In Praise of Shade

I've been talking about the "shadow side" of things here and there. It's a useful turn of phrase that gets a lot of use: metaphorically you can flip the life-giving and life-sustaining properties of a given object or element under the analytical lens and in turn describe its destructive properties as traits common to the same object or element, thereby illuminating the contextuality and contingency inherent in all things. 

But we can turn that very mechanism towards the concept of the "shadow side" itself. To risk leaving out what is doubtless a fascinating etymological and mythological history, we could briefly intuit the misty origins of the concept's genesis. Due to the particular evolution of our sensory array, we rely heavily on visual information - so light radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum - to navigate and to coordinate with our bodies to carry out basic daily tasks. We're talking about an average here: the blind find their own way just fine. 

Similarly it is light energy that powers photosynthesis, and a majority of the earth's ecological processes. The day phase of the daily cycle is the time for a majority of the earth's living things to get moving, happily fed and at work in their daily production. The night, that all-enveloping fall of the earth's shadow, is a time for retreat from predators and the cold and the drop in production brought about by the lack of coordinating light. Again, averages: there are plenty of nocturnal species out during their thing, and species subsisting on energies emanating from sources other than the active fusion of the sun - at least, directly. 

So that's where the dominant mythology comes in anyway, sustained by historical majorities and organized and sustained power: the sun and the light brings everything that is good and sustains it, while the shadows stamp out energy flows and precipitate the arrival of predation and destruction. 

But even within this overarching narrative, we have concepts and meanings that are softer in relation to "shadow," such as "shade." To the desert dweller, the shade too is very much a form of sustenance, where the intense falling solar energy is deflected and where one can slow down and cool off. Even us forest dwellers seek out the shade during the summer work season with a thirst to rival that of the parched desert dweller searching out the local watering hole or seep. Your labors won't get you far under a condition of overheating. 

If you leaf through a survival manual, one of the first things you will find in a section on desert survival - or survival out at sea for that matter - is to either immediately seek out shade or to construct it with what you have. Water is one of your most precious resources in any environment. And with too much sun, you're overheating, and the water is leaving you faster than you can take it in. 

Anyway, I think the point has been made. 

Collapse

The collapse of the Western Roman empire is a notoriously tricky subject matter, the conceptualization of which is still vigorously debated to this day, with even the question of whether the empire collapsed at all still a contentious issue. I suspect a large part of the reason for this lies in the clunkiness of our Western language structures though, which for complex historical and cultural reasons, developed into a largely thing-centered language as opposed to a process-centered one. 

Lambert Strether over at the Naked Capitalism blog recently explored some of the technical aspects of this issue, and makes a series of excellent points about it. Further, a commenter noted that Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass more or less expresses a similar view: that the 70/30 ratio of nouns to verbs in English is inverted in the Potawatomie language, which is much better at expressing living processes as opposed to "things" which are to be manipulated. A wonderful and moving book, I might add. 

The late David Graeber and other thinkers have located this disjunction all of the way back to the ancient world, in which the thing-centric thinkers Plato and Aristotle came into favor at the expense of the process-thinking Heraclitus. 

To illustrate, even many of our verbs possess a noun-like quality. One of the most common words - alongside other words like "fall" - we use for what happened to the Western Roman empire is "collapse," which is chiefly a verb and a process but is often used as a noun, frozen in the mind's eye as a sudden and calamitous deconstruction, say like a collapsed building or bridge, which in their strict functional sense, are no longer the specific, functional structures they used to be, but mere chaotic assortments of disaggregated components, at their final rest and of use to no one. 

And this frozen, decisive image is rooted in the observer with a potent emotional impression, which could be a mixture of awe and dread and other feelings, and which is carried in the present moment, and compared with and measured against one's own surrounding circumstances and experiences. 

The academic and collective intellectual understanding of this historical event then - like many others - proceeded in a sort of "tumble," in which a generation of somber scholars sifted through the historical data and concluded, "my god, the empire collapsed and its people were plunged into a dark age." And then the next generation came on its heels, their sunnier disposition recoiling at the dour outlook of their predecessors, and so the history was revised to account for a possible "continuity" of the empire through the sprouting of the Germanic kingdoms within the Western empire's shell: "no no, it didn't collapse at all, and there was no such dark age," and so on. And then the subsequent generations would take the truths intuited by the various camps - and I should add move intellectually in a relational and process-centric direction - and synthesize those with newly added historical data to produce what we have today. 

