Lava Rock

Inside Out

One way to conceptualize madness is as a social artifact that is used as a smothering weapon, wielded by those with power. This can be hard to articulate, but here: the turbulence which permeates all of society is seized upon as it bubbles up within the individual.

Those beginning glimmers of a turbulence in the individual are simply the gradual emergence of a social turbulence through the path of least resistance: where it percolates up through the most sensitive or vulnerable individuals first. The individual is isolated as "mad" and cast out.

This game of whackamole can continue until there are too many moles to whack, when that inner subjectivity coalesces through the relations of the many and through a process of inversion, emerges then as the whole objective state of society, and the "mad" ones appear as prophets.

For example, my doubts in myself as paranoid have largely been allayed by simply looking outward. I only need to look at basic facts of our current existence and instantly think: nope, not paranoid, everything really is fucked. I still have bouts of paranoia, but it is no longer the problem it once was.

So the belief in "madness" in the conventional sense may then be seen as a superstition itself. It is seen as a separate entity of its own which can be captured and then banished. Which is funny - certainly by design - as the "mad" themselves are often perceived as superstitious.

One way to banish superstition is to entertain the recognition that there is only necessity. What must happen, and where must the energy go? In other words, accumulating traumas are inevitable in a society which refuses to reconcile its own collective traumas. Yes, traumas can be isolated and sterilized in individuals in severely limited ways, allowing the greater system to stagger on. But trauma always occurs as a collective relation.

But unaddressed at their base in this way, eventually those traumas continue to build, and accumulate, and sooner or later, they must be released.

Addiction

A lot of addiction has to do with substances and activities that are designed for rapid delivery and convenience. It is a little more difficult to become addicted to something you are growing yourself, and harvesting yourself, and processing and curing yourself.

It takes quite a bit of work to do this, and the work itself is pleasurable and fulfilling on top of everything else, whereas it is typical for an addiction to supply quick hits of pleasure and fulfillment wherever it is sorely lacking.

Quick hits are rapidly metabolized, and so exhausted, and then more is needed, deepening those channels to be hit.

Much in this society is designed for rapid delivery and rapid distribution, and this is not an accident. And so the quick hits are quickly metabolized, creating bigger and more urgent spaces of lack, drawing in bigger and bigger hits, and constant acceleration is required.

Generalized, there is addiction everywhere. Part of society's function is to cordon off the aspects of this which are a threat to its powerful. And so the designation of "addiction" applies to those substances and activities the powerful do not like. "Illegal drugs" for example are substances which the establishment doesn't have a monopoly on, mainly because their effects are too destructive either to the existing social arrangements or to labor, whose production are taken up by fringe elements looking for their own power.

This is not pure caprice, as the powerful stay powerful by maintaining what living tissue is required to indulge them. But a society such as this is in a constant state of degeneration, which is arguably accelerating far past what degeneration is native to life's elemental processes.

Binary

One thing about a binary - an on and off system - is that it does facilitate control. It acts as a lever. If you have two options for something to take that you are trying to control, it is easier to make those options distinct, and depending on the outcome you prefer, encourage a certain direction for whatever is subjected to that binary.

The simple binary of life and death is significant to whatever pocket of energy is organized and "living." And so the life side of the coin must be focused and deepened, and the death side of the coin, pushed away and curtailed.

Socially, having two options - such as good and evil - allows one to take one position or the other, which leads to more stark and decisive actions. On the flip side, it also allows those with power to quarantine one or the other designation, and then use that designation as a weapon, while retaining its binary opposite as a shield. Having even a third option - let alone a spectrum of options - makes things a little more unpredictable and a little more complex, which is much more difficult to manage.

One of the peculiarities of this industrial civilization, and probably all civilizations, is that as an entity it is incomprehensibly complex, but what makes it work, or what makes it persist in its current state, is a complexity that is made up of simplified binaries stacked and stacked upon each other.

Because a binary allows a given aspect of civilization to take the shape that is desired. And a binary has to be maintained. Its boundaries and its functioning need perpetual stewards.

On Elementals

The thing about elementals, and which makes them so popular as instructive symbols in countless mythologies, is in their name: they are at the base of everything. Fire, for example, can spread through just about any sort of organic matter, and where it can't spread, or where it dies, a negation can be drawn up which is equally instructive.

This universality points to a basic logic which can be transferred beyond the locality that it arose in. It teaches beyond the confines of its own activity. You can start low, and then work your way up.

This is also why lies, or even logical or social contrivances are more difficult to keep track of. They persist in the web of previous relations they were part of. If one loses sight of those, it becomes possible to get lost, and lose the current lie or contrivance. Matters of the heart however faithfully rise up into whatever is built onto them. One can find the way again by simply returning to the low point.

On Fire

Fire really is an incredible phenomenon: with its relations abstracted, much wisdom can be gleaned from it. The special conjunctive conditions for its emergence can be seen in all sorts of complex phenomena. It may exist as a wink and as a whisper here and there, but then with enough friendly circumstances it spreads and gains strength, generating the conditions which feed it in turn. After enough work and enough magic, it takes on a life of its own, and can become a good friend, spreading heat and warm light, and which only desires to eat here and there in return. Of course it can became a good enemy too, and take everything held dear.

What's Possible

It is curious to survey the political tussling over words and where those words are applied. It is not usually the instinct of a political professional to inquire into the meaning of a given word, but to pick up and use what is widely available by convention, and what offers advantage or injury to the other.

The words are forged elsewhere, whether by other professionals, intellectuals, or by the perpetually boiling-over crucible of history itself.

Words like "bribe" and "corruption" have very clear emotional and moral registers, which were imbued at an earlier time when the social relations were hot and active and in an intense dynamic state.

There is a certainty behind those words which still echoes on, a certainty which is picked up currently by actors looking to harness the energy of a previous and kinetic time, and direct that energy towards their opponents.

Because right now, there are all sorts of behaviors which are clearly destructive: the proliferation of shell companies and the hiding away and laundering of money flows away from contemporary tax obligations, which are already weak and insignificant in the first place.

And one only has to look at all the money flows into the various organs of political machinery. And because it is how everything currently works, and because everyone is doing it, then whoever has the rhetorical acumen can slide by, equating spending money to the exercise of free speech say, while isolating "corruption" and "bribery" within neat little packages which can be handled and manipulated. I swear, if I hear someone say "quid pro quo" one more time...

There may have been a time when the handing back and forth of money - as a young convention - was frowned on by certain traditionalists, but here was a relatively new technology, and in a time of boom and growth, who is to say what kind of social relation is really forbidden until we reach the terminus of its regular operation, and judge it by its fruits.

It is those who are scrambling underneath the falling, flaming debris of a collapsing social order, who are desperate enough to make the needed changes and prohibitions en masse, that put the imprints into words that are only toyed with on a case by case basis today.

What collective actions are possible in a given period of time? I guess it depends on what is going on, and what everyone is doing.

R's and D's

This is a little late but maybe worth commenting on still. The kerfuffle over the impeachment hearings - which admittedly still manages to smolder on - lacks the perceptive focus exactly where it needs to be: inward and towards the very nature of the system that is proceeding. There is a yawning cavity there, with all of the energy directed outward, toward Russia say, or Ukraine, or even between the Republicans and Democrats. As a result, the system lumbers and grinds on in the direction it has been going, the direction that has led it to this point thus far.

To Hoard or Not to Hoard

The archetypal hoarder is really just the concentration of a tendency that is in everyone more or less: the tendency to grasp. At its extreme, the concentration is made into a media spectacle and as such, can be isolated as an aberration, usually for the sake of fascination and entertainment for those witnessing the spectacle. What starts as a private social problem is made public through this media spectacle, as it is the media that perpetually reproduces the public at the scale we are at today.

Through typical media transmission, the hoarder is a character who dependably hoards, and everyone looks on in agitation and pity. It is up to the individual to break the cycle of grasping and let go, with a little bit of help from family and friends. This is a character that has less social power, whose living conditions are perfectly acceptable terrain for shame and pity, and thus suitable for an intervention.

Reckoning with the structural social conditions that bring about this concentration - at a certain frequency and probability - is a little more difficult, and not as appealing a subject for a TV show. This becomes more apparent the further you get into the meat and bones of the structure, those parts of the structure that are a little more difficult to shift around and alter without affecting meaningful change. In other words, resistance grows as attention is shifted to those with higher social power.

