The struggle to remake our civilization into something actually sustainable has begun, and in our homes is where the struggle will be centered. There's a lot that has to be jettisoned in the work: expectations for day to day novelty, for long-distance travel, for physical pampering, for plenty of cash on hand--all these. And these renunciations and goodbyes will be painful. They're guaranteed to be.
But this necessary change isn't just defined by subtraction. It's not JUST about paring down, giving away, and doing without! It's about addition too. It's about stronger muscles and greater physical health. It's about added pride in your home, because in many ways that home will be the work of your own hands. It's about the deepening of family and community relationships. Then too it's about beauty, and a surprising amount of beauty to be discovered; yes, there's a princely place in this direction for beauty.
It's time to invest more prolifically in beauty. Time to cultivate beauty in our lives and the lives of others. And I say this not only as a literary artist, who would naturally benefit if people cared more to invest in the beauty of books, theater, and poetry. I say it as a citizen of the earth who believes without hesitation that the pursuit of all kinds of beauty could serve as a substitute for owning stuff and consuming stuff; and a much superior substitute at that! After all, the main need in life, after basic needs have been minimally met, is for meaning. And since beauty and meaning are naturally allied, it makes sense to seek meaning by cultivating beauty.
I have no means of proving this statistically--though I imagine the attempt has been made--but I wonder if there has ever been an era, when the gap between what might be spent on beauty and the amount actually spent on it has ever been so wide? We live in an age in many ways choking on its own abundance, and yet I think it's not an exaggeration to say that we're also choking on ugliness. Any glance into history will show that it has been different. In ancient times, cities vied with one another to build the most beautiful bath houses and temples and to claim the most beautiful harbors and markets and hilltop views. Today though, the cultivation of beauty in the urban landscape (especially if taxes are involved) is dismissed as a dispensable extra, and in our personal lives, it's generally treated that way as well. At least when push comes to shove.
I'm thinking of a picture I saw once of the wardrobe of a nomadic woman in Mali. She owned only two garments--the garment she had on and the one that was packed away in a wooden chest. But both of these were intoxicatingly beautiful: hand woven, stunningly designed, colorful, exuberant, flaring with life. Of course we in the so called developed world could demand more beauty in our clothes. We could afford that beauty too, especially if we reduced the number of items in our wardrobe. But we don't. We prefer cheap and plenty to beautiful and few. Sad.
Some time ago, I was reading an article on life in post-crash Greece, and specifically life for young people, over half of whom are still unemployed. It was a sobering article. The young men and women interviewed expressed a sense of being cut off from the future, of having no prospects and no sense of personal agency anymore. Many of them described feeling depressed and bored. Time itself seemed to weigh heavy on their hands. They complained that, with no money, there was nothing to do. One woman said her brother stayed in his room most of his day, sleeping or trying to sleep.
At one level I felt bad for these young folks; here, after all, were genuine victims of an economic system created for the profit of a few, and not designed for general human flourishing. A system based on speculation and the pretense of labor, not actual goods, and not active investment in the lives of living human beings. At a different level though, I felt impatient and angry at their complaints. None of those interviewed was going hungry. All of them had a home. Many of them had large families. So, what exactly was their problem again? Not enough money? Well any child playing a game of tag, knows that money isn't necessary to have fun. Too much time? Some people retire from work to have time!
Too little imagination--was that their problem? Too little insight to see the advantages of their situation? Well yes, that might be. Too small a thirst for beauty? Almost certainly. Honestly I wanted to wave my arms and tell them: plant flowers. Plant lots of them.Take a walk in the country. Play sports. Sports are beautiful. Read a bunch of good books (particularly some Thoreau). Clean up your streets. Learn to play the guitar or just sing a lot. Cook your next meal with attention to beauty. Bake your next loaf of bread with attention to beauty. Paint a mural on the walls of your room. Shine your shoes. Shine your furniture. Comb your dog. Arrange some of those flowers that you grew. Go to the museum and look at those Greek antiquities, or heck since you're in Greece dig in your back yard and see if you can find some yourself. Take a bus into the countryside some night with a blanket and a lover and look up at the stars. Let things progress from there.
