Or, as I like to say: Follow your hunger.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Ecology Without Nature, or Doctor Who vs. the Myth of Subject-Object
I'm a big Doctor Who fan, and have been since the early '80s, long before the special effects and makeup were believable. This has nothing to do with this post. I only mention it because that's how excited I am by what I'm learning from a guy named Timothy Morton, whose blog can be found here.
Ecology Without Nature is the name of his blog, and also the title of his book. He has another, which he calls a prequel to EWN, called The Ecological Thought. And the concept discussed in both books (which I intend to buy as soon as I'm flush enough), that of ecological thought itself, is one that has been blowing my mind ever since I started to figure it out. This journey has been accomplished mainly by listening to the podcasts of his classes at UC Davis, where he is a Professor of English; these are free and available at iTunes (just search "Timothy Morton"), and I can't recommend them highly enough. I don't know that I agree with every aspect of his thinking; I do have some superficial issues with the ideas he has about art and aesthetics in general (yes, human aesthetics are a big part of how we "do" ecology, whether we know it or not). But on the whole (except that according to his philosophy, there is no "whole" to be "on"), I find his Ecological Thought to be rivetingly persuasive, open in its application and liberating in its ability to identify and erase thought-problems that I couldn't get past before.
What's odd to me is that Tim Morton himself doesn't seem to find it as uplifting. He seems to think that a lot of it is rather depressing, actually...and at first, it does seem like that to me as well. But when you apply ET (coincidental acronym? Perhaps not, since we are all pretty alien in this philosophy) to pragmatist design methodologies such as permaculture, you may find that a lot of things that you were refusing to think about--because you couldn't get them to fit--start making sense, and your practice becomes yet more practicable. Practice, if it leads somewhere, is never depressing, as gardeners and martial artists well know. Painful? Yes, sometimes, even to the point of deep grief. Frustrating? Indeed! But not depressing. Tim Morton describes Ecological Thought as "viral"; "getting" it is like getting a cold, and once you've got it, you can't do anything about it except let it run its course.
I have found, to my increasing delight, wonder, and astonishment, that this seems to be true. What I "get", so far, is as follows. I hope Tim will correct me if I misinterpret anything.
The reason we are in so much trouble that we can't seem to get out of, due to our destruction of the natural world, is that it was a disastrous mistake to ever start thinking in terms of "nature" and "worlds" in the first place. To talk about the "end of nature", or the "end of the world" is to invoke a whole range of mythical, imaginary hobgoblins that only serve to scare us into moping apathy. To end "nature" and "the world" as concepts is something we should get done as quickly as possible! For, as it turns out, there never was a "nature", not in any sense: "Nature" as a medium for living beings does not and has never existed, nor do beings have "natures" that you can generalize about. The concept of "Nature" as an "object over there", as Tim says, or as a backdrop to a separate and equally nonexistent object called "humanity" that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are a part of, is absolutely useless to identifying our places as unique beings in an interconnected ecological mesh.
This interconnection is total. There is nothing "you" can identify that is "not you", or "other". A political party that wants to romantically identify itself as "Green" and its members as "greens" ignores a significant romantic irony in their own story: The reason we have the color green is because of an event billions of years ago that was, for the beings involved at the time, an ecological disaster of total proportion. Chlorophyllic (or "green") bacteria destroyed their own ability to breathe the planet's atmosphere by producing too much oxygen...which we now breathe as we poison ourselves. These bacteria now survive only by hiding in the cells of plants, like the human batteries in the movie The Matrix. Hardly a meaningful existence, you might think...except (and this is where it starts to get really Goth and creepy) that you could say the same thing about the plants themselves. For the Matrix was as much a machine for preserving humans as for imprisoning them, and viewed in this way, plants themselves are not "natural" in the way we used to think. They are machines for the survival of the chloroplasts, and really a kind of artificial life.
