Perhaps because I too occupy that pessimistically-infused, quasi-prophetic space in what I think of as industrialized civilization, I don’t find Ta-Nehisi’s perspective in any way grating (Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here to comfort you).
To some extent my view goes back to my deep appreciation for James Baldwin, beginning when I was a freshman in high school. I’d recently stumbled upon Black Like Me and I was very intrigued about the notion of getting to see the world through another human’s perspective. I asked our school librarian if she had any other books like that one, and she suggested a book by James Baldwin. What a writer he turned out to be.
What I found as a shy, introverted child, something of an outsider bussed to school from a rapidly receding farm countryside, is the attitudes I was able to experience in this imaginative literary world were very much alive all around me in many different ways, even in the then very liberal, academically-influenced Ann Arbor public school system; some attitudes were more overt than others, but arrogance is very hard to hide, because what is taken for granted as natural is not something folks tend to reflect upon.
And, throughout my life — this goes back now to those readings in the early sixties — despite all the liberal-minded efforts to create a world where racist attitudes are supposed to be induced to change through a patterning of conscious behavior towards a more open acceptance of each other, not that much has changed underneath. Particularly not by those who identify as white. An acceptance of all others who are just as human, though they may have different skin and physical feature characteristics, seems to always find a way to express itself, even if it’s embedded in such tropes as the belief that America is the land of the exceptional humans.
This attempt at patterning an overt set of behaviors that followed the work of martyrs of the sixties, like Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, only barely covers a deeply embedded institutional racism that cannot hide from an honest and calmly discerning apperception of behaviors and speech. Truth is very difficult to hide if one remains open and simply aware.
Perhaps that’s one of the inevitable failures of a political correctness program that so many have reacted against in a very political way recently. I now think that the political marketing phrase: “Make America Great Again” is code for “Make America White Again.”
This article was worth my time, I spent about an hour with it, and double checked all his research: The First White President
If anyone is inspired to read it, note where he points out in the beginning that Trump’s predecessors were the recipients of something he calls “the passive power of whiteness.” This “passive power” is a latent feature of American life that folks like Mike Ditka (“There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.”) have recently shown their obliviousness (at best) or active denial (at worst) about. However, with the rise of “Make America Great Again”, passive appears to be moving rapidly, in one sector of our population, from latent to overt. And that sector has had a large influence in electing the latest icon of American power to the White House.
“Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.” –Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma.” –Ta-Nehisi Coates
Mind if I use this piece elsewhere ren.?
On the bye, it’s been a busy summer in one way or another on this end and so sorry I didn’t keep up with things. What with one thing running just behind the next one a I haven’t really had any time to try and actually write anything worth much thought. Em, that is if I ever have much to give for thought anyways, but I do like to play at it. Any who, it’s been a long summer with winter now closing in and I’ve found that between losing my computer last spring and now I’ve also lost quite a few e-mail addresses i.e. contact numbers. Hmmm, maybe that cloud business is good for something other than the NSA keeping track of us all. Which brings to mind I had a fed show up on my door step last week, funny thing that. I haven’t seen them for awhile.
Looking forward to catching up.
Ogun
October 26, 2017 at 11:54
I miss talking to you. Had to close down the message board which seemed to be our last link. Glad it’s not. It was just too lonely sitting there (where? I mean, literally, where? In the Cloud? On a giant hard drive?) with no traffic. I am trying to keep the faith in Facebook Hell. What did I do to deserve that!? What a horrible place. Why is everyone there? In case you lost my email, it’s renhunt@gmail.com. You are welcome to use or share anything I write, here or anywhere. I don’t believe I own anything like written words, I’m just a channel of sorts, with a little of my own experiential take thrown in.
You have no reason I can see to doubt your ability to express yourself in writing. You are one of the more authentic writers I’ve ever read.
Also, I have written more about this topic and the exceptional writer, Ta-Nehisi, on Facebook. Still no feds at my door. Maybe they can’t find it. Even with GPS Fed EX and UPS drivers have trouble.
My solution to Cloud, which I refuse to use, is to back up everything important on multiple drives, which are then disconnected from the Internet.
My summer has been full as well. Finally got some wood for the wood stove, which was a bit of a scare back in June. Here we are in the midst of one of the few rain forests in the United States and all my wood sources had dried up and the corporations that own it all weren’t giving out new permits, despite tons and tons of it strewn behind in their many clearcuts. Then my wood guy showed up in July. He’d been in the Philippines with family for several months. So that’s why his phone just rang and rang and rang. Gorgeous fall this years. Some years its bland, not t his year.
Ren
October 27, 2017 at 08:59
Keep faith brother.
Ogun
October 26, 2017 at 11:57
I wouldn’t even know where to find Facebook if I wanted to. In a way I kinda feel bad about it now because I’d like to see some of the reactions to Ta-Nehisi’s latest writings. The man can turn a phrase no doubt about that, unfortunately the people that most need to read him and absorb what he has to say don’t or won’t because after all for them it isn’t really a problem just ask them. So I bet I can almost to a tee predict the reception your pieces received on a free-fire zone like Facebook.
For me though the few issues I have with Ta-Nehisi had less to do with his elegance in stating what should be painfully obvious to any sentient being within the American ethos but that he seems to be stuck in the great American exceptionalism dream. I’ve never seen him expand or rather try to explain how the presumption of white equals good bleeds into becoming the evils of empire. Hmmm, maybe how it’s the continuation of the grand manifest destiny charter would be a better way to say it. Or how it becomes my country right or wrong, salute the flag and shut up bombing those abode huts all over the world is in our best interests.
While he’s very good at pointing out how that elusive equality and justice for all ( that great American dream) hasn’t ever been realized or even really seriously attempted within our own borders he never proaches how that same blind white self-serving sickness is spread throwout the world because of……..well, we did it, so it must be good. In a way I think I can understand the brother staying small bore if that’s his intent but I’d like to see him widen his scope a bit more and focus on some of the much larger problems such blindness has led to.
I hope all that made some kind of sense.
October 28, 2017 at 07:35
He’s got enough money coming in from being The Atlantic‘s “Black Writer” — the very idea of which he says makes him retch — to live comfortably in one of the most costly cities in the U.S., maybe anywhere. That may help modify what I suspect he knows he’s saying from what I suspect he knows he should or would really love to say from a depth of outrage that should never cool, if he stays true to himself. But money is power in this society and power is seductive. I don’t know how much of an editing screen he has to go through to get something published. I know I stopped trying to get published years ago because of the editors. Those are the doors you go through to “make it” in this nightmare. The Atlantic is, after all, a for profit corporation, one that carries a long-held reputation for bringing “quality” to the American Exceptionalist Dream — or Nightmare as I see it.
Anyway, there are a lot of nuts in this nation, as should be apparent with what they put in the White House, and they aren’t getting any more sentient as time goes on. There’s no reason why they should be. Everything about this system suppresses our most human of characteristics, and very little of the standardized experiential life allows for a practice that would be actually humane. Being humane has become an abstraction to be debated. Our Nazis are just as inhuman as the Nazis that pulled off the start of WWII. I fear them myself. I’ve been physically attacked for saying things that make them uncomfortable, and I know the formula, I can say twice as much as someone with different skin color in the democratically self-conceived whiteness of this nation. When I keep my head down and my mouth shut I pass for the norm, as in the ideal of whiteness, not skin color, which is not really what whiteness is about. It’s all about power, privilege, and control, that’s the deadening logic once you accept a system that defies mutual respect. It’s about self given permission to go right on performing the ugliest, most horrific human behaviors known on this planet all in the name of the norm of power that know one receiving its benefits is willing to truly question and smile while saying how great your country is. You can’t get elected if you don’t. That’s how you get the elusive promise of something humane while the contradictory facts just keep on keepin’ on. I know that.
I’m interested in knowing what you’ve read of his, and where you think he’s pulled his punches. He thinks this is one of his best pieces where he pulled together his desire to scream the truth of what he sees with his writing flow, while at the same time considering this question: “How do you defy a power that insists on claiming you? What does the story you tell matter, if the world is set upon hearing a different one?” “Fear of a Black President” Ta-Nehisi Coates
I think every day I should pull my presence from Facebook, so I don’t recommend you find it, nor will I offer any advice on how to, unless you ask. But I can handle it, I tell myself. And the draw to write is strong in me. When the owners of Facebook start editing what I write, or refusing its publication, as Thom’s administrators did when I tried to write blogs after they killed their board, I suppose that will be the deciding blow. I edit myself, plenty, but I will not be edited.
October 28, 2017 at 08:49
Well a week without electric power short shor do put things in a whole other light for sure. But it seems things are getting back towards something like normal. We didn’t suffer too much damage unlike some others that had whole homes destroyed, I’ve only got one out building I need to patch a bit of roof on though it was a bit iffy to get the snagged branch cut out and down down as it was hung up about 30 or 40 feet off the ground. Good sized limb, it’ll make good firewood next year. Later this afternoon I’ll do that damn hole. Coulda done without that.
I suspect you know more about what kind of self editing one has to do in order to ‘make it’ than I do as I’ve never been one to do a lot of self-editing and I guess I’m now paying that price in both the monies end and socially.
Sorry I’ve gotta sign off for the moment and restart this computer or something it is moving at a snails pace.
November 4, 2017 at 07:21
So, I’m assuming you were in the path of that fierce North East storm. Nature does its tree trimming that way. I have a generator I bought after the last one here, December 2007. We didn’t have power for over a week. I had to replace all the shingles on one side of my house. Fortunately the 100 year old cedar shingles underneath still worked for the most part. Had a few buckets around catching the leaks. That was about eleven inches of rain a day worth during the 32 hours of hurricane force winds, sometimes clocking over 130 mph. Brought down most of the last of the old growth in a park up the road. The humans thought they could preserve them, but didn’t bother to realize it was the forest of brother and sister trees that keep them standing when nature has one of its big blows, not their venerable age and massive size.
Most of my self editing has to do with trying to make the words make sense to my feelings. I’m one of those rare INFs. (Why are INFs so rare?) I trust my intuitions and feelings together, not much trust in the logic part of the brain.
The doors were open to the “make it” world for me, I looked in, then backed away. That much I know had little to do with anything I can call my unique and valuable qualities, but more to do with the free pass I get from the way I look. I stayed self employed, which is not the most lucrative way to go if one is not willing to play the various games. I wrote technical stuff for awhile because that seemed to be the least intrusive on my sense of ethics about what to do with myself in this incredibly destructive society, then I called upon my practical skills that I learned as a farm kid and began to do remodeling work for others. That’s when I was surviving in West Oakland. Thanks to redlining and low housing prices in the extremely expensive Bay Area I could afford to live there. Managed to make a few good friends while I was at it.
I made self employment work for me on the strength of my work and the kinds of things people will do when they trust the work someone does for them: they share your name and phone number with friends. But I never made a big income. I was part of an artists community and like all of them, working for a paycheck was a huge waste of time. so I used my freedom to do a lot of things I enjoy doing for myself. I just don’t spend much and I spend carefully. So I ended up at a point in my early fifties where I could buy a home that needed a lot of work for cash. That became my work for a few years, flipping homes like that; now I’m living in the last one, like the music stops when the market crashes and I was lucky to be sitting in a chair, and I am on a relatively small social security monthly, but with no debts and only utility bills, it’s enough. I actually can buy a few luxuries now and then, like really nice computer parts, or good warm rain gear so I can keep dry riding my bicycle around here in the winter, though I guess that’s also practical because I don’t drive much.
Most people I know would be panicking on my monthly cash flow. The VA is my medical, not medicare B and so on, because I don’t have enough left over to pay for that. I guess I earned the VA with those four years in the Vietnam theater, though no doubt Trump and his fellow Republicans would like to end that federal expense so they can give the rich more tax cuts. Trickle down to the rest of us from them and all. You should have a sense by now of how much I despise that kind of system and the people it selectively sorts out for the controllers of the wealth.
As far as editing what I say around others goes, I’m not around others very much, but when I am, I tend to listen. Whether that’s a genetic trait in my lifelong introverted personality type or something I learned to do in order to be relatively unnoticed, I don’t know. Probably both.
November 4, 2017 at 08:20
Okay, let’s see if things move a little more easily now.
So to carry on;
whatever kinds of hoops Ta-Nehisi has to jump through to get his word out I think he does a pretty fine job of splitting those differences in the end and whatever critiques I have really amount to not much more than nit picking. The word he gets out is what white America needs to hear and finally at long last bear witness to if it is going to ever come to grips with itself.
I remember reading his ‘fear of’ essay some time ago, and sorry I forget where I ran across it, but at the time I came away with the same kind of rather uneasy feelings as this latest reading did. And I’m not sure how or why, but it seems he somehow pulls a type of equivocating shifting throughout the piece. While the acid nearly drips off the page at the same time he seems to advocate for the humble subjugation rather than a warranted outrage against a system that’s suppressed, stolen from and murdered the black, brown and red brothers for hundreds of years now. And continuing not only here in this country but all over the world.
The first time I read his article I did the same thing internally I did this time around…….waiting………waiting…….. even anticipating for him to call Obama out for what whose of us in the black community know him as: Uncle Tom.
Ah well, perhaps it’s again those split differences one must navigate in playing the game to go along to get along I guess.
I haven’t the talent or the gravitas do it but if you have Ta-Nehisi’s ear I’d like him to lay out for white America how the black community in the last 40 years has now become once again a 3/5 of representation (if that) within this country because of outlandish kangaroo court justice incarceration and through the multi-various voter suppression schemes.
November 4, 2017 at 09:01
I confess that I did not find Ta-Nehisi’s essays to be as deeply critical as I tend to appreciate. Especially of Obama. But I’m beginning to appreciate the razor’s edge he’s writing on the more I get into his efforts. He’s only 41 years old. So he’s still trying to figure it all out himself.