Again, I don't consider myself unsympathetic toward the young; I have an eighteen year old myself. Nor am I blind to the fact that many of these young people honestly yearn for professions they will find meaningful. The prospect of not finding such work ready for you when you really would like it, is indeed a sad one; it shouldn't be wished on folks. Still, sometimes some things just don't happen, and so you have to look elsewhere for meaning. And if that's the case for you and everyone you know in Greece, well it's no good lying around complaining about it and pining for what's not going to happen. Much better to get out there and make something beautiful happen. Beauty is a wage as well.
And of course I don't just mean beauty in art (though that's an obvious place to find it). I mean beauty in all the places that we can find it and put it: gardens and public spaces, homes and offices. Beauty in our clothes and our furnishings, in our books and meals. In our childrens' toys. In our theater and literature. We must banish the notion that beauty is an extra to be occasionally indulged in, and never taken too seriously. No, it's an instinct in all of us. It's our human birthright, and we ought to claim that birthright and insist on its presence in our lives, doubly so if things in general aren't going well. Furthermore, if the world around us will not give beauty freely to us, then we have to make the beauty ourselves. This can be done, often or very little cost at all.
Please consider, dear readers, the possibility of adding beauty to your own lives. Sit back and dream up a more beauty-rich existence. Write a few possible projects down that might bring that richness into being. Start humble and small. For instance I've always delighted in the custom the Japanese have of covering their books with colored paper. I've often wanted to do that, with at least a few of my books, and maybe I will. The point is this though: honestly, forthrightly let's all pursue the work of adding beauty to our lives. Most likely, with a little persistence, something significant will come of it. The muses reward sincerity.
Until Tuesday the 24th!
HB
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Hand Work as a Way to Joy
A little boy's picture of a ladybug on the refrigerator door, the rough carving of a boat, a clay soap-dispenser, an exercise in Japanese flower arrangement, a bar of lavender soap crisply wrapped in brown paper, these are all proof: that whatever is done or made by hand, however imperfectly, has a natural dignity to it, and carries the signature of meaning. And that meaning is generally more intensely felt the closer the hands are to being your own hands or the hands of someone you deeply love. The bread you eat has more meaning to you if you baked it yourself or if someone you loved baked it. The music you hear has more meaning to you if you're playing it yourself with your own two hands, or if someone you love is making it. We can debate why all this is true--there are certainly many reasons for it--but there is I think almost no question that it is true.
The fact that handwork feels so meaningful, has to be one of the biggest reasons why so many who adopt a lifestyle low on consumption and high in do-it-yourself activity find their lives more satisfying after they've shifted them that direction. Joy depends on meaning and since (to say it a different way) human meaning depends in a remarkable way on the sensed presence of human hand, then cultivating the domestic arts--cooking, gardening, carpentry, flower arrangement etc.--are an obvious place to start investing in that market of joy. Decorating our homes with things that we ourselves have made and designed may be one of the most straightforward ways of making ourselves feel at home. Again it's not so much a question of how perfect the work in question is; it's more a question of the source, of whose fingers shaped, assembled, or produced it. I have access to any number of recordings of the finest musicians in the world playing the finest work of the finest composers. But I would always prefer to hear my son improvise on his violin or my wife sing in her beautiful pure voice a simple folk tune at the piano. How could it be otherwise? Loved and live always beats even the best of what a recording can supply me with.