And what do we have today? The "collapse" of the Western empire was indeed calamitous when taken over the couple of centuries it took to happen, and it was calamitous for everyone involved, though the catastrophe certainly unfolded through an uneven geographical and temporal distribution. In particular, the 400's CE in Western Europe were complete bloody chaos. A lot of this could be attributed to a conjunction of historical timing and the rapid and mass movement of an enormous amount of human energy in the form of the great Germanic migrations touched on here before. 

To simplify, the triggers could be conceived as climate change and Hun migrations from the east, which set a rolling mass of people into motion, crashing them into each other, first in the steppes and then into the metaphorical and literal walls of the Roman Empire in turn, overwhelming those walls as they weakened and degraded in historical time. The calamity occurred in those deadly oscillations of difference: in the great amplitudes of rapid and mass movements and antagonisms of desperate people. 

The Germanic peoples and the Roman empire had existed side by side for centuries, if not in peace, then in resigned and occasionally irritated tolerance. But that uneasy dam finally broke under the strain of the great migrations: the displaced Germanic tribes required a constant expansion and movement to escape the human flood of climate and war displaced peoples from the north and east, an expansion that met its limits at the huge and inflexible borders of an emplaced territorial Roman state, which required a set-fastness and a stability to provide the constant political, economic, and technological development of a settled civilization. It was this sharp difference in delimited ways of being between the Romans and the Germanic tribes that pitted these forces against each other, eventually shaking the Roman state apart. 

We locate the calamity in this process in the catastrophic loss of continuity in the functions of the Roman state, and the loss of wide-ranging trade and economic and political circulation within the massive Mediterranean domain of the Roman Empire, which clearly shows in the historical record in profound changes in material quality of life across class during that time period, and the steady regional material degradation that shows up in the archeological record, as well as the collapse of global complexity within the empire and the progression into localization and simplification in the western side of the empire, not to mention the constant bloodshed in the form of warfare and civil war that both caused and was caused by this loss in continuity. 

But we also have a couple of very different tracks of continuity to disentangle from this mess, which vastly complicates - and makes much more interesting - our conception of collapse here. The very peoples that helped to topple the weakening and tottering Roman Empire were also the ones who helped dust it off and reanimate its corpse. 

Over the course of centuries, the Germanic tribes were gradually hooked into the Roman system in various ways. In divide and conquer strategies, the Romans would shower sympathetic chieftains with wealth, ingratiating those chieftains and inculcating into them an identification with the empire and a settled way of life, setting them against enemy tribes. Germanic peoples would also be taken up into the empire itself and settled within, serving in the Roman legions. 

Especially after the crisis of the third century when the Roman military was chewed up by plague and civil war, Rome's appetite for Germanic soldiers grew, and as the empire's decline advanced in the 4th and 5th centuries, Germanic peoples would advance ever higher in the military ranks and were given ever more responsibilities, and eventually land and delegated authority, which took root in time and would grow into kingdoms of their own as the central authority of Rome finally disintegrated. 

The Romanized Germanic peoples would come to identify with the empire, and looked up to its power and prestige and believed in it as a political, cultural, and economic entity. And they would form an alliance with the still-standing church, commanding its spiritual and ideological authority in return for its military protection in order to reproduce the forms and functions of the empire at smaller scale in a more localized manner, economically simpler and using less circulating energy, at least for now. 

Existing infrastructure that still functioned was used, and what was not functional was stripped and repurposed, and the monasteries worked feverishly to copy all of the knowledge they could, while authorities scraped old Roman political and legal documentation in order to reproduce and properly name and carry out the old legal and political forms of the empire. 

Words like "fall" and "collapse" do have a focusing function: they point to something that did indeed come to an end, in order to describe the consequences and directions of that end. But also, what fell and what collapsed and when? And then what did it do after that? Apparently, things didn't fall as far - or collapse as completely - as the images suggest. And Western Europe was indeed plunged into chaos and tumult in their own sort of "Warring States" period for another thousand years while the Eastern empire stayed standing during that time. 

But then the walls of the Eastern empire did finally fall, while the turbulence and fragmented turmoil of the West - with that turmoil taking place amidst the ruins of the Western empire, complete with all of the material, ideological, and intellectual trappings those ruins would provide - would produce that terrible and vigorous stable of European powers which would explode onto the global stage in the colonial era and dominate the rest of the world in turn. 

Language is a funny thing. But you can use that very funniness to dig deeper into the history, to reveal a richness and strangeness that defies the understanding. 

Art of Relaxation Revisited

It is true that laziness - or a simpler and less moralizing sort of "inaction" - can pose certain problems, especially when it comes to sustaining a certain skill or tradition. The laws of thermodynamics never rest after all, and so as soon as you cease putting work into organizing matter and energy into a certain configuration to suit a given need or want, that configuration is hard at work drifting back apart, or at least seeking out greener pastures, or the more interesting conversations at the cocktail party, in so many ways to speak. 

