I looked in the mirror and saw myself. I'm not sure of what I was looking for, but there I was looking back. I have, from time to time, been struck by an ability to see in a person that which will be. I'm not talking clairvoyance or premonition. Rather, there is that which will be that is evident in the that which is. Perhaps that has gone by other names in the past. I wanted to see, even in my less than ideal state, some image of what is coming that is not here already.
I remember Brita being "oh so excited" to watch Freaky Friday in which the teenaged protagonist gets to experience herself in fifteen or so years. At the end of the viewing--enjoyable if a little sillier than expected--she had a sort of anger and anxiety about it all. Brita was envious, or so I recall, of the protagonist getting to see one of the options laid out in front of her. I haven't spoken with Brita in some time, though she may follow the blog. I wonder now if she would want to see that person. I don't know. I mean, in many ways I wish I might tell a younger Caleb that all the anxieties of being young--girls/women (depending on the age), basic work, family, a sense of home--would be resolved. How many would be then kept guarded from that juvenile self?
The mirror showed myself: a wide face, a few gray hairs, slightly blood shot eyes, lips marred by wine. Nevertheless, there were no indicators of where this person might be going. I cannot see what I sometimes see in others: a potential placement in the world with clear attributes and directions. While I might calm the Caleb of ten years previous, I don't think I could calm the Caleb of only five years previous. He and I still share far too many misgivings about the world, about where he/I might be happy working, about he/I might be happy living, or with whom he/I might be living. It isn't an absence of possibility; rather, it is the overabundance of possibilities.
Tonight... Today, I get to enjoy the company of a dear friend, see a young woman I am infatuated with, enjoy the company of more than a dozen friends, play a game I get to throw myself into... And yet I am laden with ambiguities and delays that recall senior year more than hint at being a senior. I can spend ninety minutes discussing virtue, genius, direction, craft and so on, but that doesn't lay out what I might be doing in five, ten, twenty years any better than I could when u entered college (let alone high school).
Allow me to say that I am happy. I have divested myself of some emotional and academic weights, even tried to mend those gaps left behind. There are those hurdles--thesis work, roommate politics, work schedule, family responsibilities--still requiring my attention, though each provides its own lesson and potential boon. I am happy and maybe even a little relaxed compared to years before. What remains is the frustration of direction: while I may be able to find work once I complete my thesis, does it direct me any better than when I completed my undergraduate work? Am I any better situated?
I would not trade this deliberation and difficulty for anyone else's. There are those close to me struggling with their own crises that I do not envy. And then there are those that are years my senior dealing with the exact same. Where I am is my place, and I could be younger or older but still be here. I don't want to be excited for another board game or its expansion next year. I want to be excited to enter another stage of my life: a career I can delve into, a relationship with certainty and devotion (that is not said to undermine, but to outline where I am now), a place I might grow roots, or a home in which I might invest. At this point, none of these are clear and for that reason I am existentially concerned.
Are these strictly cultural concerns? Do the lifestyles of my parents and siblings construct illegitimate rules? Am I just aspiring for some status quo? Is the expansion of my film library as legitimate as the birth of the first daughter in my family since my sister less legitimate? (The last is clearly a jest, though I raise it for hyperbolic and playful, though not solely absurd reasons.) I am posed at the still young age of twenty-six with, What do I want out of my life? And secondly, though just as importantly, How can I achieve it?
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Monday, September 3, 2012
Poem: "Hub, Stems, Circles" or "From Iron to Tomatoes"
Iron arteries & steel cells trace
through the nation. Ley lines of artifice
& industry, loads of coal, aluminum, timber;
the burden of utilitarian titans visecting town,
city, neighborhood; bifurcations of old choices
cemented, leaden, and transgenerational.
Every six minutes a train passes through town,
the equivalent & consistency of light piercing
the emptiness of the sun to earth; a fractal
equation of heavy, breathing life combusting
hydrocarbons, ancient but refreshed,
made new with the labors of the living.
Wheels cut through my transit, my day, my
circuitousroutes along their own stems
leading toward--and out from--some inexorable
hub, through which my late Apalachian
childhood nights return to me, that body
laying unsleeping in an old wood house swept
off by floodwaters but still remaining
rooted there & in memory--made firmer by
its rattling constitutoinal forbears, the
lives lost in timber & stone but resurrected,
like memories thundering in on the steely clouds.
In my daytime dreaming I discern not the
architect but the architecture, the texture
of that revolutionary movement, the vast arch
marked by breaths, heartbeats, sleepless nights,
the smiles & caresses of lovers, the doubleshifts
& empty bottles & freshly cleaned kitchen counters
awaiting spills of wine & the aromatic bleeding
of late summer tomatoes.
through the nation. Ley lines of artifice
& industry, loads of coal, aluminum, timber;
the burden of utilitarian titans visecting town,
city, neighborhood; bifurcations of old choices
cemented, leaden, and transgenerational.
Every six minutes a train passes through town,
the equivalent & consistency of light piercing
the emptiness of the sun to earth; a fractal
equation of heavy, breathing life combusting
hydrocarbons, ancient but refreshed,
made new with the labors of the living.
Wheels cut through my transit, my day, my
circuitousroutes along their own stems
leading toward--and out from--some inexorable
hub, through which my late Apalachian
childhood nights return to me, that body
laying unsleeping in an old wood house swept
off by floodwaters but still remaining
rooted there & in memory--made firmer by
its rattling constitutoinal forbears, the
lives lost in timber & stone but resurrected,
like memories thundering in on the steely clouds.