For example, the phenomenon of the billionaire is not yet readily accepted as a horrifying and shameful state of affairs (at least in the carefully censored public realm), even though the associated hoards are far more extensive, and are far more destructive to far greater swathes of community than the garage filled with crap. Yes, negative talk against billionaires is more present than ever in certain regions of the political spectrum, and is even permitted to be aired in media venues, but this is a far cry from actually going to someone's house, pointing fingers and tut-tutting, and then with tears and heartfelt hugs, liquidating and setting free that whole unsightly mass of material and abstract wealth.

And for something like this to happen without the complete razing of the entire political economic structure, and the wiping out of the classes most committed to it, it would take a massive and widespread change in consciousness, of one's perception of the nature of the cosmos and one's own visceral feelings and relations to the universe. I know what you're thinking: not likely.

After all, the greater hoards bring about the conditions for desiring hoards in the first place, and those conditions brought about earlier hoards, and so on. I have my own little collection of stuff I'm quite attached to, and looking out over the world and its current state, I think: well I better hold onto this stuff a little longer. The billionaires can go first!

At least for the time being, some things can be let go, especially through one's own private spiritual and living practices.

Tahoma in the Fall

Not sure how many posts and pictures I'll get to within the next month. I've been derelict in my duties again, but hey, the writings will come when they are ready. Lots of traveling, catching up with family and friends, etc.

Desire

Desire doesn't tend to simply just go away, or even be willed away. It usually has to be exhausted, whether through its fulfillment, or through its failure.

Bugs

Flying insects which encounter difficulties in built environments are often ungenerously thought of as "stupid" or "dumb," such as when they bob their way pathetically across a pane of glass, or hover hopelessly around an outdoor light. Setting aside the numerous social problems attached to those words and concepts in the first place, this initial judgment also obscures more than it reveals.

Perhaps a more interesting question to think about is this general sense of bewilderment in the animal kingdom, in which the many beings that share the earth with us are simply at a loss when it comes to coping with this massive and spectacular human built environment, which in geological and evolutionary timeframes, has suddenly materialized into view like the sudden arrival of the Star Wars star destroyers as they exit hyperspace.

For that matter, human beings themselves are bewildered in the face of their own kaleidoscopically morphing creations. Perfectly intelligent and perceptive people often run right into the very screen doors they install and manipulate on a daily basis, when they aren't paying full attention to their surroundings.

Now, the poor insects haven't had the time to evolve responses to the baffling planes of glass which appear out of nowhere and stretch on seemingly into infinity, or the never ending constellation of outdoor lights which replace their natural forms of guiding light. These are some of the many environmental sinks which have suddenly materialized within the last 200 years, and which are hoovering up the lives of whole clouds of insects, as they are burned on light and flame, or exhaust themselves fruitlessly following false light, or are picked off by predators waiting by the lights.

We've been wondering where all of the insects have been going, as any anecdotal remark about the decline of the windshield "bugsplat" can attest to. There are many exits from the mortal coil that they have been taking. These are just a few of them.

Hoard

Whether crammed into the garage or bursting throughout the house itself, the hoarder's stash serves as a compelling emblem of our pathological material relations in the modern era.

At first appearance the hoard is incredibly disorderly and vaguely disrespectful. Those things might be true in some ways, but underneath this phenomenon is an exquisite tenderness and a perpetual strain towards long term order and control. 

The innumerable and varied objects - many of which appear as useless, trivial, and/or junk - accumulate around a terrible trauma, and the accompanying fear of an uncertain future. 

Each new object in the stash could "come in handy" someday, or otherwise is imbued with a powerful sentimentality that would be quite painful to break. This is a strange ontological realm in which the vast abundance that the industrial middle class has access to is nevertheless scarce and could be swept away at any moment, never to return again. 

To contrast, within a fertile forest, the objects of one's needs are constantly being regenerated, and indeed are striving to reproduce and perpetuate themselves, and lie in a relationship to oneself as a web of mutual support. At least, before winter arrives. 

Alas, winter is here for the hoarder all the time. Life is a taught tightrope walk in which one's precious resources are relentlessly squirreled away, as the context that they were generated in is eternally suspect as a cold and hostile vacuum. The only choice is to accumulate whatever one can get one's hands on, and never let those things out of one's sight. The whole sprawling future and all the promise that it brings is compressed and concentrated into the tight space of one's own provincial domain. 

Falls

On Water

Water, that great equalizing and dissolving force, can at the same time be essential and detrimental. As it pervades all life, it is needed by life. But then as it dissolves and breaks everything down and incorporates everything into it, it succeeds at eroding those passes at continuity such as housing and walking paths. What one needs must also be held at remove.

But then to act too strongly to protect against water, say to lay down a suffocating cover of concrete to ensure that nothing breaks down, is to deny the percolation of water into the ground where it is needed, or otherwise, the water moves somewhere else, where it eventually gathers strength and floods and overwhelms.

So nothing can really be absolutely dominated or subsumed. What is to be influenced must also influence in turn.

The Economy of Ideas

One thing that I've noticed about the dynamic ideas - within my own self at least - is that their structure and expression is highly sensitive to environment and activity. If I'm engaged in intense physical work, the ideas are formed out of direct experiences - whether through physical experiences or sensory perceptions - which are initially formed as impressions, which can then be elaborated upon when I have settled down.

Settling down for a longer period of time, the ideas begin to crop up and become much more self-referential. They are evoked suddenly and explosively, oftentimes through received symbols that are transmitted through media and reading and writing. And they build upon each other, ever taller into abstraction, as there is more energy available for them.

What is left after these processes is then stored and accumulated, which is used in subsequent processes later on. And it all steadily accumulates and mutates.

Mimetic Squeeze

Monopolization and industry concentration have powerful mimetic effects, which aren't only born out of pure mimicry, but also out of necessity. When one corporation concentrates and vies for monopoly in a given industry or market, it leads to a sense of panic and urgency within competing organizations, because the monopolizing entity is going for everything, which implies the death of its competitors.

And monopolization implies the re-coupling of corporate entities spanning multiple industries, so the patterns of monopoly eventually spread across all industries. Capital is constantly attempting to resituate itself so as to maximize the rate of profit - which functionally accrues to a minority of controllers - which necessitates minimizing the flow of costs to the body: labor, infrastructure, and resource inputs, say.

So as currency flows continue to constrict - and losing rivals are destroyed and/or subsumed - the remaining surviving smaller businesses also have to move to sap more resources in the ways that they can, or else constrict their own operations and costs. So there is a relentless and broad-based squeeze that advances the body politic to crisis.

At the same time as the rule of law is corrupted by the economic and political concentration, there is also a growing perception that anything goes, as long as one is powerful enough, a perception that reaches down into even the common citizen. Who knows what dormant schemes are now on their way to spawning and hatching out?

One could imagine that buried underneath that complex of imperial desires for conquest is the desire for that arch-monopolist, the leviathan government to put an end to the whole struggle altogether, historically with anti-trust measures and the like.

But the arch-monopolist itself must be remonopolized by the lobbies of anti-monopoly. Monopoly cannot be solved by substitution: it must be destroyed by those whose associations are agreed upon and situated to prevent further monopoly. Though of course this isn't always true. Sometimes it takes a king or a dictator. More broadly, a bad state of affairs must be replaced with a different state of affairs, which then persists for some time.

Underneath the process of monopolization is the desire for control. It was partially the hubris of rich reactionaries who didn't want to be subjected to government control that advanced us to this new era of monopolization, but it is always much more complicated. 

Because the forces of financialization - through their processes of wealth concentration and sequestration - also threaten connected economic actors and introduce further chaos which produces further desires for control. And these are forces which were broadly welcomed across the Western political spectrum - that part of the spectrum with power at least - across the last 4 decades at least.

There are numerous other interconnected crises - some of them economic, some environmental, and still others political and social - which introduce greater levels of instability into this process, which evoke the desire to control, which leads to greater instability, and so on.

And this tendency, unfortunately for all of us, is built into the general nature of capital, which through massive and historical processes of social and political succession, is here to stay, at least until it triggers another successive stage. At this time, it is apparent that a profoundly destructive stage is much more likely.

Impeach

One of the arguments that keeps coming up  about the impeachment hearings - at least in liberal circles - is that the process of the hearings, if nothing else, will at least serve to raise important questions about our political economy and world politics. It will open up a dialogue, as they say.

But this argument, besides being naive, is a mark of profound self-absorption. It is already the case that every crushing and impossible debt, every failed institution or community in the face of extreme weather, or any other aspect of political and economic injustice is enough to raise all kinds of questions and evoke all sorts of dialogue from and between affected individuals.