The mitochondria in our cells are similar. We die without them, but perhaps the more important point is that they die without us, and that's why we're here. It turns out that animals aren't "natural" either, and that even the categories of "animal", "vegetable" and "mineral" are themselves hobgoblins. Likewise "life", insofar as we differentiate between it and "non-life" of various kinds. For if the Turing test proves that there is a point at which you can't tell a computer program from a real person, the inverse also holds true, and we are all a form of artificial life.
I find that this has some very startling political implications. Take the issue of corporate personhood, for example. This is a very hot issue currently, about which my readers (if I have any) may have some strong opinions. The question of whether we should treat corporations as people or not is interesting, and capable of generating endless and potentially fruitless debate, but it's rather beside the point when you consider that we don't treat people like people! How does our legal system define a "person", anyway? Read the Constitution, read the Bill of Rights. This concept of "personhood" is so limited as to be demeaning, reducing people to objects that only differ from corporations in that they have something called "malice". Our legal system is not the sole culprit here; as individuals, we objectify people all the time. "Other" people are, to differing degrees, "good" or "evil" (to say nothing of our habit of manipulating them when we can and it suits us). Neither of these are things you would say about someone you truly regarded as a Person. Indeed, in objectifying "evil", we become evil ourselves, simply by identifying ourselves as "good". Good? You? Me? Us? What a laugh that is. I like this British sarcasm: "Good in here, innit?"
It would seem like the prudent thing would be to destroy the entire legal system we operate under and replace it with one that actually treats People (meaning you, me, the dog, the tree, the centipede, the cow, the lettuce, the computer program, the book, the humic soil molecule, the mountain, the idea, and the corporation) as People...but not as a "We the People". Because as it turns out, there is no "we" and there is no object called "The People" that can be manipulated by law. Each Person is wholly, universally unique. And each unique being is totally interconnected in an inescapable mesh called Ecology.
Anarchosyndicalism, anyone?
"Other" things are not other, for our genotypes do not stop at our skin. As our mitochondria and the mercury in our tissues from the burning of fossil fuels make clear, these "other" things are not only under our skin, they are our skin! Each being is universal, and its skin is all other beings. Our universality is made horrifyingly clear when we realize that we can't have conversations about the weather without thinking about global warming anymore.
This leads to something called OOO, or Object Oriented Ontology. Levi Bryant gives a great layman-accessible explanation of this way of thinking about existence here. I disagree with him about refrigerators, but that doesn't really matter. OOO is related to a relatively new branch of philosophy called "speculative realism". As I "get" it (which maybe is not very well), what OOO does is to remove the firewall between subject and object. "I" am as much an object as anything else I can point to, and all objects (including inanimate ones) have a perspective and a point of view just as I do. There is no subject.
I find this very refreshing when I consider all those annoying ends to otherwise interesting conversations that go: "Well, that's just your opinion, and others are entitled to their own!" Or in other cases, the conversation ends before it begins, with the insipid "Well, this is only my opinion, but..." This is the brutal triumph of relativism over constructive argument. Or, if you're being accused of being an unoriginal, pointy-headed intellectual, you might hear, "Well, you just got that out of a book!"
It turns out that no one is entitled to an "opinion" at all. Reality is not some object that one is entitled to have different opinions about as it suits one. It has intrinsic being, and deserves one's sincere attempt at understanding. True compassion requires no less than that we develop and test our arguments. And what on earth is this demeaning talk of "books", as if books were somehow un-people that we can enslave, disenfranchise and say rude things about, as we've done with so many other un-people? We do treat them that way, though: we display them on our bookshelves as if to say, "Look! See? I'm not a racist! Some of my best friends are books!"
Well, I don't have any funky soundbite ending to this one, folks. Check out Tim's books, blog and podcasts, and grock to your heart's content. See you tomorrow or so.