In my daytime dreaming I discern not the
architect but the architecture, the texture
of that revolutionary movement, the vast arch
marked by breaths, heartbeats, sleepless nights,
the smiles & caresses of lovers, the doubleshifts
& empty bottles & freshly cleaned kitchen counters
awaiting spills of wine & the aromatic bleeding
of late summer tomatoes.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Poem: Pass the basket
I have been dabbling in poetry again, and not just haiku. Here's one I cobbled together, though I admit it is still rough. It shows I have been thinking of Ginsburg and Gary Snyder lately.
...
Pass the basket
& draw on your mothy pockets
with those anesthetized hands;
the cool gift of ungiving.
What gems & fruits
might feed our musicians,
our lost poets, our hoarse sidewalk prophets?
What fuels the awoken spirits
& the half-assed Buddhas, the part-time messiahs?
Judas & Jesus are looking for a cup of coffee outside the bar;
Tanto & the Ranger have been turned away from the Shelter,
walking the streets staying warm with a bottle of Wild Turkey;
Penelope sings for her love in the coffeeshop,
& Ulysses is lost from his crew in the Ponderosa pines.
The empty basket passes for the tithe
to the unbelievers, the pagans, the uncertain übermensch.
While Clark Kent spends his off hours
scratching bad poetry for Lois
who will never read it
because she is out to dinner with an internet-inspired bad date.
And the empty basket pays the bus fare, the gas money,
most of a train ticket back home.
The kids all dream of the Village,
the basket houses full of honest child faces
& the City becomes Montreal, Paris, Austin upon waking.
Through the day they walk on stilts, wear papier mâché masks, picket for Truth--
not knowing what Truth or whose Truth,
just the word like a crisp, Braeburn apple in hand--
& they hold out hats, upturned & empty.
So we pass the basket,
not for the beer or the cuppa,
not for the gas or the tickets,
not for the falafel or dogs,
not for the hotel room or the camping permit;
yearning for full moon silver coins
& the paper to scrawl out the ghosts tucked tightly in our pens and brushes.
...
Inspired, in part, by No Direction Home; also to those with only cars, hotel rooms, and parks to sleep on or in in Flagstaff. May creativity and godliness find multifarious forms and suprising manifestations of painful beauty.
...
Pass the basket
& draw on your mothy pockets
with those anesthetized hands;
the cool gift of ungiving.
What gems & fruits
might feed our musicians,
our lost poets, our hoarse sidewalk prophets?
What fuels the awoken spirits
& the half-assed Buddhas, the part-time messiahs?
Judas & Jesus are looking for a cup of coffee outside the bar;
Tanto & the Ranger have been turned away from the Shelter,
walking the streets staying warm with a bottle of Wild Turkey;
Penelope sings for her love in the coffeeshop,
& Ulysses is lost from his crew in the Ponderosa pines.
The empty basket passes for the tithe
to the unbelievers, the pagans, the uncertain übermensch.
While Clark Kent spends his off hours
scratching bad poetry for Lois
who will never read it
because she is out to dinner with an internet-inspired bad date.
And the empty basket pays the bus fare, the gas money,
most of a train ticket back home.
The kids all dream of the Village,
the basket houses full of honest child faces
& the City becomes Montreal, Paris, Austin upon waking.
Through the day they walk on stilts, wear papier mâché masks, picket for Truth--
not knowing what Truth or whose Truth,
just the word like a crisp, Braeburn apple in hand--
& they hold out hats, upturned & empty.
So we pass the basket,
not for the beer or the cuppa,
not for the gas or the tickets,
not for the falafel or dogs,
not for the hotel room or the camping permit;
yearning for full moon silver coins
& the paper to scrawl out the ghosts tucked tightly in our pens and brushes.
...
Inspired, in part, by No Direction Home; also to those with only cars, hotel rooms, and parks to sleep on or in in Flagstaff. May creativity and godliness find multifarious forms and suprising manifestations of painful beauty.
Warming isn't cheap: Wild fires, climate change, and taxes
This is in reflection based on this article: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/20/501081/connecting-the-dots-how-climate-change-is-fueling-western-wildfires/
It is hot in Flagstaff these days. I'm not saying it is sweltering 90s and humid like I'm used to in the Midwest summers, or the 110s and 120s one might expect in Phoenix. I'm saying that like the rest of the West, we're experiencing global warming.
And it isn't cheap.
The raging wildfires in the American West are astonishing. They are the partial result of a dry winter and early loss of snow. The forests are drier than they ought to be and that great big western sky is pretty cloudless, though you may get billowing smoke in certain regions. And even when the storms do come, the parched forests are going to be less able to manage lightning strikes, flitting embers, and stray anthropogenic sparks. But what we're seeing is, in some startling ways, horribly anthropogenic. We are turning up the thermostat.
So we're sending out courageous firefighters, recruiting more planes, and evacuating more communities in order to save lives and protect habitats. Unfortunately, we are also protecting old habits. Month after month, year after year we're seeing hotter and drier weather (in the West, while other regions like Minnesota are experiencing deluges, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/20/503301/hell-and-high-water-as-record-sw-wildfires-rage-duluth-is-deluged/) that ultimately comes out of our pockets.
What do I mean? Well, those firefighters are government employees, funded through taxpayer dollars, and the necessity to pull in more planes and other equipment shows how ill-prepared this system of protection is for climate change. (This in the context of a conservative stance of shrinking government and a liberal politics that seems to stand on sand rather than soil and bedrock.) So these stopgap measures are going to hit government pocketbooks hard, and the state governments as well as the federal are seeing more moths that dollars.