Take a few strums on that guitar, and start to familiarize the mind and body with getting it right, and then put it all down for awhile, and that stuff will fade away real quick. It takes longer and longer to fade the more rigorous the repetition and the deeper you ingrain the patterns, and the more vivid and impressing the lesson is. You put more energy in and the configuration gets denser and it persists for longer. And you can put something down and it will leave an imprint, and you can return to it later and pick it up again and it will be easier to resume. But all of that is beside the point I wanted to make here. 

The opposite problem can also be the case: if you are constantly putting energy into a given system, it begins to oversaturate and overload the existing patterns within, while simultaneously depriving other surrounding systems, ultimately impoverishing them and setting them into an antagonism with the oversaturated system. This is a lesson that could really benefit our Protestant society: that sometimes it is good that one dial back the obsession and the fixation and the constant targeted application of energy to a given configuration and just fucking relax. 

So now we're getting back to our "art of relaxation" motif. It isn't just that relaxing tends to relieve stress and paranoia and overextension, and therefore, improve performance. It is also that the world is composed of an incomprehensible multitude of living things, all with their own forces and interests, and part of living in harmony with these forces and interests involves letting them simply be themselves and do their own things. Indeed, even becoming aware of certain things and turning one's attention to certain things can disrupt their function if one gets too fussy. 

One of the better examples of this is the relationship between sleep and learning. You can field anecdote after anecdote about this: someone is banging their head against the wall on something. Say, practicing a musical instrument, or hitting a stumbling block in a construction project, or getting tied down with writer's block, or unable to solve some sort of puzzle or problem, or whatever. And then they walk away from the problem, hit the hay for the night, and then the next morning, or sometime during the next day, the solution pops into their head. 

After a couple of intense sessions of practice and theory, and then some rest to let it all absorb, one's hands start to move miraculously across the fretboard. One's musical fluency and virtuosity can leap in bounds, in sudden changes of quality. Inspiration can often strike when one isn't looking for it or striving towards it. 

A lot of this has to do with the brain and the body needing downtime so that all of those hidden lower processes can do their work integrating data and experience and consolidating it, oftentimes while one is sleeping. But this can also be generalized into the waking hours and with simple rest. For example, engaging in a variety of tasks - as opposed to a repetitive single task - allows the various muscle groups to heal, and strengthen, while they are not being used and strained. 

Culturally, we don't trust what we are not directly perceiving or acting on. If we can't see it or are not aware of it, its existence and efficacy is suspect, and either needs to be ignored, discarded, or else engaged and trained into the patterns we think are proper. And what is not in active motion is "lazy" and "idle," breeding "evil vapours" or whatever the hell they call it these days. 

The land is not "productive" if it is not seized upon and worked to exhaustion. Resting land and ecosystems that are recovering and recharging are a waste of space and losing money. And we must vigorously till and rend the soil, laying waste to the indigenous flora, and trashing the mycelium networks, so that we can inject our processed nutrients and punch in our monoculture. And then we create our deserts and call them peace. 

We're not going full hippie here. Directed energy and effort must still be put into one's world. There is a countervailing cultural tendency to distrust anything visible or perceivable, and to place an uncritical faith in what is mysterious and inscrutable. That is another problem that we'll have to set aside for now. 

Chainsaw Wisdom

I've been thinking about chainsaws, so we're going to do some bits on chainsaws. Also, a title like "Chainsaw Wisdom" is a hell of a title, just like anything else really with "chainsaw" in the name. The urge to have a little fun with this is of course irresistible, but I'm not just being facetious. Bear with me; there are some interesting things to suss out here. 

First, as is the case working with any tool, you're eventually going to become aware of its shadow side. You can smash your thumb with a hammer just as easy as driving in a nail, and indeed, your thumb is a bigger target. You can cut your hand slipping with a knife or a hand saw. For that matter, you can get into plenty of trouble simply instantiating abstractions - such as using words to converse or write - when you get into a disagreement with someone and then you have a fight on your hands, which can do progressively more damage depending on how deep-seated the disagreement is and how entangled the relationship is. Not a non-sequitur: we'll get back to that part later. 

The more powerful something is, the higher stakes there are for making a mistake when becoming acquainted with that thing's shadow side, the more formalized and elaborate the procedures become for even engaging with that thing in the first place. 

