After @ReaderJohn linked this excellent piece by Teddy Macker, I went in search for more. This on Walt Whitman and the problem of American politics is challenging and hopeful. Maybe impossible. As Fox Mulder would say, I want to believe.
After @ReaderJohn linked this excellent piece by Teddy Macker, I went in search for more. This on Walt Whitman and the problem of American politics is challenging and hopeful. Maybe impossible. As Fox Mulder would say, I want to believe.
Currently reading:
Finished reading:
Future plans:
Abandoned:
Why am I doing this? Now and then (once a year or so?), I feel a surge of new, loosely-connected interests. Sometimes this results in some new ideas and sometimes it just adds to my store of useless knowledge. I’ve learned to go with it.
On my morning commute (i.e., walking a few blocks to work!), I’ve started listening to Remembering Peasants by Patrick Joyce. I think this is going to be a good one.
I’m honestly a bit surprised how much I’m enjoying this biography of Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof. To be fair, it’s a friendly biography. Still, he’s an interesting guy.
This is cool: a device for stirring natural nut butters.
Byung-Chul Han, kicking off Psycho-Politics with a banger:
We are living in a particular phase of history: freedom itself is bringing forth compulsion and constraint. The freedom of Can generates even more coercion than the disciplinarian Should, which issues commandments and prohibitions. Should has a limit. In contrast, Can has none. Thus, the compulsion entailed by Can is unlimited. And so we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Technically, freedom means the opposite of coercion and compulsion. Being free means being free from constraint. But now freedom itself, which is supposed to be the opposite of constraint, is producing coercion. Psychic maladies such as depression and burnout express a profound crisis of freedom. They represent pathological signs that freedom is now switching over into manifold forms of compulsion.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Donny quotes William E. Pannell discussing his crisis of conscience after the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. It strikes me that now such young deaths are common—barely newsworthy, and certainly don’t cause any crises of conscience. Doing nothing after Sandy Hook was a turning point for us.
Today I learned about the tolstoyans. I knew about Tolstoy’s beliefs here but I was unaware that there were attempts at building a movement specifically based on Tolstoy. Reproducing Markus Baum’s footnote:
Regarding the tolstoyans: Count Leo Tolstoy, the great nineteenth-century Russian novelist and thinker, taught that the meaning of life could be found through the literal application of Christ’s teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy sought to rescue the true teachings of Christ from what he perceived to be the irrelevant, irrational doctrines of faith. He emphasized the creed of absolute nonresistance (thus, incidentally, Tolstoy made a profound impression on Gandhi). This creed included the abhorrence of physical force, detestation of legalized exploitation of the poor, condemnation of private property (because ownership was secured by force), and a rejection of government (since it existed primarily for the sake of the rich and powerful). Many of Tolstoy’s followers banded into colonies, but Tolstoy himself distrusted such organized efforts, and most colonies did not last long.
Tolstoy’s distrust of organized efforts reminds me of another writer who distrusted movements. The same guy who said:
When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t,
and then went off by myself and did more
than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
‘go and organize the International Brotherhood
of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.
Karl Heim, as quoted in Against the Wind: “Every compromise between the Sermon on the Mount and the power politics of this world is like a water ditch dug by human firefighters – it limits the movement of divine life, dampens the spirit, and prevents the holy fire from spreading.”
The ups and downs of a new job. Last week I had a discouraging day. Today was difficult but, in the end, I wrestled a reconciliation into submission and learned a lot.
Happen Films is a great New Zealand documentary film company. Their latest is “The New Peasants,” which follows a family living mostly outside the money economy. Worth watching. The opening of the film, where they imagine their peasant ancestors, is something I’ve been thinking about lately.
Made a small table out of a piece of firewood and some kindling (black walnut, I believe) that I’ll use when I have fires in the backyard. It’s the first project where I’ve made significant use of an axe and sloyd knife.
Speaking of the Amish, you all know I have an interest in them. I realized the other day that I don’t really know much about the Anabaptists as a whole. So I have a couple of ebooks checked out: The Naked Anabaptist and The Anabaptist Story. Other (non-scholarly) recommendations are welcome.
Thanks to some past discussions here (can’t remember who or when exactly), I’ve been intending to get my beloved Timberland Chelsea boots re-soled, rather than replacing them. I took them into Crane’s Leather shop and he said my boots were built only to be disposed. Can’t re-sole them. Disappointing.
I asked him to show me a few that could be, and I settled on a pair of Chippewa. I considered some Red Wings but they would have been at least $50 more and, in the end, I’m cheap. So at least now I have myself a pair that can be repaired rather than replaced. And if Crane’s ever goes out of business, there’s always the Amish.
Well that was a discouraging day. Just when I felt like I was getting the hang of the new job, I screwed up half a dozen ways in a single day. I told one of my co-workers, “I promise I’m a good accountant!” 😂 I just ate my weight in taco salad so things are looking up.
Opening line of a 2015 book: “It is becoming undeniably clear that Western civilization has entered a post-Christian age.” That didn’t age well. There seems to be a revival in America of both (on a large scale) nationalistic pseudo-Christianity and (on a smaller scale) more serious, engaged Christianity.
Growing up, I watched my dad check the door locks every night–and I picked up the habit from him. I’m probably worse than him, actually. I have my theories about why we each acquired this compulsion, which I won’t get into here. And though I don’t know where the clinically compulsive line is, I’m probably too close to it.
Besides, it sucks as a nightly ritual. This morning it occurred to me that this whole thing needs a reframing. Beginning tonight when I check the doors, I’m going to move away from that mild anxiety toward a nightly blessing. A far better way to end the day.
Bless this house,
Bless these doors,
Blessed are those
who walk these floors.
The look on Rachel’s face when I said, “I just subscribed to Plough magazine”…
“There’s a whole magazine about plows? And you’re subscribing?” 😂
Been having a good time working on a rough table for outdoor, fireside use. This is a piece of firewood that caught my eye. Used a hatchet to trim off the bark and then a sloyd knife to clean it up. I think it’s black walnut? Creamy sapwood and chocolate brown heartwood.
Christopher Schwarz making his woodworking books freely downloadable really is an extraordinary thing.
Shard of the sun
spalled into space,
hidden in bodies
in far-distant days.
In jubilant work,
we spend our new heat,
continuing creation.
The task is complete.
The fire within
cools to a cinder.
Other warm bodies
become the new tinder.
The cycle renewed,
the new morning dawns.
Heat calls to heat:
our body responds.
Last night one of Darcy’s friends told her our house has “chill vibes.” I take that as a great compliment and recognition of what we’re trying to do here. One of my weekly prayers to the house spirit is, “may all friends be welcomed and all enemies turned away.”
Electric vehicle demand is collapsing with the expiration of the tax credit.. While EVs were never going to be the silver bullet, it is remarkable how–its appears to me–that the mainstream conversation around climate change has evaporated. Or maybe I’m just missing it.