I have plenty of reasons to ride a bike rather than drive (which, I admit, has been a failing of late), to avoid petrochemical-intensive foods (commercial meat, non-regional produce, and highly processed food products), and aim for other lifestyle changes to reduce personal carbon emissions. Even on the personal and communal scales, we are going to have difficulty buffering ourselves against these radical ecological changes. For those who don't know--and I recognize that for some this is threadbare and even trite--we get the word ecology and economics from the same Greek root: eikōs, or "home." What we don't pay for now in terms of efficiency, industrial paradigmatic shift, and cultural transformation--with the final goal of a sustainable culture, politics, and biosphere--we are already being forced to afford through emergency services, amelioration, and adaptation/maladaptation. We're paying for climate change right now, not in five or ten or fifty years, but right now.
And I want to be positive. I want to spin something exciting and beautiful and visionary out of all of this. Maybe another day. Now, I think we need to take a look at what is in front of us: short, dry winters; premature springs; dry and bipolar summers; and the perturbations of millenia-old growing seasons. I'd like to say a petition or a presidency can do it, but it demands some radical challenges to the legitimacy of the contemporary American politics, not just in rhetoric and subject, but in involvement and demands.
Douglas Adams remarked, "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as the go by." Well, we seem to be hearing plenty of those and they're not for publishing stories or books. We have already spent our stipends and now are running on cigarettes and coffee and ramen noodles. If we don't get to some serious work soon, I think we'll just be down to the cigarettes. Or maybe we'll stick with the ramen, instead.
It is hot in Flagstaff these days. I'm not saying it is sweltering 90s and humid like I'm used to in the Midwest summers, or the 110s and 120s one might expect in Phoenix. I'm saying that like the rest of the West, we're experiencing global warming.
And it isn't cheap.
The raging wildfires in the American West are astonishing. They are the partial result of a dry winter and early loss of snow. The forests are drier than they ought to be and that great big western sky is pretty cloudless, though you may get billowing smoke in certain regions. And even when the storms do come, the parched forests are going to be less able to manage lightning strikes, flitting embers, and stray anthropogenic sparks. But what we're seeing is, in some startling ways, horribly anthropogenic. We are turning up the thermostat.
So we're sending out courageous firefighters, recruiting more planes, and evacuating more communities in order to save lives and protect habitats. Unfortunately, we are also protecting old habits. Month after month, year after year we're seeing hotter and drier weather (in the West, while other regions like Minnesota are experiencing deluges, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/20/503301/hell-and-high-water-as-record-sw-wildfires-rage-duluth-is-deluged/) that ultimately comes out of our pockets.
What do I mean? Well, those firefighters are government employees, funded through taxpayer dollars, and the necessity to pull in more planes and other equipment shows how ill-prepared this system of protection is for climate change. (This in the context of a conservative stance of shrinking government and a liberal politics that seems to stand on sand rather than soil and bedrock.) So these stopgap measures are going to hit government pocketbooks hard, and the state governments as well as the federal are seeing more moths that dollars.
I have plenty of reasons to ride a bike rather than drive (which, I admit, has been a failing of late), to avoid petrochemical-intensive foods (commercial meat, non-regional produce, and highly processed food products), and aim for other lifestyle changes to reduce personal carbon emissions. Even on the personal and communal scales, we are going to have difficulty buffering ourselves against these radical ecological changes. For those who don't know--and I recognize that for some this is threadbare and even trite--we get the word ecology and economics from the same Greek root: eikōs, or "home." What we don't pay for now in terms of efficiency, industrial paradigmatic shift, and cultural transformation--with the final goal of a sustainable culture, politics, and biosphere--we are already being forced to afford through emergency services, amelioration, and adaptation/maladaptation. We're paying for climate change right now, not in five or ten or fifty years, but right now.
And I want to be positive. I want to spin something exciting and beautiful and visionary out of all of this. Maybe another day. Now, I think we need to take a look at what is in front of us: short, dry winters; premature springs; dry and bipolar summers; and the perturbations of millenia-old growing seasons. I'd like to say a petition or a presidency can do it, but it demands some radical challenges to the legitimacy of the contemporary American politics, not just in rhetoric and subject, but in involvement and demands.
Douglas Adams remarked, "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as the go by." Well, we seem to be hearing plenty of those and they're not for publishing stories or books. We have already spent our stipends and now are running on cigarettes and coffee and ramen noodles. If we don't get to some serious work soon, I think we'll just be down to the cigarettes. Or maybe we'll stick with the ramen, instead.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Counters and Alternatives: Jokes and Wisdom
All my friends have like
ideas, half-joking; we're
elder, fools, shamans.
...
I am in a quiet, reflective place. Somewhere between Rochester, Minnesota and my departure for Flagstaff from Lincoln, Nebraska, I came down with a cold. It hushed my voice and dampened my head, but my mind is heavy with magic stories, dream places, the afterthoughts of part-time strangers. I have read through the first 100 issues of Hellblazer (many of which are reread)--the comic of working class sorcerer John Constantine--and am finally jumping into Vurt by Jeff Noon--a drug-addled British cyberpunk Manchester dreamscape. During my travels I listened to Jennifer Eagan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (on Flagstaff to Independence, Kansas) and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; both of which practice a multiple-perspective, sometimes schizotypal examination of an event, a person, a family, a life. I am struck with a deep appreciation for narrative histories, even of the fictionalized sort. These multi-faceted tellings, these textured explorations of experience, of reality, always seem rooted in a magic of the moment, an understanding that language is brilliant when it points to its failure to share that which is its goal.