Take the chainsaw, which features a gas engine (or now electric) powered chain, linked in a loop, with its entire circumference studded with razor-sharp teeth, moving at high speed, which can remove incredible amounts of wood very quickly. And it does this with very little feedback or warning: you start the engine and then squeeze the trigger and then without any further effort, an enormous amount of force is put out by the saw, a level of force that would otherwise take an extremely vigorous exertion of strength and concerted effort, directed with intense and focused intention, to achieve, if it can even be achieved at that level by hand. 

Even setting aside the immediate danger of the whirling blades themselves, there is the matter of accounting for one of the most dangerous tendencies of the tool: kickback. With that chain moving at such a high speed, if the wrong part of it - typically the tip of the bar - runs into a solid object, it can buck the entire chainsaw back violently - oftentimes upwards and backwards due to the motion of the chain - right into the operator's shoulder or face. Rural nurses everywhere nod in solemn agreement. 

The dangers - and the consequences of those dangers - associated with the tool have contributed to all sorts of ingenious improvements on the overall design added over time, such as a spring-loaded brake on the front of the engine assembly that stops the chain if it is tripped by kickback, spikes at the base of the bar which allow the saw to be embedded in wood and stabilized, a safety on the trigger, and etc. And then there is wearable safety gear like chaps, helmets, and face shields. And even all of these improvements don't eliminate all of the more serious dangers. 

I've been cut plenty of times with knives and saws, and I've smashed my thumb plenty of times with a hammer, but not once have I let the chainsaw - when it is in motion - even graze me. Why?

If you consider how much damage - and how quickly that damage is sustained - that chain can do with any sort of contact with it, it becomes clear that you have to put in much more prior work to ensure that such a thing does not even happen in the first place. This is not even a claim that I am a chainsaw expert and that I haven't made dangerous mistakes with the thing. Let's look closer. 

There are specific ways to stand with a chainsaw, and there are specific ways to hold it. There are ways to place wood, and ways to cut into the wood, to avoid triggering kickback, and there are methods of cutting that avoid binding and other troublesome tendencies that can lead to kickback. One carefully controls when the saw starts running, and one moves very carefully when the saw cuts through and is free and winding down again. 

There are also maintenance considerations, such as ensuring that the saw is always sharp, and that the chain is tight and in good condition, and that the saw is running properly, and etc.   

All of this makes up an entire additional insulated layer of precaution before you even get to the real danger. A mistake could be made within this additional layer, resulting in the saw binding or kicking back without even coming close to grazing you, and it is still incredibly alarming that it happened in the first place. One's reaction is: "oh shit, that could have been bad." 

These dangers, and their accompanying protocols of precaution, leave a deep emotional and instinctual impression. Not only are close-calls and mishaps frightening in themselves, but the people with the experience of them and who can grasp the gravity of them also react accordingly and impress that gravity and caution onto others around them through teaching and scolding, which is often intense and frightening as well. 

This is also true of other powerful modern tools such as automobiles and firearms. Consider automobiles, which involve complex traffic laws and codes of conduct which govern their smooth operation, which are absorbed over years as children are socialized and then trained with them, before having to go through schooling and licensing procedures to finally drive them. 

The very existence of automobiles as a mode of travel implies an intense impression that is inculcated in children at a very young age. We're all familiar with the image of the tottering child shambling off into the road, whose delicate and developing nervous system and brain is irradiated with the fearful and wrathful scolding of the parent, desperate to correct what is certainly a dangerous errant behavior, in the context of a society based on the car, anyway. 

It is that scolding, that hot and high-velocity signal that is to hammer in a strong enough impression to correct that errant behavior for good. It stays with you. 

And these protocols migrate. The content of the protocols themselves may remain specific to the activities they govern, but the protocols themselves come with impressions and ethics that stay with you, and can be transferred to other daily activities. 

For example, the cautious impression remains, and one enters into a completely different field, like writing and related intellectual pursuits. The more one learns, the more one discovers how much there is to know, and one's cautious perception discovers that there are a multitude of mistakes and pitfalls to be had. Early on, one gets in a bad argument and gets yelled at by the teachers. Later on, bad arguments can hurt reputations, careers, and relationships. One gets to be more and more careful as one puts down the words. 

One thing I'm leaving out though is that these protocols do present as systems and traditions, but they also have to be absorbed by the individual. One can have a cautious personality and be ready-made for the protocol, just as one can have a reckless personality and choose to ignore the protocol altogether. 

After all, setting aside flukey accidents, we still have plenty of people laying into their legs, arms, shoulders, faces, and etc. with chainsaws all the time. We have a steady beat of accidental firearm deaths in the United States. And don't get me started on people's trash driving habits and the related yearly traffic deaths. 