Of course, it's only fair to admit that taking up the task of learning hand-skills guarantees some heartache and trouble as well and joy and satisfaction. What bakes can also burn. What's grown in the garden can also wither and die. What's smoothed by hand can also be gouged. And it's hard to get used to this truth, because of course every failure in handwork gestures embarrassingly toward our larger human fallibility, and makes us feel embarrassed and inadequate. My mother was a good cook, but I suppose some of my most painful memories as a child involve scenes at the dinner table, in which the family simply wasn't able to be polite about her more exceptional failures. In part this was our fault--we could be unforgivably frank--but in part it also had to do with her inability to let a disaster be a disaster, and just give up on the dish and throw it out. "It looks odd, but it tastes fine," she would assert, when in fact, it looked odd and tasted pretty odd as well! But you see, the thought of waste was so distasteful to her, and her wish for the dish to be perfect was so overwhelming, that on occasion she was just unable to admit defeat. So where our gustatory skepticism collided with her unwillingness to consign the dish to the compost--there at the intersection of six o'clock and the dinner table--we got these almost ecstatically tearful episodes. It was absolute misery.
To say it again, it takes time and practice to acquire domestic skills. And this is one reason why my wife and I often say to ourselves that, as much as we might want to change our lives quickly (to live within the limits of ecological reality, and also more in solidarity with the poor) we still say to ourselves: "one big step at a time." That is, don't set your sights too low--really work toward change. But at the same time remember that the attempt to do so all at once will likely bring the whole project of change to a shuddering halt. Better to be strategically ambitious, tackling one difficult project at a time, and integrating each new skill in with the others as time goes on. So for instance this past year we made the digging of a substantially larger garden our biggest project, and combined that with learning to preserve several new items of food. In 2014 we'll work hard on improving the garden soil; also I intend to to build a cold frame (to provide us with early greens and seedlings) as well as a solar oven to expand our food-preservation options. Also, because I want badly to find a way to serve the community with my own hand-work, and most particularly with my theater work, I plan to make my newest play "Myles to Go" into an engine for community fundraising. My troop will perform at as many venues as possible in the Valparaiso area, in order to raise funds for a low income housing project.
All of which brings up something more about hands: they can grasp one another. They can work together. It is not possible to do everything ourselves, nor should we ever try to make that a goal. No, the best place to live and be, as a human being, is where skilled hands meet skilled hands in community, exchanging one skill for another, and finding joy in the sharing. So. Out with business as usual in this anonymous economy-at-large, where stranger provides service to stranger, and products are manufactured at a distance to fill our (often imaginary) needs, and natural limits are continually transgressed, and speculation is the most profitable enterprise, and the poor (who do not know how to speculate except in lottery tickets) are left to their own devices. Truly a different world is possible, one in which we put our own beautiful flexible hands to collective work until the earth becomes a garden and a holy wilderness, instead of moving, as it is moving, so inexorably, so mechanically, toward a vision of emptiness, smog, and infinite loss.
HB
Until Saturday the 21st!
The fact that handwork feels so meaningful, has to be one of the biggest reasons why so many who adopt a lifestyle low on consumption and high in do-it-yourself activity find their lives more satisfying after they've shifted them that direction. Joy depends on meaning and since (to say it a different way) human meaning depends in a remarkable way on the sensed presence of human hand, then cultivating the domestic arts--cooking, gardening, carpentry, flower arrangement etc.--are an obvious place to start investing in that market of joy. Decorating our homes with things that we ourselves have made and designed may be one of the most straightforward ways of making ourselves feel at home. Again it's not so much a question of how perfect the work in question is; it's more a question of the source, of whose fingers shaped, assembled, or produced it. I have access to any number of recordings of the finest musicians in the world playing the finest work of the finest composers. But I would always prefer to hear my son improvise on his violin or my wife sing in her beautiful pure voice a simple folk tune at the piano. How could it be otherwise? Loved and live always beats even the best of what a recording can supply me with.
