jabel

Tara Couture, writing about a place near her farm:

There’s something mysterious there, attractive to animals of every ilk, but unknowable, too. The feeling of the ridge transcends the logical ‘glacier dropped it off’ explanation. If someone told me it was a stone dropped from a dragon’s mouth many eons ago, I would be more likely to believe them.

When I was young, a Holiness preacher said, “A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.” I loved that line. Then I left the Holiness churches and hated it. Now, all these years later, I write in the margins next to that passage.

And it’s not the first time it’s come to mind this week. I was sent a video of a person explaining a Pentecostal church service in terms of mass delusion and mirror neurons and several other phrases she had dutifully learned from her textbook, bless her. It all made a great deal of sense and it was so pitifully boring.

Do you want a more enchanted world? Step one: lose your taste for tidy, respectable explanations.

Tara Couture, Radiance of the Ordinary:

We douse the meat in chemicals to make it look vibrant and fresh, then wrap it in cellophane. We wash the eggs and dip them in chlorine to ride them of the gift of a feather from the soft underbelly of the mother hen. We remove all trace of connection—a leaf, hair, bones, hide, crumbs of soil. And in every little thing wiped away, so too the wiping of our awareness. Nothing here has died for us. No need to think of such things. And the blessings, like the clumps of earth that once clung to that carrot, are washed away.

“And in every little thing wiped away, so too the wiping of our awareness.” Perfectly said. You cannot forget the connection between your breakfast and an actual clucking hen when the eggs have feathers—or even a bit of shit!—stuck to them.

After coming across that “writers against AI” image, I decided to put it into my micro.blog newsletter’s footer. Then, inevitably, I wondered “is that presumptuous to consider myself a writer?”

I quickly concluded, “Who cares? You’re being tiresome.” That’s the proper response and I am satisfied with it.

Later, though, I came across this line from Caspar David Friedrich quoted in The Romantic Revolution:

bring to the light of day what you have seen in the darkness, so that it can work on others, from the outside inwards

A writer, then, could be considered a person who practices bringing the inward outward through the medium of language. Nothing in that definition requires publishing or audience or even much talent–though it is a level of effort beyond simple communication. At its highest levels, of course, it is art. It can also be one way of meeting the work of life: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

I always hated it when people told me not to take myself so seriously. Hated it. I’ve always been a painfully sincere person who wants to do the right thing. I heard that advice as suggesting that I was ridiculous for taking life seriously. And, to be fair, some people did mean that.

But now, as fifty approaches, maybe I begin to understand. Over the past ten years I can see more clearly the ways I pose and cope—and how others do the same. I see the pain hidden beneath these behaviors.

Does this mean I should not expect better of myself and others? Certainly I should. These behaviors have real consequences.

But this is what we do, isn’t it? It’s ridiculous and wrong and very, very human. It’s funny, in a way.

If I laugh at it, it’s not a mocking belly laugh. It’s not a joke that says “look at you!”—rather, “look at us!” It is half amusement, half compassion.

So on a morning of big, complicated feelings I look at my coping instinct with amusement and compassion and I’m able to dial it down a few percentage points. Silly old bear.

In Radiance of the Ordinary, Tara Couture opens the chapter “The Dance” with a truly cozy (there’s that word again) description of an early winter morning on their farm. Waking up, starting a fire, reading on the couch, standing barefoot in the grass to greet the sun. She continues:

It’s all lovely, yes? It’s as lovely as we’ve crafted it to be. And as much as I’d like to leave us there, cozied up by the hearth, I cannot. As romantic as the soft days of this country life may sound, they are only soft because of the hard days. There’s nothing wrong with romance—I quite like it myself—but to only show that side of things is dishonest, and it’s important to identify that dishonesty wherever it exists, especially in this time, in this world, where we are inundated with images of endless pleasures. Where our culture sells us on the idea that hard work is beneath us, or out of reach. Where entertainment is our highest calling. That strife and disappointment are wrong, frustration somethign to run from, discomfort something to avoid at all costs. None of these things are true, and they keep us locked in a perpetual chase with no fulfilling destination. They are romance as a gloss, a thin veneer of gauze and plastic roses meant to keep us eating without ever being satiated. And because of that, I need to pull us out of that warm winter nest of pleasures and into the reality of what makes it so profoundly and deliciously pleasurable—and that reality is work. Hard and demanding work.

Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age (thanks to Donny for the recommendation):

Just as mainstream left and right politics realigns around a joint commitment to tech-heavy liberal-modernism, so it’s possible to imagine, in the words of Stephen Quilley, ‘a realignment built on the overlap between libertarians, Burkean localists, and religious communitarians currently (sometimes unwillingly) camped out on the political right on the one hand, and green/anarchist anti-moderns on the left!"

This book represents an attempt by one particular writer inclined to green anti-modernism on the left to find the overlaps with those groups camped out on the right. An easy point of agreement is on the benefits of rich, local associational communities grounded in livelihood-making. Letting go of currently high levels of fossil-fuelled plenty may be a harder journey for both left and right, but if my arguments about our impending dark age are accurate, we don’t have much choice about that. Probably most challenging to traditional left or anarchist thinking is the need to let go of a sense of individualist freedom and self-fashioning, and to embrace the idea that self-realization is possible only within the limiting (but also enabling) structures of already given communities and families - and, what’s more, communities with spiritual underpinnings.

This has been my trajectory for a while now. “Left” and “right” are two drunks having a bar fight: sure, I walked into this bar with one of them but the whole thing is getting stupider by the moment. I’m far more interested in connecting with those on the side of life, against technological death.

Erik Davis reminded me of Finis Jennings Dake today:

My favorite relic of those months is a version of the King James Bible I picked up at a Christian bookstore at a strip mall near the coast. The store, which I visited a number of times and was more important to me than any particular church, was one of the many nondenominational Christian shops that popped up in the 1980s, paralleling the New Age stores of the era with their spiritual lifestyle blend of books, cassette tapes, bumper stickers, statues, jewelry, and inspirational wall art.

The Bible in question, which I still own, was a more old-school affair: a faux-leather-bound copy of the Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible. On its thin scritta pages, the 17th-century King James prose was copiously, almost talmudically broken down with over 35,000 notes and commentaries crammed into side columns and myriad appendixes. Its author was one Finis J. Dake, a Pentecostal evangelist from Missouri who, after violating the Mann Act in 1937, became the first Pentecostal to publish a scriptural reference work on anywhere near this scale. Imagine a listaholic fusion of Jack Chick and Charles Kinbote, the deranged literary critic who animates Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and you would not be far off.

My dad had one of those. In fact, I may have been the person who bought it for him. Even for us self-taught, Spirit-drunk fundamentalists with a rainbow coalition of bizarre ideas, Dake was a bit out there. He was never openly promoted. The people who read him tended to discover each other, like Freemasons noticing each others’ rings. We’d be deep into our Sunday night fast food burgers when someone would say, “what do you think about the pre-Adamite world?”

Leaving aside my nagging worry about what this meant in terms of pollution, the following is beautiful simply as a piece of prose personifying the river flowing through the Clairvaux Abbey. From Lewis Mumford (The Myth of the Machine), as quoted by Michael Updegraff (“Transitions of Power,” Mortise and Tenon tenth anniversary issue):

The river enters the abbey as much as the wall acting as a check allows. It gushes first into the corn-mill where it is very actively employed in grinding the grain under the weight of the wheels and in shaking the fine sieve which separates the flour from the bran. Thence it flows into the next building, and fills the boiler in which it is heated to prepare beer for the monks drinking, should the vine’s fruitfulness not reward the vintner’s labour. But the river has not yet finished its work, for it is now drawn into the fulling-machines following the corn-mill. In the mill it has prepared the brothers food and its duty is now to serve in making their clothing. This the river does not withhold, nor does it refuse any task asked of it. Thus it raises and lowers alternately the heavy hammers and mallets, or to be more exact, the wooden feet of the fulling machines. When by swirling at great speed it has made all these wheels revolve swiftly it issues foaming and looking as if it had ground itself. Now the river enters the tannery where it devotes much care and labour to preparing the necessary materials for the monks' footwear; then it divides into many small branches and, in its busy course, passes through the various departments, seeking everywhere for cooking, rotating, crushing, watering, washing or grinding, always offering its help and never refusing. At last, to earn full thanks and to leave nothing undone, it carries away the refuse and leaves all clean.