jabel

So I’d like to visit some area cemeteries this summer and I’d like to mark them on a map app and maybe make notes. I’d also like for the app to be somewhat privacy oriented (which I know means “not free”). Any recommendations?

One of my favorite tools: my dad’s Petersen Manufacturing (Dewitt, Nebraska) Vise Grips, complete with his initials etched into it. He worked as a signal maintainer for the railroad in my early childhood—a job he was always proud of. His work there ended when he seriously injured his back.

The previous owner of my house left behind some heavy duty Lyon shelving in the garage. It is a heap of trouble to disassemble and reconfigure but I’m going to hold onto it because it’s older than me and will probably outlast me.

It’s been a rough week here with the sudden decline of our fifteen year old dog Murphy. Last weekend he seemed to be not quite right. He laid down on the floor on Saturday afternoon and never stood up again. His front legs seemed to have stopped working. We took him into the vet on Monday morning and she said it was likely a neurological problem. If it’s temporary inflammation, he should be better in a few days. If he’s not better, then it’s likely permanent.

So we’ve been nursing him this week, waiting to see what will happen. He’s confused about why he has to potty into a diaper. He’s a good boy and he knows he isn’t supposed to potty in the house. He’s struggled to get up a couple of times but it’s just not working. It’s hard seeing him like this. Frankly, he doesn’t seem to be improving and it seems likely he will leave us on Monday. He’s been with us almost as long as Darcy has.

It’s “Limestone Month” here in Bedford and this morning Rachel and I went on a tour of Green Hill Cemetery, the large cemetery in town that also has the most notable monuments and locally carved limestone folk art.

The tour guide was engaging and very knowledgeable. Unfortunately he was an old guy with a bad foot walking with a cane. And he can’t get volunteers to help. And there’s not enough money to cover the high costs of restoration and maintenance. And the number of available burial plots is decreasing and likewise their prospects for long-term revenue stream.

So the situation is not good. There were complaints about how people are less engaged with cemeteries now, buying fewer plots (presumably due to the rising popularity of cremation) and visiting the dead less regularly.

There are important things that could be lost if the trend continues, like historical knowledge and local, totally unique works of art. At the same time, I do not plan to be buried in the traditional manner; I would like some sort of green burial if local regulations are enlightened enough at the time of my death. Preferably I would be left atop a hill sacred to a local deity and consumed by crows. Barring that, at least no vault and no embalming.

So while I believe mainstream American burial customs reflect certain unhelpful beliefs and should be modified, I would not want to see Green Hill Cemetery fall into ruin. I don’t know what the answer is. Some cultures leave people buried for a period of time and then (once the memory of the person has faded over a few decades) inter the bones in a charnel house. This at least maintains the character of the land as a place of the dead without locking it up for the sake of long-forgotten souls who happened to live in an era of strong property rights.

Part of the problem they’re having is with maintenance of the monuments—precisely because they exist outside, in the weather and on shifting earth. Preserving them in a museum would be much easier. And, fascinating as some of the monuments may be, how many of them are simply the vanity of wealthy men etched in stone?

Part of me wants to volunteer to help and part of me wants the whole, unsustainable system to be replaced by something better.

2 Samuel 5:24:

And let it be, when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then shall the LORD go out before thee, to smite the host of the Philistines.

As a kid I always loved that phrase “the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees” and I still think of it every summer evening when the wind is blowing in a storm—as it is tonight.

I’m sad to finish Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Next, I would like to at least read The Portable Jung and the Red Book. Any other recommendations for an interested layman?

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.356

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything that happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

Now spinning: Beach Boys compilation “Endless Summer.” Not my usual music but it caught the attention of my teenage daughter. I came into the room and found her taking a video of it playing.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of pictures of local limestone sculpture lately but I’ve been trying to appreciate some of the unique features of my hometown. Here are some replicas of the Moai from Easter Island.

