Facing the Music

A few nights ago, I watched a film called A Late Quartet. I don't intend to review it here, though I will say I found it consistently interesting, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to see an intelligent film about Western classical music, and what it's like to take part in the work of perpetuating that great tradition. For the purposes of this post, though, I mention the film because it served as the prompt for the thoughts that follow.

The story of A Late Quartet follows the members of a fictional string quartet, called The Fugue, which has been playing together for some twenty-five years, but which finds itself suddenly in the midst of a staffing crisis. Its cellist has just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. His continuing with the group is out of the question; drugs might help him for awhile, but not for long; at most for another season. He wants to leave with dignity and not out of embarrassing necessity, and so he recommends that, before his playing gets any worse, the quartet immediately replace him with a cellist who has substituted for him before, and who he believes would do beautifully. His first desire is to see the life of the group continue on. 

I happen to think that the world is facing a set of circumstances a great deal like the loss of a cellist to a string quartet. We're losing something basic, something fundamental, something that touches on every aspect of our civilization. Something serious enough to stop the music as we know it. We're losing the cheap resource base on which we depend. We're losing easy oil, cheap ores, fertile soil, and clean water. And these are not extras. These are necessities.

Now there's plenty of denial about all of this still, but the truth is that the game of cheap resource extraction was up about ten years ago now, when the general price of commodities (for the first time in a century) began to rise instead of fall. And while it's true that we are a long ways from having extracted all of everything--we'll never get there, thankfully!--we have come to certain limits of expense; we have come to the place where, if we want more of any given resource, we are going to have to pay progressively more for the work of getting it out; and every year, more and more.  

Already an ounce of gold costs more to extract and refine than it can command on the market, even at today's historically high prices. Already groundwater is running dangerously low everywhere from Saudi Arabia to India to the American West (and again the costs of alternatives such as desalination are prohibitive!). Topsoil is blowing away at alarming rates, so that the cost of growing food on less and less fertile soil can only go up. Fisheries are collapsing as well; recently a single Pacific blue-fin tuna sold for more than a million dollars! So. Maybe our present way of life can continue for a season or two. That is, maybe for a time, we can blind ourselves to the facts and manifold facets of decline, and continue to live as though our present pace of consumption can continue forever. Eventually though, a reckoning will come. Eventually we'll have no choice but to change. And we'll have to learn to live with less. And live more lightly on the earth.

Here's a short list of what will strike many people as the downside of change. None of this is predictive; it is diagnostic. All of it is already taking place, at least in the developed world. 

• Rising prices for basic necessities, as measured against people's ability to pay for them, and not necessarily in the official inflation rate.
• Widespread break-down of urban infrastructure. 
• Declining real wages.
• Changing employment patterns: with fewer and fewer people participating in the labor force, and more and more of those who do take part, doing so part-time only.
• A rise in the underground un-taxed economy, say in bartering for skills, or renting out properties informally for vacationers, or living with family. 
• Less travel.

Here are some changes that are more in the embryonic stages, but will probably become much more a part of our lives as time goes on. 

• More gardening and local food production. Not just as a hobby, or because it's green and progressive, but really out of a practical need to feed ourselves.
• Less money spent on research and development, in everything from cancer research to nano-technology.
• In general a greater sense of distance--with geography making a difference again, in world trade, for example.

How will people react to having to make these necessary changes? Well in general, I suppose it makes sense to say that they will not like them. Will resist them. Will continually want to believe that limitless progress and economic growth is right around the corner.

There is an instructive scene in the movie, in which our cellist attends an exercise class for Parkinson's patients. The instructor opens class by saying that, with Parkinson's, everything in the patient's life contracts and bunches up: the shoulders hunch, the handwriting shrinks, the hand can no longer palm the grapefruit. She then leads the class in stretching exercises, the point being, as she says, to take control of the symptoms. To face the facts of contraction, and do your best to deal with them. To take responsibility for the only body you have, shaky as it is, hunched as it is becoming.

The class begins the stretching exercises, with every student taking part except the cellist and another man behind him with a cane. The man with the cane seems oblivious, and our cellist can only look on in horrified disbelief. He stares and stares, unable to get himself to do the stretches. It's a painful scene. And yet later it becomes clear that he's learning to cope, and with a kind of noble humility. In particular we see him in a harness on treadmill. Just walking walking walking--into his new reality.

I see much my work as a householder at Sunnyside as a sort of analogue to the treadmill scene, though I will say I consider my own work a great deal more cheery! Still, it's work! Learning to garden. Learning to preserve food. Learning to do with less. Learning to say "I don't need that," or "I can do that myself," or "instead of this, I'll do this." Part of the trouble with the work I'm describing is that the necessity for it isn't always viscerally clear yet. My family, if it wished, could spend more freely. We could turn the thermostat back up to where it was, say, five years ago in the wintertime! We could drive a lot more. We could decide the garden was just too much work and turn it all back to grass. And to entertain ourselves and maybe to impress the neighbors, we could buy a lot of things that we don't need. 