In my mind rested but restive mind, these connections are clearer than I will make them. I am entertaining the possibility of Tarot cards. I am intrigued by them in at least two clear ways. First, the tradition of the Tarot represents a way of evaluating and taking in the world that I appreciate even in my inability to understand. Tarot, like alchemy and the I Ching and other alternative wisdom traditions, relates some sort of synchronicity, reflectivity, and/or intertwining of the self with the greater structure, being, and/or perception of the world. Though the logic--a term I use loosely and anachronistically--remains elusive and unclear, the axiom that we are in and of the world is deeply satisfying to me. If in the process of making one's experience more understandable, one also comes to appreciate the world in a novel way, even if it is only through articulating uncertainty and strangeness, then I am captivated. (Note: I am not interested in divination or predictive uses of Tarot; divination, though it has a long tradition, strikes me as a misapprehension of such practices except under specific circumstances.)
Second, Tarot provides a counter-structure to knowledge and knowing compared to the one with which I am "comfortable." The rhetoric(s) of "capitalism" and "democracy"--by which I mean very specific, politically and temporally situated concepts--are deeply troubling. Capitalism has the troubling ability to claim counter-narratives and commodify them. Democracy has been used to validate and valorize the use of violence and the appropriation of public funds for militaristic ends. Theory and practice that go beyond and counter to such stifling structures of knowing are of crucial significance. Despite that, I think it is important to consider how such work may still allow space for hegemonic politics; with that in mind, capitalism and a disempowered democracy can continue to infiltrate such important work.
What strikes me as so important here is that an empowering counter-rhetoric around identity, political economy, spiritual and applied ecology is possible through working with both of these "intrigues" simultaneously. If we are to either deepen or contradict practical, praxical economy and politics, we have the challenge of thinking beyond the boundaries with which we are comfortable. I am not interested in rehabilitating sick institutions or ameliorating their impacts, though I think that those will be intermediate outcomes of such work; rather, I am interested in fostering (also read as "planting," "tending," "preparing") replacement institutions and clearing ("opening up," "contesting," "developing") the space in which such [counter]institutions can dwell. If these are to be both powerful and relatable--something we both want and can do--then they must be rooted in a deeper relationship of the human person to the world. This human person is porous in environmental, social, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, and--in the spirit of these alternative wisdom traditions--cosmic ways.
So why the haiku? Well, it is derived from a few text messages I sent to my friend Sam Bradley. It seems that all of my friends expect free drinks now that I work at a wine bar, though they only expect in "half-joking" ways. What does this mean? Well, I identify three roles (though there are many more, and synonymous names for these three) in which wisdom and jest are intertwined: the elder, the fool, and the shaman. The elder may chide and condescend, but offers pearls of guidance and truth that the jokes and stories may allow to stick. In oral traditions, the elder (sometimes maternal, sometimes paternal, sometimes both) is the primary individual(s) responsible for passing along stories and histories that communicate personal identity. The fool (when well articulated and not simply the ridiculous or obscene) provides a mirror through which we might see the self or society (as individual; the society: an everyman; the outcast: drunkard; the authority: royalty or the Church; and so on) in insightful ways. It is by providing a foil of the norm, appropriate, or normative that we can see the truth of who and what we are. (This is highlighted by how the fool and the shaman are sometimes analogous in certain cultures, such as some northeastern First Peoples of North America/Turtle Island, though I am not able to be more specific.) And third, though not finally, is the shaman who provides an intermediary between human, ecological, and spiritual worlds. (Note: These are definitely overlapping and co-constitutive categories for many if not most cultures; how they exist as such, though requires specific and sympathetic analysis.) The shaman demonstrates knowledge in counterintuitive ways to the cultural norm, though such practice is validated by the in-betweenness that such roles explore. Plants', animals', and places' spiritual significance may be identified through medicinal use or magical qualities. Shamans provide insight into the experiences of spirits, places, animals, and plants that support the well-being of the community even if the reasons did not fit with the understanding of the community, such as by "listening" to waterways and precipitation or--as Aldo Leopold puts it--"thinking like a mountain" to appreciate the relationship between wolves, mule-deer, and the mountains.
If I want to take these roles and insights seriously, it means stepping beyond normative behavior. It means exploring and dwelling in the in-betweenness where the shaman finds tense, dynamic, and insightful home. I think of Slavoj Zizec, whose uncouth enthusiasm and diction makes him a sort of jester in the court of political theory, in the theatre of theory, as it were. He crosses the edges of the socio-cultural norm (where trash and human waste go, the analysis of gender and perversion in film, the demarcation of imagination in the political) to show us the rather narrow limits of our society, politics, and psychology. I work hard to appreciate the wisdom that I do not understand from others, but the practice of it strikes me as absurd or nonsensical. It is important to me to break such habits and I know of no clearer way than to practice counter-habits.
...
And as an afterthought, I plan on writing for this specifically (reflections, essays, poetry, etc.) at least once a week.
ideas, half-joking; we're
elder, fools, shamans.
...
I am in a quiet, reflective place. Somewhere between Rochester, Minnesota and my departure for Flagstaff from Lincoln, Nebraska, I came down with a cold. It hushed my voice and dampened my head, but my mind is heavy with magic stories, dream places, the afterthoughts of part-time strangers. I have read through the first 100 issues of Hellblazer (many of which are reread)--the comic of working class sorcerer John Constantine--and am finally jumping into Vurt by Jeff Noon--a drug-addled British cyberpunk Manchester dreamscape. During my travels I listened to Jennifer Eagan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (on Flagstaff to Independence, Kansas) and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; both of which practice a multiple-perspective, sometimes schizotypal examination of an event, a person, a family, a life. I am struck with a deep appreciation for narrative histories, even of the fictionalized sort. These multi-faceted tellings, these textured explorations of experience, of reality, always seem rooted in a magic of the moment, an understanding that language is brilliant when it points to its failure to share that which is its goal.
In my mind rested but restive mind, these connections are clearer than I will make them. I am entertaining the possibility of Tarot cards. I am intrigued by them in at least two clear ways. First, the tradition of the Tarot represents a way of evaluating and taking in the world that I appreciate even in my inability to understand. Tarot, like alchemy and the I Ching and other alternative wisdom traditions, relates some sort of synchronicity, reflectivity, and/or intertwining of the self with the greater structure, being, and/or perception of the world. Though the logic--a term I use loosely and anachronistically--remains elusive and unclear, the axiom that we are in and of the world is deeply satisfying to me. If in the process of making one's experience more understandable, one also comes to appreciate the world in a novel way, even if it is only through articulating uncertainty and strangeness, then I am captivated. (Note: I am not interested in divination or predictive uses of Tarot; divination, though it has a long tradition, strikes me as a misapprehension of such practices except under specific circumstances.)
Second, Tarot provides a counter-structure to knowledge and knowing compared to the one with which I am "comfortable." The rhetoric(s) of "capitalism" and "democracy"--by which I mean very specific, politically and temporally situated concepts--are deeply troubling. Capitalism has the troubling ability to claim counter-narratives and commodify them. Democracy has been used to validate and valorize the use of violence and the appropriation of public funds for militaristic ends. Theory and practice that go beyond and counter to such stifling structures of knowing are of crucial significance. Despite that, I think it is important to consider how such work may still allow space for hegemonic politics; with that in mind, capitalism and a disempowered democracy can continue to infiltrate such important work.
What strikes me as so important here is that an empowering counter-rhetoric around identity, political economy, spiritual and applied ecology is possible through working with both of these "intrigues" simultaneously. If we are to either deepen or contradict practical, praxical economy and politics, we have the challenge of thinking beyond the boundaries with which we are comfortable. I am not interested in rehabilitating sick institutions or ameliorating their impacts, though I think that those will be intermediate outcomes of such work; rather, I am interested in fostering (also read as "planting," "tending," "preparing") replacement institutions and clearing ("opening up," "contesting," "developing") the space in which such [counter]institutions can dwell. If these are to be both powerful and relatable--something we both want and can do--then they must be rooted in a deeper relationship of the human person to the world. This human person is porous in environmental, social, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, and--in the spirit of these alternative wisdom traditions--cosmic ways.
So why the haiku? Well, it is derived from a few text messages I sent to my friend Sam Bradley. It seems that all of my friends expect free drinks now that I work at a wine bar, though they only expect in "half-joking" ways. What does this mean? Well, I identify three roles (though there are many more, and synonymous names for these three) in which wisdom and jest are intertwined: the elder, the fool, and the shaman. The elder may chide and condescend, but offers pearls of guidance and truth that the jokes and stories may allow to stick. In oral traditions, the elder (sometimes maternal, sometimes paternal, sometimes both) is the primary individual(s) responsible for passing along stories and histories that communicate personal identity. The fool (when well articulated and not simply the ridiculous or obscene) provides a mirror through which we might see the self or society (as individual; the society: an everyman; the outcast: drunkard; the authority: royalty or the Church; and so on) in insightful ways. It is by providing a foil of the norm, appropriate, or normative that we can see the truth of who and what we are. (This is highlighted by how the fool and the shaman are sometimes analogous in certain cultures, such as some northeastern First Peoples of North America/Turtle Island, though I am not able to be more specific.) And third, though not finally, is the shaman who provides an intermediary between human, ecological, and spiritual worlds. (Note: These are definitely overlapping and co-constitutive categories for many if not most cultures; how they exist as such, though requires specific and sympathetic analysis.) The shaman demonstrates knowledge in counterintuitive ways to the cultural norm, though such practice is validated by the in-betweenness that such roles explore. Plants', animals', and places' spiritual significance may be identified through medicinal use or magical qualities. Shamans provide insight into the experiences of spirits, places, animals, and plants that support the well-being of the community even if the reasons did not fit with the understanding of the community, such as by "listening" to waterways and precipitation or--as Aldo Leopold puts it--"thinking like a mountain" to appreciate the relationship between wolves, mule-deer, and the mountains.
If I want to take these roles and insights seriously, it means stepping beyond normative behavior. It means exploring and dwelling in the in-betweenness where the shaman finds tense, dynamic, and insightful home. I think of Slavoj Zizec, whose uncouth enthusiasm and diction makes him a sort of jester in the court of political theory, in the theatre of theory, as it were. He crosses the edges of the socio-cultural norm (where trash and human waste go, the analysis of gender and perversion in film, the demarcation of imagination in the political) to show us the rather narrow limits of our society, politics, and psychology. I work hard to appreciate the wisdom that I do not understand from others, but the practice of it strikes me as absurd or nonsensical. It is important to me to break such habits and I know of no clearer way than to practice counter-habits.
...
And as an afterthought, I plan on writing for this specifically (reflections, essays, poetry, etc.) at least once a week.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Recipe - Squash Spice Cakes
I've been meaning to post this for a few days. I hope it gets reincarnated by my classmates at the Willow Bend Environmental Education Center.
...
Squash spice cakes
Adapted from Pumpkin Whoopie Pies, http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Pumpkin-Whoopie-Pies-369375?mbid=ipapp
Recipe makes about 2 dozen.
