Age of Decay?

I have this idea that's not fully formed, but goes like this:

Maybe we're just in an age of especial decay this last century or so, and really, this whole trajectory is not that bad. This is what i mean: Maybe some of the bad things that anti-civ/primitivist people criticize are not inherently the problem, but the problem is the debased form we see now.

Like the Weston A Price folks talk about the benefits of raw dairy. Now, maybe the paleo/vegan arguments against dairy are rooted in the debased dairy of modern industrial society.

Maybe more broadly the idea that fat makes you fat is just symptomatic of hydrogenated fats, and other industrial fats, which are bad for you, and not the same as good, healthful fats like coconut and animal fats,

Also- one of my teachers a year ago discussed the idea that writing was this empowering thing for Frederick Douglass and others in his age, and that literacy was connected to taking action in one's life. Maybe the critique of media is more about the critique of industrial era media that obfuscates, rather than informs. Maybe media does not 'mediate' in the worst senses of the word necessarily.

Same for the critique of language- maybe it's more a critique of the debased and disenchanted language of postmodernism, where everything is reduced to language, and nothing really matters (indoor philosophy stuff), that is worthy of criticism, rather than language inherently.

This seems to go well with the idea of balance and attempts not to overstate one's case, and bend teh stick too far in the other direction.

But the converse is also compelleing, and probably what I tend toward. That maybe the debasement has always been here, and I'm romanticizing the supposed elevated forms of teh past. Maybe Zerzan and others are right when they point out simply that the emptiness of this culture, of this trajectory is finally being laid bare for more of us to see.

Maybe media, as the word implies, does necessarily mediate in the negative sense of distancing us from life. Maybe the means by which it did so were less sophisticated a century or two ago, and thus authenticity existed alongside the abstracted world more fully then, but the basic thrust was toward what we have now from the beginning.

Maybe it's not just the 'Green Revolution,' but agriculture itself which is the catastrophe in teh colloquial as well as biological sense.

Maybe, raw or pasteurized, cow milk is meant for baby cows, not adult humans, and pasteurization just exacerbates its ill-effects.



My own current thinking is somewhere mixed along these gradients, but I wanted to get down some of these ideas that I'm toying with.

Telepathy, inter-species communication and language

I was on the train a couple weeks ago, and sat next to a woman with a small dog in a dog-carrier bag. She let him poke his head out and I pet him a bit and played with him. And I had this realization about communicating.

I was trying to convey something to him, some sentence of some sort, maybe about his cuteness, or telling him that the train, though maybe a scary place, would not last long, and he'd be home soon. Something.

i realized that I was going about this attempt at telepathic communication all wrong. I was trying to use it as 1:1 analogue of regular language. But language is very much about deceit, and I was trying to manufacture somethign to say, trying to muscle it across to this dog. Earnest and well-meaning as I was, the effort was not going to bear fruit.

I thought about Derrick Jensen's account of his time spent with Cleve Backster and that the yogurt was very sensitive to respond to real emotion, but not forced emotion. I suspect the dog was the same way. What i was trying to convey was not real emotion, was not legitimate in the deepest sense, but busy-work. It was me not being comfortable in beingness and wanting to fill that void with something, so as not to face the simple co-existence of two beings.

Soresnon talks about affect-talk, that is, truth-talk, which conveys emotions and other truths in a very fundamental, and also, when necessary, nuanced way. That, I think, is what telepathy is about. It's conveying that basic truth.

That's why I now suspect that when people talk about Zerzan's critique of language, and ask how it we'll function without language, how we'll say without words the things we convey now, they're missing the point. I was, too- no judgment passed. The point is, when we live in a context in which spoken words aren't so central, when we don't have the sort of infrastructure we have now that depends on logos, we will live in a much more direct way, and our truths will not need to be spoken to be understood.

And all of this I think is another element to the idea that language is for comveying falsehood, not truth.

(As an aside, I don't think language has no place- I suspect it does and probably has for a long time, and it can be damn beautiful. I'm just trying to explore the sort of situations that are deeper than words).