One thing I do appreciate: You can’t bludgeon the power people over the head with their blindness. And yes, it’s been Europe and the People Without History for this go-around with this long term grand experiment in civilization. About a ten thousand year experiment so far.
As a preface to anything about his writing, I want to say I see him as saying, as you said, what needs to be said to the deaf, dumb and blind white population in power, still in power, and obviously so with Donald Trump’s election. Most of the outrage against Trump does not fully acknowledge what he represents, nor the facts of the white demographics that voted for him. Many people, including Hillary, want to blame the uneducated rednecks, I think she called them the deplorables, or something. That is just a continuance of their elitist’s blind arrogance to history and the facts of life today, along with an absence of any semblance of empathy, an absence of which they like to lay on the sociopathic oligarchs they pretend are not in any way them.
I feel deeply that Ta-Nehesi understands that aspect of this election, and articulates it. Whether the people who need to hear it can, do, I don’t really know. I suspect a few are finally there. I think most still want it to disappear without their having to face it. I do have friends in my Facebook community who love him. They are almost all women, with the exception of doug, who you are acquainted with from Thom’s, and Chris, who you met at least once at Thom’s in a thread he started down in the Prophet’s Way forum where, you may recall, one of our more vociferous women on the board who ironically called herself Zenzoe, decided to make it into a very nasty war over religion rather than a discussion about spirituality. A whole bunch of my other friends also showed up, briefly, experienced Zenzoe and her henchpartners — oddly all men as I recall — and, satisfied that Thom’s was still a nasty place, left. Mostly women. (You left women out of your list of people who have been brutally colonized, objectified and subjugated by the white European patriarchy that’s morphed into the lethal neoliberal global “economy”. To call it a culture or a society is to make those words meaningless.)
I’m about half way through We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy, which is a collection of his essays at different points through the Obama Administration, most of which I’ve read at one point or another at The Atlantic. The title is a reference to eight years during the reformation period following the civil war. Very powerful reference, and I learned some more history I didn’t know. But the book is more than a collection, it’s a writer sharing with me his thoughts that were present when he wrote each essay. As one who enjoys writing and the context of writing, it’s much more to me than just a rehash of some essays. And as a result I am developing a much greater appreciation for what Ta-Nehisis is trying to do there at The Atlantic, which I think he sees for the “gift”, if you will, that it is for him as a writer, knowing full well that writers are lucky to get a voice at all, much yet one from a prestigious podium.
I don’t think he’s going to call Obama out as an Uncle Tom. The picture he’s drawn for me has even brought out my own feelings of empathy for what Obama has had to go through to be the iconic black president in the “White” House. Even though Obama backed off at every point where he could have given voice to the hundreds of years of oppression that are still ongoing, point out how it is still ongoing, we still got this White Power reaction that is Donald Trump. I watched people around me through the last eight years and I saw what was happening, and it’s just as Ta-Nehisi described it.
For example. One guy I know, I was talking to him about the possibility of getting subscribed to this emergency phone program, called Lifeline, because he could use it. He said, oh you mean the Obamaphone, and he sort of spat it out with a sneer. I did my breathing exercise for for long enough to collect myself. No, I said calmly and firmly, I meant the Reaganphone. Lifeline was started during the Reagan Administration. 1985. He looked at me with the typical dumbfounded doubt. Fox news never mentioned that to him, I suppose, when they were labeling anything and everything that associated socialism with Obama. That’s kind of a metaphor for the whole process of what was going on that no Martin Luther King, no Medgar Evers, no Malcolm X would ever be in the White House to speak out about, could not have been elected to be there. So, we are lucky to at least have had the image at least, I suppose.
So that’s the blunt reality of the Hopium that got Obama in the door. And yeah, I’ve been critical of what he’s done too. But I’m critical of America, the “Exceptional” and all its horrific acts that made it what it is. Obama just happened to be there. I know the president of the U.S. is not the acting CEO the nation, as Trump is trying to be, but a conglomeration of forces, mostly wealthy business forces. But criticism was never personally about one of the only presidents I could stand to listen to since I was listening to them blather their propaganda, and that includes JFK.
All I’ve ever wanted is to get a conversation going. I got one going over this on facebook, but it didn’t amount to very much. Nevertheless. It’s in the works and I can always bring up the references if I see an opportunity.
Ta-Nehisi said he learned a lot from his interactions with his readers and critics on his Atlantic blog. I didn’t know about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic these days. Maybe I would have his ear if I did.
November 4, 2017 at 10:36
I may find a copy of ‘Eight Years’ and do some reading if it’s more than a collection of already published essays though at the moment I’m trying to wade through ‘Manufacturing Consent’.
The people you listed that like Ta-Nehisi don’t surprise me at all, they would be the usual suspects (lol). Myself I don’t really consider me a critic of his as I do like his writing and thoughts, but like you would like him to go somewhat deeper and expound on the subject more. I know he has it within but also as you say how far over an edge can any one writer lean before one falls off and then out of sight never be heard from again becomes a vexing question. He’s not a priest nor prophet ala MLK or a firebrand Malcolm X nor a revolutionary like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale or Fred Hampton but I think he is more than just singer in a rock and roll band and would like to see him make a jump in that direction.
If given the chance would America have actually hired a ‘black president’ may be a question worth pursuing. Given Americans very limited knowledge of what black culture actually is the chances would be vanishingly small. There is a place Ta-Nehisi could have expounded and educated white America on, what the overriding black culture is really about which is inclusion more than anything else……..It allways has been and always will be.
But now America has it’s black portrait to hang up on the wall to feel good about as they go blindly stumbling through the dark looking for rhyme or reason for it’s malaise rather than turn on the light and look in the mirror.
November 5, 2017 at 07:10
It feels like you’ve hit the high points of Ta-Nehisi’s critique without reading Eight Years. The “black portrait to hang up on a wall and feel good about as the go blindly…” drives the nail all the way down in one stroke.
I’m pretty much burned out right now. I’m going to take a little break and try to revive. Then I’ll get back and hopefully have some more to say. It’s always been difficult for me to sort out clinical depression from my feeling/intuition of what’s taking place.
November 5, 2017 at 13:18
It’s daunting to try to explain structural racism to those who benefit from it from birth. The experience of it falls into that dubiously meaningful abstract philosophical category tossed around since its invention: existential. Then you have this problem of different types of personality types, which are obvious to some of us, I think, but utterly abstract and foreign to others. And most of those others are of what those who try to put type the distinguishable parts of personality into categories would call “sensing”. If there’s any truth to these dinstinguished characteristics, and any truth to the efforts to quantify their appearance in the population, then the majority of the population favor sensing. Existential sensing is different from existential intuition in the following ways:
Sensing (S)
Paying attention to physical reality, what one sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells. Sensors are concerned with what is actual, present, current, and real. They notice facts and remember details that are important to them. They like to see the practical use of things and they learn best when they see how to use what they are learning. Experience speaks to them louder than words.
The following statements generally apply to Sensors; they:
Intuition (N)
Intuitives Pay the most attention to impressions or the meaning and patterns of the information they get. Intuitives would rather learn by thinking a problem through than by hands-on experience. They are interested in new things and what might be possible, so that they think more about the future than the past. They like to work with symbols or abstract theories, even if they don’t know how they will use them. They remember events more as an impression of what it was like than as actual facts or details of what happened.
The following statements generally apply to Intuitives; they:
I’ve taken a professionally administered MBTI assessment and I come out an INFP. N is for intuition in that alphabet soup. As I was trying to explain above, people with S rather than N in their personalities, are the most predominant in the population. As an intuitive, I find describing something like structural racism, as I understand it, to most people — structural racism is by its very name about abstract social structures, not concrete buildings, and understanding these structures requires “reading between the lines” of any description about any part of society — to be nearly impossible most of the time. I guess what I’m trying to do, here, is come up with some sort of explanation for myself, for why I find myself so inadequate to the task when it starts out in my own mind that what I’m trying to explain is so obvious.
Anyway, yesterday was one of those days for me. So when I got back from my Sunday ritual of riding my bicycle to South Bend, where I meet a few friends for morning coffee and conversation, I was semi depressed and exhausted. And that’s when I saw your comment. I have my writing energy back. I always think it’s gone forever when it goes.
What I consider one of the more understandable descriptions of structural racism is something I happened to have recently read again in Ta-Nehisi’s essay: The Case for Reparations (It’s the year 5 essay in Eight Years). As a result of my recent re-acquaintance with the piece, and its seeming clarity, I was all excited because I thought the patterns he provided would help me to describe how it all works. These friends of mine, by the way, are all part of a recently formed group called The Willapa Bay Resistance. Some are involved in the efforts to protect immigrants from the Republican anti immigrant policies. What they think they are resisting, though, I’m never quite sure. Anyway, as always, I fail to explain what I’m trying to explain as the big picture that has to be resisted. Or it feels like I fail.
By the way, a friend of mine who knows one of the producers of the documentary: I Am Not Your Negro had an exclusive secret code to enable viewing the festival version on line. She shared it with me for my birthday, and I had those friends over for a viewing. They all loved it. But I don’t really know what they loved about it.
I have more to say about what I think resistance means in this society, but this is already a lot of words to keep inside some framework of sense. Another time maybe.
November 6, 2017 at 07:55
Partial quote from MLK letter from the Birmingham jail,
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Full text here : http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
Hmm, not sure why I thought that would fit here but for what ever reason it came to mind I still think it’s one of MLK’s most prophetic message for all the yesteryears now passed unto todays world.
I confess I haven’t seen ‘I am not your Negro’, but I take it your showing wasn’t that long ago? Perhaps now after your group has time to sleep on it a bit the time to discuss what the movie meant for each is neigh either as a group face to face or if you think they’d be more honest do some one on one conversation, but whatever force their hand so to speak if for no other reason but to find a place to fit some piece of the puzzle within the big picture just for yourself.
Even while not really knowing a thing about any of the group I’d be willing to bet they didn’t give it more than a second thought or two because the black, the brown and the red is always forgotten in this country unless we are rioting in the street.
Sorry, I don’t really mean to sound that bitter but……it does come out that way at times.
Yeh, well resistance. Resistance to what? We have a smorgasbord menu to choose from in these fractured mirror times. Which is more pressing than the next? Population? Climate? The oceans? Social calamity? Biodiversity? War? Man, the menu goes on and on seemingly forever without really doing anything but touching on but really never bringing into focus what ‘the big picture’ is. So I guess I know what you mean when you say, I don’t really know what resistance means.
November 7, 2017 at 06:53
That quote voicing MLK’s disappointment with the white moderate’s follows from what I was trying to express with my entire last post. I was speaking about the moderates of the species. The moderates of this world are in the majority, I believe, given all I’ve seen. They are the ones most apt to be comfortable with the structure of a given society. It’s difficult for idealistic people to appreciate the depth of that. Moderates is a word that I feel describes people who do not want to change much as long as things aren’t terribly uncomfortable. I think this is a deeply human thing, not something that varies much with external appearances. Where moderates are willing to do something about change will, I predict, be where their sensory experience renders them with feelings of discomfort.
Idealistic issues that they might listen to, say on Sundays, are not issues that burn brightly in their minds to illuminate the details of the Sensory aspects of their lives, details that they can remain comfortable living with day by day.
I think back to where I was mentally in 1963. For one thing I was a teenager. For most of the year, 16. Not very experienced in the ways of the world. But I was desperately searching to make sense of things, and I had a lot of discordant and contradicting pieces all around me that I was trying to make sense of. One was the patterned way that people tended to mistreat others, especially in terms of group attitudes. I have this kind of deep sense of a need for mutual respect in all my encounters with others, and when it’s not there, my intuitive response is to react and try to make things fair, equal, mutually respectable. I guess that’s why I’d picked up that book Black Like Me in the first place while still in junior high. But still, I was pretty ignorant, experientially, at 16, meanwhile a 34 year old man was writing those amazing words from his jail cell. I didn’t even read them until years later. And they mean a lot more to me now than they would have at 16.
Nevertheless, the human-constructed world I’d begun reacting to, and in my own way trying to resist becoming a part of, therefore becoming an outsider at nearly every turn, is not much different from the vision I get while reading MLK’s letter from that jail cell. There is something consistent in the deeper meaning of his words that transcends time, and transcends a number of things in order to make sense of this unique human pattern of doing unjust things to others. Like he says, there are just laws and unjust laws. True. But maybe the whole thing of codifying ways of behavior as laws is misbegotten from the beginning of the effort. And I don’t think any such thing was taking place before humans invented this technology that makes up civilization. That technology being institutions that are based on rational, machine-like principles. And then somebody needs to create laws that it runs by. When you want to make that somebody that can’t be questioned then you need to invent a god.
So, a word that I did not know at the time MLK was writing that letter, anarchy, or anarchism, is a word that describes my resistance. Archy means to rule, and it comes from arch which is a structure with a top and a form of everything else coming beneath. Without a formal structure in society a people cannot create a sense of hierarchy (there’s that word archy again). To put an “a” in front of archy is to describe in one word a state of being against structure. You don’t have to be violent to be an anarchis, but violence is what hierarchy does to maintain itself. So sometimes defense seems appropriate, I suppose.
I discovered while studying the accumulated debris of cultural anthropology that there have been, probably were for most of the evolution of the human species, cultures without archy. If there’s any meaning to democracy I can make sense of it would be a non archical society where people treat each other with mutual respect. Every surviving society that might have any resemblance to about 150,000 years of the existence of a homo sapien species is one based on mutual respect. There is no formal hierarchy, though there may, usually will be, people within who have special qualities; and those are both appreciated, while at the same time a society develops agreed upon ways of making sure those with special qualities don’t get more of the shared resources than anyone else. This was probably because it was found that as survival, as a group effort, these shared efforts work best when everyone is given equal respect.
And what is any society, and now all societies combined, but an effort for a single species to survive on planet earth? Why is it any more than that?
If anything stands out to me today, it’s that civilization has long since abandoned that principle.
How do you explain that to a moderate who is happy with what they are sensorily getting from civilization? I try. I fail.
November 7, 2017 at 08:10
Yet another prophet from those heady years, a young white man that hadn’t yet mashed himself up on the motorcycle and still had a clear vision.
See how well his metaphors fit into to todays world some 55 years later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5al0HmR4to
November 7, 2017 at 08:12
My friends who watched “I am not your negro” with me are all Bob Dylan devotees.
November 7, 2017 at 08:22
I’ve always felt a deep resemblance between All Along The Watchtower and Waiting for Godot.
So does this explain why Dylan got a Nobel Prize (for literature)?
November 7, 2017 at 08:44
I’m not sure what happens to my sense of Waiting for Godot in this version of All Along The Watchtower, but, anyway, I like their interpretation.
November 7, 2017 at 09:03
63, yeh that was a long time ago. Ya got 3 or 4 years on me ren and if I was even aware of MLK or Dylan for that matter it would have been of small thoughts in passing only as I was wound up in my own head about my immediate family issues. About that time I was trying to come to terms with the fact I had long known somewhere inside, but kept at bay somehow, that my own mother or father didn’t want me around and didn’t want to deal with me. The end of 63 going into 64 was when I found myself on the street figuring out how to eat and stay alive. The actual first time I believe I listened to Dylan was after I’d been rescued by my grandparents and some friend from high school dragged me along to some ones house that was starting a band. When we went in they were all gathered around the turn table going gaga over Dylan’s new tune’ Like a rollin stone’. They felt it had some deep significance for them/us. Hmmm, I listen to it once and walked away, oh hum been there done that.
Mlk, I don’t think I really learned much about him till my black power days and then it was after he’d been murdered. Though I do remember some of the olders talking about him while on the march to Delano during grape strikes with Chavez but I didn’t pay it much mind at that time.
Waiting for Godot and ‘all along the watch tower’? Interesting. Still wandering through my brain trying to find a connection between them.
November 8, 2017 at 05:10
Yeah, I’m still trying to understand what my years actually mean. It doesn’t feel like I imagined it would to be this age.
You don’t have to bother with any of this crap. You just stimulated some thoughts and I get a kick out of indulging myself.
From everything I remember you saying over time, it sounds like you were in Southern California back in 63-64. When were you rescued by your grandparents? Which side of the family were they? Your mother’s or father’s? How and when did they get to California? Most of the people I got to know in West Oakland had come out from Mississippi and East Texas back in the forties and West Oakland was really bustling then due to the war. (Sorry, its the anthropologist in me I guess. I never knew my father’s parents, just his brothers and sisters and their kids, and they were close-knit. Still are, back in Michigan. My mother’s parents wanted to get me away from my father because they thought he was abusing me by “putting me to work” on the farm, even though he’d made me a full partner and it was sort of my agreement with him to do the work. They were big time socialists involved in the auto labor unions of Detroit. They were also immigrants from Croatia, which was a nightmare part of Europe when they fled after WWI. I guess things don’t really change much there. During all this my mother was really not with us, mentally. She was in and out of mental institutions.)
How long were you trying to survive on the streets before that? I can only begin to imagine how you must have been feeling about the world about then.
Living on a farm and doing the farm work created my world at that time. I was not appreciative, of course, but rather I indulged myself by dreaming of getting away somewhere, Europe, France and especially Paris where Baldwin, Miller and other expatriate literary figures I was into had gone… that was one of my escapes. But looking back at all that work and what I had to do to figure it all out — ancient breaking down machinery problems, animals I got to know and care about, planting, haying, building things — all that set me up for life in ways that I now believe gave me a kind of advantage over city born and bred kids. An advantage I could only begin to appreciate years later. Just the physical health alone was a gift that keeps on giving. I ate and learned to appreciate quality food that they call organic these days. I’ve watched all that rise up and then gradually become a commodified pretense, just like the dissent from the ’60s became commodified, and hippies became yuppies. I developed life long self reliant habits that I always go back to. I had to do most of it alone, but at least I was in a healthy environment. I can’t help but believe that’s why I’m so concerned about what the human species is doing to this planet. I really found my peace of mind in the natural world around me while growing up. I’ve always wanted to share that somehow.
I guess it also helped set me up to learn how to get by without a lot of influence from friends. I learned to rely on my own mind and imagination. So really, most of that culture rising up at the time was peripheral for me. The odd thing is, looking back, I feel like I was somehow in touch with a lot of it in a subconscious, parallel way. I think it took being thrown into that gulag known as boot camp for me to seriously begin to get out of my own self-absorbed head. Up until I was facing the draft, and decided to go Navy so I wouldn’t have to shoot anyone, my fantasies were made up from the books I read. Didn’t watch television, didn’t have much chance to see movies. I listened to farm reports on the scratchy radio turned up loud in the barn while I milked cows as, I think, other kids my age were listening to Dylan and talking about what all his lyrics meant. I didn’t know who Dylan was in any culturally significant way in 1963, or even in May of 1966 when I got off that bus in that gulag.
I am forever conscious now of how ignorant we can be of what is going on in the world, because I can look back and see how ignorant I was of all those forces swirling around me at that time.
I didn’t really discover the music or culture of the sixties until the summer of 1970, after I was free of the institution we call the military.
In April, 1967 while Martin Luther King was speaking out against the Vietnam War, I was dealing with my own epiphanic revelations that had occurred in a dream back in early February, about what I was entrapped within — the military — and what it was doing in Vietnam. Again, this is deeply shared through some subconscious means I can’t explain, because what the U.S. was actually doing was not something I was privy to. It would only be after I got out, when I had access to a university-based information system, that I would find scraps of truth to put together with my vision. They kept that, and all that was happening back in the states, far from our daily ingestion of information. We were just sensory automatons doing our jobs, and treated as such. It’s the infamous “need to know” routine all institutions like to indulge in to keep the minions barefoot and pregnant.
But when MLKing was breaking with the Johnson administration, with all its “Great Society” smoke screen for the true ugliness of the American Imperial colonizing genocidal fact in the world, I was embroiled in my own obsession of how to get out of this institutional trap I found myself in. In essence, it was the same struggle, as I later was to discover as I began to unravel all the lies and all the propagandistic crap we are constantly being fed.
And these institutions are like those Russian dolls. You get out of one and find out you’re in another, that was inside the one you just opened. Being outside and inside something at the same time may be my curse as an empath (The Many Strange Behaviours Of An Authentic Empath).
Two men having a conversation on a barren road by a leafless tree characterizes the beginning of Waiting for Godot. All Along the Watchtower is about two men, the joker and the thief, having a conversation. The song begins with “There must be some kind of way outta here” The bleak setting of each seemed to connect in my mind somehow when I listened to Dylan’s lyrics. I don’t know how that happens, I’d read the play back in ’63 and the hopeless, repetitious feel of it never really left my mind I suppose. Each act is a repetitious repeat of doing nothing, which can be frighteningly similar to just plain ol’ daily life. I can see how the ending of All Along the Watchtower can also be its beginning, thus helping to create that infinite cyclic effect. “Outside in the (cold — Jimi Hendrix, Dave Mathews versions) distance a wildcat did growl, Two riders were approaching, the wind began to how.” Beyond that I don’t really want to try to unravel all the ways it does or doesn’t resemble Waiting for Godot. It’s a feeling. And I can’t shake it.
November 8, 2017 at 08:52
For me ‘All along…..’ will always be tied up with war somehow. The imperial elite behind walls with all the associated trimmings while out in the ramparts facing the wild winds of fate two return chased by the fangs and claws of an end that can’t be avoided and perhaps will make it home this time………..only to be thrown out once again to defend the imperial walls against the inevitable.
‘And there must be some way outta here says the joker to the thief’ (brothers in arms). Both are wise to the games and machinations of the world and both want out of it all but the way out is one either want to face because to find the out is an unknown neither one of them understand. So tomorrow the same absurd theater is entered into willing all the while both hoping the end will be decided for them.
Sorry yesterdays writing was abbreviated and today I’ll have to do the same as I’ve not much time to spend at the key board, lots to do.
Promise to catch up and fill in some blanks (questions) when I have more time.
November 9, 2017 at 05:51
Sorry, so far that’s the best I’ve come up with for Godot and ‘All along……..’.
November 9, 2017 at 05:56
The beauty of literature is that it invokes subjective interpretations. I started out wanting to study literature thinking that it would be a gathering of minds who like to explore and share interpretations, and discovered there are those intellectuals involved who profess to be experts at interpretation, and they like to think they know (the) correct ones. That seems to be a characteristic of certain personality types. I don’t know why they are the ones that tend to get in positions of authority most of the time. But I can guess.
Your interpretation is a good story. Civilization and its perpetual warring is also part of my feeling of hopeless dismay.
I have to inspire myself to get out in the cold rain and ride. I’m going to put my writing energy there for now. So, take your time.
November 9, 2017 at 08:09
Even from this distance in time it’s hard for me to revisit those parts of the past that involve my immediate family. So I don’t usually do much else but peripherally refer to it only when trying to help in anothers understanding of ‘how I know’. And theres parts of my life post family that shouldn’t be discussed in any room with ears so those places and pieces also starts getting spotty as well. Ah well, such is a life lived on the edges.
Rescued by my grand parents (my fathers side) is kinda putting a, how shall I say it, a gilded finish on a picture that on closer inspection doesn’t look as pretty as when viewed from afar. In the spring of 65 my mother tracked me down (how she has that kind of reach is a whole other part of life story) in Reno, but it could just as well been in the Bay Area because at that time I traveling between the two areas depending on the weather. I loved the high plains desert so I guess it wouldn’t have surprised her to find me there. Any ways she tracked me down and told me my grand father had hurt his back bad enough that he was wondering how they were going to get through the season and if I would be interested in going down there and work the ranch while he healed up. So I stuck out my thumb and made the trip and the deal was stuck. I would do the work around the ranch and they would pay me with room and board and enroll me in and see me through high school. Off the top they told me I was on my own, I could come and go as I pleased as long as the work was done but don’t call them if I got into trouble or needed bail. So to take the gild off of ‘rescued’, I was not much more than a hired hand. Many a time I would be gone days at a time and show up at the breakfast table and nary a word about where I was or what I had been doing.
Though in fairness I guess in their way they tried to bring me closer into family but by that time I had so insulated myself against any more of that kind of hurt their overtures were for naught. I still felt I was just a hired hand and really, I still do to this day.
Yeh, not much has softened within me in regards to my family. I go back there only when I have too and then my blood only runs cold.
I’m wasted just putting down,
Later
ogun
November 10, 2017 at 07:33
I apologize for helping to stimulate painful memories. I ftend to repress how deeply damaged we are as members of civilization. I tend to think all of us being damaged daily by an ongoing process of social and cultural dehumanization, but some suffer much more than others for obvious reasons. What you had to endure is just wrong. Exploring the why of it all is not a salve, nor is gilding the memories.
In my case I’ve more than less successfully insulated myself. I’m more than 2000 miles from all that family and the churning that goes with it.
Take care.
November 10, 2017 at 13:41
I use rescued to describe the experience both because the word is one that most people can easily relate to and at the time I did feel rescued, if not by my grandparents then certainly by fate. The weight of every day and every night of how to survive through to the next day with the street as the only home isn’t something I’d advise for any 13 and 14 year old child.
In todays world the first shelter I may walk into with my story would have brought either or both of my parents before the bar to answer charges. For the misbegotten back then though there was no such place to hide from any of the four horsemen. And if there were I would have never gave them a second thought. My mantra was to keep moving, to feel the current only I seemed to know was there and keep within it. When I found myself at a lost for that flow and things became cold I’d move along to pick it up again is the best way I can describe how I got through those days.
At any rate the only real scars I came out with don’t have anything to do with the street per se but rest squarely on my parents shoulders and starting from when I was about 3 years old. But that was all so yesterday I guess, my father was killed in 78 or 79 in San Jose and truthfully I don’t know if my mother is even still alive and I don’t care if she is or isn’t. I hope she rots in hell.
Sometimes (like now) I’d like it if I were called to attend her death bed so I could tell her that to her face. ‘Rot in hell bitch’.
That’s a trip I’d go out of my way for and gladly make.
November 11, 2017 at 06:51
Please forgive me if this does not adequately honor the depths of your experience, but I feel a need to respond somehow. Your story of survival as a child thrown into the streets has an epic feel about it. Even the sound of a spiritual quest, but without the usual benefits, found commonly in indigenous societies where these kinds of quests are consciously set out for children as part of their recognized need for rites of passage to adulthood, of a guide. Those who find their way without that guidance are often those who have the makings of a given society’s shaman.
I know that the streets of civilization are cold and inhuman, inhuman in the true sense of our ancestral history of survival in the natural world, where that survival involves our innate capacity for empathy, caring for each other, and all aspects of being human that are now thrust upon the nuclear family, with now an increasing institutional trend for less and less structures of societal support once again. Salvaging these remnants of our social humanity were thrust upon the family during the time that the wealth was extracted from the earth, while the earth was uncaringly abused in pretty much the same degree the humans who were used in the hierarchically ordered institutions that came about to make it happen were. The making of cities — civilization comes from the latin term civitas, or city — is the making of an inhuman, cold, institutionally ruled environment where our humanity is rationally stripped from the process. Of course that’s my personal, therefore subjective description. Many disagree with that, obviously.
I tend to use the term “unnatural” to describe the civilized creation of a world that envisions itself as separate from nature, but I’m also aware, from careful examination of what I mean, that my meaning is a very limited and inevitably hyperbolic way to envision it. It is more like an artificial intelligence creating a kind of machine-like, uncaring robotic system within an overall structure that is, in its suppressed, and consciously forgotten intent, a form of adapting to the biosphere. But the “artificial intelligence” loses sight of that. Therefore, somehow within that overall structure, the people and their very humanity is left out of this adaption, where in all the previous social/cultural creations our endowed humanity was always at the very core. And, I must add — because of the results of my own vision quest years and years ago — why, I don’t know, but people are willing to go along with the loss.
What continues to amaze me about women is that when civilization comes in and destroys their very culture, their very way of life, of survival, they, as a rule, have shown the courage and the strength to hold things together for their children while supports all around them are falling apart. Often the men go off and get drunk or something like that. This is just an observed “as a rule” story that those who have bothered to care and observe (a recent phenomenon institutionalized as a profession called anthropology) have been able to tell us. Throughout the long arc of destructive civilized processes there haven’t been many who have bothered to notice the effects. After all it takes a lot of energy to do that and when things are falling apart, it generally takes most of humans’ energy to survive. Thus many epic stories of individuals with the strength to survive this horrible, ten thousand year process of cultural destructiveness are not told, and lay in graves that remain unmarked. That’s part of the underlying meaning I found in a book titled Europe and the People Without History. History tends to be the fond and official story of civilization that remains, at least partly because of the technology of writing. Can’t be too proud of my own writing when I consider that.
Generally speaking when civilized people destroy societies, “indigenous” societies — those where the people are not set up in institutional structures to make war and all the other wonderful effects of this institutional machinery that the civilized hi(gh)-story pridefully tells with special examples (generally the wealthy ones amongst the body polis) for creating — those societies fall apart rapidly because most of it is carried in people’s heads and collectively shared orally, and the people are left essentially on the “streets” of civilized societies, to fend for themselves without their skills. I think this is similar to what you were left with when abandoned as a child. I know it might not look exactly like that, but the story of homeless, genocidally-destroyed peoples of all the various colonized continents will have similar characteristics, with people with implicit questions they might even ask themselves, like: what do we do with these skills we have developed for survival over centuries that are now useless in this new environment where we are not free to use them?
Somehow the women as a rule seem to find answers, and strength to get by. Why? I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer. Maybe they’ll survive until some sort of “rescue” comes along, even if it’s the rescue of a set aside plot of land where the people can be herded and a few scraps from the civilized world will be thrown their way in compensation for their loss, or maybe not.
What happened to the people who were ripped from their societies in Africa and brought here in chains to be put to work to build this iteration of civilization is that horror of inhuman destruction ramped up on a grand institutional scale and then extended at a level of inhumanity even the people suffering hourly within this modern, barren-of-genuine-networks-of-social-humanity society we are struggling with — while thinking this is the best, most “progressively” evolved way the world could be — for several hundred years. I seems to me a very linear and therefore rational view to think we are living the best way humans have ever lived, and one that I’ve expunged from my consciousness long ago. But I don’t find many who share that story line absence. So I’ve had to live with being mostly (though not entirely) alone in my self-created storied views.
I don’t know how people find within them the strength to survive that civilizing experience, which has happened to us all in various ways. Somehow you did. I’m not at all sure I have, and my own struggle was no where close to as existentially dire as yours. Maybe your mother couldn’t.
Happy Veterans Day, fellow vet.
November 11, 2017 at 10:02
You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t wave that bloody rag or give any big rah rah’s for the service ( abbreviated as it was) I gave for it’s existence. Marching for imperialism wasn’t and isn’t something I find particularly endearing or dying for in any way heroic. Generally when I meet another vet I don’t thank them for service or ask about campaigns lived through but only say welcome home and let it go at that. IF I have an opening I may well delve into whys and what fors that usually devolve into shouting matches, so these days I mostly keep my mouth shut and move along.
Yeh, I’m not one of the more patriotic souls you’re likely to meet, I know too much. I know too many of the lies, too many of the veils thrown over the truth and too much of the disconnection willfully blind people make between cause and effect even within their own lives never mind with that of the world at large.
So no I didn’t wave any flags yesterday. I didn’t attend any parades or visit any graves. Somewhere along about bed time because some yammer head on the radio was talking about what a great day Veterans Day was I did give a passing thought like; “Veterans Day, yeh rah rah” waving my fist around holding a make believe flag in it and falling asleep I didn’t have any good thoughts.
Family business will have to wait, time for me to start moving.
November 12, 2017 at 07:15
I hoped you’d hear that last remark about Veteran’s Day with a tone of irony, after my extended rant that came before it. Anyway, as I was leaving Treasure Island after being processed out, crossing the Bay Bridge West Oakland on a bus, looking out over the Bay towards Alameda where I’d been stationed the last two years, I remember thinking, “I don’t think I can call myself an American anymore.”
November 12, 2017 at 09:33
Actually yes, I did read the irony in your sign off. I just needed to put my two cents worth in; aah probably just as a knee jerk reaction more than anything else. Chalk it up to another one those things that have bitten so deep they never really heal but continue to fester and ooze throughout ones life.
‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gentle into that good night” if I may misappropriate and repurpose Dylan Thomas for my lame fight against what passes for civilization in the world today.
The edges are going to be the only haven for anyone that may hope to survive the coming darkness that’s quietly but surely enveloping the human race.
The edges are the only places I’ve ever found that contain any light to follow.
And my resident crows now gather on the branches outside the window.
My favorite birds, I may start naming them. Maybe then they would start recognizing me as something other than a human but one of their own even if not in body than in spirit. Perhaps if I called to them by name they would come to me one by one and share their secrets only they know.
Would they tell me there are no secrets? Would they say that the only things I call secret are those things I refuse to see? Those I refuse to feel? Those I refuse to move towards?
Alas, they fly away again.
November 13, 2017 at 06:08
Right on (to use a somewhat worn and dated phrase). I feel much the same.
I don’t have a lot of hope for the survival of the species, but it’s gone through bottlenecks before and a few have come through to repopulate. One of the big ones was supposedly about 40,000 years ago when a small grouping of maybe ten thousand homo sapiens scattered around parts of Africa survived. Supposedly DNA studies show we are all related to those survivors.
This bottleneck is of the species’s own dark making. It’s called civilization. And it is very dark within.
November 13, 2017 at 08:22
Had to step away for a time ren, as you may have guessed going into the dark pits of family is for me is stepping on and then falling into a rotted wood covered dry well that is always within the land scape of my life. Once I fall into one those man traps clawing my out becomes a point of the survival of self.
At this point of my life while wandering the ramparts I’ve learned to read the signs those holes are located around and pass them by usually with little thought other than their existence because to wander too close the ground beneath the feet give way throwing me to the bottom with only a narrow patch of light that never reaches the bottom to help guide me out.
It’s very dark there so at this juncture ren I would prefer to turn my back on it and head in another direction. I’ve ventured close enough and once at the bottom it takes me a long time to climb out. It’s easy enough to find darkness almost anywhere one chooses to look these days without looking for pits of despair long passed to wander in.
Last night I visited the Black Agenda Report to check out the happen’n and ran across a pod cast of a symposium on the Black Panthers and specifically Huey Newton’s part in forming of the basis of the Panthers philosophy. Wish I lived closer, I would’ve like to attend. The about 20 min. presentation was a rather rambling talk about the split between the cultural nationalists who only want to be included more within the broad deadend capitalist aims and what is the true point of the revolutionary thought of inclusion for all.
One of Huey’s thoughts that came within the talk that stuck out for me I believe was a direct quote from Newton, “an education should be for the liberation of self” (paraphrasing now,) and not for a planned cookie cutter out come to fit an artificial constructed (non) community based on only self (i.e. capitalism).
Though most of the speech seemed to me to be mostly a rant against Temple University and the audio absolutely stinks you can (try to) listen and make something of it if you’d like here; https://blackagendareport.com/africologists-will-snitch-you
Then this morning on my way to my vice (the NYT crossword) I ran across this; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/t-magazine/bali-green-school.html?hpw&rref=t-magazine&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
Since then, today I’ve mentally been meandering across what little I know of other educational institutions who are trying the alternative. Summerhill in England and the Waldorf schools here in the states and almost start believing in some hope.
November 15, 2017 at 08:26
I had that feeling I’d lured you into a dark place. Sorry.
I woke up to another of my dark prescient dreams and that’s been hanging over me all day.
I tried to listen to the podcast; had difficulties because my hearing is still not up to hearing everything even with these prosthetic devices. Higher pitched voices are a problem. Had to step into another room and then I could sort of make out what she was saying. I kind of get it. Education is, after all, an institution designed to get people to adapt to institutions.
I think you probably have gathered that I don’t have much hope the final effects of civilization, not just on the human species that blindly created what amounts to a disease and now can’t let it go and move on to some form of adaptation that’s not so lethal, but so many of the other species, including eventually endangering those crows you mentioned, and my own blue jays here that no one else seems to appreciate. I think I’m going to just sit and dwell on all that for the rest of the evening. Cold and wet outside. Pushed myself to ride in it, though it’s getting harder by the year to choose to discomfort myself. Warm and dry by the fire this evening.
November 15, 2017 at 18:47
I almost didn’t link that pod cast because the audio was so bad, my hearing is still pretty good and even I had a hard time making any thing of it so I knew you’d have terrible trouble with it. But as I was bringing my thoughts on it’s contents I decided to let someone else make their own decisions on it’s meanings.
Instead of trying to sneak the Panthers into conversations I’d probably be further ahead if I just straight ahead openly declare my intentions, but the Black Panthers name has been so tainted and warped (might I say manufactured) within the American imagination it’s almost if not completely taboo to suggest they were one of the best chances of the many offered for a different path to have come out of the 60’s.
The institution of education has been my decades long favorite dead horse to beat. While at times it’s kinda up lifting to see and read of alternative schools here, there or else where thinking coolly about them one realizes they ARE schools and classes for the monied elites and decidedly not for the masses. After all the system doesn’t want too many thinking and whole people that would only go messing about with the proper order of things.
A few years ago I had a chance to teach an arts class in metal at a Waldorf school. At first I was rather flattered at the offer, then as I thought about it more I knew it’d never do for me as I don’t function well under set time clocks. Tick tock, go to work. Repeat tomorrow unto next week…….next month……next year…….tick tock, time to go to work.
It felt too much like school to me even though I may have had as much to learn from the youngsters as I had to give them, at lest that’s what people tell me, I couldn’t bring myself to the commitment of making a filing order of my life to (perhaps) set someone else free of the cookie cutter space outlined for them. In the end I decided what I may have hoped to achieve didn’t seem likely so I thanked the board and now I enjoy just living with my crows and yes the jester jays as well as the hawks and chickadees, the owls and the damnable woodpeckers along with the fox camped out back with the weasel as it’s neighbor instead of having to report for for class. I feel my life is ordered just fine.
Guess they’ll have to figure it out on their own, just as the rest of us have.
This year it was heartening, I’ve seen more butterflies and bees than I have in quite a number of years all together. Hope it’s not a last gasp.
November 16, 2017 at 07:34
I had problems with our institutionalized education system from the first day of kindergarten, which I don’t remember in every little detail, but I do vividly remember my strong feelings that I needed to get out of there. I think I had what might be called a hysterical fit. My mother had walked me to the school, which was a couple of blocks from our home on the northwest side of Detroit at the time. My father was off somewhere driving a semi truck, I really hardly even knew the man as yet, as I recall. It was just me and her. Apparently I had such a disturbed reaction at the threat of being left in that cold room that the teacher agreed with her that I go home for the day and come back again the next day in hopes that maybe I’d calm down a little.
I never liked any of it over the next twelve years and I barely graduated HS because I’d skipped so many classes that I was only one missed day away from triggering the automatic fail button. I didn’t know that, no one told me it was even possible. I was passing all my classes, though in some cases barely. I only found out about it while in some sort of gratuitous round up counseling session just before my graduation, with an assigned counselor I didn’t know. She had me there sitting while she read my history and said, wow! you are only one day from not being graduated. What? Yeah, if you’d missed one more day you couldn’t graduate. That was one of those moments where I realized I’d had some kind of real stroke of luck happen to me, because I didn’t have a clue. I just hated being there and I took every opportunity not to be. I doubt seriously if I could have forced myself to come back for another year.
Today they have community colleges and better ways of testing out of classes, don’t know much about the system anymore. I just know we got my niece out of the system and into an open-minded home schooling program, and she never bothered to get a HS diploma, but graduated from UC Davis at the top of her class at 20. Her work is in the art world, clothing and wardrobe design. She’s self employed in New York City doing wardrobe design for New York City Ballet, high end modeling gigs and stuff like that. All of which started at home with us supplying her interests as they grew, starting with a spinning wheel. By the way, she’s half Korean, has been accused in a New York restaurant, in a nasty tone by a likely Trump supporter, of being a Mexican immigrant. Lovely world we live in.
Neither Ta-Nehisi Coates nor James Baldwin have college degrees. Baldwin didn’t even go, instead he tended to his dysfunctional, poverty-stricken family’s needs by trying to provide some much-needed money. Apparently Ta-Nehisi dropped out. It’s hard for me to imagine how any college writing course could have made James Baldwin a better writer. Especially at what he wrote about which is still very relevant. He was one of my models for wanting to go to Paris after I escaped high school. Thank you America and Vietnam for diverting that goal to a different part of the world, though I guess there’s a French connection with Vietnam.
November 16, 2017 at 10:08
Like wise here, it’s hard to remember all those long days of absolute boredom without some jog of memory to bring it to the fore.
My high or if you prefer low points are flunking 1st grade. Eh? Who flunks 1st grade? And I remember in the 3rd grade regularly visiting a psychologist (gee, thanks mom and dad, he fucked with my head real good and tried to complete that job for you)). There after school was mostly learning in the first two or three weeks what was going to be repeated ad nauseam till the end of each semester. Which by the way I never completed to anyones satisfaction no matter whatever other I would consider accomplishments I came up with during all those endless days of coma inducing iterations bleated at us and then expected to be echoed back verbatim.
Yeh, I hated school from the beginning and then when I got the chance I found college wasn’t that much different. So I chucked all the institution crap long ago before completing any degrees of any sort.
I never considered them an integral part of where I wanted to go at any rate.
November 16, 2017 at 12:13
As an addendum to the above;
I was always place in the upper classes because of my SAT scores. I can only imagine in nightmares what the lower scorers experienced.
November 16, 2017 at 12:32
I somehow got through first grade thanks to the intervention of a teacher who came in after the first one was hospitalized with a “nervous breakdown”. I was one of the listed causes according to my father who then told me I needed to refrain from acting out in class, though I doubt he put it in precisely those terms. But it wasn’t dictatorially said, that wasn’t his way. It was more like a slightly misdirected suggestion I had to read through. He seldom had good advice for me and I’m grateful I never felt any need to follow it. He was probably seeing the psychological counselor instead of me, given the marital circumstances and the laws in Michigan that made it so he couldn’t divorce my mother without the probable prospect of losing control of his kid. At least that’s what he believed. It may not have been true. He was not the sharpest tack in the box and he didn’t really know how to research much of anything. He’d just believe what some authority figure would tell him. He was a good hearted person; I’m grateful for that at least. But we were never in the same head space about anything.
I don’t remember everything I did in first grade before Mrs. Binder came in, but I remember moments of silence that would follow after I’d pipe up with something that would finish one of that first teacher’s dictatorial statements when she was trying to keep us all in line. I suspect she might have been a control addict. Then I would get marched up to the front of the class with her holding my ear as we went, where I’d get my hand smacked sharply with a ruler until the bones of the palms were bruised. They could still do that in those days. That was my introduction to authority.
They brought Mrs. Binder in to run the class after the first one left, I can’t remember her name, just that she was this anorexic, shrewish looking woman. She didn’t leave — in front of us anyway — in a straight jacket the way I watched them take my mother off just after I finished kindergarten to a place called “Mercywood Sanitarium”, but I heard later from my father she had spent time in a similar place. I wonder if they gave her shock treatments like they did my mother?
Mrs. Binder is one of the few names I remember from that era. Instead of whacking the shit out of my hand she put my bored ass in charge of helping the slow reader group to get through “See Spot Run” and the rest of that insufferable crap they put in front of us to “help” children learn to read, which I had already accomplished before I went to kindergarten, thanks to my “schizophrenic” mom whom they shocktreated and drugged into a state of near catatonic insensibility that lasted the rest of her life.
Eventually Mrs. Binder became the principal of our grade school. Even before she was appointed principal, which I think was about my third grade year, she kept tabs on what I was up to from one grade to the next, in a kindly way. She was one of the only ones who took the trouble to find out why I might be acting out the way I did, and she knew what had happened with my mother, which, like any family dynamics, is probably important to know if you are going to pretend to actually be a guide to some child’s development process. In my experience she was a rarity in the institutions of learning. Grade school was somewhat tolerable for me thanks to her, but I lived for recess and going home. I was considered smart so that helped me get through the general negative though not severely dictatorial reactions to my state of boredom. I could have been treated a lot worse, and I can only imagine how I’d have responded, given that there was no iron hand at home to be concerned about.
In light of your mentioning the Black Panthers. I lived a few houses from one of their headquarter houses in West Oakland, and I got to know some of the people who’d been there during that period, with what they were actually doing as opposed to what they were reported to have been doing, and all the shit that came down on them as a result. I happened across this little bit of exchange Between Representative Karen Bass and Jeff Sessions: Lawmaker asks Sessions why there’s an FBI report about black ‘extremists,’ but not one about those who are white.
“This department will not unlawfully target people.” –Jeff Sessions.
November 17, 2017 at 07:21
I don’t really know what to say about the why’s or what fors’ I was so pushed out by my family from such an early age, only that it started long before I could have done or known how to go about changing anything in my temperament or my dynamics within the family much less with the world at large once I started entering into it. I remember once asking either my father or mother about why I was seeing that man weekly (psychologist) and was told because he was going to help me. If I didn’t voice it I remember thinking it….help me with what? There after I came to the realization he was there to try and change me somehow so started paying more attention to our talks and gauging the directions he would want to take and track towards. He wasn’t as smart as he or anyone else thought he was, it wasn’t long before I was running him in circles if I wasn’t just feeding him answers he wanted to hear. For me it just became another one those boring things attached to school to get through so I could get on with what I wanted to do, whatever I might have wanted to do your guess is probably as good as mine, because I can’t remember. All I needed to learn I guess is put my time in and shut up about it.
Yeh, that work didn’t out so well. I still have some of my old report cards my father saved. Remember the comments section where the teacher would write on the back? I’ll spare you the more florid condemning comments made about me within the class room atmosphere but there are none doesn’t end without a request for a teacher parent meeting.
Hey I just remembered a substitute teacher we drove over edge. Seventh grade I think it was, our regular teach was Mrs. Churchill and the class for the most part adored her. That year though she and her husband were getting ready for a move to Chicago for a tenured position at the university and she was gone a few days for this that and the other. We’d put up with this substitute for about a week and a half (she was insufferable) or maybe (lol) it was the other way around. Either way, Mrs. Churchill was also the art teacher for the school and kept all the art supplies in a walk-in closet at the back of the room, heck there was even a kiln in there for firing ceramics, well we’d had enough with who ever that poor sub was. One of the guys just got up in middle of some babble she was on about and walked into the supply room tossed a few papers around before she got to the door and wandered out with her raving at him as he went back to his desk, and then when she went in to straighten up we all jump up slammed the door and wouldn’t let her out by leaning against the door. When she started crying the girls prevailed in talking us into letting her out. She never said a word to us as she ran out of the classroom bawling. We got the principle as a teacher for the remainder of that day. And Mrs. Churchill was back the next day. She wasn’t very happy with us.
We never saw that poor soul again, there after if Mrs. Churchill was off one of the regular teachers from another class of the school would be in front of us. I can only assume their regular class had a sub called in to replace them.
Sessions is only one slimy piece of offal in this administration. While everyone is so mesmerized with the clown car in the center ring of the circus the rest of the crew is running amok completely tearing apart whatever has been accomplished over the years and decades that could be counted as good. By the time they’re finished most if not all will have to rebuilt from the ground up. Sessions is like the rest of them, making his own law.
Remember a week or two ago went I mentioned in passing about a fed showing up on my door step?
“Although it’s unclear what actions the F.B.I. will take as a result of the report, the conclusions pave the way for it to gather data on, monitor and deploy informants to keep tabs on individuals and groups it believes to be B.I.E.s.”
Well it’s clear enough for me.
November 18, 2017 at 08:05
Clear enough to me too.
I just put myself into a kind of deep funk trying to respond to doug, our friend from Thom’s, the guy who stimulated me to start that message board then abandoned it for Facebook. Now he occasionally pastes what I think he considers to be cleverness on my Facebook page. I sometimes respond with something, he seldom responds back but just moves on to the next thought that crosses his mind, spreading it here and there amongst his Facebook friends. But he did respond, eventually, in this one case and we almost got a conversation going. I think you can view it because I try to make everything public on my timeline. But if you can’t, here is this morning’s exchange:
Douglas Thomas: Thanks Ren, I have the Wolf and Saul books. I don’t see anything changing in the USA without real electoral reform to address the people’s needs rather than the donors. As the world’s fertile soil becomes too toxic to produce sustenance for humans an…See More
BBC – History – London’s ‘Great Stink’ and Victorian Urban Planning
Cholera epidemics, the ‘Great Stink’ and miasmas…
bbc.co.uk
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Douglas Thomas: Remember when we talked about sustainable societies aka those not tied to infinite economic growth as the measure of success but a basic healthy happiness as a metric, like farming or fishing on your own, or for your community. Haiti’s farmers got screwed when chicago boys saw their daily income as poverty and doubled it but now they cannot farm or support their families but they could and did before Americans said they were suffering under their old livestyles. Service jobs are not dead end jobs unless people in their culture continually say they are. High minimum wages make seervice jobs viable and beneficial to the community. not to mention less class concious tabloid warfare.
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Ren Huntsinger: The details of our collective self destruction are everywhere and easily seen right in front of us. I do not consider the rest of the “civilized” world to be on a different track from the United States. That discussion on alternative, sustainable ways of living, — ways that would have to be invoked intentionally, not as an ethical change from this consumer capitalism, but as a survival pursuit that would come from opening the eyes and seeing the horror of destruction all over this planet, ecological destruction with the climate as a systemic result of the the entire process that only accelerated once humans discovered these stored sources of solar energy, like coal at the early stages of the industrial revolution, then oil as the technologies for digging up the earth and taking over the huge variety of habitats evolved — that discussion on sustainable alternatives comes as people are beginning to wake up to the possibility that the two or three day supply of food on their grocery store shelves are dependent on giant commercial global systems that could conceivably fail. The discussions have been rising up all over for decades, but the system implacably grows on.
All that the majority of humans seem to actually have noticed in all of this was their wonderful, sprawling cities, the flush toilets that replaced the outhouses in the 20th Century and their refrigerators so they could store the industrially grown and slaughtered protein sources, which require the take over of more and more habitats as the soils are depleted while the population soars to now over seven billion, the chemical fertilizers and pesticides run off into the streams, the rivers and eventually make the hypoxic dead zones spreading into the ocean from the mouths of the great rivers all along the coastlines. In the US they iconically see it as their unique exceptional contribution as they continue their practice to genocidally destroy other cultures with far more sustainable ways to teach those who want to find sustainable ways, and this has spread to the rest of the world in the typical imperial fashion with any complex society that is based on this kind of infinite growth adaptive strategy.
This death to the ocean’s life capacities is occurring simultaneously with the rise of mechanized, high tech fish finding and gathering processes that help each of the nations of this global system work together to now achieve the brilliant capacity to have diminished the ocean’s predator fish by 90 percent, while raking the spawning grounds for the last crumbs so as to achieve the maximum potential to reduce any possibility for the fish to regain their former populations before this all began.
Humans have both overshot the carrying capacity of the earth while at the same time working diligently to reduce that carrying capacity in many systematic ways.
Concern for all this from the mouths of the highly educated and trained experts is minimal, so the minions can turn to the growing and very real civilization-created problem of finding jobs for themselves to survive within these human adaptive systems. They are, in the end, merely a means to adapt ourselves to the planet. How are we doing with that?
I give you the human species, the Holocene Sixth Mass extinction, and an increasingly erratic changing global climate.
“Jobs” did not exist as a concept until there were corporations to provide them and people left their precarious survival modes of existence for the promise of refrigerators and toilets. And now a few people are beginning to wonder just how they are going to create these sustainable societies while simultaneously being trained from kindergarten to learn the skills so they can perform jobs.
A dead end job is a job working for a corporation that has no concern for its effects on destroying the environment.
November 18, 2017 at 09:17
Doug had the same propensity at Hartmann’s as well, but there was always someone else to pick up the slack after he’d desert the conversation as there were many other contributors. After I saw the same pattern on your forum I just shrugged my shoulders thinking, well that’s Doug. However though, the reason I didn’t jump back in after I’d gotten another computer up and running last spring was I thought that maybe I was stifling any conversation because of my rather pedestrian thinking, At times I kinda felt I interrupted some of the deeper thinking and exchanges you and others might have carried on with if not for me. So I resolved to stay away for awhile. Too long it seems.
To a certain extent I think Doug has bought into the, what is usually unsaid but always implied, the infinite growth model the pox of civilization has unleashed on it’s own living space. Humans and rats are the only species on earth that will spoil its’ own nest. And if nothing else in the end no one will say anything but we did a hell of a bang up job at that.
If the human species were to be scored as an olympic event we’d get a solid ten off the high dive platform it looks so intentional. More than likely though the end will look like Wiley coyote clawing at midair after running off the cliffs edge and not scored as a lovely swan dive for a perfect landing to be replayed in slo-mo during a medal ceremony. Hmmm, much as it’s looking day by day now, clawing in midair trying to find traction to regain the cliffs edge to at least hold on to before the certain plunge into the rocks at the bottom.
Nope, no tens given for that kind of form.
Man kind has no wings except in the fantasy of imagination and gravity is real.
I don’t know how far down the rocks are from here but it shor don’t feel like we’re on solid ground looking over the edge but out in midair wondering if that cliffs edge can be grabbed before https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/8c6ee5510ba3c7d6664775c0e76b53e72468303a
takes over.
November 19, 2017 at 07:56
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity
November 19, 2017 at 08:04
Sorry, that last post was just me playing around trying to get what I wanted to paste.
I’ll figure it out one of these days.
Just ignore it.
November 19, 2017 at 08:08
Yes, too long. What we’ve been doing under that original blog post of mine is what I consider a conversation. I value straight forward exchange that can mix in whatever is taking place in anyone’s mind. Some of my own greatest insights come out of those exchanges. Now, I don’t mean great in any grand scheme of things, just the kinds of insight that make my own life well worth the effort to keep track of with a little reflection. You are by no means an unimaginative, mundane contributor to that sort of exchange nor do you speak in litanies of clichés. At least they aren’t clichés to me.
One of the reasons I loved exploring the works of anthropologists was because those efforts were about finding the features of other ways of living that I would never be likely to imagine through trying to make sense of the ordinary aspects of a people’s every day lives. I think we have that same opportunity even within our own familiar surroundings by simply listening to each other, because each of us is a subjective experience all our own.
A couple quick questions. I don’t know what you see in these reply boxes, or what is available to you after you post. I, obviously, as the owner of this blog, have access to features that must be kept from the general visitor because we all know what some trollish people will do if given the opportunity. So I’m wondering, do you see an edit opportunity under your own posts?
The other question: I’m curious if you can see my Facebook Timeline I’d linked in my other post. I don’t know if Facebook allows anyone who is not a Facebook member to see any Facebook content. So I was just curious to know if you can see it.
November 19, 2017 at 13:30
This morning I read another of Chris Hedges’ hyperbole-laced summaries of our current world political condition (Behind the Mask of the ‘Moderates’); this paragraph, which pretty much sums up my own observations of a world system run at the behest of the powerful figures at the top of the many corporate hierarchies that feed, house, clothe, and employ the population. while keeping it in constant subservient debt to the banking system, could have been the entire article for those who have read his writings over the past 15 years since his breakout book, shortly after 9/11, during the early Bush II years (War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning):
“Nations have surrendered their economies to global banks, corporations, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. This has created political paralysis. The longer this paralysis continues, the more governing institutions and “undemocratic liberalism” are discredited. The inability of the “moderates” to protect democracy, along with their attempt to redirect democratic aspirations to the culture wars, means they and traditional liberal and democratic values will vanish and the door will be flung open to the right-wing proponents of “illiberal democracy.”
Near the end he quotes James Baldwin:
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
The master of observation remains relevant nearly thirty years after his death.
And maybe there’s nothing particularly new to say.
November 20, 2017 at 06:13
I might be the last person on earth that doesn’t have a Facebook account and if not I’m among the few that don’t, but to answer your question, nope Facebook won’t allow me to view the timeline (as I guess it’s called) without registering and signing in.
And there are no editing capabilities in the the reply box from this end. Not that I mind, it centers and focuses my mind when I can’t go back to rearrange or add and subtract within the text at leisure. Though it can bring to the fore some of my worst proof reading skills. Head slap! how did that get in there? Or how did I not put that ‘to be’ in? And for crying out loud thier is spelled their. Over all though I don’t mind about the no edit after posting, it kinda brings back the days of sealing an envelope putting the stamp on and after dumping the letter into the mail box only to then while walking away remember that you wanted to rephrase this that and the other.
Ya know? The bad old days when we might spend a week or two composing a three, four or five page letter……And still not get it just right.
My last couple of posts I was trying to figure out if I could copy an image of the equation for gravity rather then reprogram my key board to recognize mathematical equations that could be just typed out because I don’t use them that much. I just thought it would be fun to throw it into the stream of conscience babble I was indulging myself with in the post before them. Didn’t work out so well did it.
And I note this paragraph is about as clear as mud too so I’m going to move on.
Brain don’t seems to be a little preoccupied this morning. Over the weekend a friend asked me to make up some shutter hinges for his house. Now as a general rule I wouldn’t consider doing anything like that because repetitive work drives me crazy but as he’s a close friend; mmmmm ok Derrell whatcha ya want? And what does he hand me but a hinge thats as old as his house. Meaning to say it’s from about the 1870’s. Yeah yeah Derrell I can a make a few for you, how many? Ya know thinking he only wanted to replace a few that were missing or beyond use.
BUT NO!!!!! He wants to replace every single one in his three story (probably 4,000 Sq. Ft.) captains house dating from the late 1800’s. At this point I ain’t gonna try to guess how many that is. Did I say I detest repetition?
The hinge is quite elegant in design and yes I could spend a day or two to make up the figs and figuring out how I could pound them out in a few hours. But why if he only needs two or three sets if that? Why does he want it all new? Aah damn what have I gotten myself into?
Okay, so I got this sample back to the shop and now have it cleaned off (old paint etc) and I thought eh is this actually original material from the 1800’s? That would mean………yep, it’s wrought iron. NO RUST! Or should I say very little, only the small places that collected too much carbon from the coal and oxygen during forging.
He wants to keep and reuse all the hinges he has!
Why do people think the newer the better?
Wrought iron can still be found and bought though not without some effort and much expense. Have I mentioned repetitive work drives me stark raving mad? He’s a close friend and I don’t know what I’m going to do at this point, because money don’t mean that much to me and never has, but repetitive work?
I’m beginning to wonder if my friend hates me.
November 20, 2017 at 07:22
Lol. I think that the capitalist system’s way of treating each other as objects was invented, or at the very least embraced, as a way to deal with this problem of friendship and its many subtle networks of obligation that make societies work in very different and very human ways.
Everything I do for others these days is done on the basis of friendship. I fix things for people that would require the services of a “professional” plumber, carpenter and especially an electrician. Nearly everyone thinks of electricity as some sort of magic. I suppose when you feel that jolt of electricity charging through your body, and nothing seems to be an obvious source, it can engender such beliefs. I do it for “free” because it makes them obligated to me. The obligation is like a long term debt that allows me the freedom to say no, but I almost never do. What I do is, if I’m feeling put out, or busy with my own concerns, I let them know, and then they begin to get hints that I might be feeling put out a bit by helping them out. It works because I have been receiving SS for almost ten years now, and before that, after I stopped doing contracting work for others, I made my cache of money by fixing up and selling houses. Another thing I think the sense of obligation does is trigger this ever vestigializing skill of empathy. If I can say no because they owe me, they think in terms of that rather than in terms of the money that greases these exchanges. You can go off on that with your imagination for awhile and see how that might work.
I have never in my life written anything that can’t benefit me by editing it. Editing is one of the most amazing ways to learn what the hell is going on in my subconscious. A lot of people I know who don’t really enjoy writing — would rather talk, I guess — view editing as a “corrective” process. Well, it is that in some instances, like thier for their, but it is in so many incredible ways so much more than that. When I went from a typewriter, which is not much more than hand writing, just easier for people to read if I’m the one hand writing, to a computer back in 1962, it was like a whole new world of editing suddenly opened up in front of me. I went from slow motion, laborious rewriting/editing to something that finally can keep up with my stream of consciousness… or nearly, because the stream of consciousness itself began to find jetstreams within my mind.
And that brings up your introduced subject of repetition. I don’t have much patience for repetition either. And so my writing was very sloppy and often quite unorganized for many years, because I just didn’t have the patience to keep redoing it. Which I have to do because editing is a never ending process for me. Almost all the editing I do is evolutionary. And I just have decide when to move on to the next evolutionary loop.
This environment is better for me than Facebook. I hate Facebook. It’s just unfortunately, almost everyone I have met and become “friends” with has gravitated there (speaking of gravity). But this environment could be even better for us as conversants. It could be like the message board. What I have to do in order to embed url’s in a line, which you can’t do, is I have to edit my posts. When I edit it brings up the post in a page that allows me the same html formatting that I have available when I write one of my posts. I can then craft the post to look something professional, with italics, bold, different fonts and so forth. That’s were creative writing takes off for me. I can begin to do things with the type that emulates the complexities of body language. Of course it’s still a rather crude emulation, but it’s far more than flat, undifferentiated typeface. And yeah, like knowing you have to get it write (lol) er right the first time before you put a stamp on it and post it on its way, that too is challenging. So it’s not all bad.
November 20, 2017 at 08:26
Well yeh, that’s the thing about these damn hinges, money isn’t the object. I could give Derrell any price I please for them and he’d probably go for it. For instance I found a similar type on a colonial repo site (but not nearly as elegant as these pieces) for a mere $60 not as a pair but for each made of (I’d guess) mild steel and from the looks not welded out of the forage.
If Derrell gets something into his head, money is no object for him.
My best shot I think is to try appeal to some common sense in this case. First of all even if all the pieces were replaced new by the time they were fitted and mounted they all would be just as deformed and bent as the originals are at present because A: unlike newer designs no two hand made pieces will ever be the same as the one before or after so there will be no templates for the fixing on and B: if you’ve ever worked on 100 plus buildings one will find nothing, absolutely nothing is square or in plane and those dimensions weren’t even true when those hinges went on in the first place, that’s why each one is bent somewhat differently, custom made in place so to speak and C: I can reproduce what he has, but they will never be as valuable has what he already has no matter what material I use. Better that I straighten and repair what is needed and reproduce missing parts keeping as much as possible original.
Don’t know ren, it’s the only line I have otherwise I’ll quietly find another smith to do the job because not for love nor money will I willingly submit to mind numbing repetitive exercises. Some people find it compiling for one reason or the other…… but I don’t.
November 21, 2017 at 06:01
I know exactly what you mean about doing anything with hundred year old buildings because that was the bulk of my remodeling work in the East Bay, especially in the hills above Berkeley and Oakland, and why people wanted us, because we (my two brothers and I) came in as artists and worked with the existing craftsmanship and the lack of geometric perfection that went into creating these lovely homes at or before the turn of the last century, Craftsman homes and such. Their beauty is due to that handmade quality workmanship that the vast majority of new construction today simply lacks — to their very humaneness. A lot of the time I would just use my eye to make the new work fit with the old. Square and plumb would be strikingly out of place. We did a lot of kitchens and baths because those are the two main things that people want brought up to modern day technology standards. It was always a challenge to make the new work fit both in style and craftsmanship. The work was a long series of endless problem solving moments, hardly mind numbing. And that’s very satisfying both to do and when you step back and look at the whole of what you’ve done when it’s finished.
I don’t know your friend, of course, but it was the humane quality of the homes that we always stressed to our clients that seemed to appeal to their sense of aesthetics in recognizing what we were doing, and in helping to engender a sense of pride in what they got from us. Everything you wrote about those hinges was in line with what we would tell our clients about the challenge of giving them something up to date that would not conflict with the home they loved for its original qualities. In your case it seems you are arguing for keeping what’s actually there in place because they are still functional and would be no less functional than something new. We always stressed that. Can what’s there be revived and we’ll just fit something new within that works with it? If possible, always. With very few exceptions our customers agreed.
November 21, 2017 at 06:43
Well……..Derrelll can and does go off the the deep end in that regard even within his own craft. But…….he can get fanatical at times. At this point I may be the one going over edge because so far this hinge thing is in my lap from not much more than casual banter while sharing a few beers among a group of friends around the table. I think someone asked me what I was up to and I said something about a new piece I am starting to put together (in my head) and it was getting time to fire the forge up to try out some ideas for it, then Derrell not hearing anything but the forge getting fired up put this hinge in my hands saying ‘here’s something to do’. And now I’m left with thinking, huh? right in the middle of a round table of other skilled craftsmen of various trades. So only basic questions and observations were exchanged and commented on before the topics moved on elsewhere.
So I’ve got to get back together with Derrell for real conservation before this hinge consumes me. Heck I just realized this one piece may be the only example he has that he perhaps found in the basement on a lone existing shutter from one window, or perhaps from a shutter from the widows walk when it was the only house over looking the harbor and rolling seas (I know at one time the house was all of that).
How functional he wants want it all is another question worth asking, er or maybe not because if it’s going to be done knowing Derrell they will be of use even if in today world they’ll never be used…….he can get fanatical, he’ll probably hand make all the shutters himself.
Ugh, these damn hinges. Time to go and have some serious conversation. This hinge is driving me to distraction.
November 22, 2017 at 08:32
Sounds like it will work out.
It was good to hear a little about what matters to you. Obsessiveness goes with the territory. I have to deal with it in my own stuff. Sometimes hard for me to start something because I know what I’ll do when it catches hold of me.
Kathleen Allen (k allen from Thom’s) is wondering about my conversation forum, now gone due to lack of interest, because she has friends in the East Indies islands who were devastated by those recent cat 5 hurricanes, and she thinks maybe I can help with my interest and with links to permaculture / off the grid sustainable living. Now there’s a serious conversation. I wonder where I can have it now? I did a lot at Thom’s over the years. I’m not about to start up another lifeless message board on a whim. There are plenty of excellent, active places to go on the Internet, along with lots and lots of youtube videos. I suggested: Simply type in a few key words in a search engine.
I guess if your island home has been wiped out by a couple of cat 5 hurricanes and the President of the United States has decided that your skin is too dark for you and your community to qualify for rebuilding services of any sort, or medical help, then a conversation about permaculture design could be a real and valuable endeavor. The First White President indeed.
I say: take advantage of the Internet while we still have it. The last vestiges of government control of that too are being handed over by Trump’s appointed FCC head with no strings or oversight to the corporate oligarchs who control this vital intermediary to our national communications grid. That doing of that has been an important conversation for a number of years now as we’ve watched the rest of the civilized world shoot past us with powerful, community-centered and community-funded internet provision services. We exceptional Americans remain “free” of all that communistic control — it’s even been deemed “illegal” for communities to try to do their own in some states — and leave it to the ” free market” entrepreneurs to provide us with our services.
So, there you have a few passing thoughts. I’m not even putting them on Facebook these days. Just sitting here watching the rain and the fire flickering in my wood stove. The birds drop by and perch on the small volunteer maple that’s growing off the corner of my deck. The neighbor’s cat sits under the deck awning on an weathered, hand-carved chair that came from Indonesia, watching the birds. Hoping, I suppose. Looks like we’re going to have another wet winter.
November 22, 2017 at 10:16
Happy thanksgiving ren, whatever it means to you. Though it’s hard for me to figure out what it’s all suppose to mean it is the thing to say today I guess. So I hope as this day passes it’ll bring fond memories of by gone days for you.
Happy thanksgiving.
Oh yes, this hinge thing will work out ok. I just obsess over stuff, most of it doesn’t do much for anyone else and most of the time every one else just considers it all a waste of time. But sometimes even I question my motives in how singular I can become in my focus; could it be a self defense machinism so I don’t have to think or act on the much larger issues both close at hand and those from afar ? I can control this little piece of metal, I can shape it, form it, then reform it and then use it or scape it for some other use. I can make it harshly utilitarian or as a graceful soaring peaen to it’s purpose in life. Out beyond this small piece of metal I have in front of me I can do little, but this few ounces of iron I can control.
Hmmm, I don’t know ren it could be a self defense I surround myself with as some mental protection against becoming overwhelmed by the larger vulgarities of the world.
Out out damn hinge!
So you heard from Kay. I was wondering here she’d gone off to. She’s always a pleasant change of pace. Give her my regards.
Yeh permaculture, I think the biggest step people have to make is the reordering in their expectations of just what in life is worth living for. A new hi def tv so to be spoon fed scenes of wild kingdom or to experience the warm breeze through their hair and stirring up the butterflies while walking in the meadow.
Doing more with less instead of jumping in the car for a run into town to buy something they’ll use once because the second time it’s used it’ll break. Oh well it was cheap enough anyways, but thinking to complain as they jump in the car for the run into town for another useless whatever. Getting over the over-consumption habit is probably the biggest hill any modern person or peoples have to climb to get towards anything that approaches a permaculture philosophy.
Advice to pass on to the people of the islands………..boil the water before consuming.
There, I feel like I’ve already done more for the islands than our fine president.
November 23, 2017 at 07:17
Happy Thanksgiving to you with the same whatever it means to you. I guess it’s the least offensive of the holidays for me. Today I’ll be getting together with some friends. All of us no longer doing family gathering Thanksgivings here in this fringe town that seems to attract dysfunctional family rejects. My contribution is a citrus cheesecake that comes from a 1920s New York City Jewish deli recipe I found in a Bon Appétit magazine about thirty years ago. It’s become one of my signature recipes. A Jewish friend of mine gave it a Kosher blessing for authenticity, which I humbles me.
I was offended by Christmas as a kid, and wrote an essay about it that focused on the commercialized aspect, which hasn’t improved much. Later, as my reading of history deepened, I was offended that it represented the Christianization that goes with colonizing other cultures and their traditions, robbing them of their habitats, genociding them, and so forth. I don’t think my ex ever forgave me for my humbug attitude towards Christmas, though I don’t see that as a single source for her eventual search for greener pastures and our parting of ways.
I don’t know what my obsessions are, Randy. I just do ’em and really get into it. It could be as simple as a kind of meditation. Coffee is a meditation now for me, or maybe just a ritual.
I was introduced to coffee at about five as I recall. My father took me fishing for great lakes perch out in Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay, that helps define the thumb of the state. We were in a row boat out in the Bay, it was fall, chilly and raining steadily. This was my very first time fishing. I was catching fish as fast as I threw the line back in the water, I’d catch one; I’d pull the fish out, my father would take it off the hook, put another minnow on the hook, I’d throw the thing back in the water and catch another. Of course that’s never happened again in the rest of my life. My father never had a chance to fish much himself throughout. Eventually, I suppose to give himself a break, plus I was getting chilled as I recall, he pulled up a thermos from a bag under his seat and poured me a cup of coffee with a lot of cream and sugar. I don’t really get off on fishing despite my great first experience that should have hooked me if it was in me to be hooked, but I did get hooked on coffee.
Today I roast my own. I’ve been roasting my own since I moved up from the Bay Area where I was always within an easy bike ride to some of the finest coffee cafes in the world. No such places around here. So in desperation I bought a roaster. I’m on my fourth roaster, some died, some were simply not capable of achieving the perfect roast I am forever seeking. I am now spoiled. I would be roasting coffee even if I lived next door to Peet’s in Berkeley, though their coffee is usually good enough to drink while having a conversation with a friend.
Citrus Cheescake and home roasted Ethiopian Yirga Cheffe:
November 23, 2017 at 08:23
Having a dinner party with friends is a good fitting event for the day ren. Way back when all my old circle of friends still lived in relative proximity of each other every year for thanksgiving Julie would host a Marvin Derslag day party. I doubt I spelled that name right but no matter Julie (being a huge baseball fan) always said she was throwing the party in honor of the little known ball player who she thought should be given some of the credit he never received in life. So this time every year all the misfits that cared to attend were invited to Julie’s pot luck festivities.
Most of those old circle are like me now, scattered to the four winds and to far away from each other anymore for those kinds of get togethers though once in awhile something large happens to get us in one place at the same time increasingly and sadly they’re now gatherings of remembrance rather than unabashed joy.
And at any rate I think maybe we’ve all become somewhat jaded with the world leaving not much room for joyous celebration and toasts. Or for that matter any reason for many thanks to to give.
My hats off to you ren that you and friends can still use the occasion for a delightful get together.
Between today and my yesterdays writing about my thoughts on what I considered the sharp incline to climb towards a permaculture mentality I’ve realized I know precious little of what the social structure actually is in that part of the world. And of what I do know has more to do with the capital investments the monied interests are demanding back in full with interest. And I can well imagine those interests are at the moment licking their chops for a land grab as the peoples wander helplessly for the next meal or to somehow find care for their wounds and will take the first piece of green to be flashed in front them selling off their birth right and land their families have occupied for generations.
One can only hope they can resist the Sirens call and tell the banksters to piss off.
November 24, 2017 at 06:09
It was a friendly, at least semi cheerful get together as these things go for us. A couple of people dipped into some of today’s dire politics in their conversations, but for the most part we centered on the great food we all brought and shared, some of us can still drink a fine glass of wine without serious repercussions, and so forth. A lot of people have to watch their diets and have had to shift into declining years careful diet mode.
A few are more like me. To them I can speak my truth. Most of the rest are still in he human power structure somewhere and not willing to let go of all that offers them.
I try to smile, but I see that we as a species are all on death row, and that’s not to be mistaken for seeing that we age and die naturally. “Dead person walking” echoes in my mind as I look around at what we’ve wrought on this planet. I’ve had this vision since February 1967 when I woke up off the coast of Vietnam and realized that ending the insanity I’d finally come to recognize as our reality and ending my participation in it was so simple as merely letting drop our prosthetic killing devices and walking away from all the death and destruction, and towards a way of living that would be based on mutual respect for each of us and for the environment itself.
Of course, that way of life that we need to walk towards has to be created. At the moment there is nothing to walk towards. I thought there was when I had my epiphany, but now I see that I was wrong to imagine, as in hope that. It once may have existed as something to move towards, but that’s way in the past now. Because the cultural ways of living that once were the dominant ways among us, and the environmental systems and conditions that made those many different ways possible, have been destroyed, and very rapidly, and very recently.
Its destructive rise looks like this:
Human Population Growth
Accompanying that graph is this:
Global wildlife populations have fallen by 58% since 1970
Take it a few years further and it inevitably looks like this, or worse:
Human Population Growth through 2100
Accompanying that graph is this rosy predictions: Global mass extinction set to begin by 2100, study finds
Well, these scientists are not always synch with my narrative, nor with each other, especially in regards to what they all mean by mass extinction. It seems to me that the mass extinction has already begun. At the very least it can be marked as beginning in 1970, the year I got out of the military. It seems to me that a 58% decline of whatever species level was in place in 1970 is a mass extinction measure. But what do I know?
So yes, I come to permaculture in my meandering mind. Permaculture is a creative concept. I think we as a species must become actually and intentionally creative as a whole. And simultaneously I saw and still see that it would/will never happen, never all at once. And it became clear as the bright rising sun that as long as it didn’t happen all at once, then there would be plenty of leaders and minions like the soldiers and sailors around me, on that ship, others, and on the land in Vietnam, to carry on. And that reality has continued to this day.
Today, more than fifty after that early morning epiphany, I’ve questioned and sought and thereby developed that vision into seeing more than the weapons of war as prosthetic killing devices. Those are parts of an entire set of technologies that all work together to destroy, while in the minds of their creators they are seen as wonderful creations. I see institutions as technologies and humans as the machine parts that make them work, and most all the sum of the technology of civilization itself, because it all traces back through a deadly, coldly rational, human-created systemic symmetry of combined purpose to the death of the other species on this planet as the humans continue to take over their ecological niches and therefore their habitats. So we remain on death row as a species. Nothing on this planet can compete with this deadliness of purpose. Except, perhaps, death, or entropy, itself, if that can be considered a thing.
So there’s my cheerful morning wake-up thoughts after a fine dinner with a few friends.
I got there about 2:30 and I was exhausted, as I always get when in a crowd, by six.
I liked playing baseball, but I am not a fan, so I don’t know many of the players. I like the idea, though of honoring someone as a kind of symbol of honoring the unrecognized. That fits my narrative.
November 24, 2017 at 08:13
What happened??>!!!!!
Just spent part of yesterday and this morning writing out a piece and tried to post and it all just disappeared?
November 27, 2017 at 07:32
I don’t know. I don’t see any evidence of it anywhere that I can retrieve for you. I’ve had that happen in other software environments, but never in this one. Best thing to do if you don’t like rewriting something from memory is write in a word processing program in your computer. I don’t know what comes with Apple operating systems, but I’m sure they have some sort of default word processing program.Your own computer’s writing programs tend to be stable and they tend to save your work as you go, where writing through your Internet connection can be glitchy, depending on your service provider. Once composed, copy and paste into the reply window here or where ever you are writing on the Internet. Good way to keep a copy of your writing for reference. Some people even use one of their email programs to compose, those are a sort of word processing program, then save the drafts.
November 27, 2017 at 08:08
Aah, I don’t know ren. I think that last shout was more of a rage against the damn machine than anything else. I didn’t really expect anyone could help in finding all those 1’s and 0’s now forever floating around in the nether zone of nor and nan gates.
While not comparing myself to Shakespeare because all the monkey’s would certainly have an easier time of recreating my scribblings…….well I think you get the idea.
All in all it was just a rage against the machine I needed to get out and not directed towards anyone or one thing in particular.
I’ve tried over the course of a couple of days to recreate the pictured I worked to paint through Sunday and Monday , but I may as well’ve thrown the typewriter into the monkey cage and hoped for the best. That’s how successful I’ve been.
I haven’t forgotten though and a little later I’ll give something of a quick outline of how it went and catch up a bit.
At the moment though I’ve got to move.
November 30, 2017 at 08:22
I enjoyed that metaphor from the first I’d heard it… Rage Against the Machine. And then a rock band decided to give itself that metaphor for a name.
Adapting myself to these computers is not unlike adapting to the machinery of society. Both are implacable, inhumane. The only human expression in my struggle comes from me. And all that expression is a waste of effort in the end. Faceless authority beating us all into line, or giving us choices like a rat in a maze that brings us all to the same feeding trough that they control. Then we fight over the scraps. Now everybody’s raging against the “threat” to net neutrality, as if the corporations that control their ISPs ever did what they did at the behest of the people and what they want from the Internet. Really, all some of us ever wanted from it to begin with was a better way to share information than beating out messages on our drums. Now what is it for most? Repetitive occupations for their minds. Sometimes thought of as entertainment.
I remember when I switched from a typewriter to a personal computer in the early eighties, late ’82 as I recall. I was just beginning my efforts to become a writer in the technical field that offered me a chance to be a self employed consultant. My first was a KAYPRO II.
I actually paid $1595 very hard earned dollars for it and thought I was really getting something. Little tiny screen that I quickly found inadequate. But everything that I have now was there. Writing software, a modem to connect to research data bases, and a printer. Anyway, here’s the point of this little story and how it relates to rage against the machine: one of the early things I had to learn to keep in mind as part of my adaption to this machine was to save my work. A little blip in the power and “poof” hours of pained writing on a project disappeared. Eventually I pasted a note next to the screen between the two 5 1/4″ floppys:
SAVE
YOUR
WORK
!!!!
Rage Against The Machine – Testify
December 1, 2017 at 08:22
I almost linked that song when I used the phrase rage against the machine. After playing your link for some reason this tune flashed into my head
While simultaneously thinking about Chris Hedges and a few of his upbeat wishings and hopes on what I believe he calls ‘the human spirit’. Wish I could share his warm feelings, though in his later interviews he seems to concede that it looks very like a lost cause because of the dead end path the human has consciously or perhaps as talked about here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lWJluRA2XY ,unconsciously chosen.
But either way does it matter for what is surely going to be an ugly end for the human and the natural world at large?
Last weekend after some aside play about my baseball days (semi pro) and then after giving a hallelujah to closing in these parts of the annual blood sport called hunting I ran off into my original epiphany for the future of the world. I mentioned I couldn’t remember the exact circumstances or timing that brought the vision to me but that vision remains vivid for me even to this day.
I’m not much of one that’ll draw many conclusions from circles and arrows attached to any graphs but my epiphanies come to me almost whole clothe as mental images and internal feelings and this particular one came sometime during the days I was still wandering around in the deep woods up north and building a dome or two aah now some 40 plus years ago. I saw this ugly dead and lifeless brownish ball with an even uglier smudged gray haze surrounding the edges floating in a jet black far beyond background. I knew immediately then it was earth of the future.
For quite some time now I’ve considered most of the scientists overly rosy in what they predict the world has for a window we can correct towards as I firmly believe the so called tipping point has long since been passed and the feed back loop is well under way no matter what we do. 2 degrees C is a laughable joke if you ask me. The arctic is already been written off by almost everybody, the Greenland ice sheet have people chewing their finger nails to the nubs over and Antarctica is melting away at a worryingly pace. Mean while no body seems to notice nobody seems to care as the rain forests are clear cut, as they fish out the oceans, as they drill another oil well, blow the top off another mountain, poison the ground for another mono crop of tomatoes, dig another hole for gold or copper or some other unattainium throwing all the by toxins to the four winds as they fill up their suvs for a trip to buy the newest iPhone (or newest whatever). Anything alive that isn’t unintentionally killed off (you know, collateral damage) is then systematically hunted down and destroyed.
The assault on the ecosphere by mankind is so large I don’t how it could be stopped even if somehow the will to do so were to find a voice, that tipping point was also passed long ago. I see mankind standing out on our branch in the tree of life happily sawing that branch off while at base our sown seed is busily chopping at the trunk of the entire tree and I’m not laying any odds on which one will finish first. I only know who I’m rooting for to win but I feel that’s a losing proposition as what I see come 2100 is a few lone solar powered TV sets running test patterns in an endless loop for no one or live thing to watch as Mother Earth patiently waits for the wheel to turn.
