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.