But why would the impeachment hearings suddenly make a difference significant enough to address the profundity of the problems we face?

One only has to listen to the initial hour of the public impeachment hearings to grasp what has been apparent throughout the entire process: it is just another echo - albeit a highly distinguished and formalized one - of a largely self-referential and theatrical operation of a political system that has long since been decoupled from the systems it governs.

The witnesses yammer on, carefully reconstructing and airing the binary products of political manufacture, while recalling endless streams of conversation and system processes which only concern them and their class, while the listener sits, head-cocked and ears perked up, but eyes glazing, straining to comprehend in vain. There is no truth here. Nor is there dialogue, only a series of monologues bursting forth like spears from a phalanx.

This effect was built into the structure of the hearings from the very beginning, thanks to the selectiveness and constraint with which the threat of impeachment was raised. Up until now, the structure of the economy was fine, the self dealing was fine as long as it wasn't too loud or gaudy, the cascading failures to deal with numerous environmental disasters were fine, the refugee crisis and profoundly cruel way of dealing with it was fine, the financial cannibalization was fine, and so on and so forth, because it was all continuous across the functioning of both parties for decades.

But now Trump threatens Biden politically in an open and un-coded way and my my now the gloves are off! Now the cherished sensibilities of the established political class are the precious thing being sullied; nevermind the growing rivers of blood and ash sullying everyone else.

Now, it wasn't my intent to echo Republican talking points about theatrics either, which themselves are theatrical expressions embedded in the same carefully constructed political dreamworld. It is self-evident that this is all theater, but theater is not categorically bad in and of itself.

No, there is good theater and bad theater. Theater is an expression of the workings, activity, and efficaciousness of the people and institutions producing it. Good theater can change the way people think and feel about each other and their worlds. It can matter. Bad theater is boring and irrelevant, or offensive depending on who is witnessing. It is usually this way because the people producing bad theater don't care much more about anything but themselves and what rotten fiefdoms they can cobble together in the service of their own provincial interests.

This is a function of the health of the institutions they are part of, a health which acts on them and sets them into unfortunate trajectories (if the health is bad), which also act on the institutions in turn.  And for this reason the avenues of right action left open to us as a society will not involve our political institutions in their currently constituted form. 

Sawed Stump

A Quick Update

It has been some time since a posting, but here are a couple now. Life circumstances have changed again, as they do around here, so the content and frequency of the content will change too. For the better? I don't know, but difference can always be counted on. More to come.

Politic

A modern industrial society, with its modern complexity, requires in turn a modern politics which reduces and compresses that complexity to manage it.

And so archetypes are put forward to direct and channel the political energy. The brokerage of images - images embodied in individuals - as a historical and social mode of politicking is furthered as a mechanism to make this process possible.

Archetypes do have to be made though, and today they are manufactured. And the brokerage itself must pass through a mode of manufacture too. And even the mode of manufacture itself has to exist within a social and historical reality.

So we get left with a largely binary set of images - which are both crude and refined in their own ways - which do nothing to describe reality, other than to ritualistically function to keep the industrial society in motion.

And as the processes of industry break down and tumble apart, so too do the political machines, and the crude images crash against each other as their crude and simplistic barriers meet together violently.

The Human Element

Many analyses of the environment and climate spheres tend to be kept separate - and held up as distinct and delineated objects - from analyses of political and economic spheres, though of course there are always accompanying commentaries that make note of crossover effects that one sphere might have on the other. There are plenty of excellent analyses to go around which deliberately make use of multiple spheres to build a holistic case, though these analyses do tend to be shoved to the margins by those dominant institutions of information dissemination which those analyses threaten.

Nevertheless, less plentiful is an appreciation of really how explosive the human element tends to be within this greater metabolism, all of which make for a holistic object of study. Say, we look upon the growing storms and wildfires with trepidation on the one hand, and then upon the frothing global trade and nationalism with lamentation on the other, but then never the twain shall meet, at least in the public eye.

Yes, we're trained to look out upon an object and cast judgment on it, or else switch gears and turn the perception inward within a stream of introspection, both processes of which are very useful in different situations and yield their respective fruits. But to synthesize the two? We don't seem to be as good at that, at least collectively.

Which is just as well, and seems to be a common condition of modern conscious existence. After all, how many can withstand the intense feelings of vertigo, upon becoming alarmed at the increasingly kinetic and turbulent biosphere, and then looking inward to find that explosiveness mirrored in one's own self and society? This is an explosiveness which is ready to burst forth from the mere necessity of motion, where everywhere solutions to problems stand poised to beget yet more problems.

This may seem an esoteric line of inquiry, but energy itself does seem ever more esoteric the more one stares it in the face, which becomes mind-melting. The simplistic metaphor of a dying fire - deprived of its fuel, heat, and/or oxygen - is dashed to pieces upon application to a human organism deprived of food and water, which in its advanced state, becomes ever more explosive and dynamic.

Like the locust, which, finding itself in drought, is moved to frenzy in a consuming cloud which tears across the landscape, the advanced human organism, in a state of deprivation, is spurred into monopoly, war, and total control.

We are left with a choice of actions in which the consequences of each are not significantly different. To avoid turning our gazes inward, it is necessary to continue along the same pathways, the same ruts, marshaling conventional methods, such as current technological fixes to current technological problems, which draw in a whole different set of resources to substitute for the resources being depleted, which at the current scale, sets into motion the same patterns of depletion and turbulence that the previous patterns effected.

Otherwise, to turn the gaze inward is to come up against one's - and others' - own explosive nature. One is moved to change one's nature internally only through dramatic constraint, change, or trauma, all of which tend to originate from external sources.

One's nature can be changed externally from the influence of others, though this outside influence more than often fosters resent. Witness the political directive to "change your life" and save the world. Well who is beckoning this change? Are these beckoners changing every aspects of their own lives, are just the parts that are convenient and have a favorable image?

And then there is the problem of the global elite, whose very natures and existence are predicated on the image of total power and control. And so the inward-facing appeal to change their lives, and give up some control and power is actually an absolute threat to their control and power, which is met with the thirst for more control and power, which increases the need for them to change. Now they exist as the mortal enemy of all of humanity, including themselves, which requires a marshaling of comparable amounts of energy and resources to vanquish them, which produces a turbulence - both internal and external to the human organism - which we are trying to avoid. 

At the end of this analysis, the human element itself takes hold in the consciousness as a fearsome and dynamic force, its presence front and center, and even those terrifying environmental storms and fires take a back seat. This is the storm and fire par excellence.

Its modern form, which in its material expansion and global breadth, and its cultural atomization and resent, is poised to explode upon being antagonized, and is currently in a historical state of explosion in response to historical antagonisms, and then as it explodes it continues to antagonize itself and its own environment. This is a mechanism which is more fearsome than the atom bomb itself, which was merely birthed by it.

Is a life of peace and dignity possible in the face of such a state of affairs? Well of course. But first this is a vision which must be seen and felt.

Frost

Mine

A belief system can quickly go from describing some sort of truth to simply being a declaration of "this is mine." It takes work, limited time and energy, and social resources to make visible and bring a belief system into circulation, whether through publications, media and cultural outputs and practices, or simple labor and leisure practices themselves, as governed by various political, economic, and legal organizations at many different levels of scale. Many times social benefits accrue to fortunate souls who are merely perceived to produce or even preside over these beliefs. Getting at a belief system, especially for the incumbent, may go from an exercise in truth-finding and clarification to a struggle over "what is mine."

Our Golden Age Shall Be Eternal

It is amusing to watch the various bursts and explosions of certain types of wildlife as their numbers peak and disperse at various times during the seasons.

In the summer, suddenly these huge ants were everywhere, feverishly scouting, working, and rummaging in every direction, and then just as suddenly they vanished. There were a proliferation of garter snakes in the garden, and during the day they could be seen just everywhere, sunning themselves. The gnats would come and go in swirling clouds.

Migratory birds would suddenly descend in droves, making rackets and building nests and collecting worms, and then disappear again. Huge banana slugs could be seen collecting early morning dew, and then the first frosts came and they vanished.

Earwigs could be seen proliferating everywhere, and when one turned on a water spigot outside they would tumble out of it, looking almost sheepish, and then scrambling into the depths of the grass and on to the next adventure.

And suddenly a proliferation of a type of plant occurs on available soil, and then it all blooms and goes to seed, and then blackens and melts away, and the scattered seeds go dormant.