Breaking, again

I've been trying too hard with this blog. Taking some time off to re-group. Wish me luck.

Balance

Ted's recent discussions over at Free Range Organic Human reminded me of a conversation I had with a co-worker a few months back. We were talking about a friend, who prioritizes autonomy, and the co-worker commented that, much as he understands it, he doesn't share the emphasis on autonomy, because he sees it as largely a reaction to a world where we have so little of it. In a better society, autonomy would exist alongside interdependence, and would not need to be prioritized.

It reminds me of the emphasis on power that Ted talks about as reigning supreme in nature, and otehrs' comments that the fact that the powerful of this culture seek dominance over others is a sign of powerlessness and insecurity, rather than legitimate power.

The desire for power or autonomy is perhaps a legitimate desire given our circumstances, but should not be vaunted to the ideal that they often are for anarchists or radical-type folks. They're a self-defense mechanism, just as actual self-defense skills are, but that doesn't mean that the ability to fight or to be autonomous or self-empowered is the last step in life.

Balance, balance.

Vibes

I saw a creepy, disconcerting movie yesterday called 'Alone With Her,' about this stalker and the woman he's electronically surveilling, and into whose life he insinuates himself. She senses that there's something wrong, something off about him as he first starts to enter her daily life, and later eventually writes this off and tries to ignore the bad vibes she was getting, even to the point of fighting with her best friend, who rightly is suspicious of him.

The movie did a good job of depicting how we can be put into situations where we rationalize and talk away out gut feelings about what's going on.

Makes me think of Sorensen and the idea of affect talk, which is necessarily truth talk, and the subsequent idea that we can't really lie about feelings, and that the truth will express itself, involuntarily if need be. In Jensen's book 'Listening to the Land', which I revisited recently, one of the interviewees talks about aphasics in a hospital he worked at who saw Ronald Reagan, and found him hilarious because of the disconnect between his body language and what he was vocalizing. Truly, words lie.

Another example of vibes, and how they don't lie: sometimes I give my partner a back massage. and I['m not always into it. I can feel it, though, when my apathy is not accomplishing much. Mechanically, it may be the same movements, but without the love and joy, massages are not all they can be. I was at an accupuncture workshop, and the speaker said that massage therapists leave the field on average after five years. You can only keep giving energy out and not having it replaced for so long. Ascending versus descending energy , maybe.


On the other hand from all this- vibes can be misread, and it can take a long time to learn or relearn positive associations with situations that you may have had negative associations with before. this happens a lot to me with so-called 'bad' neighborhoods around Manhattan and Brooklyn. I often feel uneasy because of being raised by well-meaning but somewhat racist family members when going through black or hispanic neighborhoods. When I'm with my partner, she doesn't have those same associations and is probably a better judge of vibes in that case. Slowly, these associations get unlearned, and that's good. Over time, our sensitivity returns.

Oh- also, Sorenson's article reminds me of Mutant Message Down Under, a possibly discredited fiction/truthful account of this woman Marlo Morgan who spends a couple of months with Australian Aborigines on a walkabout. She talks about telepathy among them, something very similar-sounding to Sorenson's affect talk. One of the things she recounts that they taught her is that we in the civilized world spend so much of our energy hiding ourselves and our motives and feelings, that we dull our more refined faculties of the ability to communicate truths across distances to one another without words. That resonates with me.

I know I spend so much energy not being comfortable with my inner world. Sometimes I find myself near someone I haven't seen in some time, and will talk a short while with them, and then find myself fabricating a reason to leave the encounter. (Not everyone, but many people, and it may be even the default for me.) I think afterward why I did that, why I hurried myself away, even in those circumstances where I had nothing legitimate to hurry to, and I think it has to do with honesty and comfort with myself. For whatever reason, I often feel like I am hiding something, and cannot be myself, like i'm not comfortable in my own skin.

I think this is related to Ran's comments about working through purposelessness, and getting over the hump we've been acculturated with, getting comfortable with not having any 'productive' thing to do, not hiding from ourselves.

All in good time, friends. Mindfulness is the first step.