3/4 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c white flour
1/4 c oats
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon, generous
1/4 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp ginger or anise
Mix in a bowl and set aside. Preheat oven to 35oF.
1 stick butter (8 Tbs) at room temperature
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 ground flax (optional)
Blend until smooth with an electric mixer.
15 oz puréed squash
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
Blend together with the mixer.
1/2 c white flour
Gradually add in flour mixture. If needed, add in white flour until desired texture. This can make a more cookie style or a more cake style depending on the added flour. When thoroughly mixed, grease cookie sheets. Use a tablespoon measure to scoop generous globs of batter onto cookie sheet, they will double in size. These will bake pretty fast, 9-13 minutes. Once slightly cooled, move to cooling rack.
...
Squash spice cakes
Adapted from Pumpkin Whoopie Pies, http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Pumpkin-Whoopie-Pies-369375?mbid=ipapp
Recipe makes about 2 dozen.
3/4 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c white flour
1/4 c oats
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon, generous
1/4 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp ginger or anise
Mix in a bowl and set aside. Preheat oven to 35oF.
1 stick butter (8 Tbs) at room temperature
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 ground flax (optional)
Blend until smooth with an electric mixer.
15 oz puréed squash
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
Blend together with the mixer.
1/2 c white flour
Gradually add in flour mixture. If needed, add in white flour until desired texture. This can make a more cookie style or a more cake style depending on the added flour. When thoroughly mixed, grease cookie sheets. Use a tablespoon measure to scoop generous globs of batter onto cookie sheet, they will double in size. These will bake pretty fast, 9-13 minutes. Once slightly cooled, move to cooling rack.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon: A Paranoid Allegory
The entirety of the anthology is available in .rtf format at
. This commentary contains spoilers.
...
Philip K Dick published the short story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" in 1980. The story concerns Victor Kemmings and the interstellar passenger ship which has failed to completely put him in cryonic stasis for the ten year travel to his new home. The ship's AI struggles to provide stimulation to Kemmings that will keep him from going mad. Unfortunately, as the AI tells Kemmings, "I am a simple mechanism, that's all." The AI relies on memories of Kemmings childhood and first marriage, and subsequently on wish fulfillment fantasies of what it will be like when they complete the journey and arrive at LR4-6, the colonized planet around a distant star.
"I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" masterfully prefigures fantastic questions of SF that appear in films such as Primer, Moon, and Solaris. Dick uses the lens of SF to tell us stories about ourselves and often about where we are headed. Philip K Dick died in 1982, four years before my birth, and just two years after publishing this story. What strikes me is his keen observation of how technology doesn't give us any distinctly new tools to encounter the world. Kemmings, laying back in his malfunctioning cryonic sleep chamber and blessed with nearly two centuries of life, is still obsessed with a few brief events from his childhood and first marriage. This excursion to a distant place is intended to be a new start, though even this new start comes with all the weighty emotional baggage he has taken into every other adventure.
I have read this before as a cautionary tale from a paranoid genius. We ought to watch our technology and watch ourselves because we shouldn't expect our "simple mechanisms" to do more than we allow them. How I presently reread it was concerning the depth with which Dick portrays the technological goal as some obscure liberation from our histories (childhood and spoiled opportunities), our physical limitations (age and travel), and psychological neuroses (the trauma of guilt, responsibility, and authenticity) which is ultimately unattainable; at least through technology alone. In fact, the abilities of the ship's AI suggest that real transformation and liberation must come through interpersonal encounters and are beleaguered by the rich complexities and wish fulfillment of technology.
When he was four, Kemmings was stung by a bee he tried to extricate from a web. He says to himself, "It was unfair. It made no sense. He was perplexed and dismayed and he felt a hatred toward small living things, because they were dumb." After an inattentive mother tells him to put Bactine on the sting, he finds his cat Dorky reaching for a bird in the garage. With his newfound disgust of small, stupid animals, he helps Dorky to the bird who snatches it and with the crunch and ruffle of a fresh kill. This precipitates an entire new wave of guilt leading to a leaden sky chiding him for his wrongdoing. Dick uses a very basic, believable, traditional narrative for a child--sticking with succinct, uncomplicated sentences--but allows these brief episodes to erode the later development of complex relationships and guiltless pleasures.
The ship's AI began the fantasies with Kemmings's first marriage with a small French woman named Martine. He reminisces of their first home but it is all overshadowed by its inevitable decay. These are the realities that stick with Kemmings. Despite a luxurious future replete with a wine cellar and 20th Century counterculture kitsch ("Fat Freddy Say's")--an allusion to a richer and more fulfilling past--Kemmings cannot but notice the way these memories are undermined, eventually leading to their frantic and terrible decay. The ship can take Kemmings's memories and provide him with a playground of childhood and youthful recollection, but it is the neurotic and anxious mind that pollutes and strips out the richness of these earlier experiences.
Even with the wish fulfillment of arriving LR4-6, his anxieties build up so much that an aching wound is treated by the hotel's robot doctor. Kemmings engages the robot doctor concerning the verisimilitude of this new world, taking a scalpel from the robot doctor--who has been as obliging as possible--and unscrews the back of the television to reveal an empty box. "'Oh dear,' the robot doctor says," now clearly channeling the ship's AI. Through various repetition of this landing fantasy, Kemmings makes it alive, if not entirely well to his new home. In the meantime, the ship has contacted Martine in order for her to meet Kemmings at LR4-6 and provide some form of recuperation or at least comfort. This is when we see the profound unraveling of Kemmings's mind:
"'There's no use turning [the TV] on,' Victor Kemmings said. He stood by the open closet, hanging up his shirts.
