Garden fairy
Could these actually be tiny, tiny grapes? This is very exciting.
Emphatically agree with this article. And I do not say that as someone who cannot manage technology; I do okay. I say that because it is increasingly apparent that high tech is a hassle with zero resilience.
Things used to work in this country. This is the stock complaint of the Baby Boomers, and if you are lucky enough to inherit a piece of their technology, you may find yourself agreeing. But when I say “things used to work,” the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy
We were meant to be inspired when Business Leader said his rule was, “better than yesterday, not as good as tomorrow.” My rule, on the other hand, is this: become increasingly useless to people like Business Leader.
I was looking for the “always convalescent from some small illness” quotation a few days ago and found it (where else?) on Alan Jacobs blog. Recording it here for the next time I’m looking for it:
In the work that would make his name as one of the finest medievalists of his generation, The Allegory of Love (1936), he pauses at the end of a learned exposition of the poems of Ariosto and Tasso to make a confession: Samuel Johnson, [C.S. Lewis] says, “once described the ideal happiness he would choose, if he were regardless of futurity” — that is, if he did not need to consider any future consequences of his choice. “My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.”
Related to this: I’ve always loved the phrase “speaker for the dead,” though it’s been so many years since I read that book that I’ve forgotten its exact meaning there. We should have a Speaker for the Dead, who speaks in community about the needs of ancestors. And a Speaker for the Squirrels, who is familiar with their needs. Speakers for all sorts of beings, who give them a voice when matters that might affect them are taken up for decision.
There seems to be a natural affinity between animism and anarchism. Animism sees people everywhere. Human people are most obvious to other humans-—but nonhuman people are not hard to perceive for those with eyes to see. In animism, the world is a community of people of every size and shape, with unexpected and unknowable intelligences, carrying out their own purposes.
Alan Jacobs made a very useful distinction recently:
The goal of libertarianism is to increase individual liberty, while the goal of anarchism is to expand the realm of cooperation and collaboration.
It’s useful because it could be easy to lump libertarianism and anarchism together as “small government politics.” (In fact, the first politics I discovered and adopted in college was anarcho-capitalism, which is a right-wing version of libertarianism.) But Jacobs point neatly differentiates them: anarchism is community-focused, not individualistic.
At the same time, it rejects hierarchy and the domination of the powerful. It is mutual governance, not top-down rule. A politics based on cooperation among equals, with no centralized structure demanding conformity–sounds a lot like animism, don’t you think?
An anarchic animism, politically speaking, would be centered on local governance, in community with all the local, living beings. Decisions would be based on consensus and humans would not be unduly favored. Granted, hawks and chipmunks are unlikely to attend meetings. But their concerns should be taken into account by people familiar with the habits and needs of hawks and chipmunks. The political goal would be the flourishing of the local community of beings.
Utopian, I know. And, yet, is it not an serious indictment of our current system that such ideas are taken to be absurd?
Lovely video from Pete Larson on the rhythms of life.
Rode down the Milwaukee Trail and came across several patches of stunning fire pinks growing out of the rock above the White River.
Don’t yuk someone else’s yum.