"Glorious Beyond Expression And Beyond Thought"

My favorite Berkeley quote (all emphases in the original). Hoorah for the real, proper idealist, in the full sense of the word ...and for theology that can still stand up to our contemporary scruples. (For those who do not know, people often boil his philosophy down to "We are all just ideas in the mind of God!") I definitely think with heavy skepticism in most situations, especially those that instinctively make me feel uneasy (such as in a short interaction yesterday with a gutter salesman who was exceedingly schmaltzy, my uneasiness exacerbated more so when my grandmother did not seem "plussed" when he tried to sell her windows, too!, and imposed on the interior space of the house, when he was only expected to work on the gutters, outside!), but not like the skeptic in his Three Dialogues.

Philonous:

"Look! are not the fields covered with a delightful verdure? Is there not something in the woods and groves, in the rivers and clear springs, that soothes, that delights, that transports the soul? At the prospect of the wide and deep ocean, or some huge mountain whose top is lost in the clouds, or of an old gloomy forest, are not our minds filled with a pleasing horror? Even in rocks and deserts, is there not an agreeable wildness? How sincere a pleasure it is to behold the natural beauties of the earth! to preserve and renew our relish for them, is not the veil of night alternately drawn over her face, and doth she not change her dress with the seasons? How aptly are the elements disposed! What variety and use in the meanest production of nature! What delicacy, what beauty, what contrivance in animal and vegetable bodies! How exquisitely are all things suited as well to their particular ends, as to constitute opposite parts of the whole! and while they mutually aid and support, do they not also set off and illustrate each other? Raise now your thoughts that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and order? Were those (miscalled erratic) globes ever known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates the universe. How vivid and radiant is the lustre of the fixed stars! how magnificent and rich that negligent profusion, with which they appear to be scattered throughout the whole azure vault! yet if you take the telescope, it brings into your sight a new host of stars that escape the naked eye. Here they seem contiguous and minute, but to a nearer view immense orbs of light at various distances, far sunk in the abyss of space. Now you must call imagination to your aid. The feeble narrow sense cannot descry innumerable worlds revolving round the central fires; and in those worlds the energy of an all-perfect mind displayed in endless forms. But neither sense nor imagination are big enough to comprehend the boundless extent with all its glittering furniture. Though the labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret mechanism, some divine art and force, linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse with each other, even with this earth, which was almost slipped from my thoughts, and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense, beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought? What treatment then do those philosphers deserve, who would deprive these noble and delightful scenes of all reality? How should those principles be entertained, that lead us to think all the visible beauty of the creation a false imaginary glare? To be plain, can you expect this scepticism of yours will not be thought extravagantly absurd by all men of sense?"

followed shortly by:

"...To me it is evident, for the reasons you allow of, that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind of spirit. Whence I conclude, not that they have no real existence, but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist. As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite, omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it."

...to be continued!

Keep reading: "Glorious Beyond Expression And Beyond Thought"...

"The Turfgrass Subject"

"[W]hereas the aesthetic of the lawn may be old, indeed ancient, the turfgrass subject is new: the urban person who is concerned about nature but uses chemicals, who supports the Kyoto Protocol but drives an SUV, who recycles fervently while constantly wasting more and more,"

writes leading political ecology writer Paul Robbins in his book, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are, and continues,

"Rather than condescendingly dismissing such inconsistencies as 'cognitive dissonance' as is common to apolitical critique, the book advances an alternative, which emphasizes the range of constraints on our alternatives and that stresses the way the biochemical machines we make increasingly make us who we are."

Keep reading: "The Turfgrass Subject"...

Reflections on Pacifism

A couple disclaimers: I've discovered that to reply to Derrick Jensen's premises alone presents some hefty work. I have a lot to say and quite the difficult time organizing how to say it. The university library nearby has a copy so I will soon look into the full scope of Endgame for myself, but other excerpts from the book are also available on the book's website. Since I have so much to say and have not found an easy way to communicate it, and also since I promised I'd be more consistent about posting, I'm going to pick the simplest and shortest of the premises and whittle away at that for you now. I don't have too too much to say about this premise, as I do about the others. I suppose as I read the book and see how Jensen expounds on these premises, I will have the ability to offer my response to the premises from another vantage point.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

I'd like to know exactly what Jensen intends to imply here. Does he mean to say that there are many different kinds of love, some mixed up, contentious, violent, conflictual, imbalanced, detached, overbearing, balanced, distant, unemotional, and on and on? When I sometimes indulge my cheesy side, I can still hear Edmund in the Mansfield Park movie declare, "There are as many kinds of love as there are moments in time." We can leap from disassociating love from pacifism to talking about domestic violence and other conflicted love/non-pacifism combinations. Would Jensen like to just hop on the bandwagon here and declare that love does not imply pacifism because a devoted husband can still turn and kill his wife in a rage, or vice versa?