"'Why not?'
"Kemmings said, 'There's nothing in it.'
"Going over to the TV set, Martine turned it on. A hockey game materialized, projected out into the room, in full color, and the sound of the game assailed her ears.
"'It works fine,' she said.
[...]
"'Look at this.' He paused in his work of hanging up his clothes. 'Watch me put my hand through the wall.' He placed the palm of his right hand against the wall. 'See?'
"His hand did not go through the wall because hands do not go through walls; his hand remained pressed against the wall, unmoving.
"'And the foundation,' he said, 'is rotting away.'"
We are taken to appreciate the fear that Martine must feel being told that she is not real, that the TV is not real, that the wall is not real. Kemmings is living the virtual despite the material. His perception, once infused with the anxieties of youth, is now infused with the contamination of the virtual and imagined. The ship's AI has succeeded in keeping Kemmings in some way functional, but by resorting to cross-pollinating memories and wish fulfillment, Kemmings has conflated them all. I reflect more and more on the infiltration of the world with the hyperreal. Professor Jennifer Musial discuss how Twitter might support class questions by posting them to the classroom wall via the projector. A typed 240 character question is not a replacement for a raised hand. It is not real in the same way, even if it is real in its own way.
Kemmings recalls the 1980s when the poster he and Martine received as a wedding gift was made. The poster is framed and preserved, a valuable antique that Martine confesses she has had to sell since the ending of their marriage. In his dream-like state, Kemmings questions the poster's authenticity. He worries that the signature of Gilbert Shelton may be forged, applied after Shelton's death. Even the certificate of authenticity could have been added after the fact to provide certainty to a fake. He and Martine default to the friend who gave it to them, an expert on late 20th century counterculture. It is a human being not some artifice that provides him some measure of reassurance. Later, not even Martine can be the direct contact Kemmings needs to bring him back to the present and the real. At the story's close, he reflects to himself, "We didn't have sense enough to take care of it. Now it's torn. And the artist is dead."
I find this story haunting not because it is grim and paranoid, as is Dick's overall style, but because it seems so prescient. Between social media and video chatting, 3-D televisions and semi-immersive media environments, we seem to be overlapping with the moment when the virtual eclipses the material. In many ways, this may already be so. Online fora and chatrooms provide reinforcing environments for like-minded zealots of one bent or another. News sources and "objective" resources (see http://xkcd.com/978/) become so intermingled, either narrowing into blind fomenting certainty or broadening into untamable absurdity, when both have become subject to the whims of 24-hour news cycles and unchecked user-generated content. Our virtual and material have entered the hyperreal in which neither attain the certainty for which both strive.
These contemporary anxieties are not because of our "simple mechanisms" run amok. At least not according to Dick. Rather, we are seeing what neurosis, paranoia, anxiety, and fear turn into when given powerful technology and neverending play. Kemmings is stung by a bee, lifts a cat to snatch a bird, and dreamily squashes a feeble fluttering alien insect. His mother's cold demeanor and his parents desire to get rid of their cat Dorky plant a seed that yields a deep taproot into his subconscious which manifests as a grim karmic ritual throughout his life. His demeanor and self-destruction, as well as his fear from a grim omnipotent sky-god, become mind-numbing and deconstruct even the infirm barriers that hold his mind together. Technology offers us both a looking glass and a magnifying lens, an MC Escher artifact constantly reflecting ourselves onto the world in myriad beautiful and horrible amalgams. Our tools do not make us wise, it is how we use what we have. As Dick's story attests, we are not men with the tools of the wise; rather, we are children stumbled into the gardens of ancients and gods.
...
Philip K Dick published the short story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" in 1980. The story concerns Victor Kemmings and the interstellar passenger ship which has failed to completely put him in cryonic stasis for the ten year travel to his new home. The ship's AI struggles to provide stimulation to Kemmings that will keep him from going mad. Unfortunately, as the AI tells Kemmings, "I am a simple mechanism, that's all." The AI relies on memories of Kemmings childhood and first marriage, and subsequently on wish fulfillment fantasies of what it will be like when they complete the journey and arrive at LR4-6, the colonized planet around a distant star.
"I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" masterfully prefigures fantastic questions of SF that appear in films such as Primer, Moon, and Solaris. Dick uses the lens of SF to tell us stories about ourselves and often about where we are headed. Philip K Dick died in 1982, four years before my birth, and just two years after publishing this story. What strikes me is his keen observation of how technology doesn't give us any distinctly new tools to encounter the world. Kemmings, laying back in his malfunctioning cryonic sleep chamber and blessed with nearly two centuries of life, is still obsessed with a few brief events from his childhood and first marriage. This excursion to a distant place is intended to be a new start, though even this new start comes with all the weighty emotional baggage he has taken into every other adventure.
I have read this before as a cautionary tale from a paranoid genius. We ought to watch our technology and watch ourselves because we shouldn't expect our "simple mechanisms" to do more than we allow them. How I presently reread it was concerning the depth with which Dick portrays the technological goal as some obscure liberation from our histories (childhood and spoiled opportunities), our physical limitations (age and travel), and psychological neuroses (the trauma of guilt, responsibility, and authenticity) which is ultimately unattainable; at least through technology alone. In fact, the abilities of the ship's AI suggest that real transformation and liberation must come through interpersonal encounters and are beleaguered by the rich complexities and wish fulfillment of technology.