Ecology Without Nature is the name of his blog, and also the title of his book. He has another, which he calls a prequel to EWN, called The Ecological Thought. And the concept discussed in both books (which I intend to buy as soon as I'm flush enough), that of ecological thought itself, is one that has been blowing my mind ever since I started to figure it out. This journey has been accomplished mainly by listening to the podcasts of his classes at UC Davis, where he is a Professor of English; these are free and available at iTunes (just search "Timothy Morton"), and I can't recommend them highly enough. I don't know that I agree with every aspect of his thinking; I do have some superficial issues with the ideas he has about art and aesthetics in general (yes, human aesthetics are a big part of how we "do" ecology, whether we know it or not). But on the whole (except that according to his philosophy, there is no "whole" to be "on"), I find his Ecological Thought to be rivetingly persuasive, open in its application and liberating in its ability to identify and erase thought-problems that I couldn't get past before.
What's odd to me is that Tim Morton himself doesn't seem to find it as uplifting. He seems to think that a lot of it is rather depressing, actually...and at first, it does seem like that to me as well. But when you apply ET (coincidental acronym? Perhaps not, since we are all pretty alien in this philosophy) to pragmatist design methodologies such as permaculture, you may find that a lot of things that you were refusing to think about--because you couldn't get them to fit--start making sense, and your practice becomes yet more practicable. Practice, if it leads somewhere, is never depressing, as gardeners and martial artists well know. Painful? Yes, sometimes, even to the point of deep grief. Frustrating? Indeed! But not depressing. Tim Morton describes Ecological Thought as "viral"; "getting" it is like getting a cold, and once you've got it, you can't do anything about it except let it run its course.
I have found, to my increasing delight, wonder, and astonishment, that this seems to be true. What I "get", so far, is as follows. I hope Tim will correct me if I misinterpret anything.
The reason we are in so much trouble that we can't seem to get out of, due to our destruction of the natural world, is that it was a disastrous mistake to ever start thinking in terms of "nature" and "worlds" in the first place. To talk about the "end of nature", or the "end of the world" is to invoke a whole range of mythical, imaginary hobgoblins that only serve to scare us into moping apathy. To end "nature" and "the world" as concepts is something we should get done as quickly as possible! For, as it turns out, there never was a "nature", not in any sense: "Nature" as a medium for living beings does not and has never existed, nor do beings have "natures" that you can generalize about. The concept of "Nature" as an "object over there", as Tim says, or as a backdrop to a separate and equally nonexistent object called "humanity" that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are a part of, is absolutely useless to identifying our places as unique beings in an interconnected ecological mesh.
This interconnection is total. There is nothing "you" can identify that is "not you", or "other". A political party that wants to romantically identify itself as "Green" and its members as "greens" ignores a significant romantic irony in their own story: The reason we have the color green is because of an event billions of years ago that was, for the beings involved at the time, an ecological disaster of total proportion. Chlorophyllic (or "green") bacteria destroyed their own ability to breathe the planet's atmosphere by producing too much oxygen...which we now breathe as we poison ourselves. These bacteria now survive only by hiding in the cells of plants, like the human batteries in the movie The Matrix. Hardly a meaningful existence, you might think...except (and this is where it starts to get really Goth and creepy) that you could say the same thing about the plants themselves. For the Matrix was as much a machine for preserving humans as for imprisoning them, and viewed in this way, plants themselves are not "natural" in the way we used to think. They are machines for the survival of the chloroplasts, and really a kind of artificial life.
The mitochondria in our cells are similar. We die without them, but perhaps the more important point is that they die without us, and that's why we're here. It turns out that animals aren't "natural" either, and that even the categories of "animal", "vegetable" and "mineral" are themselves hobgoblins. Likewise "life", insofar as we differentiate between it and "non-life" of various kinds. For if the Turing test proves that there is a point at which you can't tell a computer program from a real person, the inverse also holds true, and we are all a form of artificial life.