There are of course local species - and more persistent and larger populations like local trees for example - which move on slower wavelengths, though at the proper timescale they too may be seen to be exploding and then melting away.

And then say on a people scale, a sudden profound spiritual insight comes with a developed set of mechanisms, rituals, and symbols to reproduce that insight and spread that insight further along sympathetic subjectivities, individuals say, who have had similar experiences and are similarly receptive. And those insights sublimate into something else - or calcify - and are transformed and then pass away in their original form.

And I can laugh at myself too: my, these thoughts seem deep and big, and wow the work I'm doing seems to be pretty interesting and important. And soon it will all be dust!

Trails

Wild trails may be easy enough to follow for some time: one just continues in the direction that is passable without tromping through thickets, crushing delicate plantlife, scrambling over slopes, and submerging oneself in water or mud.

But you do have to pay attention. These trails are always changing, in accordance with the principle of least resistance. Stream courses are always changing. Rocks are rolling off of hills and resettling. Slopes are eroding. Trees are falling over. Rapid plant growth in the spring and summer, and die-off in the fall and winter may affect lines of travel.

The humans - and even the animals - that regularly use the trails, and maintain them by compacting them, may decide scrambling over a new set of fallen logs, erosions, or plant growth is just not worth the effort, and may redirect their path through a better course, subtly altering the trail in turn. And then the trail has changed.

Certainty in the Wild

What the wilderness demonstrates - namely for someone not accustomed to wilderness spaces - is the centrality of certainty as a state of mind to action and activity. This demonstration occurs through a contrast between the familiar and unfamiliar.

If one is unfamiliar with the terrain, and unfamiliar with subsisting in the terrain, a given stretch of land travel can seem like an eternity. This is because in modern human environments, one becomes accustomed to setting symbolic ends and judging abstract quantities. How long will this take? How many miles of travel is it and how fast is one moving? By habituating oneself to these measurements and actions, one becomes comfortable with how long something will take and how much travel is required, and if one knows what one is doing, or is with someone who knows what they are doing, then the mind is at rest or at least certain.

This is due in part to the nature of modern transportation, which has become highly regularized, systematized, and organized, which allows the attention to drift to abstract and objectified quantities like time and and distance. Even this is changing of course, and there are regular exceptions; uncertainty in the built environment is a very interesting topic of its own, but for now I'd like to continue on to the wilderness.

These measurements and timeframes can break down in the wild, as navigating the wild is not the same as navigating a built environment, especially if one is not traveling with someone with the knowledge and experience of navigating a given region of wilderness. Learning how to navigate can take more time, and so this muddies the symbolic picture, and the subjective experience of that picture.

Even a mile of travel in uncertain terrain can become daunting. Is one going in the right direction? Every step one takes without catching sight of a readily identifiable landmark or destination begins to raise doubt and consternation.

This doubt and consternation can quickly build into fear and panic, especially if one is actually lost, which greatly lowers the efficiency and effectiveness of one's navigation. Restoring certainty here takes the redirection of one's attention from definite and measurable quantities of time and distance - though some of this can be mediated with a map and compass - and towards the learning of navigational skills and the development of sensory faculties of navigation, and the placing of one's trust in those subjective experiences, for starters.

Potential

The thing about the mass dysfunction of an existing ideology and way of life is that it makes everything else possible. After the deluge (or even right before it) you're just asking, "well why not?" Because this way of life that was supposed to be functional and supposedly the only way to go about things has just worked out so well, and now it is on its way out. What to replace it?

Of course everything that is possible eventually gets winnowed down by necessity, competition, and the emergence of new victors which anchor and deepen their newfound power. But hey.

Apres Moi

Right: Le Deluge. Some beautiful phrasing, which due to its popularity and corresponding overuse, has detracted from its beauty a bit. But the phrase and its corresponding imagery - and history - does have some prescient content, which may account a good deal for peaking usage. That and its cool and sophisticated to throw around old French sayings. But I'll go ahead and stop nitpicking.

The "deluge" part is usually what takes up the most space in the collective imagination. But I think just as interesting is the relationship between the run-up to the deluge, the deluge itself, and the aftermath of the deluge, and so on in a historical progression of interrelated parts.

The metaphorical - or literal - flood is never really a permanent end. It is a transitory - and let's be clear, significant - event that indicates the breaking apart of a given order, which allows for other orders to be ushered in. The problem with this though is the chaos and strife in the interim.

When things break apart violently and traumatically, those living and surviving through the process tend to be shaped dramatically by those experiences. And bare survival amidst violent and catastrophic upheaval tends to encourage the eventual concentration of power, and the eventual perpetuation of that concentrated power, lest the individuals within that process wish themselves and their heirs to experience the same things again.

Which, let's be clear, is not true everywhere. Chaotic and tumultuous phases of history are often responsible for some of the greatest spiritual insights, which foster peaceful and humble living, among other things. But it only takes successful power accumulation somewhere, and then it encourages all of the others around it to do the same. Those great spiritual insights do eventually find their way into encapsulation within corresponding great religions, replete with their walled kingdoms and loot-filled cathedrals, after all. It's complicated. Yes. 

It is the concentration of power that eventually leads to a situation in which that power needs to be dispersed violently once again, in the "deluge." So the long-form problem is the chop: that historical relation in which a wave begets a valley which begets a wave and so on.

It is hard to get off the teeter-totter when it is constantly rocking, so you eventually just have to fall off, which makes no guarantee of where you'll end up. So you fall and others fall, and perhaps the teeter-totter falls apart altogether, and the sum of that activity contains the essence of that falling, so then another teeter-totter emerges, merrily rocking away after the momentum of that falling. On and on and on. It's as if the teeter-totter has to fall apart so completely that there is no possibility for one to emerge in quite the same way again. At least, for anything to really, totally change.

Inverted Trash

Conversely, when an environment is built out enough that human artifice becomes the dominant feature, such that even natural features take place there as features cultivated by human deliberation, then the nature of "trash," or what is "out of place" changes in turn. Tree branches and other plant sheddings that are cast aside no longer appear as natural, to degrade on their own terms like on the forest floor. They too appear out of place and as trash - though something perceived as quaint like fallen leaves can stay, at least for a limited amount of time - and must be swept up and disposed of somewhere else.

But other forms of trash, like cut lumber which "belong" in built environments still become trash when they degrade and become "out of place" when they are no longer useful and/or attractive. The more widespread the built environment becomes, the more energy must be expended to put things where they belong and move them elsewhere when they no longer belong. Less and less can simply be left alone to do what it shall.

Cracked

Trash

As soon as you remove a piece of wood from the forest and cut a couple of straight lines on it, the quality of the wood changes dramatically. It becomes more"useful" as building material, in a certain relation with other elements of human artifice, but it also begins its decline into "trash."

A rotting board of lumber sitting on the forest floor doesn't look too good; it looks like garbage, because it looks out of place with its perfectly straight lines, even though it will decompose anyway. And it is garbage.

That same exact piece of lumber, before it was altered, as a fallen or shattered tree, in the form of a stump, cut off round, or a large fallen branch looks perfectly fine lying in the forest. Untouched, it may not be very useful, but it looks like it belongs there, even as it decomposes, as alas, that is what trees occasionally do. And indeed, it adds to the beauty of the forest's landscape.

Damage Revealed

Until you work directly with it, or work with people who work directly with it, there are forms of decomposition that just remain hidden until something or someone brings it to your attention. Let's say, for example, the effects of wet soil on plant leaves, wood beams, or shovel blades. It is hard on all of them. It spreads disease and rot on the plants, it rots and decomposes the lumber, and it breaks down the shovel blades.

These oversights can be embarrassing, but how could it be otherwise? Some signals are just too insulated the further you are from them. And you learn of them through hard experience, or by someone who has learned through hard experience telling you directly about it.

And sometimes you just bang an elbow on something. After all, the elbow is not the centralized thing doing the coordinating. But getting more in touch with your elbow does help to cut down on the banging.

Keep Em Spinning

To avoid mounting social problems - which steadily increase in traumas and costs inflicted with duration and advancement - a certain universal buoyancy of personal wellbeing is required among oneself and one's peers.

Fundamentally, this amounts to housing, clothing, means of transportation, self-maintenance, and reproduction, food and water, and heat and energy that is on par with what is available to one's peers, so that each can stand with a daily dignity and respect in the eyes of each other.