Pacifism itself... Part of me definitely admires Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement; the long history of civil disobedience (connecting such figureheads as Jesus of Nazareth, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and their devotees); and the refrain of "Peace, love, and justice" that inspired so much enthusiastic protest and creative (though eventually it turned destructive, apathetic, meaningless, or ineffective) action in America during the sixties (with quite the lead-in from the fifties). There are some aspects of the hippie worldview that, in a certain light, on certain days, are pretty cool--groovy, even (My father and his students would like to bring back the word so there you have my little effort). However, I don't see violence as something to overcome, even as something to wish to overcome. I think the destructive impulse resides in each of us, and mostly, we just have to figure out how best to use that capacity, to understand why we choose to use it for whichever particular reason.

I did, in fact, at one point have little interest in hearing anything directed away from a goal of something akin to "Peace on earth (and mercy mild)." But then I read Ishmael, and just as the voice on the cover (Jim Britell of the Whole Earth Review) predicted, I would end up dividing my life up into the books "I read before Ishmael and those read after." Having read Ishmael, I saw everything I encountered through the vocabulary of concepts I had made acquaintance with in Quinn's work. Not only did I continue with a lifelong impulse to question everything (already enforced the same year I was introduced to Quinn by a reading of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave"), but I questioned everything through an anthropological, evolutionary lens, with the unassuming but explosive question, "What kinds of other ways to live did and do Leavers have that get obscured by 'one right way to live' thinking?" at the forefront. Violence was certainly an integral part of life for every human culture, in some form, for, after all, even incredibly pacifistic cultures have to fend for themselves and survive somehow (broader discussions of violence and survival arise here - more material for later!). Hence Quinn's "erratic retaliator" strategy (Also more on this later; You can pretty much assume that any concept I introduce which isn't common knowledge, or on which my take isn't fully clear, I will note the instance myself and come back to it with explanations later, in future posts, eventually). So is this what Jensen is getting at? Pacifism is not the ultimate, the grandest goal for humanity as a whole (Why humanity as a whole would need a common goal is beyond me anyway, at least nowadays, this many years post-Ishmael), the greatest bit of "progress." Love and pacifism are not synonymous. You can have love as an ideal without getting it mixed up with pacifism.

He could have intended so much by this teensy phrasing. And in the end, he does imply a boatload. So what does he mean by it? I will let you know once I latch onto a copy of the book!

Keep reading: Reflections on Pacifism...

If There's No Such Thing As Away...

If there's no such thing as away, how come that's where all the blame goes? (Non-E-prime statements, obviously. In fact, the rest of the post doesn't follow E-prime strictures, either, not until I have time to edit out the verbs, "that is.")

I want to share a quote I uncovered in Janine Benyus's marvelous book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired By Nature (I mistyped the subtitle--well, typed in a subtitle of a different book--"Remaking the Way We Make Things," which actually corresponds to another delightful, world-changing book, William McDonough and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle). I'd started hearing myself say repeatedly to myself and others how this book was becoming steadily obsolete, twelve years since initial publication now, but really, the message of this book hasn't reached a wide-enough audience. Sure, the science might have progressed...

(Start parenthetical rant:) Solar cells are now something like 43% efficient, but she quotes, in an epigraph to a chapter, a news release dating from 1994!, that states, and I'm including the whole thing, too, because it's an adorable quote, as well, though not quite the original focus of my post:

"'Pond scum' may be a synonym for 'primitive,' but the tiny organisms that compose it easily beat the human state of the art when it comes to capturing energy from the sun. Some purple bacteria answering to that unflattering description use light energy with almost 95% efficiency--more than four times that of the best man-made solar cells."