Well, I guess I will get a little started. Subjectively, I have observed a steady qualitative change in driving habits over the years, with habits getting steadily worse, more reckless, and more solipsistic.

The average car in the US weighs 2 tons or so, and of course cars have trended larger in this country for some time. Cars are built really well now. They handle well, and they're well-sealed and comfortable, and minimize road bumps and road noise. They're loaded with TVs and stereos and all manner of creating a comfortable inner world. 

All of this is great, but also drivers forget that their wills are locomoting these 2 ton hunks of steel, and the faster you are moving, the less time you have to respond to what is an increasingly complex driving environment. The car designs are safer, so there's that. But the accidents, phew the accidents.   

One solution is to move away from the technological suites that are the most dangerous anyway, in the hopes of mitigating some of that damage. But this is a society that likes to have its cake and eat it too. Self-drive is going bust, and we shit on trains. We'll hang on to our most dangerous toys, and acquire more, and all the while allow those solemn precautions surrounding them to degrade and lapse. 

Whoops

I should know better by now than to set definite intentions for writing output on this thing. When you live in the giant industrial shredder that is the United States, a loose shirt sleeve could very well get you caught in the thing, and then in you go, torn in a multitude of directions. 

The only issue with this particular metaphor is that it implies conscious and competent design: a precisely constructed machine that executes its intended task with purpose. As this is only partially true in the case of the US, I'll use another metaphor of a different color, mixing it in like a paint, and maybe we'll get closer to the right hue. 

I think also of an increasingly turbulent environment, say like an overcharged river or a chopped up ocean or great lake. It pays to have organized and concentrated energy to have on hand, such as a kayak and paddle and the knowledge and muscle power to use them, or even a small engine on a boat, and one can at least attempt to navigate between the chop and the whirlpools, charting a course through the turbulence. 

But when you lack that energy - in my case money is pretty tight - then you're more liable to get sucked into the prevailing currents, and the best you can do is to attempt to go with the flow and see where it all goes. And besides, being a semi-nomadic worker and somewhat free agent, I'm freed up for all sorts of loose requests floating around, unfulfilled in this burning trash heap of a country. 

What I'm getting at is that I've gone into some construction work (the money sounded good) offered to me: an extensive remodel that has gone way overschedule and blown past its budget, lending an extra hand to help these poor guys wrap things up and finally get out of there. They're at wits end: they're under constant and mounting pressure to finish a job that seems to never end. 

The reasons for this are many. Mistakes and changes on the part of the overworked and scatterbrained contractors and the workers yes, but also changing design decisions on the part of the owners, skyrocketing material and fuel costs, miscommunications and misunderstandings with suppliers, leading to inappropriate materials such as unsuitable water-based paints peeling right off of the steel posts and rails. 

The project was delayed for two months because a scattered architect couldn't send through the proper building plans. Crucial inspections that could cause operations to screech to a halt have been delayed by days or even weeks. 

I've seen this sort of thing elsewhere too and have attempted to describe it previously: you're getting an enormous wide-ranging and systematic degradation of the country's civic and economic institutions, and this damage begins to accumulate and reveal itself gradually in the operation of the daily life that keeps the country running. 

Construction for example is an interesting intersection of the material, legal, political, economic, and domestic spheres. Dysfunction in any one of the spheres can put a project on hold: costs can mount up in supply chain squeezes or gouging for example, and then these cost overruns cause disputes that can get held up in dysfunctional legal systems and so on, so the entire operation can jerk its way down through stops and starts until it finally arrives shakily at its conclusion, presenting the illusion that something has been done while simultaneously sustaining damage that accumulates in people over time. 

For that matter, it can get more personal. I've observed a number of anecdotal affairs in which increasingly desperate people are caught up in inheritance disputes in which legal processes get held up with various dysfunctional mechanisms and professionals, and the the increasingly desperate people get more desperate and perceive the dysfunction as back-stabbing and malice - which may be present as well - which destroys those relationships for good. 

People get a little weaker. They get a little angrier. Their wallets and bank accounts get a little emptier and less cash is flowing in to contribute to domestic reproduction and the restoration of daily autonomy and dignity. And so they get a little more resentful. And then the New York Times sails by overhead, aloof, with headlines - just saw one this morning - that drawl on: the economy is showing signs of robustness. Well, I suppose the point has been made. 

All of that aside, I'm getting tossed around again and seeing plenty of interesting things. Grist for the mill as they say. Lots of partially-written pieces backing up, and hopefully more will be forthcoming soon.