Of course, it's only fair to admit that taking up the task of learning hand-skills guarantees some heartache and trouble as well and joy and satisfaction. What bakes can also burn. What's grown in the garden can also wither and die. What's smoothed by hand can also be gouged. And it's hard to get used to this truth, because of course every failure in handwork gestures embarrassingly toward our larger human fallibility, and makes us feel embarrassed and inadequate. My mother was a good cook, but I suppose some of my most painful memories as a child involve scenes at the dinner table, in which the family simply wasn't able to be polite about her more exceptional failures. In part this was our fault--we could be unforgivably frank--but in part it also had to do with her inability to let a disaster be a disaster, and just give up on the dish and throw it out. "It looks odd, but it tastes fine," she would assert, when in fact, it looked odd and tasted pretty odd as well! But you see, the thought of waste was so distasteful to her, and her wish for the dish to be perfect was so overwhelming, that on occasion she was just unable to admit defeat. So where our gustatory skepticism collided with her unwillingness to consign the dish to the compost--there at the intersection of six o'clock and the dinner table--we got these almost ecstatically tearful episodes. It was absolute misery.
To say it again, it takes time and practice to acquire domestic skills. And this is one reason why my wife and I often say to ourselves that, as much as we might want to change our lives quickly (to live within the limits of ecological reality, and also more in solidarity with the poor) we still say to ourselves: "one big step at a time." That is, don't set your sights too low--really work toward change. But at the same time remember that the attempt to do so all at once will likely bring the whole project of change to a shuddering halt. Better to be strategically ambitious, tackling one difficult project at a time, and integrating each new skill in with the others as time goes on. So for instance this past year we made the digging of a substantially larger garden our biggest project, and combined that with learning to preserve several new items of food. In 2014 we'll work hard on improving the garden soil; also I intend to to build a cold frame (to provide us with early greens and seedlings) as well as a solar oven to expand our food-preservation options. Also, because I want badly to find a way to serve the community with my own hand-work, and most particularly with my theater work, I plan to make my newest play "Myles to Go" into an engine for community fundraising. My troop will perform at as many venues as possible in the Valparaiso area, in order to raise funds for a low income housing project.
All of which brings up something more about hands: they can grasp one another. They can work together. It is not possible to do everything ourselves, nor should we ever try to make that a goal. No, the best place to live and be, as a human being, is where skilled hands meet skilled hands in community, exchanging one skill for another, and finding joy in the sharing. So. Out with business as usual in this anonymous economy-at-large, where stranger provides service to stranger, and products are manufactured at a distance to fill our (often imaginary) needs, and natural limits are continually transgressed, and speculation is the most profitable enterprise, and the poor (who do not know how to speculate except in lottery tickets) are left to their own devices. Truly a different world is possible, one in which we put our own beautiful flexible hands to collective work until the earth becomes a garden and a holy wilderness, instead of moving, as it is moving, so inexorably, so mechanically, toward a vision of emptiness, smog, and infinite loss.
HB
Until Saturday the 21st!
Saturday, December 7, 2013
On Hiatus till December 17
9-Volt Nomad will be on hiatus until Tuesday the 17th of December, as I put the finishing touches on a new play, and prepare it for a public reading. Thanks so much for your patience!
HB
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
The Drones are Coming! Hurry Up and Buy!
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon has informed us that within a year or two we may well have the privilege of receiving packages under five pounds by way of automatic flying drones. Yes sir, request a product over the web and within perhaps as little as half an hour it could appear at your doorstep. Yeehawwww. Just whipping up that fruit compote and realize you're out of vanilla? This is just for you! Need some birth control pronto, with only minimal interruption at the love nest? Amazon Air Prime to the rescue!
Once upon a time, the only thing a drone was good for was impregnating the queen bee, whose progeny kept the fruit trees fruiting, and the honey jars flowing, and come to think of it pretty much all of human agriculture afloat. Then THAT form of drone was translated into something large and mechanical and useful for exterminating wedding parties in Afghanistan, paradoxically losing its association with fertility. Now however the benefits of drones come to humble little ol' you and me! Because now, like everything that started out good and natural, the drone has been reached its final state of perfection, and has been transformed into an instrument of commerce and consumption!