God

I wanted to write this earlier, after Dan commented in an earlier post about Richard Dawkins' disparagment of God. I don't think too much about it, but there's something to God, whatever that may mean.

I was raised Catholic, and recently learned that my grandfather was Jewish (later converted), so I'm of the tribe, as it were. (That adds a layer of interesting-ness to my flirtation with Judaism mid-HS, but nothing substantive enough to draw any conclusions from). Despite this, I stopped caring about God/religion a few years back.

But man, this song really has an effect on me. I'm not unself-conscious enough to be able to say straight-faced that it's profound or thereabouts, but there's something there to it, that really affects me. Just this sense of connection to something broader and less trivial, maybe.

This is one of the most attractive components of spirituality to me, and it's something that I saw in animism or other indigenous spirituality, which in turn opened me back up to God, again, whatever that means.

It's something hard for me to talk about since it all sounds so corny, but the idea of the well really makes sense for me. It's palpable the feeling I experience sometimes, when some feeling rises up from my core to my throat, and I just want to stay there in the moment. Man, I feel like a trashy novel writer, but it's legit, whatever it is I experience.

I don't know if we're supposed to stay there forever, as maybe some advocates of enlightenment suggest, but I think we could use a lot more of that. Likewise, there's probably room for life outside of language, and we can all use so much more of that from where we are now, trapped in linguistic jungles that are, to paraphrase Edward Abbey, symtomatic of an indoor philosophy. But there's still probably a place for spoken language, and there's probably a place for the mundanity of un-profound existence. We just have no balance now.

It's been a long time...

Long time since I posted, that is. I just haven't felt that I've had much to say or contribute. I often find myself lagging behind the other bloggers in this sphere, like Jason or Ran or Dan. That's ok, though. I don't want to compete much.

Things are pretty uneventful for me. I've been working the grind mostly, though admittedly it's not so much a grind, since I have a pretty good gig. I'm steadily chipping away at my school debt, which stands at just over $6K (USD) at the moment. Since I started paying it back in October, I've paid the money-lenders more than $1K, which, if I continue apace, means I think I can be debt free by 2008.

I found a great site: EarthClinic, which has lots of natural remedies on it. I used some of their suggestions to get over a pernicious sore throat that must've come across the pond from Dan. Took me a full week to get over it 95%, and still working on that last little bit left.

I started doing yoga a couple times a week, after having stopped exercising in early December, right around the time I started eating meat again. It's funny, because I suspect that I could have actually put on some muscle if I'd kept at it, and I may be a little bit with yoga. But I decided that weigth training is a bit too contrived for me at the moment, and I like that yoga, trite as it's become in popular culture, really does feel more holistic, focusing on strength, flexibility and the mind and spirit, rather than trying to force the body into a certain form. I may yet go back, so we'll see.

Cooking is going well- I'm just about there at my goal from a month or so ago of eating 20 of my weekly meals from self-prep, rather than buying pre-made grub. It's funny, because it's a rarity now that I do eat out, and I actively try to avoid it. A good cheap meal at home can usually be had for quickly, and I'd almost always rather do that. I made a sourdough crust for my subsequent pie after last post, which came out alright, but in need of work. The sourdough is good, though, and I just today was offered some 4 1/2 year old rye starter from a local cheese farmer. Also got a cast-iron skillet, uncured, which I've seasoned myself, and which is also great.

I mentioned to Ran that I can sympathize with Loretta's comments in a recent postout about my generation: it's been an active effort on my part to learn basic skills, and though I don't buy into the myth of success in this culture, I've shut down so much that I have a hard time with any delayed gratification, and things not paying off right away. I'm trying to learn to drive, which has been a mixed experience, partly because I have had to fight the urge to quit and not put in the effort, cuz hey- fuck cars. But it's a valid skill that may be useful to have, and which may be necessary for me to stick with my current job.

It all just takes time, I guess, time I (we) may or may not have. But that line of thinking goes nowhere, since we don't really know, and since the likeliest emotion that is to elicit is guilt for not doing the 'right' thing or desapir for the same reason.

Anyway, I hope anyone reading this is doing well. Keep on keeping on, friends.