When he was four, Kemmings was stung by a bee he tried to extricate from a web. He says to himself, "It was unfair. It made no sense. He was perplexed and dismayed and he felt a hatred toward small living things, because they were dumb." After an inattentive mother tells him to put Bactine on the sting, he finds his cat Dorky reaching for a bird in the garage. With his newfound disgust of small, stupid animals, he helps Dorky to the bird who snatches it and with the crunch and ruffle of a fresh kill. This precipitates an entire new wave of guilt leading to a leaden sky chiding him for his wrongdoing. Dick uses a very basic, believable, traditional narrative for a child--sticking with succinct, uncomplicated sentences--but allows these brief episodes to erode the later development of complex relationships and guiltless pleasures.
The ship's AI began the fantasies with Kemmings's first marriage with a small French woman named Martine. He reminisces of their first home but it is all overshadowed by its inevitable decay. These are the realities that stick with Kemmings. Despite a luxurious future replete with a wine cellar and 20th Century counterculture kitsch ("Fat Freddy Say's")--an allusion to a richer and more fulfilling past--Kemmings cannot but notice the way these memories are undermined, eventually leading to their frantic and terrible decay. The ship can take Kemmings's memories and provide him with a playground of childhood and youthful recollection, but it is the neurotic and anxious mind that pollutes and strips out the richness of these earlier experiences.
Even with the wish fulfillment of arriving LR4-6, his anxieties build up so much that an aching wound is treated by the hotel's robot doctor. Kemmings engages the robot doctor concerning the verisimilitude of this new world, taking a scalpel from the robot doctor--who has been as obliging as possible--and unscrews the back of the television to reveal an empty box. "'Oh dear,' the robot doctor says," now clearly channeling the ship's AI. Through various repetition of this landing fantasy, Kemmings makes it alive, if not entirely well to his new home. In the meantime, the ship has contacted Martine in order for her to meet Kemmings at LR4-6 and provide some form of recuperation or at least comfort. This is when we see the profound unraveling of Kemmings's mind:
"'There's no use turning [the TV] on,' Victor Kemmings said. He stood by the open closet, hanging up his shirts.
"'Why not?'
"Kemmings said, 'There's nothing in it.'
"Going over to the TV set, Martine turned it on. A hockey game materialized, projected out into the room, in full color, and the sound of the game assailed her ears.
"'It works fine,' she said.
[...]
"'Look at this.' He paused in his work of hanging up his clothes. 'Watch me put my hand through the wall.' He placed the palm of his right hand against the wall. 'See?'
"His hand did not go through the wall because hands do not go through walls; his hand remained pressed against the wall, unmoving.
"'And the foundation,' he said, 'is rotting away.'"
We are taken to appreciate the fear that Martine must feel being told that she is not real, that the TV is not real, that the wall is not real. Kemmings is living the virtual despite the material. His perception, once infused with the anxieties of youth, is now infused with the contamination of the virtual and imagined. The ship's AI has succeeded in keeping Kemmings in some way functional, but by resorting to cross-pollinating memories and wish fulfillment, Kemmings has conflated them all. I reflect more and more on the infiltration of the world with the hyperreal. Professor Jennifer Musial discuss how Twitter might support class questions by posting them to the classroom wall via the projector. A typed 240 character question is not a replacement for a raised hand. It is not real in the same way, even if it is real in its own way.
Kemmings recalls the 1980s when the poster he and Martine received as a wedding gift was made. The poster is framed and preserved, a valuable antique that Martine confesses she has had to sell since the ending of their marriage. In his dream-like state, Kemmings questions the poster's authenticity. He worries that the signature of Gilbert Shelton may be forged, applied after Shelton's death. Even the certificate of authenticity could have been added after the fact to provide certainty to a fake. He and Martine default to the friend who gave it to them, an expert on late 20th century counterculture. It is a human being not some artifice that provides him some measure of reassurance. Later, not even Martine can be the direct contact Kemmings needs to bring him back to the present and the real. At the story's close, he reflects to himself, "We didn't have sense enough to take care of it. Now it's torn. And the artist is dead."
I find this story haunting not because it is grim and paranoid, as is Dick's overall style, but because it seems so prescient. Between social media and video chatting, 3-D televisions and semi-immersive media environments, we seem to be overlapping with the moment when the virtual eclipses the material. In many ways, this may already be so. Online fora and chatrooms provide reinforcing environments for like-minded zealots of one bent or another. News sources and "objective" resources (see http://xkcd.com/978/) become so intermingled, either narrowing into blind fomenting certainty or broadening into untamable absurdity, when both have become subject to the whims of 24-hour news cycles and unchecked user-generated content. Our virtual and material have entered the hyperreal in which neither attain the certainty for which both strive.
These contemporary anxieties are not because of our "simple mechanisms" run amok. At least not according to Dick. Rather, we are seeing what neurosis, paranoia, anxiety, and fear turn into when given powerful technology and neverending play. Kemmings is stung by a bee, lifts a cat to snatch a bird, and dreamily squashes a feeble fluttering alien insect. His mother's cold demeanor and his parents desire to get rid of their cat Dorky plant a seed that yields a deep taproot into his subconscious which manifests as a grim karmic ritual throughout his life. His demeanor and self-destruction, as well as his fear from a grim omnipotent sky-god, become mind-numbing and deconstruct even the infirm barriers that hold his mind together. Technology offers us both a looking glass and a magnifying lens, an MC Escher artifact constantly reflecting ourselves onto the world in myriad beautiful and horrible amalgams. Our tools do not make us wise, it is how we use what we have. As Dick's story attests, we are not men with the tools of the wise; rather, we are children stumbled into the gardens of ancients and gods.
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