On and Off

Weeks of digging dirt, shoveling gravel, and splitting and hauling firewood, really start to catch up with you physically and even mentally. By all means, it is essential stuff, but then as the body recoups and rebuilds itself, the active mind is muted and dulled. One thinks and instead of producing forth thoughts, there is a dull and vague mass that sits and hums where the content should be. But here rest and sustenance is appropriate, it will be back in good time, so long as one continues the regular exertions and keeps the psychic muscle defined so to speak. Plenty of ideas bouncing around to be expressed, but the actual expressing, well I've had to punt a lot of that as of late in favor of a number of material projects and social obligations that beckon. 

For those reading, such chaotic patterns of writing productivity could be somewhat frustrating, at least from my own speculation of the outside looking in. Kudos to those writers and outlets keeping a regular schedule, whose dependable works are a great comfort and source of daily stimulation, perhaps to be coupled with breakfast and tea, in my case at least. 

But from the inside on my end, and in relation to my own work, all of the chaotic expressions and intermittent utterances make perfect sense: work where it is necessary and effective to work and do good work, whatever the form that may take, whenever the means and the energy are available, in accordance with the structure of one's life activity. I chose some of it, but a lot of it also chose me. 

One has to make a number of carefully considered choices and compromises in the face of a voracious and exploitative society that, contrary to the loudly proclaimed individualist aesthetic, is wholly uninterested in the flourishing of the individual, outside of that individual's energetic and battery-like contribution to the engines of perpetual accumulation. There is a constant churning tide that one has to struggle against, to live with some sort of idiosyncratic and local satisfaction that exists apart from the cheap, half-hearted, and manipulative approval of one's managerial "superiors," depending on how deeply situated one's assorted appendages are in the so-called "rat race," which is difficult to leave entirely, but with some effort and surplus exertion, can be pulled away from far enough to afford a breath of fresh air or two. 

Enough of the vague rambling for now. Maybe there will be a time to elaborate on some of the stray thoughts expressed here. After all, I do believe that the fruits will be good when they come, and that the work here is indeed worthwhile, or I wouldn't be continually coming back.    

Endure

You can really feel it in the production of infrastructure and to a lesser extent in the production of tools and equipment: the really dense and heavy stuff, meant to persist, takes incredible energy and work to manipulate. Moving the heavy stone, shoveling gravel, moving dirt, manipulating steel, iron, and lumber -  in these activities the energy transferred from the body is easy enough to detect. One makes enormous exertions, and then as soon as one comes to rest, the deep ache, the fatigue, the ceaseless hunger is palpable and dramatically affects the consciousness, but those very things can lend a deep satisfaction of their own as they are addressed with deep rest, and the pots of chili, curry rice, sausages, hamburgers, medleys of potatoes and onion and cabbage, and what have you, taste all the more delicious, and fill the holes and cracks. 

Besides, the difficult and strong exertions can produce lasting effects enjoyed by many: perhaps a century or more for good solid infrastructure, well done. And for the ancients we can talk millennia, at least in terms of the remaining bones still standing in those haunted historical monuments. Though we shall see how long our quality steel and iron constructs last, and of course the stone and brick built to endure. And there is always the question of who is building what for whom. 

Us hypermoderns have become accustomed to the belching and squirting out of plastics, which erupt and cool into slick and colorful shapes, which then begin to crack and flake and photodegrade and melt away nearly as soon as they are instantiated, but not completely disintegrating a moment before they are temporarily appreciated and then bought, after which they can then proceed to fall apart; the perfect material for a society of marketers and conmen. It teaches: nothing lasts, nothing is to be trusted.

For things to really endure, it does take quite a bit of time and energy to put into something, at least in my experience. That feeling that something challenging really took a bite out of you and knocked you down for a bit, is, contrary to initial impressions, a reassuring and satisfying feeling, so long as you can be confident that what you are doing is worthwhile. 

With all fairness to plastic, we could say all of that chemical and technical knowledge is a deep and enduring work of its own, all of which of course rests on a dense and solid infrastructure, but the concentration and nature of the labor varies wildly in its geographical and temporal spread, and who is doing the laboring and why and who is benefitting from the labor, and then there is the matter of whether the project itself is worthwhile or even sustainable, a loaded question for most people anyway.  Bah, another set of arguments for another time. 

Boom Meet Bust

As revealing and illuminating as a great crisis can be, as a massive distortion it can also produce equally sizable distortions in perception. Say, with the ongoing pandemic, everyone is talking about stimulus and vaccination, and boy, we've got a handle on the reigns again pal lets take this thing for a spin. The feeling of being locked down and under the boot of the virus is a palpable one, and one starts to huff and puff under such strain, and of course, the light begins to approach at the end of the tunnel, and one can't fire out of that long tomb quickly enough. As I've expressed before, it will be good if some of the danger dies down again, and things get a little better, and we get to do some nice things again, and strike while the iron is hot, carpe diem, etc. etc. But the memory of the low and the dark is a valuable one, especially concerning the how and the why, and whether it will be back.   

My Place

At least since the dawn of agriculture, when this instinct really took off and dug in, so to speak, we've been quite territorial as a general tendency. Not in the sense of being unwilling to share space with anything else; on the contrary, we fill space with just about as much noise and bustle as we can pack into it, just so long as that noise and bustle is organized to serve whomever has the power to alter the environment and benefit from that alteration. Herein lies the territoriality. 

Once it was a dominion over the land one claimed, a claim usually backed by some kind of organized political power. Now it lies largely in a sense of proprietorship over whatever one purchases, including the temporarily bought labor of other human beings, which is often tied to the land, things built on the land, and things which interact with the land to produce the things we want. 

The ability then to affect change in one's living environment is a coveted one that is often hard won with social permissions, and on the backside of these social permissions is the threat of sanction. This is especially the case the denser arrangement one enters into, as typically there is a larger cultural, economic, and political harmony that one must harmonize with and at the same time be accepted by to interact with it in a meaningful way, or else it is altered with enormous expenditures of energy, which require social power. 

After all, there is a wide range of possible aesthetic expressions, manifestations, and functions in the modern industrial - and globalized - world, and these things take social power and resources to permit, and once they are expressed and manifested, they must be frozen into place and maintained with all of the wrath of the legal and enforcement mechanisms backing them. 

There are many ways to lay down a wall, or carve out and pave a pathway or road, or to put up a house, or to arrange a garden or even landscape, and an equal number of ways for these things to visually appear, and then the ways in which these things eventually come to pass are also dependent on available traditions, techniques, skills, materials, and social impetuses for organization. 

One steps foot in the typical modern American city for example and finds it to be essentially a home for cars, and all of the infrastructure bends around this fact, a state of affairs that is owed to a particular form of culture, political economy, and lineage of historical events with their own ascents of particular interests. Which work just fine for certain classes and individuals, and for others, there is profound alienation and dispossession. Some wiggle room certainly, but how much, and where, and when?