In an advanced industrial society, this means a set of specialized and professional commitments to perpetually generate each individual in this image. A "job" then not only has to secure those basic and fundamental needs that all individuals socially related to each other should have, but should also act in concert with the other "jobs" to faithfully produce them and make them accessible to secure. A delicate balance.

A balance which we - the supposed masters of the universe - should nevertheless have no problem striking, yet it is not so.

For one thing, we are continuously expanding the nature and definition of that most basic set of fundamental needs for each member of the community. Only so many palaces and beachfront sprawls and giant manicured gardens and driveway fountains can be built, and so higher tiers of community must be artificially constructed based on principles of superiority and exclusion.

And for that matter, it could be said that this idealized equilibrium of social status and participation was corrupted from the start with early processes of conquest and forced labor like slavery and indentured servitude, and those reactionary prescriptions for race, class, gender, and etc. which set in motion powerful social and material forces that take great exertions to reverse.

At the very least, to maintain the flow of "nice things" there must be a supple and flexible organization of associated labor to maintain high productivity and social harmony. That is, individuals must be able to free associate in accordance with their talents and their chemistry in working with others in association, and of course for many this is not the case either.

One is thrust into the world and expected to generate for oneself a whole range of goods and products through one's economic activity, all of which require intensive and voluminous amounts of labor, knowledge, and usable energy, or else one is dirty, unwashed, vagrant, lazy, crude, unstable, and most of all, suspect. To avoid this, one has to throw oneself into the arms of an organization that delivers for oneself these economic goods, which through concentration, monopoly, economic depression, and artificial and hidden unemployment, is fewer and further between, with less available positions than socially necessary.

And so those that still hold onto these increasingly rare and valuable positions hold them with a deathgrip, and live in fear of losing them, which causes all sorts of social problems of its own. The organizations become less dynamic, less open, and trust and communication die while cultivated image and signaling reign supreme.

And with the curtailing of quality economic goods and the spreading of suspicion, paranoia, and resentment, the greater body politic is set against itself. A few lord over the rest and the many prostrate themselves this way and that. And in mirroring the deathly organizations, here too communication and trust die, and a smile in front with a knife in back becomes the dominant mode of relation.

And here, when these dangerous social relations set in, it is already too late to reverse them. There is far too much weight in economic commitments alone, and far too many obligations to hold onto to take a break and re-evaluate one's position. Lost trust takes much more labor to restore - and opportunity cost in stopping one's "progress" however temporarily to take a breath and take stock - than incrementally increasing levels of surveillance, manipulation, and coercion.

But the problem with this is that the former clears the air and repairs the foundation, while the latter only muck up the air and erode the foundation until everything gives at once.

Chenuis

Needs

In regards to our material conditions, our material needs can actually be very difficult to suss out. Yeah we need food, water, shelter, and connection. But that connection part does complicate things. We're connected to a spectacular and violent process of material change in which our technology is undergoing permanent revolution.

Embedded in society, we ask, what do we need? What tools and appliances? What is economically available? What is available by salvage and personal skill and knowledge? What is acceptable to the average sensibility of our group? 

And further, one can't simply break away and live in peace, engaged in one's own idiosyncratic activity, even if it doesn't dramatically affect greater society. Idiosyncrasy itself is dangerous to a mass industrial society, as it raises the potential of mimicry in that new direction. There are people with clubs and cages who are here to prevent that. 

My Good Luck Charm

Funny how something like a lucky rabbit's foot, or a similar cherished object that is perceived to bring good luck is expressed in terms of probability - or the obscure and inaccessible workings of some objective process that determines various outcomes - when it is really a powerful emotional bond that brings about a state of mind, however fleeting that state of mind is.

Similarly, people engage in these sort of informal prohibitions of taboo "jinx language," such as refusing to talk about the weather or car traffic out of fear of influencing it, without acknowledging the fact that the states of fear and doubts themselves are really the core things being avoided, which can have powerful effects on one's immediate life if entered into and sustained.

There You Are

You really have to stop and marvel at the sheer difference in the state of consciousness it would take to simply navigate a given stretch of land free of human influence; in other words, a wilderness before mass development.

The sights and sounds that one has to pay attention to for instance. One really has to know how to read the land, and have an intimate acquaintance with detailed sensory knowledge of the surrounding environment.

Beyond that, there must be a certainty behind one's own instincts, and one's lineage of traditions and knowledge in navigating the land. This is a certainty that in the face of human development sinks so far into the background that it has become moot.

For example, a street, sidewalk, and street signs presuppose so much: generations of development and regularity that make one's presence there - at least one's fleeting and intentional presence - a certainty before the question is raised.

Yes, we've had thousands of years of human development - oscillating in density and intensity of course - but depending on where you are, what you are doing, and when you are doing it, the consciousness involved can be a very different thing.

Elk

Implications of Succession

One interesting way to view our current predicament is through the lens of ecological succession.

The study of succession is really just the study of a certain ecosystem within a given slice of time, with the observation that the ecosystem will progress, regress, persist and hold in a balance, change, or collapse in a certain way. As such, a succession will have a certain marked off beginning and end.

The beginning typically occurs after a significant enough disturbance, such as a wildfire, volcanic event, landslide, severe storm, human development, or even mass extinction - ends in their own respects - which free up space and resources for new ecosystems to form. Or else an existing system is colonized by invasive species, which alter the balance of the system and pull in new and disruptive elements.

At the beginning, you have your pioneer species come in, and their ongoing actions on the environment set out the conditions for subsequent species to emerge, and then so on in groupings or waves until the system stabilizes and becomes a climax community. At least until that climax community undermines the conditions for its own existence, is colonized, or is wiped out by some powerful and catastrophic force.

One of the implications of this is that everything grows together and supports each other - at least until power concentrates, which we will get to. So if a forest or field is left to its own devices, it takes the action of the totality of the current grouping of life forms to create the conditions for certain types of life to flourish.

A certain species of tree for example may need a lot of sun exposure, and so requires fertile and clear land to grow tall and remain exposed, and as that species' density increases, its propagation slows in that given area, but then creates niches for other types of species which can form something like an understory of small trees and shrubs which require less light, and in which the new soil composition is favorable.

And then the selection of those trees and plants depends on the local availability of their seed, and their modes of propagation, and the composition of the wildlife that is also feeding on and propagating those plants.

So of course we can see that this can take a long time, and really whatever thrives just happens to thrive given the vagaries of the natural forces within a given slice of time in a given ecosystem's lifespan.

We can also view the simple clearing of a plot of land for a garden as a small process of succession - and then the existence of the human settlement and the human organism itself as part of a larger process of succession.

When you clear forest land and then fence it off and dig up the ground to plant a garden, if that clearing is large enough and traumatic enough, which it usually is, you won't just have another section of forest spring up from the soil if you stop the process and just let it go. That would be rather preposterous and miraculous.

This is the case even though you're in the middle of the forest and surrounded by forest. No, what you get is the proliferation of "weeds," plants that are well suited to that cleared space, which tend to be undesirable and which don't have enough nutrition or body to be thought of as suitable food. Who knows what you might get in a couple of generations? But that's more than enough time for starvation to set in.

If you could simply tear up the land and then scatter a bunch of desired seeds for food crops, and then have an ecosystem of desired food species spring up and flourish without any intensive human labor, why, we'd have our mythical Eden ages ago. But this is simply not the case. A thoroughly altered landscape will take off in all sorts of wild directions away from the interest of the entity doing the altering, and it could take generations to produce desirable food again, so it takes labor and knowledge following the altering to set the conditions in place to maintain the desired food crops.

Which is why you typically see large-scale agricultural systems requiring enormous amounts of human, animal, and mechanical labor and concentrated resources. Even no-till and permaculture methods require a fair amount of labor and much care.

There might have been something approximating an Eden some time ago, in which human activity was low impact and the ecological era allowed for an abundance of usable and desirable food as a matter of course. But much has happened since then.

There is a lot of interesting stuff to get at within that progression: say, the nature of indigenous communities and the nature and origins of civilization and extreme human expansion, and why those things happened.

But I only have the time and energy to get to my central point: that we have this situation in which power is concentrating and human activity is perpetually intensifying and expanding. As a result of this, to grow a whole mess of desired foods taken from all different parts of the world over the surface of vast expanses of land alters the land in profound ways that sets all sorts of chaotic living forces in motion.

There is a relationship between organized destruction and creation in which the more concentrated power is present, the more propensity there is for that power to affect the environment around it and ultimately undermine the original generative forces of that thing's power, in which that thing concentrated its power in a distinct ecological time frame forged over generations upon generations of succession.

