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.