I find that this has some very startling political implications. Take the issue of corporate personhood, for example. This is a very hot issue currently, about which my readers (if I have any) may have some strong opinions. The question of whether we should treat corporations as people or not is interesting, and capable of generating endless and potentially fruitless debate, but it's rather beside the point when you consider that we don't treat people like people! How does our legal system define a "person", anyway? Read the Constitution, read the Bill of Rights. This concept of "personhood" is so limited as to be demeaning, reducing people to objects that only differ from corporations in that they have something called "malice". Our legal system is not the sole culprit here; as individuals, we objectify people all the time. "Other" people are, to differing degrees, "good" or "evil" (to say nothing of our habit of manipulating them when we can and it suits us). Neither of these are things you would say about someone you truly regarded as a Person. Indeed, in objectifying "evil", we become evil ourselves, simply by identifying ourselves as "good". Good? You? Me? Us? What a laugh that is. I like this British sarcasm: "Good in here, innit?"
It would seem like the prudent thing would be to destroy the entire legal system we operate under and replace it with one that actually treats People (meaning you, me, the dog, the tree, the centipede, the cow, the lettuce, the computer program, the book, the humic soil molecule, the mountain, the idea, and the corporation) as People...but not as a "We the People". Because as it turns out, there is no "we" and there is no object called "The People" that can be manipulated by law. Each Person is wholly, universally unique. And each unique being is totally interconnected in an inescapable mesh called Ecology.
Anarchosyndicalism, anyone?
"Other" things are not other, for our genotypes do not stop at our skin. As our mitochondria and the mercury in our tissues from the burning of fossil fuels make clear, these "other" things are not only under our skin, they are our skin! Each being is universal, and its skin is all other beings. Our universality is made horrifyingly clear when we realize that we can't have conversations about the weather without thinking about global warming anymore.
This leads to something called OOO, or Object Oriented Ontology. Levi Bryant gives a great layman-accessible explanation of this way of thinking about existence here. I disagree with him about refrigerators, but that doesn't really matter. OOO is related to a relatively new branch of philosophy called "speculative realism". As I "get" it (which maybe is not very well), what OOO does is to remove the firewall between subject and object. "I" am as much an object as anything else I can point to, and all objects (including inanimate ones) have a perspective and a point of view just as I do. There is no subject.
I find this very refreshing when I consider all those annoying ends to otherwise interesting conversations that go: "Well, that's just your opinion, and others are entitled to their own!" Or in other cases, the conversation ends before it begins, with the insipid "Well, this is only my opinion, but..." This is the brutal triumph of relativism over constructive argument. Or, if you're being accused of being an unoriginal, pointy-headed intellectual, you might hear, "Well, you just got that out of a book!"
It turns out that no one is entitled to an "opinion" at all. Reality is not some object that one is entitled to have different opinions about as it suits one. It has intrinsic being, and deserves one's sincere attempt at understanding. True compassion requires no less than that we develop and test our arguments. And what on earth is this demeaning talk of "books", as if books were somehow un-people that we can enslave, disenfranchise and say rude things about, as we've done with so many other un-people? We do treat them that way, though: we display them on our bookshelves as if to say, "Look! See? I'm not a racist! Some of my best friends are books!"
Well, I don't have any funky soundbite ending to this one, folks. Check out Tim's books, blog and podcasts, and grock to your heart's content. See you tomorrow or so.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
I'm hungry
I am a tall, slim, neurologically sensitive, introverted and yet physically active person. I am therefore hungry most of the time, and I love to cook.
It is lunch time and I have been sitting and designing this blog all morning, drinking tea and coffee. There are vegetables from a local CSA (community-supported agriculture) in my fridge, waiting for me to make a dressing to dip them in and eat them. Cut vegetables lose 50% of their nutritional value in the first hour after harvest, and though mine are still a lot fresher than any you can get from any store, they need to be eaten soon. For my two dogs (children of my dear wife Deb's previous marriage, and very dear to me themselves), it is also lunch time. It would be better if I took care of these things right now.
But I want to talk a bit about what hunger means.
