My first attempt at a Black Forest cake won’t win me a spot on the Great British Baking Show—but hopefully it tastes good at lunch tomorrow.
Today’s task: Black Forest cake for Christmas lunch. None of the elements seem particularly difficult but the decoration will be something more than I’ve ever attempted. Also, what do we think about freezing it until Sunday night? Would that harm it in any way?
Happy Solstice, everyone!
The Winter Solstice has always been my favorite of the Quarter Days. I was marking it long before I would have thought of calling myself an animist or pagan. For many years, winter was my most dreaded season, probably due to some seasonal depression that thankfully has eased over the past few years. Just as hitting the halfway point of a long walk flips some mental switch, so the Solstice has been an annual turning point for me.
Here in southern Indiana, however, it wouldn’t be right to call it the beginning of winter, which has always set in long before the solstice. Here, Thanksgiving could be called the last day of Fall—and the Solstice as the descent into the depths of winter. The Christmas lights on the houses don’t usually stay up past the new year, rendering the early evening darkness still darker. The sun is making its return trip, yes, but the increase in daylight following the solstice moves very slowly. The worst winter weather here happens in January and February. So while Solstice is a turning point, it’s a turn taken in patient hope.
Our Yule log was cut from a windfall in the nearby woods. The branches are from the front yard. The candles are a bit less local—from a beekeeper in Cincinnati.
Simple, uncomplicated things. Imbue them with whatever symbolism you wish but, for myself, I prefer it simple. I’ve done complicated; I understand the appeal. But these days I’ll take what has worked for aeons of humans: Sky Father. Earth Mother. Sitting in silence. Conversing with ancestors. Observing the seasons.
This is enough.
The times in which we live are almost enough to make me into a Gnostic.
- The stupidity on display everywhere has the flavor of fatedness. The fatedness, however, arises not out the beneficient providence of God but the delusions of a Demiurge. We have become entrapped in a lunatic mind. The levers are broken because the Engineer has disconnected the power.
- American voters will be forced to choose between two elderly men representing two dying ideologies. And every effort to find a way out of this bind serves only to heighten the hatred and division and further solidifies the goddamned inevitability of it all. We both must and must not act. Is some new Archon set to inherit this age? Has this Archon devised some perfect Chinese finger trap?
- Is reality an illusion? Whatever the answer to that question, Apple intends to wedge glass and silicon between you and the physical world. Enhanced reality, like enhanced interrogation, is a euphemism taken up by those who love their fantasies. Gnosticism told us that we were born into a world of unreality—a world from which, if we would listen, secret knowledge would deliver us. Soon enough, a large number of us will be paying premiums for beautiful blinders and immersive illusions.
I know I’m playing a bit fast and loose with some ideas here. On the other hand, maybe that’s sound strategy. Stay slippery; surf the weird. If we are in fact living in gnostic times, we should not count on predictability and solid reality. Perhaps the key skill we must learn is negative capability, which John Keats said is
when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason
Just as there will be merchants of illusion, there will be merchants of certainty. Reject them both and trust your gnosis.
Wendell Berry, “It All Turns on Affection”:
For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong to a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.
In this house we say Happy Holidays because even though we celebrate Honda Days, others may celebrate Toyotathon or Lexus December to Remember.
It probably says something about me that this is one of my favorite Aesop Rock songs.
In a recent continuing education course on AI, the speaker said, “No one will lose their jobs to AI, but some may lose their jobs because they don’t use AI.” On that first half, bullshit.
The second half, however, may contain some truth. I’ve reluctantly begun using the university’s enterprise version of Microsoft Copilot—mostly to answer questions about Excel so far. It’s useful. Basically a much more efficient search engine.
I don’t actually think I’d lose my job if I didn’t use AI—but over the course of the next few years my work could suffer comparatively without it. But here is where I need to be cautious: while I may find a tool to make my work more efficient, I must remember that the goal of my work is not efficiency. Ivan Illich:
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.
Tools are not neutral. They are products of intelligence and have an intelligence of their own. Used mindlessly, they will shape the worker according to the tool’s nature.
What does this mean for my use of AI at work?
- I will remain in control of my work’s purposes.
- I will not use artificial intelligence as a substitute for my own.
- I will not allow the values of the designers of AI—which perforce exist within AI itself—to override my own values.
Just received a shipment of coffee that a neighbor recommended to me.
An appropriate reading when you’re coming down with some kind of sickness:
It isn’t hard to inhabit Tao’s Way.
Just stop picking and choosing,
stop hating this and loving that,
and you’re there bright and clear.
A hair-width distinction is error
enough to split heaven-and-earth:
to face Tao’s shimmering Way
simply give up like and dislike,
for battling things you dislike
is mind’s great disease.
The Way of Ch’an, “Fact-Mind Inscription”, translated David Hinton.