Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine:

In 1589, William Lee of Calverton developed one of history’s most quietly revolutionary technologies. The legend goes that Lee was upset that his wife spent more time knitting than with him, so he devised the stocking frame to speed up the process. Lee’s machine, about the size of a large desk, allowed its operator to use pedals and bars to automatically mimic the movements of a hand knitter, making it much easier, and faster, to produce stock-ings, socks, tights, and other knit garments. (At the time, men wore tights, not pants.)

The machine worked so well that he tried to commercialize it. But Queen Elizabeth refused to grant Lee a patent, and left him with a foreboding rebuttal: “You aim high, Master Lee,” she said, before expressing concern for the hand knitters his device would affect. “Consider… what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” Lee died broke, oblivious that he’d sowed some of the earliest seeds of the Industrial Revolution. His brother James Lee pressed on with his invention, however, and it later became a key tool in England’s booming textile industry.

At our point in the timeline it’s virtually inconceivable that someone in authority would stop some new automation because of the harm it would do workers. We all look on helplessly because we know our tech overlords are unleashing destructive forces and we know no one in power will stop them because the economy must grow at all costs.

Video about the meaning of Gandalf’s speech to the Balrog. “Servant of the secret fire.” I’m putting that on my business card.

Austin Kleon mentioned The Book of Building Fires in a recent newsletter and, of course, I’m interested. Good book so far. I finally got my order of dried guajillo peppers, which means it’s time to make beans again.

Spring Mill (and Rachel!) in the snow.

The view out our front door

Happy birthday to Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), “inhumanist” poet of the central California coast. In one of the highlights of 2022 and possibly my life, we visited Tor House and Hawk Tower and got a personal tour. They ask visitors not to post any interior photos, so here I am standing outside the gate while we awaited our guide.

I have three birthdays of people unrelated to me on my calendar: Wendell Berry, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robinson Jeffers. They are there because each writer’s unique vision has formed me in important ways.

If Wendell Berry is my icon for the close, domestic, and dear, then Robinson Jeffers is my icon for wild and indifferent nature. He is medicine for our innate, human egocentrism. He called his outlook “inhumanism” and described it like this:

It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. We know this, of course, but it does not appear that any previous one of the ten thousand religions and philosophies have realized it. An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. This attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment.

…

To sum up the matter:–“Love one another” is a high commandment, but it polarizes the mind; love on the surface implies hate in the depth,–(Dante who hated well because he loved)–as the history of Christendom bitterly proves. “Love one another” ought to be balanced, at least, by a colder saying,–this too a counsel of perfection, i.e., a direction-giver, a guide though it cannot be a rule,–“Turn away from each other,"–to that great presence of which humanity is only a squirming particle. To persons of Christian faith, if any should read this, I would point out that Jesus himself, intuitive master of psychology, invoked this balance. “Love your neighbor as yourself”–that is, not excessively, if you are adult and normal–but “God with all your heart, mind and soul.” Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity.

Our lives are so taken up with ourselves. We spends hours of each day talking to each other, watching and dreaming about each other. Jeffers, though, sitting atop his pile of sea-washed granite overlooking the Pacific, writes of hawks and storms and takes a long view of history. Reality is out there, beautiful and pitiless.

Credo
My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean; out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

The winter storm seems to have moved out at this point. This is one of those times I’m thankful to live in town rather than the country. Apparently the country roads are impassable. We’ve been under the highest level of travel warning for a day or so now.

Some pictures from the neighborhood today. Rachel and I have been listening to the Telepathy Tapes for most of the day. While we’ve been listening, I’ve been playing solitaire. Haven’t done that in years, especially with real cards.

There were a couple of us in line to fill up our kerosene tanks in advance of tomorrow’s winter storm. Around here, it seems, only the smallest and dingiest stations have kerosene. The shiny, new ones never do. I wonder why that is?

Alexander Beiner:

So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband. This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is “he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being.”

They are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not. Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity.