Spark

One can spark emotion like one sparks fire, with the right fuel and catalyst, and let its light progress through the caverns of one's memory and concepts.

Season

In the winter, all of the regularly farmed plants begin to break down in a systematic fashion. Disease and insect attacks are better able to destroy energy-deficient and temperature stressed plants, and so they eventually die off, returning to the soil and restoring to the soil those elements that are crucial for the flourishing of life when the energy returns. The waiting seeds know to begin drawing the resources and extending organic structure outward, taking in what nutrients can be procured as the heat grows once again. 

What one eats and offers up to one's community decays, and so one breaks down in the winter in turn. But if one can rest and conserve one's energies, there are great pleasures to be had. And it makes the coming renewal all the sweeter. 

Conserve Undisciplined Change

In America, and really the modern world, the concept of conservatism has become hopelessly corrupt. Those who call themselves conservatives in this world tend to hilariously and tragically destroy conservation, tradition, and effectiveness with their beliefs. They have yoked themselves to a system that is the veritable embodiment of destruction. Show me the conservative who knows what to do and how to do it, who knows what is effective and what will produce harmony and flourishing, in perpetuity – at least in acceptable intervals of time.  

Community

A community is often seen as a system in the sense that its constituent parts – individuals, technologies, shelters, food stuffs, etc. – interact with each other in a distinct way, a way that possesses a certain character. It is not a closed system, but an open system that interacts in turn with the environment in which it is nestled.

Interactions which negatively affect the community’s reproduction into perpetuity could very well be called damage. An individual whose effects are preventing the community from reproducing itself as a whole – effects that can be minor or intense, widespread or particular and local – tends to be sanctioned, or damaged in turn: the daily reproduction of the individual in its present form is altered, so as to preserve the community.

Sanctions are meant to repair harms to other individuals, and to the community system itself, restoring harmony. A healthy community can sanction an individual and restore its own reproductive form, which is in harmony with its environment. An unhealthy community, however, is something else entirely.

A community whose very relations damage the environment it is a part of, and which damage its own constituent elements, cannot repair itself by sanctioning or damaging its constitutive individuals. No, such attempts at sanction cause great harm, both to the individual and to the community itself. This damage is chronic and self-reinforcing, in which a damaged individual is damaged repeatedly and only gets worse, and the damage spreads with greater intensity and breadth as the process continues.

To bring such a process to the attention to a community of individuals is to divide them, between those who want change, and those who don’t. Both interest groups have those who benefit from such a system, and those who are harmed regularly. Such a division, or polarization, is damage itself. A sick community then progresses to disintegration by repeatedly doing damage to itself.

Such a community then can only move forward by reconstituting itself, or it must destroy itself. What then, is damage?

Local Delights

One enjoyable aspect of the local economy is the collection of delights that can be found if one searches in the right places. Small farmers, bakers, brewers, chocolatiers, etc. are busy practicing their crafts for the love of it, as opposed to grooming their products for market, so more time and energy is put into the bare product, which circulating within a small distance, requires less marketing, , distribution, processing, packaging, among other things. The products are very fresh, seasonal, and idiosyncratic. One finds small treasures to be enjoyed while they last: fresh and delicious milk, chocolate, cheese, melons, among other things. They spread by word of mouth, because they demonstrate quality.

What's more, these products cannot be scaled up. Their locality and uniqueness places constraints on their circulation, so that society's worst economic forces are not able to sniff out the productive centers and transform them into yet more profit centers.

Market Variability

The variability of vegetables makes waste more easy to generate. They must be uniform to sell to the greatest number on an open market, and they must be quantified and standardized so as to achieve this. The reasons for this are a little more complex, which may be useful to get into another time.

But it is impossible to individualize the product in this case. Walking in an open field, one can pick a piece of food and eat it, whatever shape it may take, and one is grateful to have the food. But on the open market, competition allows for near perfect vegetables that are in the best possible condition and shape. One can pick through them, and choose, and therefore, there is tremendous pressure to narrow one's offerings down to such specimens, for fear of losing one's sale.

Accomplish

What does a plant wish to accomplish, what does a body wish to accomplish, what does one wish to accomplish?

It is possible here to extrapolate upon Plato's strange phrase about "carving nature at its joints." It seems as though life differentiates itself into disparate bodies with their own boundaries, properties, and ultimately interests, and the bodies themselves are further differentiated into regions or sections which cohere together via various binding materials.

Aggregates form out of these interests exerting claims on one another, regulating each other through their own mutual actions on each other, actions which go towards maintaining some common body or vessel which is to sustain them.

Certain bodies also eventually evolve so as to regulate themselves.

But it seems as though when organizing communal production to make food and other supplies, it is useful to concentrate on general flourishing. What does everything want to do, and how does it all help itself in a system achieve this to the greatest extent possible? A system which is of course not closed, but which is interacting with countless others throughout space and time.

Look Like Me

The constituents of a body to place pressure on the body in various ways, so as to make the body more like themselves, or direct the energy collected from the body towards themselves.

Permafire

A good month has passed since the valley filled with the smoke of the nearby fires. A general stillness during the month, combined with dryness, growing drought, exploding bark beetle and moth populations, and dry thunderstorms with lightning have produced ideal conditions for fires to break out throughout the land. The smoke is so thick that the mountains have become obscured, and the lookout stations have a more difficult time tracking the fires.

With the state's strained resources, the fires are chipped away at with whatever aerial watering is possible, and the land is worked with ground teams and volunteers. The state asked the federal government for additional resources, and was denied. Plenty to be written about here, but for now I'm focusing on the fires.

During one year, the smoke filled the air for 3 months. Fire seasons like these place a great strain on the general population health, and everyone stays indoors whenever possible. Animals and crops are affected in various ways. Tourism and outdoor activities are suppressed, campfires are banned, and in extreme cases, whole national parks are closed. 

There is a widespread malaise that descends upon everyone in the area, probably due to a combination of physical reactions to the smoke, and the psychological effects of being under a sooty ceiling for weeks on end, without sunshine and without a clear reading of the changing time of day.

The day becomes homogenized, and the landscape takes on a surreal and grim quality,
reminiscent of the ashen wasteland in Mcarthy's apocalyptic The Road. Passing cold front may treat one to wind and rain, and a savored reprieve in which one sees sun cloud and sky, but too early in the season, and the valley only fills in with smoke again in short order.

As the fires grow and burn for longer periods of time, and the weather and climate become more unforgiving, the future stretches wearily ahead in the imagination. One's summer becomes an ashen casket.

Unity and Individuation

Individuation gives way to the shearing forces of competition, the attention becomes focused on relations between each other, as opposed to one's relation to the community and to the earth, where one's actions begin to orient to the preservation of such things. The individual acts to preserve and buttress the individual, and this instinct is multiplied and achieves a greater social quality of its own, a quality of individuals draining energy from the whole, and breaking away from the whole.

But this state of individuation is necessarily compelled by a failure of the unity to account for the individual, when the individual itself attempts to impress itself upon the unity, and make everything connected to the unity more like itself.

Competition and the Flow State

To progress far enough in a given discipline in solitude, one has to be filled with a certain intensity of movement, or be granted some pleasure for advancing in achievement, or possess both of these things.

The flow state, the sometimes ecstatic and oftentimes hypnotic effect of being utterly absorbed in one's discipline is the experience of this.

Competition is introduced when you take this process and double it, adding the presence of a rival, which does change the experience of the discipline, oftentimes adding an anxiety of failure but also a thrill of achievement.Though competition also births the flow state in turn.

But one is very much focused on the other. Cooperation on the other hand may feature two individuals perfecting their disciplines in parallel.

Structure and Extension

Through a principle of generation, a structural tendency pushes extensions outward, in various repeated geometrical shapes, like a spiraling head of lettuce or a sea shell.

Aging and Friction

As one ages, one crystallizes and regularizes, so as to clutch and capture the life that one has steadily learned to excavate. At the same time, this makes one hard and brittle. Motion meets friction, and one pays for one's grasping attachment by eventually breaking down through it.

Though there are plenty exceptions, in the modern world the young encounter a resisting obstinance in their elders, that things must be done a certain way, and the young turn away in resent, and their values invert. Though of course they still unfold in accordance with their kind, their connections to their heritage.

CG Magic

One thing that today's blockbuster movies betray is the fact that so much of the energy, care, attention, and resources are concentrated in various entertainment technologies such as CG animation. Layers of quality emerge in the work itself.

The CG sequences get more rich, spectacular, realistic, and imaginative, whereas the people-relations, the acting emotions, the dialogue, and the basic human elements become emaciated and diminished.

To Write

The writer whose writing instrument breaks down becomes constipated with ideas. The act of writing, of manifesting the ideas into physical, shareable, viewable forms seems to exercise them. One is able to breathe through one's discipline. Much like the lungs take in the surrounding oxygen and distribute it, one's mind connects with the earth and others by encoding the objects of experience into written artifacts.

Stories

Down below, a stray weed was peeking out from under a head of lettuce, as if hiding from my pruning grasp. Aha! Natural selection. The individual weed has proliferated by nestling itself next to plants favored by human farmers. A story is generated, based on a projection of my own experiences. One can then cross-check this story with empirical data in many different ways, so as to satisfy oneself. If one's inquiry takes one as far as one goes without serious contradictions, one is satisfied with the story, and it may pass into circulation.

But what was the plant actually doing, if not simply becoming and unfolding in that particular space, in accordance with necessity, altogether apart from my own interests?

Our stories unfold on various deeper frameworks, which hold until competing frameworks come into view, all of which are maintained past the point of generation. Our stories live and die with us, on greater time horizons than our individual lives, but which decay in turn. 

The Hunger

One thing that often goes unsaid about intense labor is the immense hunger which comes out of it as a consequence, which besides the low pay, long hours, and restrictive and repetitive tasks that often accompany this occupation, can introduce an oppressive element of its own. One is constantly driven to hunger, constantly nagged on by its aching impulses, constantly procuring food and cooking it, because of one's intense appetite.

If one is paid very little, food takes up an even greater amount of one's daily allowance. Where there is not enough available resources for procuring food, the balance is taken out of one's body as one loses weight, where one's shrinking and sunken core acts as a visual reminder that one's body is literally being transferred into the objects of one's task.

Conversely, if one is doing nothing but meditating, one can fast comfortably for days or even weeks. And within the happy middle, a healthy amount of exertion and eating keeps the body busy and happy.

Ideas Pushing Through

As the science rediscovers what many cultures across time have known, that plants, and trees in particular form communities and communicate through various types of fungi in the soil, a question arises: in what state of radical separation do the urban and farmed plants exist in? What is the experience of a community of plants as a shovel cuts into the tissues of communication?

The answers to these questions could very well lead to yet another impetus for revolution in a given sphere of production. What does this mean for the farm as a productive entity?

This is one curious aspect of modern civilization, this constant refocusing and revolution of our spheres of perception, and our ideas themselves, which connecting to the earth that produces them,
 (and which is acted on by them in turn) tend to erupt through material reality itself.


Indeed, if we were to act on our emergent sensibilities for interconnected plant communities, we would have to revolutionize production itself, which connected to everything else, would generate a chain reaction of upheaval.

It would involve great pain and suffering, as revolutions tend to produce, which can be attributed to the brittle qualities of a fearful conservatism which seeks to attach to ongoing processes of suffering and destruction.

Receipts

As one emerges as an individual, birthed and forged in a violent empire, the question arises: what does one owe one's fellows, and one's cradle, one's earth?

Technical Difficulties

Welp, got a few posts up before my network adapter took a shit, right after my Windows partition took a shit. More posts to get up, but for now I'm locked out on the laptop. So it goes.

Mountain Life

Life on a mountain generally takes shape around gravity's pull and the flow of water down the mountain's contours. Plant life enjoys an array of possibilities based on how well water can be retained as it flows downward. The snow packs melt, and flow or trickle via pathways of least resistance, shaped by the water flows themselves, wind flows, and erosion.

On the ridges, sparse alpine meadows form, often horizontally and their leaves and roots extend so as to capture sunlight and nutrients, while limiting themselves to austere limits of extension.

Further down the mountain, where the land plateaus, lakes may form, which nurture meadows and grass, and then trees, which also tend to grow throughout the ravines, which carry water in the spring and summer.

The aligning desires in this case hold in various matrices, denser as water and nutrients collect, which map to the mountain's ever-changing contours.

Working Toward Ends

A deeper end or set of ends can determine the experience of labor in any given direction.

If one respects and/or agrees with the end/s, then labor is pleasurable and one steadily advances in skill and accomplishment. Life becomes more meaningful and generally satisfactory.

Ambivalence toward a given end or set of ends is not entirely gratifying, but one can hum along, do a sufficient job, and achieve one's pleasures outside of work.

And then of course if one disagrees with or has contempt for an end, one steadily becomes more resentful, uncommunicative, uncooperative, and resistant throughout the process. One may even become fearful, or become stricken with terror, if work is wasting time and energy and one's position is dire. 

Not really rocket science, I know. Just thought it was worth jotting down.