December 3, 2017 at 07:53
That was a satisfying summary of the situation, Randy. The truth is right in front of us, it doesn’t need to go anywhere or compete with that sign that someone found to flash amongst all the other images in the Leonard Cohen video accompanying his musical poem about the Future; a future that is now, as I see what’s all around me, and was then, I felt, when I first heard that song in 1992, The sign post in the video has arrow shaped boards attached up and down pointing in different directions with words indicating locations like “Lost” “Unsure” “Confused” “Unclear” “Perplexed” and so on. Kind of the state of our declining civilization that, in this frame of mind, can “find it acceptable to hand the country over to one.” Goes well with the title of your next video: Confronting the Signs of a Society in Decline. I’m guessing the post itself could represent the truth simply anchored in the earth.
Hedges, whose career path since breaking from the NYTimes I’ve followed in the evolution of his own writing, seems to be a preacher who never got his church, combined with a scholar who escaped the ivory towers to wander the earth like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. While I think it’s true he has a loyal readership, I also think he’s been saved to continue his wanderings — hasn’t been assassinated or otherwise disappeared yet — because he doesn’t have a following. That’s in comparison to charismatic figures like Martin Luther King who could speak the same truths and get people spiritually aroused enough to frighten the powers that manage this insane asylum, along with their minions who carry out the task of keeping things in line until they need to bring out the big guns.
It was a little weird, or maybe just the weirdness that’s always accompanied a synchronicity for me, reading about your brown world vision. Somewhat like you I had what I call a “brown dream” years ago that still haunts me. I think I was probably on that planet you envisioned, rather than being out in space and seeing it as a whole. So my vision is not of the same broad epiphanic nature as yours, but the feelings I got from it are a part of my current apocalyptic sense of things that I even felt inspired enough to start a blog about watching, and a message board. But most people don’t really want to talk about doom, and I can’t blame them.
In my dream everything that had once been alive was long since brown and dead. The air around me and even the sky was a brownish haze with enough light coming through somehow so I could see, and something like a brown powder covered everything, but with no wind to blow it around in my dream, and I was wandering around all alone. I came upon a brown, paintless farmhouse, one of those very typical wooden structures from the late 1800s with a porch across the front, and I went up on the porch and fell through the rotten boards in a cloud of brown rotten powdered wood. I remember struggling to get out of the hole and then finally getting back on solid ground. I wandered for what seemed a long time seeing broken images of what had once been a living world, dead trees, abandoned brown machinery, brown skeletons of large animals. Why or even how I was corporeal enough to see all this I never found out.
Several of us were having a discussion about all this last Sunday at our one and only coffee place, it’s kind of our version of a church gathering I suppose because we do it every Sunday. One of my friends, Brent, who teaches and practices permaculture, along with other survival skills like how to recognize edible and medicinal plants in nature, made a similar comment to yours about the branch we are sitting on while we saw it off. His analogy involved a life boat, and he sees us dismantling the life boat to burn it for warmth. Same result I guess.
I enjoyed playing baseball. One of the few things I was able to find time to get away from the farm and do. I had a good arm with a strong wrist, probably from milking our Jersey cow and other things that farm life helps develop, and I wanted to be a major league pitcher some day. I was doing pretty good at it until I had a farm accident my fifteenth winter while feeding hay to the cows out in a snowy, icy field where we had built them a large hay feeder. I had a fall from that icy hay rack as I was throwing and breaking bales of hay into it that did some damage to the fifth lumbar in my lower back, a displacement I found out years later in an X Ray that made the constant repetitive action of pitching too painful to endure for more than an inning, among other things. Could never run as fast, for instance. Anyway, making it to semi pro is a pretty good accomplishment in my mind.
December 4, 2017 at 09:57
That baseball stint was an accident of timing more than any kind of pursuit on my part.
I like most kids of our age played a bit of baseball growing up, how could one not, but my first real love was the basket ball court I discovered in the 4th grade. Second best was football, after that baseball was just a lazy midsummer thing to do if everyone could come up with enough mitts to pass around amongst the teams. Lol, I remember well the mad dash off the side line when the last side out was made to get dibs on the best gloves coming off the field. I also remember many the time playing with a glove that for all intent and purpose was useless, no lacing, no back strap or strap flapping in the wind, left-handed gloves used backwards because your right-handed, etc. Yes those were the good old days of bases drawn in the dirt with your toe, of playing with found balls that had covers coming unstitched or half torn off and bat/s that may even be whole rather than broken and sawn off then whittled to shape.
Shrug, at the time for me it was just something to do but I always loved team sports and reflecting back I think it had more to do with my longing to belong someplace, to be accepted, to be part of a family of some sort at least. I never was of course I was always the outsider if we weren’t on the court or the field of play. I never really ‘played’ the game everyone else seemed so willing to engage in that lay outside the lines though I understood those rules well enough, I just wasn’t going to play in that game so I never found an extended family in my athletic play.
I won’t bore you with how far any of that athletic business went but through it all I developed good hand eye coordination to go along with a naturally quick reflex. On the ball field that transferred into a good glove with a strong arm that was a natural in right or center field. I didn’t do bad as an infielder and considered something like a backstop at third or short, but ummm my throws had a tendency to sail a bit ( that drives first baseman (and coaches) crazy), however I could throw a strike to any base or to home plate from the deep outfield.
Any ways, in the late 70’s a bunch of us were all living together in one house nominally ‘house sitting’ for a friend who was off working for AT&T in another state. After he returned home he talked the company store into financing a ball team to field and one thing led to another from there. I made the team. It was an ok team for a first year team, guess we about middling in the standings. The reason I quit was one night under the lights I tried to stretch a single and sliding into second I broke a guys ankle………Snapped it clean off. Bone coming through the skin, the whole nine yards story.
When I heard the crack I knew one of us was hurt and lay still and quiet wondering if it was me or him…..then I heard the cry.
I haven’t picked up a bat since that night.
Song for your friend and his boat vision.
December 5, 2017 at 13:50
I suspect if someone wants to be a professional anything in this society they’d have to be dedicated from some inner desire. In my case, whatever my interest in baseball, it wasn’t that and I’m sure I’d have not gone the whole route. I’ve always been more deeply interested in things like the story telling you left off with. Thus I’m more drawn to your earlier tale about building “a dome or two” in the woods, for that’s where my instincts led me, at least as a story teller. I turned to building my repertoire of back country survival skills along with long distance bicycling as a way to enjoy my physical abilities, rather than sports. Even when I was pitching I wasn’t really a part of the team. I had my little obsessive thing going, trying to pitch the best pitch in the moment. I hadn’t even got far enough to try to figure out the batters yet. For my practice I remember mostly that I pitched alone at home on the farm, throwing through a hanging tire for a strike zone. No sand lot practice with toe drawn bases for this guy. I think rather than looking for family, I’ve been looking for something I’d call culture. Because I don’t think we have much of it left anymore.
My brother’s the one who is pursuing his long nurtured boat vision. He’s put nearly everything into a 40 foot sailboat, making it sea worthy for an ocean cruise he plans to begin about a year from now. He has visions of finding some lost tropical culture on islands somewhere off in the Pacific, I think. Under the “Friends and Relations” heading in the side column of this blog you can find a link to some of his artwork if you want. I’m storing some of it for him, which is like a rare gift. I don’t think I’ll be sending him that Peter Kagan story, although he may already be familiar with it. The ending is something I worry about for him. He keeps hinting that he wants me to join him, because I have much more experience at sea than he. But that’s a chapter long closed for me. Really have no interest in such adventures these days. Being at sea for days and days is an existential experience I have no desire to revisit. Sailing is about the journey, not the ports of call. I understand his somewhat secondary urge to leave this crumbling nation, though, as a kind of rising stormy wind behind a long nurtured dream.
One of the cuts from the vinyl Ports of Call I wore out back in the late fifties:
December 6, 2017 at 08:14
Just a couple of thoughts;
I’ve always found Kagan and the Wind a good allegory for mans hubris in the face of forces beyond his control. He ignores just one time the plaint of the spirit and muse he has taken to, he even initially tells the wind who he knows well that he won’t listen to what it has to say because he knows more and better. The winds of change weren’t amused, as they never are, because they are not there to be ignored.
That Kagan survived and his muse lost ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie ) and returned to the sea will be of little value if he hasn’t learned to feel the forces that are always swirling around and listen to the winds of change.
I don’t know your brother or how in touch he is with, for lack of a better word, those cosmic forces, but Kagan may well be a story he should hear, learn and pay heed to.
Aah well ren. you know me, always playing the mystic. I’m just babbling so feel free to ignore me.
We’re all bobbing around in choppy seas trying to keep our bearings.
December 7, 2017 at 07:56
No, not to be ignored. Good thoughts.
Daniel and I have talked about these things over the years a lot. In some ways I’m the elder, almost like the father neither of us really had in this relationship, because I’m nine years older and he was just coming into his adolescence when I returned from Vietnam. I guess I couldn’t help but start paying attention to him. He needed an older brother. But he’s come a long way over the years, through a number of self-initiated rituals of passage. I’m going to publish a new essay about that topic today. I’m still editing.
We have an ongoing narrative structure we’ve developed over the years not unlike some of the thoughts in our conversation here. If you look at his artwork you might see some of it there. I do. He’s also quite playful about it, “a musing” at it, if you will, but also deeply serious. He’s come to talk about civilization, for instance, as having been taken over by an AI (Artificial Intelligence). I like it as a metaphor. Institutions are an AI. It’s of our own derivation of course, but like Kagan and his troubled interaction with his muse, the AI ignores the cosmic forces, and people who are listening to the AI instead of those larger forces are in for an unexpected storm and some very cold weather. Thus an apocalyptic death becomes an appropriate metaphor to me.
My bearings are rolling around on the deck of my pitching ship most of the time.
December 7, 2017 at 09:48
I’d say that’s all to the good ren, because unless bearings are free to roll about the quiet center of passage will always remain lost. Only free moving bearings can ever expect to maintain a return to center or ever hope to find a center.
Hmmm I guess that was ok, so off now to left right brain stuff.
December 8, 2017 at 07:31
Or not. LOL
an added coda:
December 8, 2017 at 07:55
My “bearings rolling around on the deck of my pitching ship” is the best I can come up with for describing my systems way of thinking. I developed this approach back in the seventies along with my studies in anthropology and ecology, neither of which goes well with linear rationality. The linear approach always seems to need a goal and a compass. Can’t see where that has much application in the world I live in.
You do seem to have a broad musical palette. I have about a half dozen or so of Loreena’s CD’s. Book of Secrets is one, with this cut. Enjoy seeing it portrayed as someone else’s visual series of scenes, apparently from the Caucuses, though I’ve never been in that region myself. Don’t get that from the CD so Youtube offers a nice expansion to other’s imaginations. My own moonlit imaginary visuals while listening are different. I guess someone decided a filmed night ride might not be so pictorial.
December 8, 2017 at 10:50
Truthfully I rarely consider Youtube for visuals but only for easy access to any various bards that can paint a vision either for me or someone else in song and words that I may pass along. It’s only a rare accident that visuals match the words on Youtube if my opinion were asked.
I remember coming across a video of the song that was all night scenes some time ago and somewhat more satisfying in jiving with my own visions when hearing or rather the feelings that come to me in the ride but I admit was too lazy to find. Sorry I’ll try to be more attentive to visuals next time.
Confession,
I’m one those people perhaps you’ve heard about that when I’m just relaxed listening to people either talk or sing (or I could be reading an accomplished bard of word) I actually see color associated with the words both in my head and feel them in my body. I don’t mean just associate the words with color or feeling but a flooding of mind and body. Hmmm, there’s a real name for that ‘condition’ though it escapes me at the moment. At any rate it’s not very linear.
But I always wanted to be able to do that for others with words. Never could though. Bummer
Where did that bearing go I wonder?
And I seem to be missing more than one at that.
December 8, 2017 at 12:56
Synesthesia. I get it too. I used to think it was normal for everyone.
I wasn’t being sarcastic, I actually enjoyed seeing someone else’s associations. Other people live in different worlds. I try to keep that in mind, even appreciate it. It’s work to do that, of course. It’s like my bearings rolling around loose. I have to get used to that too. I’m not at all sure that order of some kind, or any kind, is the norm. Where did that idea that there should be an order to things come from? Got me.
December 8, 2017 at 15:21
At one time I thought it was perfectly normal and that everyone wanted to be a writer. I was so disappointed it wasn’t to be for me that once while amongst well versed friends I lamented my lost dream and was shocked to find no one else ever had harbored such thoughts. I still find that revelation of, not everyone wants to be a writer, a bit curious.
Order is the bane of humans and may well be it’s undoing. Order is what put humans on the map to begin with but now we are shocked and confused to find we can’t categorize and order everything. I mean really who could imagine the west coast burning out and down while it snows in the gulf of Texas and the northeast hasn’t even got ground solidly frozen yet.
The normal human is lost without order while some of us consider chaos and entropy the natural state.
December 9, 2017 at 06:00
And feeling lost they are threatened by the unknown, and threatened, afraid. And so, restore the order: off with their heads, those heathens and anarchists!
So… they all felt it acceptable to hand the country over to one…
December 9, 2017 at 07:16
I want to add something that came across my screen this morning. An image invoked with a cartoon. As context I note that MAGA has been coming up in ‘net conversations recently, apparently as a result of something tweeted by you know who. As I mentioned in the original essay in this long series of thoughts we’ve shared, MAGA is really just code for “Make America White Again”. So, this morning I see that cartoonist Mr. Fish seems to have conceived it that way as well:
December 25, 2017 at 05:52