And to maintain that power, and to continually produce the objects of desire which are to maintain and expand that power, a constant stream of labor and technological application must be applied to hold in place that given mode of organization, which of course faces diminishing returns in the form of soil degradation and disrupted external ecosystems, which requires further expansion and intensification of activity, until there is no more space to tear up and exploit. And then?

Me

What they often get at with "God" - or what is "logically real" or "empirically evident" or the "way of the market" for that matter - is really just another wave in that vast and infinite ocean we loosely call reality. This is apparent in the "God disapproves of this" and "God disapproves of that" language, which carves out a limited extended thing, made up of the "goods" and set against the "bads" and so on.

But somehow that wave is it and really all there is. Which is true to an extent, as it is difficult to entirely escape the wave in one's own lifetime, or even in multiple generations. But to mistake that failure to escape as some sort of ontological absolute - in which the wave is projected into all of eternity as all there is - is to commit some sort of spiritual imperialism, which leads eventually to just plain material imperialism. Which, to be fair, probably leads to the extent and the power of the wave, resulting in its inescapability.

If what one is is all that exists, then it follows that anything that contradicts what one is is necessarily out of place or worse, evil, and therefore should be destroyed, reorganized, and reincorporated into what one is. There are of course different disorganizations and different evils which have an entirely different quality from each other, depending on where they originate, and therefore they have a different moral heft or value depending on the observer. But that's another issue.

This is a situation in which one extends one's own limited imprint over the rest of the living world, and wherever one has the actual energy and power to extend, one has to crush and wipe away that living world that one is extending over, in favor of one's own living world. Which is all the more destructive the more dramatic the expansion one's own self is undergoing.

Which raises the question: what came first? Did the spiritual, ideological, and material imperialism arise out of the raw forces of expansion, or was the expansion encouraged and influenced by the imperialism? I'm being a bit coy perhaps, but raising naive questions can lead to all sorts of interesting avenues.

A bit like exploration. If one has already decided on where a given path goes, then one will choose whether to go down it or not, depending on one's intentions. One then carves a path. Or a rut. Just by being in motion in relation to previous activity. But if one cocks one's head and asks, "what if?" then who knows where one ends up? In an oasis? Dead? And maybe giving up and asking these questions - when all of the other paths turn out to be terminal - is itself a forced path.

Falling Rock

On Perceptions in Space

The impressions that space and the ambient environment can give have quite a profound effect on one's own basic mood and perception, which can then in turn powerfully shape the thoughts and experiences which occur on that base.

Going through a pass on a cloudy day for example can really serve to direct one's thoughts on the immediate surroundings, and give one the feeling of being enclosed and introspective, whereas a clear day can reveal the full spread of the landscape, and direct one's attention out and give rise to wide open and spacious thoughts.

Exploration

Just the process of exploring backcountry land - that is, land that stretches beyond a given established trail system in a wilderness, and which must be navigated with map, compass, and altimeter - can provide a number of useful lessons and insights.

First, one has to relearn all sorts of old logic systems for navigating territory, as well as how to pay attention to how land features work, what they say visually and aurally, and what it all means for one's own orientation to the land.

This is because modern trail systems are so ubiquitous, and so convenient, so that they necessarily relegate more fine-grained navigational details to the background, or even out of one's attention completely. Yes, trails can sometimes disappear or become ambiguous and one has to navigate then, but for the most part one is on a pressed down track which has been well-traveled, with all of the expectations of time, distance, and energy that come with that.

Without all of that, one has to make various decisions concerning time, energy, and orientation. Where do the rivers go, and where will the water be? Should one get up on this higher shelf of land before one gets stuck and pushed down further into the valley where one doesn't want to go? How long will it take to traverse this field of crumbled rock? What landmarks and high points can be utilized for navigation? What wildlife can one expect in a given biome? How distinguished is the landscape, and can one retrace one's steps if one gets into trouble? And so on.

It is the presence of density and regularity of human activity that allows for the stability and accessibility of one's own human needs and expectations. Where people have been en masse, one knows one can have an easier and more dependable time, and focus one's energy and thinking on simpler navigation, such as being in physical shape, wearing the right clothes, allowing enough time, bringing the right supplies, and so on.

Even in the backcountry, traversal is easier and faster when as little as a trickle of people have come through, and there are cairn markers to follow and informal packed down trails to follow which usually mark out the most sensible traversals.

It is when one is lost and running out of time, with the sun going down, that all of the concerns of navigation and economy of energy become so pressing, and take up so much space in one's consciousness. And when one is alone and meets a bear on the pathway, one's own frailty in relation to the land becomes all the more apparent.

Foreboding

There was a tree up on the hill above us that was making all of this noise for a week or so. These loud cracks could be heard in intervals, and at first it sounded like a large animal fooling around up there in the forest. Well, finally the tree fell with a massive crash, revealing itself.

When I got to the shattered stump, it seemed to tell a story. The stump was twisted and splintered in a way that suggested that gravity was pulling the tree downhill. In its weakened state, it was twisting downhill and vulnerable and stressed parts of the grain were supposedly snapping with a loud crack in intervals, until after the final snap, the entire tree twisted off its base and fell with a crash downhill.

After a certain point, the weakened tree's own massive weight sheared it against itself, and nothing it could do could prevent it from leaning and turning against itself and eventually snapping against itself and falling. One could imagine that fateful second when one loses balance, and no attempted compensation can arrest the fall.

There is plenty going on in this foreboding metaphor, whether in the individual instance or the macro trend, as the falling trees seem to be increasing with frequency. Apparently the hemlocks in particular have been afflicted with some sort of disease (pests are another issue), and are falling in droves. It is not as apparent with the alders, but something is going on with them too.

Cloudy Tahoma

Obsessions do tend to lead to repetitions. I am quite taken with the old volcano, so there will probably be plenty more of these.

I Knew It All Along

There is a common paranoiac vision in which certain institutions or authorities are stealing one's life force, like a vampire or some sort of extractive colonizing alien. This vision can be quite true in an indirect way.

For me an easy example consists of the video game industry. I play the occasional video game, which can be useful for simply resting one's mind and body by setting aside various daily concerns and efforts. But past a certain point, one is devoting growing amounts of time and energy into something that essentially evaporates as one turns away from that specific pursuit and turns back to life.

This problem is thrown into greater relief as one goes about conducting one's own life affairs. It takes time, energy, and attention to learn to cook well, or build and maintain one's shelters, or maintain one's living space on the land, or grow food, or gather and process herbs and medicines, and etc.

All the time and energy one puts into one's leisure time takes time and energy away from those other pursuits. It is of course necessary to rest and simply play and enjoy. But there are many forms of play and enjoyment that continue to develop various general skills, like physical condition, techniques, flow states, relationships, knowledge, and all the rest.

Something like a video game is a very specific activity at remove from most life processes. Sure your dexterity and hand eye coordination get better, for starters, and for the higher quality offerings you get to partake in various mythologies and cultural experiences, but then this has to be held against the actual industry's drives and interests, which is more interested in extending play time, purchases, increasing addiction, and so on.

So you're giving more and more time and energy to a specific industry that is eager to command your attention for greater amounts of time, which is then taken away from you, more or less. This all makes sense at an equilibrium, in which you labor in a specific capacity to capture a swathe of life energy, or money, and then spend that energy in the way you see fit, such as toward another specific effort that somebody else is putting in, like putting together a video game.

But there's not an equilibrium. Across every industry, there is a tendency towards concentration and the encouragement of dependency and extraction, even within one's own labor process in the form of a labor alienating and extracting job, and in one's own home in the form of extractive rent.

It's as if one is more and more being sucked dry by eh, distant vampires or aliens.

Primed

Much of the time people are primed by their circumstances and experiences and ready to assent or dissent to a given construct of words. But then words can also point to and focus upon certain things, eventually leading to changes in one's nature and one's circumstances and experiences.

Grow

Beneath much explosive growth is often a great wound. One moves the earth and razes forests and threatens labor to perform and obsessively researches new technologies and methods, and expands one's locus of control so that one will never feel that insecurity and worthlessness again.

Oh, It Is Much Worse Actually

There has been a very visible string of reports in which data emerges that suggests: well so and so is actually much worse. Say the forests are even less healthy than we thought, or the glaciers are melting much faster than we thought, or the coral is in more trouble than we thought, or the lead in the water problem is worse than we thought, or the infrastructure is more crumbly than we thought, or the plastic waste crisis is worse than we thought, or our estimates of the speed of warming were a bit conservative, or...