On one level, this says a lot about the inaccuracies and false assumptions underlying the capacities of "primitive," a word that traces its etymology to the un-stigmatized concept of beginnings, one-ness, originations...prime, primal, first. However, it also reminds us that the scientific and inventive processes of agricultural-industrial civilization are just that -- innovative. We may have detached ourselves from many useful instincts, but civilization is not a cut-and-dried failure to discard immediately, without looking back, as some, such as primitivist author Derrick Jensen, encourage, and at all haste, at that. (Hmm...I have a lot to say about his Premises to his most recent work, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization; Vol.2: Resistance, which complete work I have not yet had a chance to read, only this year having gotten around to A Language Older Than Words, a strange, sometimes loony, sometimes beautiful, powerful, poetic, ruminative work. As such, I think I might just discuss my qualms with those premises tomorrow.) Our culture has some awfully amazing accomplishments to its credit, and it continues to achieve them, as in more and more highly-efficient solar cells with better and better low-cost production. Though, of course, we should stop a second, as with any thought process in our consumerism-run-amok society, and ponder, "Do we really want to figure out how to make things better (Well, yes, the confluence of dismal planetary situations needs amelioration and remediation, but for our purposes here, I meant 'better things'), or would we end up better off if we learned once more how to require less?"

Requiring less has really bugged me a lot lately. Everything seems tied up in ways to get us to want more, and I feel this very acutely, half-trapped in these processes I do not wish to condone, not consciously, at least, as with any condonation. (With condone defined as "giv[ing ] tacit approval to" and tacit defined as "understood without being openly expressed; implied," using dictionary.com/Random House Dictionary. No, no, not doubting the intelligence of my readers, just getting a refresher myself. A long time now has passed since I had to worry about my words so carefully, to alleviate, by my worrying, such looming nightmares--not really--as the SAT. The crucial lesson of humility reminds us that it never hurts to learn the same lesson twice, multiple times, even. How's this for an exercise in meditation, the perception of relative urgencies: Try feigning ignorance next time your boss tells you how to do a routine task you've executed competently for what seems like forever. Perhaps she or he will offer insight or nuance to the task. Forgive this person, this other being, for doubting you. As a result, perhaps you'll find you've expanded your repertoire, if not in the nuance of the skill, at least in the limits of your patience. And godspeed!) My thinking about this has a lot to do with my recent reading of a small but feisty young-adult novel a friend passed on to me last month. Titled The Gospel According to Larry, this story involves a young man whose alter-ego goes haywire, the culture(s) surrounding his alter-ego, actually. Nevertheless, he stays true to the core tenets of his voluntarily simplistic lifestyle. He owns a mere seventy-five possessions! If he acquires something new, he either has to pass it along or send another of his belongings on its way. If he feels tempted to purchase a new item, he has to grapple long and hard with how much the item is really worth cluttering up his life just that bit more. I've felt incredibly jaded the last couple years. Something about this book, combined with this summer of productivity and other changes to my life this year, compels me to make more of an effort to simplify my life, perhaps even down to this drastic measure. Why not? (End rant; back to the initial point...)

(A refresher: I had started saying, "Sure, the science might have/has progressed...")

...but the idea of mimicking the planet's ancient processes, rather than applying our own hubris to the design of processes and materials, still has quite the following to amass. Onwards! Yeah...anyway, the quote:

"Though environmental policy makers have focused on the growing glut of garbage and pollution, most of the environmental damage is done before materials ever reach the consumer. Just four primary materials industries--paper, plastics, chemicals, and metals--account for 71 percent of the toxic emissions from manufacturing in the United States, according to the researchers. Five materials--paper, steel, aluminum, plastics, and container glass--account for 31 percent of U.S. manufacturing energy use."

-John E. Young and Aaron Sachs, authors of The Next Efficiency Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Materials Economy (Heh - I typed, "Sustainable Energy Revolution" -- Oh, propaganda, how you get to poor, tired souls!)

Initiatives to clean up our highways and parks, to curb the persistence of litter, have their place, but this gives us a bit of a jolt. Where best to focus our energies? We have limited lifespans, and the doomsayers predict we have very little time to solve pressing problems that could make living in the world we want to live in impossible. How will we spend our time? What to prioritize? (I also wish to discuss this topic of prioritization in an upcoming post.)

Many exhibits, photographs, books, poems, edicts, and other creative endeavors have derived from the very important concept, "There's no such thing as away." How important for us, in said overly consumptive society, to acknowledge how "away" only equates to "trash bags in trash cans that get dumped into larger garbage bins or dumpsters in garbage trucks that go to refugee camps for all the exiled trash bags, to commune with one another, die their slow deaths in the company of their trash bag companions, decompose together, layered over with the filler of more bags, soil, more bags, soil, then crushed, then filled in with more soil, and eventually something growing on that soil" -- Uy, how depressing landfill culture can feel!

But we can hardly consider our understanding, a raised consciousness (ah, the legacy of the sixties), enough. To reduce our feasible actions to the conscientiousness involved in extracting waste from our homes is quite the sad state of affairs, isn't it? And all that effort in contemplating purchasing a new item (the "Is it really worth it?" test)! It's much more difficult to stop our habituated selves from purchasing frivolous objects, with obscene amounts of packaging waste that doesn't often lend itself that well to any creative use or re-use, than it is to not have the objects available to purchase in the first place.

Streamlining. It can happen through legislation, but that's an intricate, unwieldy process. Who wants to waste the time, when one's intellectual capacities could go toward some other, more fulfilling use? It can also happen through materials design. Designers use intelligent design (Yes, ha ha. Good, good. It's one of my favorite things about the design professions, how much I get to use the words, "intelligent design," in an ironic way!), and suddenly, a billion worries extinguish in a single conscientious, carefully considered plan. And round and round we spin about this "best use of our efforts" challenge. What does the best use of your not-infinite life span look like?

Keep reading: If There's No Such Thing As Away......

Remedies to the Why-am-I-so-crazy? Wonders

"How is it with your soul?" ask the United Methodists with a zeal peerless in these often glum twenty-first century days. The perpetual inquiry of John Wesley at his small spiritual meetings centuries ago, I ask it of you today. Do you feel fulfilled? Do you feel you've barely begun to live, to grasp the meaning of existence, of your actions, beliefs, emotions, ambitions? Do you waver up and down, some days just wanting to give up? Fear no longer! A companion is here!

My mother discovered Susan Brackney's The Lost Soul Companion for me years ago, and I read it at the time she handed it on to me (so probably about time for a re-reading, huh?). A delightful little compilation of sound advice, quirky ideas, and general creative revelry! I recommend it highly to "free spirits" and those looking for "comfort and constructive advice" in general, in other words, "lost" souls of both kinds, those down on their cheeriness, happiness, or fulfillment luck, and those diving down in the dumpsters.

In this book, I discovered a technique for concocting home-made snow globes, using epoxy (eww!) and old jars (yay!); a handful of microwave recipes I never got around to using; snazzy advice on improving one's social life, ability to socialize, and relationships in general (ask questions, listen, talk less - advice which I've doled out a lot lately for other reasons); my interest in attending Burning Man (which only grew more incendiary after I experienced a miniature version during the talent show at the conclusion of my introductory course on natural building in Brazil four years ago); many uplifting, encouraging, inspiring words on creativity and fulfillment (some areas of rumination dear to me!); two little, disoriented birds, and many other zany drawings and heartening words.

This book has quite a spunky feel to it. Check it out if you've had the hopelessness blues or the why-am-I-so-crazy? wonders lately...or just for a relaxing kick. (She suggests purchasing the book from an "indie store," your local bookseller, which I also support, or for those in need of instant gratification, she says, using the big box and online stores, but I'd suggest that eager readers check out Alibris, the compendium of used booksales online, instead. Turning to your library or a book-swapping site or system doesn't hurt, either.) You can also drop by Susan's website, which features excerpts, resources, and her own blog (or apparently just use my links - got a little overzealous there! Ahem! I mean, O.C.D.. I could've kept going and hyperlinked the whole post! Double entendre on the hyper!). And if you're not feeling especially much like a lost soul, you can always check out Susan's other title on the topic, The Not-so-Lost Soul Companion: More Hope, Strength, and Strategies for Artists and Artists at Heart. I've set my sights on that one! Oh, ever expanding guilt-laden reading list!

Keep reading: Remedies to the Why-am-I-so-crazy? Wonders...