But all that would be to move backwards, not forwards, into a world in which it's time (at long last) to share with the poor. Time to care about the effects of our lifestyle upon the life systems of the planet. Time to labor to add beauty and life to the world, not consume the same beauty and life. Time to accept the reality of a grand universal contraction, and learn what the new situation, however painful, has to teach us. 

I hope you consider joining me.

HB

Until Saturday the 18th!

Food of Affection

Our son, a college freshman, has been home for the last three weeks, for Christmas break. He's an easygoing young man, not hard to please. And he's pretty effortlessly fallen back into the old routine. He would of course, be free, if he so wished, to do all sorts of novel and interesting things: light a dozen roman candles, do some winter camping at the Lake Michigan dunes, fry up some bok choi in a wok. Or whatever. But the fact is, like most human beings, when he comes back home, he wants to do the same things he's always done: hang out in his room, read a book or two, answer questions on the Internet forum he's in charge of, and come downstairs in the afternoons and evenings to be sociable: to play Parcheesi with his mother, and maybe a little music with his dad. This year too, pursuant to the season, he helped to decorate the tree, and accompanied us to church on Christmas Eve, where he sang with us in the choir and allowed himself to be fussed over by various members of the congregation, who were happy to see him back. Then on Christmas day itself, as well as on New Year's Eve, he was with us at his grandparents' place, which is a cheerful yellow house just down the way (a geographical circumstance we perpetually bless). In the end, of course, now that he's eighteen, our son is the one that answers for his time, and not us. And yet isn't that where the deepest honor lies, of having him with us?: the fact that he's here NOT because he feels obliged to be, but because he really wants to be here? Values our company? Freely chooses to stay with us, spend time with us, just hang out with us?

Mind you, the food at Sunnyside is part of the attraction; he admits as much himself! There's a good cafeteria at school, where it's possible to eat a reasonably wholesome diet. Still, it's not the same; how could it be? Try finding peaches at a cafeteria like the peaches we canned with him way back in August; we've been bringing them up in pints and quart jars from the basement every five or six days, to slurp ragged and sweet from a bowl. Or try finding dills as zesty as the ones we serve here; canned (again) this past summer right here at Sunnyside. Or try coming up with a pie as delicious as the blueberry one he and his mother baked two days ago, with berries that have been waiting in the freezer since August to find their way into such a pie. No, it's impossible. And not just because of the ingredients, and not just because of culinary expertise here, though these do play their part. But because here at Sunnyside, family affection, generated by memory and shared experience, is bound up in the food itself. Take that away, and the food, no matter how fine, has lost some essential savor. Affection or its absence is tasted. This we know for certain. 

Affection. I find myself coming to that word again and again, as I consider the future of the planet and how, if the beauty of our planet is to be sustained, and if human life itself is to remain richly viable, that future needs to be different than the present. Affection for the earth beneath our feet. Affection for the homes we inhabit. Affection for the other creatures of the earth. Affection for our neighbors. Affection for the architectural spaces that surround us. Affection for those we mingle with in our professional lives. Affection for our food. Affection. The thing about affection is that it's particular to a place or person. It's found amply in small things and in the presence of the unique, but gets bled out of whatever comes manufactured and standard. Its absence in our lives makes us feel alienated from one another and from our surroundings, but the expectation of its presence is what attracts us to the places where we are most likely to feel it. Most especially home. 

My mother's cooking was one of the best things about going back home, when, as a college student, I got that opportunity. My mother was an adventurous cook, remarkably resourceful at using up what odds and ends were available in the refrigerator or the garden. Another way of saying this is to say she was a master of improvisation, which on the up-side, meant that whenever you sat down at the dinner table, you were in for something new and interesting, though on the down side, it also meant that some of her triumphs were essentially unrepeatable, because she herself never kept track: what herbs, what spices, how long did the onions fry? etc. But nowhere else could I get that cooking. Again, not so much because of her skill, though that was part of it. And not so much because of the ingredients themselves, which were often nothing special at all. But because, especially before I was married, nowhere other than in my mother's kitchen did I have a person so connected to me, who had herself trained my taste buds, and who of course cared about what I would like, and who, out of love for me, labored to please and surprise.

I would like so much to return to my mother's kitchen! Year after year, I still grieve the loss of that possibility. Yet at the same time I'm comforted by the thought that in some ways such a return really is possible--mostly by attending to the same principles that she attended as pilot of the counter-top and captain of the knives and spatulas and spoons: Cook with a sense of place and season, and of what you have on hand and available. Cook with affection for the ingredients. Cook with an affection for whoever is going to enjoy your the work of your hands. In short, cook your way home! 

One final note: I need one more week of intense work to fully complete my new play "Myles to Go." So I ask for my readers' patience until the 14th of January, when I look forward to posting again. I'm aware that these breaks are not the conventional way to encourage reader loyalty! But I also believe that if part of the mission of 9-volt Nomad is to encourage others in the ways of simplicity and sanity, well, its writer needs to practice those arts as well! So, as we say here at 9-volt Nomad, one big thing at a time! 

With affection, then, and until the 14th!

HBthing