Yeah, anyway, something happens in our daily thought in which anecdotes and stories and common oral observations can sort of grab our imagination for a moment, and then we shrink back in doubt and embarrassment and hold tight until the reams upon reams of  written data come in, which then evoke a more enduring certainty, whatever those reams happen to say.

But then we have to start asking: what sort of resolution is this data really capable of? How long does it take for the proper resolution to emerge, which sufficiently provides a sense of reality to base one's confidence on? And what are the instincts, desires, and interests of the institutions producing this data, and what is the health of these institutions? What other forces and desires are at work to obscure and distort this data, and otherwise divert our efforts from its conclusions? How long do we have to keep hearing: oh, it's actually much worse, before we collectively do something about it?

Desire, Affinity, and The Growing Waves

There are curious patterns of thought and feeling in our society in which we develop intense affinities for very limited natural phenomena. Say someone really likes a certain beautiful flower or shrub, and then acts to preserve or reproduce that plant, protecting it and nurturing it, often to the exclusion of other plants. Or someone's parent has an intense affinity for a certain plant, and then that someone acts to preserve that plant out of a tenderness for the parent, as it becomes an extension of the parent that even outlasts the parent's lifetime. Where did that sensitivity for all of life go?

These patterns on their own are one thing, but then they can combine and over constant repetition and longer timeframes, lead to quite profound and efficacious accumulations. It is very easy to influence and effect nature, for example merely maintaining a compost pile, or piling up a mound of rocks can create a new habitat for snakes and spiders, whose population in the area take off, and these effects grow more profound the greater the mass and breadth of them are involved. Take for example the desire for a certain vegetable, which places it upon a pedestal in a certain form, with a preferred appearance and taste and so on.

And then couple that desire with a desire for a mass society to continuously expand, and with a desire to engage in commerce and encourage and exploit that expansion, and soon enough you are moving the entire earth and accumulating vast fields of this specific vegetable, which affects the soil in its own specific way, and provides the desire and sustenance for its own set of insects or rodents or any other kind of "pest," which then proliferate in turn.

And the depletion of the soil and the proliferation of "pests" pulls together their own desires for mass quantities of fertilizer and pesticide and fencing and infrastructure, which itself is pulling desires for manufacturing and fossil fuels and all the rest, which are pulling their own desires together for transportation and heavy machinery, and all the like, and then the sum of all of these things is encouraging the desire to accelerate reproduction and expand and attend to their maintenance and reproduction.

The specificity and mass that is involved in encouraging a limited swathe of this limited life field tends to produce a wave effect, in which desire and needs set huge and complicated chains of manipulation into motion, and this motion pulls everything into it and transforms the earth with it. And soon enough, these waves grow larger and larger, until their forces are overwhelming and have the potential to topple whole societies, as we see with that great wave, climate change, which with the mass movement of carbon, and the heat that it generates, can theoretically wipe out the vast web of life persisting in the current chunk of geological time.

If we really did have a mass sensitivity for all of life, the negative feedback would have kicked in long ago in a great enough amount, and we would have relaxed our limited desires in favor of the desire for balance and stability. So it is worth repeating the question: where did that sensitivity go?

Apologies

I've long been in the habit of just writing when I've felt like it, or when I was particularly inspired by something or saw something and felt compelled to articulate it and flesh it out, which made for inconsistent and fluctuating content. There was a time when there were patterns of creation that correlated with periods of mania and depression, though the bipolar cycles have mainly flattened out due to various life influences and circumstances. 

Now the content comes when I simply have the time and energy, and when I actually feel that I have something to say. The content is probably more sparse now, and few and far between, for several reasons. 

I've moved further into more intense physical and material doing, which is not meant to be a slight against any sort of writer that makes a living of the writing. The doing that I have in mind is associated with a lifestyle that requires more time and energy to be bound up in intense physical exertion and concentration. 

Building, farming, exploring and all of the rest of those similar things have a language and a galaxy of techniques of their own, which all have to be learned and refined over time. I feel that just as I got my bearings in the world of philosophy and political economy - with a little music and photography on the side - I was suddenly dropped into a vast and incomprehensible ocean, and slowly I'm beginning to make more sense of it. 

As explicated here, and many times implied, this time and energy bound up in physical exertion is commanding on many levels. One's mind begins to change; one's concerns and habits begin to change. And so on. 

As long as I see something that I'd like to articulate, and have the energy to do it, then I will continue to write. It is enough for me to show something, and then leave it, to let it go on and do what it will. I am satisfied with it, and feel as if something has been processed and expelled, so to speak. And hell I just enjoy to write. And maybe some day I will still write that book. 

Lake

Homesteading and Social Drag Pt. 4

It is curious, this endlessly expanding, gravity fighting, nature-escaping, life-accelerating civilization, which is marbled throughout with these increasingly urgent dreams and projects of getting back to nature and the land, of simplifying, of deflating, of surrendering to gravity, and all of the rest of it. This is an urgency that grows as industrial production and capital double over on effort and activity.

Is it some form of self destruction? Well perhaps if you want to attribute some sort of essence to the project of civilization. But what it looks like to me is more the dynamic forces of a multitude which may progress in a certain direction more readily, but which has a wide of array of transformational possibilities, so long as the time, energy, and will are available.

At the very least, we can conceive of the homesteading dream as a sort of friction or drag acting upon the supposed fundamentals of what we imagine the modern civilization project is supposed to be about. Of course this phenomenon is not specific to homesteading by any means.

We can find a parallel - not a flattering one perhaps, but striking it up in these terms is at least useful for explanatory purposes - in the Marxist concept of anti-value, which unsurprisingly, tends to be passed by in silence other than in certain rarefied theoretical circles.

Of course there was a different term for this in classical liberalism: "rentier" activity was quite loudly talked about even in the mainstream then, but since the 19th century this sort of language has been systematically snuffed out and swept under the rug, as it were.

But anti-value or rentier activity is often identified in what is today known as FIRE sector activity, or in finance, insurance, and real estate. As the theories go, the reproduction of value and expansion of "productive" activity was predicated on the increasing production of largely material goods and services. The currency sort of correlated with all of this, though due to its characteristics, was subject to hijacking by largely financial and abstract economic forces which diverted the surplus away from production and consumption. Get rid of the rentiers and unleash the free economy, as it goes.

But the finaciers and the rentiers lauched their rebellion against productive capital, and harnessing their own forces of economic "drag" inverted the logic of production and began to eat up the surplus, all the way erasing ideologically the traces of their actual processes in relation to the economy. And now the headwinds are beginning to blow against them yet again.

More generally there is a dependable rebellion that occurs in any sort of extended project, at least in the last couple of thousand years of human history, in which a given extension or movement or project overexerts itself and falls back on itself, spawning reactive movements and projects which take a different direction as ideological values invert or become altered.

This rebellion, this drag, is a natural part of the process. There are intervals of reaction, which vary in intensity and frequency, oscillating over centuries, showing up in the historical record like the winter and summer bark on trees. With the winter bark, growth in the mass of the trees falters and it appears as the darker, thinner rings on the stump or round, whereas the faster growing and expanding summer bark is lighter and the rings thicker.

And so with rebellion a given process begins to drag against itself and slow itself, but the extent of the rebellion - and rebellion takes many forms - is limited to the time and energy available to change directions and natures away from the movement the rebellion is moving away from. Rebellion begins to lose its spark with the age of the movement, exhaustion and resignation of its constituents, and the demoralization that comes with losing one's struggle against a greater power that is unable to be budged in one's lifetime, or even in several generations.

Nevertheless even the great trees must eventually fall, with all of their rings oscillating across history going down with them. If one is to be a rebel, and if the dignity of one's life is to be predicated on this rebelling, so be it.

Bump in the Night

Occasionally in the canyon a huge old tree finally gives it up and comes down with a thunderous crash, which in the middle of the night can really startle the disoriented sleeper, scraping and distorting the sleeper's dreamscape, which makes for a vague recollection and recursive sense that one was expecting the disturbance all along.

Or someone sets off a homemade explosive or some such device, blowing off steam, not giving a thought to the people living nearby.

And every huge crash and temor in the night registers as the possible Event when the mountain finally blows its top, and one expects the oncoming shockwave or lahar with dread, which has yet to materialize.