Apparently the only thing standing in the way of drone delivery nirvana is those pesky government regs regarding low-flying aircraft and public safety. Aw who the heck cares? Kid playing on the jungle gym gets bombed by sack of organic sugar? Hey it's a Darwinian world. Gust of wind hits drone, which snags a massive transmission wire, blacking out half a mid-sized city? Let it go! In general they look so cool, landing in the yard, like they're out of Mission Impossible.
I'm even told that Bezos's proposed delivery method is going to be "very green." That is, because the drones will run on electricity, they're theoretically less polluting than delivery trucks. Color me skeptical. First of all, electricity comes from all sorts of sources, among them coal; now coal is about as green as a black bear's coat is blond. Second, dunno how many packages each one of these drones can carry, but I doubt it's that many. So sure, delivery to a half dozen houses would probably be "greener" than the pizza guy delivering the pizza to the same number of houses, but it ain't going to be "greener" than all of us waiting for a day or two to get what we ordered by way of a good-old-fashioned, big-ass truck. Those trucks may run on petroleum, but they also carry hundreds of packages. They're also driven by human beings, who sometimes say hi to you and smile, but hey, we all know those are going obsolete. Heck some of them even belong to unions.
Actually if we really wanted to make instant delivery into something green, why not hire folks to pedal rickshaws? It's just a thought. We could power the drivers on rice and dhal. Come to think of it, there were once a few places where this was done. Even within living memory. A country of hundreds of millions, if I recall, and with a civilization of some age and repute.
Mind you, I'm not saying the drone scheme is going to be unprofitable, though it may prove to be. I'm not going to insist that it's unsafe, though it probably is. I won't even claim it's uncool. I am however going to claim that the genius of the scheme (and it is genius) fits a general and insidious pattern of distraction. I am going to claim that its primary function is to serve as the propaganda of progress and to associate the Amazon name with it. In other words it's today's update of the Roman bread and circuses. Lost and lonely in suburbia? Don't have a job? That's okay, have your consumer soma delivered by drone. At least you got that!
If you're a glutton for punishment, take a look at this article, on a slightly, but not all-that-different, subject. It really honestly comes within a whisker of telling us that the poor and downtrodden in these bright shining days of the modern financial super-state, ought to be content with their situation, because by golly they got some good programs on the tube, and by golly they can see them nice and clear on that really big screen that they bought at Walmart!
"I know it seems like it's out of science fiction, but it isn't," says Bezos in the interview, which was aired on Sixty Minutes. Well great. Listen I have news for you, Mr. Bezos. A whole lot of science fiction is really damned dystopian, and I don't use either of those d-words lightly.
Thanks for making the world such an obviously better place, Mr. Bezos.
Thanks for injecting some balance and perspective into our lives.
Thanks for reminding us that what really matters in life is power, speed, and convenience.
Thanks for helping to make the automatic earth so much more than just a cool phrase in a Paul Simon song.
Thanks for being out in front of the pack on the question of labor too, and who or what ought to be given labor: robots with no needs but only missions; or living, needy flesh. The second category is so yesterday.
Thanks once again for harnessing the power of golly gee-whiz in the service of existential distraction. This especially helps us ignore the dying of natural world, and the relationship of that death to universal instantaneous gratification and conspicuous consumption, which after all we can do nothing about.
By the way, I propose that--partly in honor of the Christmas season-- you name the first drone Gabriel, after the archangel of the annunciation, who was said to have informed Mary that she would give birth to a savior. Clearly we, too, are on the cusp of a new age, of what, we are not free to say. The mind however reels in an ecstasy of anticipation. The spirit rejoices in Amazon our groovy savior, whose messenger is landing soon in our very yards, delivering toothpaste and flip-flops.
Oh, just one more thing, Mr. Bezos, you might want to take a look at this. Clearly there are a few yahoos who might impede the glorious coming of the Amazonian Lord. Though maybe you can buy them off with a few free handgun deliveries.
HB
Till Saturday the 7th!
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