Cause and Effect

We're smart enough to get very good at making change after change in a chain, no matter if those changes are accumulating run away effects that disperse and then concentrate outward beyond the reach of our perception. 

Brief on Power

What makes the personification of imperial power so abominable is that you get this localization of the numerous forces holding together an incredibly fragmentary and contradictory unity, as imperial power derives its greatness and potency from the reach of its spread and intake. Any who step forward to marshal that power - no matter the values held - must then take that form. But that doesn't have to be the only form that power takes. 

The Craft

Fluency is a magical emergent quality that often comes with the constant stacking of numerous smaller mechanical masteries, a necessary but not sufficient component of the whole process of course.  

Moment of Truth

As the pandemic was first coming on, I do remember the widespread shock in reaction to the conduct of the ruling elite and their administrative efforts, the ongoing revelations of motives and interests, etc. as they moved to address the pandemic in their own way.  

But to borrow from Aristotle's virtue ethics, if you're lying and producing finer PR, if you're monopolizing and financializing, if you're sweeping serious political and economic problems under the rug and praying that they go away, and spending all of your time and energy sharpening those other similar tools, and then your mettle is tested, well, then what else do you do?

Energy and Separation

Interestingly enough, one of the prime directives in permaculture is the “recombining” and “re-densifying” of the living field. These are in quotes because I’m just using the terms loosely to describe what people like Bill Mollison have talked about. The permaculture practitioners have their own manner of speaking. Nevertheless, these directives reveal much on their own merits.  

To put it negatively, one of the core critical insights in the permaculture discipline is that the separation of the productive elements interrupts their interrelated flows of consumption and production, producing a two-sided pathology in which additional inputs of work and energy need to be “imported” into the system as the separated producers are deprived of their local and mutual energy inputs, and at the same time, the waste outputs have nowhere to go to be consumed in turn, necessitating their buildup and stockpiling and the need for their “disposal,” or else they simply persist and pollute. 

What you see in a lot of living things is a dense concentration of stable, perennial energy which then branches outward with the changing seasons and availability of solar radiation and other forms of energy – in trees and woody bushes for example – growing ever more feathery and fine in the form of branches and leaves as it reaches its spatial and temporal extremes, before dying back and beginning the cycle again. There is a spatial relationship in the movement of energy in living things: the more spread out a given living system, the more energy it takes to move energy to the various extremities, or to put it another way, the more energy is lost in the production of energy. 

And then you put all of those living things in relation to each other in an ecosystem, and those ecosystems that persist tend to become bound up into closed circuits in which products, waste products, and the producing organisms themselves are immediately incorporated into the consumption of other local producers, who themselves are providing the materials and wastes for the consumption of others in a webbed chain, sustaining ultimately their own energy sources and the indirect regulation of their own wastes. The density and proximity of the energy exchanges allow for greater layers of complexity, diversity, and activity of living systems, as there is more energy freed up for play.

For the current mode of industrial civilization, the reverse is the case. Consider in this case our tendency to perennial separation and expansion of the productive centers – albeit with its share of busts – in which the spatial separations are perpetually augmented at an increasing scale and at a varying rate of acceleration, necessitating an accompanying increase in energy usage (extra work) and an accumulation of waste product which has to be moved around, stockpiled and neutralized through the passage of time, or transformed through additional energy transfers (still extra work), all of which interact dialectically to ratchet up various energetic antagonisms until they are brought to an explosive head, affording an eventual depression and plummet to baseline, from which the ratchet begins anew to return to its ascent. 

This can be illustrated by the path of development of urban centers and their suburban satellites, which increasingly separated from the soil, must be sectioned out spatially and then interrelated with zones of pure food and energy production, such as commercial farms which separate the food crops from each other, necessitating also their separation from local wildlife like birds, rodents and deer, and weeds, which are perpetually destroyed and excluded, all of which require increasing amounts of energy inputs to smooth out the turbulence caused by such disruptions, and the movement and processing of the produced wastes.

Harder material realities like infrastructure, figuring in subcategories like energy and transportation, persist for long periods of time, and so the shorter frequency deficits that are created in that cleft between increasing energy and work requirements and declining quality and return in energy sources, have to be made up with ever finer modes of separation and differentiation, accelerating distancing and the burning up of energy. At some point, we decided that we came too far to go back, and the prevailing currency became debt and deceit. 

Of course everything does eventually die, and a civilization is a little more difficult to encapsulate and analyze than a tree for example, though even trees have their mysteries. 

Though we do admire the local flora and fauna and the ecosystems that they make up, we more closely resemble the explosions and eruptions and storms that we flee from fear in – and perhaps regard with awe, an important phenomenological component.

What we can offer is a spectacular vision, a pleasing flash before and through detonation, much like the gorgeous wildflower blooms over the past years which indicated abnormal and overactive water and nutrient flows, or the fluorescent coral colors indicating their final moments before bleaching, spectacular phenomena which attract pilgrimages, often brought forth with caravans of fossil fuel-powered vehicles. A doom which is nevertheless beautiful in its own way.

Stay Still

Stay still for long enough and you can begin to witness the unfolding life field right before you, which is less perturbed by the turbulence of nervous motion.