In Montana the intermittent quakes are greeted with the sickening suspicion that the supervolcano under Yellowstone has finally blown, and the End is approaching as some looming and nebulous presence of a great cloud. Or in California, with its own intermittent quakes, each new 5 or 6-er is greeted as the next possible Big One, and a complementary run to the grocery or survival store for supplies. And then so on.

For many, the imagination goes straight for the Big End or whatever you want to call it, that disturbance which finally sets off a quality change into motion, ending the endless procession of the status quo. These disturbances set off the popular imagination, like snapping at a rubberband pulled tight and painfully tense.

The tension of the present is palpable at least, which continuously builds as waves of stored and released energy - in its many forms - circulate and accumulate, and the structure of what is becomes increasingly unstable and plastic.

And for others, who are unlucky enough geographically, temporally, and/or socially/politically/economically/etc. and are therefore made vulnerable, these releases, these disturbances, which imagined as the heavens finally cracking open, really are the End.

Say, the shaking earth with its waves that pass through human artifice weakened by socioeconomic and political forces, or the fire with its greater intensity and frequency promoted by the changing climate, which takes up the mismanaged and dried out lands and incinerates them, or the howling hurricane winds and surging waters which pass through mismanaged and poorly planned infrastructure, or even the cracking bullets barking forth from the barrels of wasted human capital, and all the rest of those highly kinetic forces really do spell the end for those caught in their pathways, and on and on it grinds.

Wired Pt.2

Homesteading and Social Drag Pt. 3

It is here where we can enlarge our frame of reference and consider an expanded view. So we have a modern form of homesteading - which in essence is very similar to the premodern form - that in its actual day to day operations differs dramatically from its popular connotations, images, and ideals.

We have accounted for this gap, and really, we can expect to find these divergences when looking at any sort of ideal and its corresponding reality side by side. It is the natural way of things, much like friction and gravity slow down our deliberate progress in a given direction.

Yet we often reason in accordance with pure ideal and its attendant expectations. This can be useful in a highly specialized society which is actually functioning properly, in which there is a circulation between the regions of production of pure reason and the regions of production of practicalities that this reason touches upon, say when academia interfaces with various political and social institutions to form policy. When and where these relationships are functional and accessible to most of the populace is a different question for a different time.

Instead, it may be useful to set this pure reasoning aside and evaluate the combined nature of idea and action. As power in a society concentrates and the society contracts, it may be useful to mirror such a relation and attempt to compress one's understanding across ideas and practicalities, and where these ideas become action and how these relations progress naturally. Much as the idea of "praxis" crops up in times of crisis, there are times when we can alter our approach altogether.

But what I'm getting at is that the resurging interest in homesteading and the drive towards simplification, deceleration, and degrowth seems to pull against the seemingly fundamental drives of what we call "civilization" itself. If one briefly evaluates the defining characteristics of Western civilization for instance, one sees an obsession with an endless expansion into space, of getting off of the ground and out of the dirt, of resisting gravity,  of deepening specialization and material complexity, and of accelerating motion and increasing the consumption of energy indefinitely.

On a homestead one slows down, one sets oneself back into the dirt, one generalizes one's skills and simplifies one's material extensions, one contracts and localizes one's efforts, one lowers energy expenditures, and etc. At least this is all relatively speaking.

Indeed, the image of civilization begins to emerge in the homesteading experience itself. As touched on before, one is still working with industrial and manufactured products and resources, and one still harbors sensibilities, instincts, knowledge, and desires taken from that world.

As one labors towards the ideal of simplification and divestment, one witnesses the persistent and recurring interconnections and bindings which form a bridge to the industrial world. As opposed to a clean break, one finds that one is leaving industry slowly, one's motion is decelerating and one's nature is changing, but one is still a product of industry and civilization, and it is a desire that emanates from this corrupting world to seek out previous iterations of simpler and less destructive living.

A picture of civilization begins to emerge which is far stranger than what we tend to imagine. Civilization is not merely that outwardly expanding accumulation of human artifice, but also the product of the effects that artifice has on its surroundings, and it is also the product of its own internal contradictions and pressures - which are partially a result of its interactions with its surroundings and the effects of its own influences - which transform it and regenerate it.  We can take a look at all that next, and then finally wrap things up.

Reality Pools and Crystallizes

At times when an ideological structure is put together - especially in a grand way with sweeping vision - with the right words, associated feelings, and relational logic, the spectacular lighting up of sensation and awe that the ideology inspires is enough to generate a belief or devotion of its own. Soon enough, the ideology takes the place of that which it was built to describe and revere.

Memory and Knowledge

Stores of memory and inter-generational knowledge play a major part in material relations and alter them. In a simpler case, the honey bee benefits from the accumulated knowledge of its sting. An angry bee may give you a slight tap on the head or shoulder, giving you the chance to make a run for it, and so it achieves a deterrent without having to sting and sacrifice itself, which may very well presuppose knowledge of its sting in the first place. A subtle cushion of inter-species relations is afforded after generations upon generations of work and development of defenses like the stinger.

Uh Oh

The claim (to hold against others): "I'm hurt" is quickly becoming invalid, as many are hurting in many stacked and interlaced ways. And many will be hurt still.

On The Knapsack Pass

Homesteading and Social Drag Pt. 2

Previously we observed that the true nature of homesteading diverges from its popular imagery, and upon clearing some of the illusions surrounding it as a popular conception, resolved to further expand upon the meaning of it as a larger process.

However before proceeding to an expanded view of the issue, and then a wrap-up and conclusion, I'd like to take a brief detour.

There is a growing interest in going back to homesteading, or farming, or something similar, which can be seen as a desire to somewhat simplify one's life and move closer to the land and the nurturing processes connected with the land, such as making food, crafts, clothing, shelter, and all the rest. This is a clear reaction to the intensifying fields of destruction wrought by capital and industry in general, which has been growing and becoming more visible over several years, and really over the last decade, but which is by no means a new phenomenon.

But why the desire and the ever-increasing interest? I'd like to make sense of it, at least partially on the individual level.

Part of the motivation, as hinted at before, consists of the ongoing loss of power and disenfranchisement of the individual, and the ability of a given individual to affect the conditions of their own processes of production and reproduction. We should unpack this a little more.

As seen in the Marxist concept of fetishism, there is a power that emanates from the terminus of the chains of manipulation. The commodity holds a certain kind of power to the eye of consumer, a power that obstructs the actual nature of that commodity's production, that is, its nature as a product of dense social interactions. But this is a phenomenon that occurs more generally than the concept suggests, and is really everywhere.

The contractor becomes powerful after assembling together numerous materials of socially produced origin, while using tools and techniques which are also socially produced, but is nevertheless perceived to be powerful locally as an individual, because it is the individual putting everything together and doing the providing.

Similarly the householder is perceived to be powerful within the community or family for putting food on the table, however many hands in nearby or faraway places made that food possible. And so on across every specialization and level of organization, wherever there is an individual that helps to provide the community. It is this power, which by various means is being concentrated and pulled away from the average individual.

What is supposed to be a community of peers is transformed into a gauntlet of humiliations and degradations, as individuals in myriad ways can no longer provide for their peers while existing autonomously, more frequently needing to ask various permissions from increasingly powerful bosses, landlords, elites, and etc.

This socially painful situation is made all the more acute as the loss of local control amounts to universal and increasing destruction which is perceived to be emanating from distant and alien powers.

Revolution often marks a breaking point within the sum of these forces, in which there is a rebalancing of power at the various terminals of manipulation, which at least attempts to proceed toward a more even and stable distribution of this power.

A more even distribution of power allows individuals to subsist more autonomously with respect from their peers. It makes up the lifeblood of a healthy community in which there is mutual trust and respect. 

Of course revolution manifests itself in many different ways, and though it is often conceived as sudden calamitous change, it can also grind on gradually as well, often leading up to those changes. One of the ways could very well be a growing shift into a homesteading lifestyle, however that may look.

If you take various manufactured ingredients and produce something, there is still power emanating from you. Though the source of that power can be traced to the sum of its parts, it is significant that one can produce something and provide something, however removed from the actual process of production is from the land itself.

So the movement towards the homestead is a movement closer to the base of production itself, away from all of the specialized and complex chains of production which are beset with avaricious middlemen and corroded trust. If one can no longer buy enough high quality food for example, one can at least attempt to grow it oneself, even if the growing is with manufactured tools and soil amendments. One is at least cutting out portions of the chains of production, taking back however meager portions of power in the process. Where is it all going? What does it mean?