Western civilization (particularly in the USA, which I know best by far) is characterized by a universal state of chronic dissatisfaction. We are generally very hungry people, despite the fact that we consume at least six times as much of everything as we could possibly need. It is no wonder: the circumstances of our existence in the early years of the 21st Century make satisfaction impossible most of the time. We hunger for sustenance, health, meaningful livelihood, objects, togetherness, solitude. In general, I think we hunger for change.
It is right that we should want change. Our present mode of being really sucks, when you look at it. And my criticism of our present economic, political and social arrangements is not that they make some people very fortunate and most people very unfortunate...nothing so populistically Marxist. Rather, my criticism of these things is that they make life fundamentally impossible for everyone, regardless of empty and meaningless definitions of fortune or misfortune. Life under the circumstances we have been choosing to set is simply unlivable.
To distract the hungry, "change" of a kind has been built into these circumstances. This is the equivalent of changing the font or background color of one's blog (but not the fact that blogs depend on technology powered by ecologically and socially destructive mining), changing from one laundry detergent to another (but not the fact that one does not know how to make soap and stop littering the planet with plastic bottles), changing from Republicans to Democrats (but not the fact that we have no democracy and no longer live in a republic), or changing from Coke to Pepsi (both essentially the same, both nearly as destructive in their manufacture as petroleum, both crap). The fact that "change" was the magic word used by the Obama campaign illustrates that our hunger has grown to such a magnitude that Power can no longer distract us from examining these circumstances: they are no longer untested "features of the landscape", to be accepted as inevitable. When Power is forced to use explicit language to describe what they have previously been feeding you implicitly, you are well on the way to truly real Change: a dismantling of the circumstances of your life which you once thought inevitable, and a total reconfiguration of the infrastructure of life itself.
The only trouble is that if you just let it happen instead of taking an active and intentional part, you will most likely not find the new circumstances comfortable. Indeed, they may not be able to support your survival. This may be the case even if you do take an active role. But the active have a chance of determining the circumstances, and therefore a chance at life itself...life; not merely survival, but living. But the passive? I'm sorry, no.
I have always been a particularly hungry person. Hungry and inquisitive regarding my hunger, I have never accepted circumstances with which I was dissatisfied; I have rarely even accepted the parameters of my "likes" and "dislikes" without question. At age 11, I experimented with foods of different textures and flavors in a fashion I can only describe as Tantric, putting my least favorite foods first on the "to eat" list at the dinner table and watching how that list changed, destroying my own concepts of liking or not liking different things that are all good anyway. At age 10 I was foraging for wild edible plants in the Berkshire Hills, deconstructing the boundaries between "food" and "weeds", and also the link between "needs" and "markets". At age 12 I was hunting small game with a bow and arrow, and learning (from my sometimes angry father) that what you shoot, you have to kill; what you kill, you have to clean, cook and eat. Otherwise, no supper! At age 15, I was already refusing to accept the social parameters I was given by high school teachers and guidance councillors, that "you'll have to deal with this horrible shit for the rest of your life, so you'd better just accept it, or you will be a failure". I have rarely failed to refuse bad food. I have rarely failed to accept good food, regardless of whether I thought I "liked" it. And because of this, I have found to my sometimes great satisfaction that I have rarely failed in general.
Follow your own hunger, rather than hungers you are given to want. Cook (and if possible, grow) your own food. Learn to identify the edible and poisonous circumstances of your life, choose the edible, and spread their seeds; there is no need to weed out the poisonous, for well-nurtured edibles will out-compete them (I never "quit" smoking; I have simply not smoked in two years). Accept the bitter along with the sweet, for it quickens the blood and gets you ready for a new spring after a long winter.
Me? I'm a-go make some tzaziki and some sweet brown rice. Bon appetit!
It is lunch time and I have been sitting and designing this blog all morning, drinking tea and coffee. There are vegetables from a local CSA (community-supported agriculture) in my fridge, waiting for me to make a dressing to dip them in and eat them. Cut vegetables lose 50% of their nutritional value in the first hour after harvest, and though mine are still a lot fresher than any you can get from any store, they need to be eaten soon. For my two dogs (children of my dear wife Deb's previous marriage, and very dear to me themselves), it is also lunch time. It would be better if I took care of these things right now.