Now spinning: the Abyssinian Baptist Choir led by Professor Alex Bradford. Liner notes by no less than Langston Hughes.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.300

We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a “going beyond all that,” but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives experience a glamor which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should.

And then, as if to prevent me from getting too carried away in my praise of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, comes the travel chapter. I think Jung was really trying to learn from non-Europeans but there’s way too much talk about savages to make for comfortable reading.

Purchased for the car. I can’t tell if I’m getting wiser or crazier as the days go by.

Finally getting some rain! It’s been about a month since our last significant rainfall. Hopefully it will last for a while today.

Today I learned that “archeology” is an alternate spelling for “archaeology.” And the strange thing is that one website says the former is the American spelling while the latter is the British. As far as I can recall, I have never seen the former spelling used until today. What about you?

Xenophobia plus bad grammar

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.235:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. … Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.

I could read Memories, Dreams, Reflections all day long. It’s a book full of mysterious visions and dreams from a person who is among the deepest minds of the last few centuries—yet it is completely readable.

Thanks to @readerjohn for passing on this article about an 80-ton limestone carving of Washington crossing the Delaware. Turns out it was a project initiated in 1974 by Merle Edington, a member of my hometown’s Chamber of Commerce. The carver was Frank Arena, who was retired and 76 years old at the time. Click through the link above for a picture.

More about Frank Arena: He was born in Brooklyn and moved to Bedford with his Italian immigrant father Frank Sr. One of Frank Jr’s first jobs was to help his father carve the columns of Bedford’s Masonic Temple:

Frank died in 2001 at age 102, having lived across three centuries. His grave is marked by a monument topped by a hat. “Whenever you saw him, he had that hat on. He carved stone in it. He went to church in it. He was always in that hat,” recalls Gene Abel (no known relation), the caretaker of Green Hill Cemetery.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p223:

Gradually, through my scientific work, I was able to put my fantasies and the contents of the unconscious on a solid footing. Words and paper, however, did not seem real enough to me; something more was needed. I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Or, to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the “Tower,” the house which I built for myself at Bollingen.

I rescued a good bit of old trim from a nearby remodel. It was just going to go into the trash! It’s basically identical to the beautiful old trim on our house. I think I could make some nice small pieces (boxes, picture frames, etc) from this stack. But holy crap they loved to drive the nails.

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, p.29 (pdf):

A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence.

Illich uses the word “tools” very broadly here: “rationally designed devices.” This includes everything from hammers to machines to health care systems. He defines conviviality as “individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.” A convivial tool, therefore, is a tool (broadly defined) that gives a person creative autonomy.

He contrasts this with industrial tools, which begin in service to a particular need but eventually capture the user and society itself. Think of cars. At first they vastly improved transportation. A hundred years later, we have traffic jams and car payments and car insurance and registration fees and BMV paperwork and the costs of maintenance and fuel. What began as a tool to serve humans has transformed into a tool served by humans.

Think now of computing devices and the internet. For those of us who remember life before them, their appearance was a revelation. Yet now we all have the experience of becoming servants to the tools. Modern technology is, in short, a monumental hassle. A hassle, furthermore, that we must endure if we are to participate in a tech-driven society. It is becoming increasingly difficult, for example, to live without a smartphone.

What if some part or another of our technology fails on a large scale, even for a brief time? How incapacitated would we be in such a situation? That would be a good measure of the degree to which our tools have become our masters.

Entrance to Green Man’s Grotto is finally complete. We’ll see if the wood-burned sign weathers well. I covered it in a few coats of polyurethane.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections p.161:

I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a “façade” behind which its meaning lies hidden—a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or animal seeks its good as best it can. These forms of life, too, have no wish to deceive our eyes, but we may deceive ourselves because our eyes are shortsighted. Or we hear amiss because our ears are rather deaf—but it is not our ears that wish to deceive us

This (unsurprisingly) jives with that Weird Studies podcast I mentioned a few days ago