Pie Crust Recipe

Taking a page from Ran's site, here's a great pie crust recipe I tried tonight that I found in this year's Slingshot organizer.

I used it as a base for his pumpkin pie recipe. It turned out really well- crunchy and tasty, and no need for expensive added fats like butter or coconut oil , since it's made of fatty nuts anyway.

Here's my modified version:
2 Cups mixed pecans and walnut
11 pitted dates
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp cinammon powder
2.5 tbsp water

Finely chop pecans and walnuts in food processor
Add remaining ingredients, and continue to process until it's a moist, workable consistency (add more water if need be)
Spoon into pie pan and spread and flatten with your fingers
Bake 15-20 min if desired

We baked for near 40min before putting in the pie filling, so we had to take our pie out a little early to avoid a burnt crust. I imagine 15-20 minutes is good, or no pre-baking at all!

The we followed Ran's recipe the rest of the way. It's a great vegan (raw? if vanilla extract is) pie crust. It comes out nice and crusty.

Good luck!

Idle Theory!

Everyone who comes across me probably already reads Ran Prieur, but in case you missed it, check out his latest post, which links to both Dan's great piece about the mistaken idea of DNA, rather than environment, as king within biology, and Idle Theory, which suggests that idleness, not strength, speed, whatever, is the better marker of biological fitness.

That is, those species that can get by with doing less are better suited to deal with times of difficulty than those who are constantly working for their survival.

Makes me think about how I sometimes get flustered when people talk about biology as determinative. Like Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene. But I remember at times like this that science changes with the times, and though it's also important to adapt and integrate new information without undue prejudice, that information is not always true. This stuff validates my gut sense of the world, and yeah, that can be unreliable or whatever, but not always. I think I'd rather get in touch with my true self and the honesty I can access of the world in myself, than deny my feelings and operate in a purely abstract realm. I dunno- it's tricky. But nonduality and the universe is within me, and I am the universe, and I just ahve to align myself to its widsom. Cool stuff- sometimes hard to do and certainly hard to access sometimes for me, but a good sentiment worth appreciating.

(...)

Been experiencing some despair recently. Frustration maybe, and lots of lethargy. Mostly playing video games, which I rarely do.

I'm thinking that too much of what I'm reading about primitivism recently is charged with personality wars, and vitriol.

I don't know what to do. Probably needs to be worked through. Feeling scared. Ran keeps bringing up the collapse of the dollar. I'm scared of that. Starting to understand when people say they don't want the collapse (that is, a hard crash) to come yet. Just a little more time. I want a little more time. Not prepared enough, yet not doing enough about it. Mostly mental decolonization. I'm reminded, unpleasantly, that words can only go so far. All the books in the world, with all the right ideas, are insufficient. I can't rewild in a library.

I used to really want the hard crash, and quick. Makes things easier. Slow crash, puttering engines of civilization, ending in a whimper, are much less dramatic, but much more difficult. I also have trouble experiencing the rage of a dying world right now, being too preoccupied with personal affairs, mostly finances and food. Of course I want the global holocaust to really start teetering. But more viscerally, I just want my school loans paid off and my rewilding journey to begin in earnest. Gotta remember that every moment is a gift. Don't have forever. Should seize it, not (just) out of guilt and fear, but of joy in the act of remembering, reliving, what it is to be more fully human.

I like forceful statements about timelines. Collapse for 2012, like a slogan. Helps me get motivated. I keep falling back to 'well, it hasn't happened yet, I have plenty of time.' Obviously untrue- the collapse has been going on for a century, maybe since World War I, and the formation of the splinter states afterward. Maybe with the accelerated rate of ecological breakdown. Maybe just with all of the momentum of civilization coming to a head in any of the various problems evident. Gotta keep this in mind.

Contradictions. Living with contradictions. Discomfort with that, yet satisfaction with it. Mentally overtaxed from philosophical musings. I want to return to the immediacy of embodied living. Hard to do within cities, ripe environments for infinitely introspective deconstruction, postmodernism, etc.

...
/sentence fragments.