But I want to talk a bit about what hunger means.
Western civilization (particularly in the USA, which I know best by far) is characterized by a universal state of chronic dissatisfaction. We are generally very hungry people, despite the fact that we consume at least six times as much of everything as we could possibly need. It is no wonder: the circumstances of our existence in the early years of the 21st Century make satisfaction impossible most of the time. We hunger for sustenance, health, meaningful livelihood, objects, togetherness, solitude. In general, I think we hunger for change.
It is right that we should want change. Our present mode of being really sucks, when you look at it. And my criticism of our present economic, political and social arrangements is not that they make some people very fortunate and most people very unfortunate...nothing so populistically Marxist. Rather, my criticism of these things is that they make life fundamentally impossible for everyone, regardless of empty and meaningless definitions of fortune or misfortune. Life under the circumstances we have been choosing to set is simply unlivable.
To distract the hungry, "change" of a kind has been built into these circumstances. This is the equivalent of changing the font or background color of one's blog (but not the fact that blogs depend on technology powered by ecologically and socially destructive mining), changing from one laundry detergent to another (but not the fact that one does not know how to make soap and stop littering the planet with plastic bottles), changing from Republicans to Democrats (but not the fact that we have no democracy and no longer live in a republic), or changing from Coke to Pepsi (both essentially the same, both nearly as destructive in their manufacture as petroleum, both crap). The fact that "change" was the magic word used by the Obama campaign illustrates that our hunger has grown to such a magnitude that Power can no longer distract us from examining these circumstances: they are no longer untested "features of the landscape", to be accepted as inevitable. When Power is forced to use explicit language to describe what they have previously been feeding you implicitly, you are well on the way to truly real Change: a dismantling of the circumstances of your life which you once thought inevitable, and a total reconfiguration of the infrastructure of life itself.
The only trouble is that if you just let it happen instead of taking an active and intentional part, you will most likely not find the new circumstances comfortable. Indeed, they may not be able to support your survival. This may be the case even if you do take an active role. But the active have a chance of determining the circumstances, and therefore a chance at life itself...life; not merely survival, but living. But the passive? I'm sorry, no.
I have always been a particularly hungry person. Hungry and inquisitive regarding my hunger, I have never accepted circumstances with which I was dissatisfied; I have rarely even accepted the parameters of my "likes" and "dislikes" without question. At age 11, I experimented with foods of different textures and flavors in a fashion I can only describe as Tantric, putting my least favorite foods first on the "to eat" list at the dinner table and watching how that list changed, destroying my own concepts of liking or not liking different things that are all good anyway. At age 10 I was foraging for wild edible plants in the Berkshire Hills, deconstructing the boundaries between "food" and "weeds", and also the link between "needs" and "markets". At age 12 I was hunting small game with a bow and arrow, and learning (from my sometimes angry father) that what you shoot, you have to kill; what you kill, you have to clean, cook and eat. Otherwise, no supper! At age 15, I was already refusing to accept the social parameters I was given by high school teachers and guidance councillors, that "you'll have to deal with this horrible shit for the rest of your life, so you'd better just accept it, or you will be a failure". I have rarely failed to refuse bad food. I have rarely failed to accept good food, regardless of whether I thought I "liked" it. And because of this, I have found to my sometimes great satisfaction that I have rarely failed in general.
Follow your own hunger, rather than hungers you are given to want. Cook (and if possible, grow) your own food. Learn to identify the edible and poisonous circumstances of your life, choose the edible, and spread their seeds; there is no need to weed out the poisonous, for well-nurtured edibles will out-compete them (I never "quit" smoking; I have simply not smoked in two years). Accept the bitter along with the sweet, for it quickens the blood and gets you ready for a new spring after a long winter.
Me? I'm a-go make some tzaziki and some sweet brown rice. Bon appetit!
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