Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
Things have been close to perfect up here, the weather clear and calm, the tourists all gone back to wherever they came from and it has been quiet. There are moments when the Sun is just so, the light diffuse, long rows of clouds rolling across the sky right to left and the colors of the farm- the barn red, the scarlet of the maple leaves, the rust colored heifers standing in the last of the green grass, the blue smoke of apple wood drifting up through the trees around the smokehouse- appear to have some message in them.
Our oldest cow is on her way out, ditto the old boar and it is the first time since we’ve lived here that mortality has become something present and real. Slaughter has never struck me as death, but as a harvest whereas losing a beloved breeding animal to age has something of a familiarity to it.
What do we ever know? The things we experience filtered through our own personal lens, the visual, the visceral and the spiritual aspects all tied up into a single moment of presence, of witness. And so we either learn from these moments, look for the connections and the patterns that make them part of the greater fabric of life, or we choose not to.
Knowing is for each of us to decide for ourselves, I suppose. I try not to repeat mistakes, not to be careless or to do harm either through ignorance or inaction, but also to lend my hands to the bigger process that works ceaselessly around us whether we see it or not, whether it benefits us in the short term or someone else who we will never know a hundred years from now because that is all we can do.
I wonder if you see how well connected this post is to all the other pieces that went before it this week- the number 23, Muck’s friend dying, FM’s hunt with his son, the nurse and the cop- what do all these things have in common? Where does it all go and where did it all come from?
You speak of the beauty of creation, the second from last chapter. To lend ourselves to those not yet born who will create from the same whole cloth.
A celebration, of sorts. Begotten by forgotten men and women understanding their unique role in bequeathing to those they will never know, a leg up.
The circle of life.
Moments in time.
A second hand sweeps by, on it’s ever lasting circular journey.
We but occupy a moment on the great wheel.
We do with it what we will, be it positive or negative.
In common? Entropy.
But seriously… Why do things have to “mean” anything? Why can’t they just “be”, and that be acceptable?
People are hard wired to look for patterns and meaning, both non-existent (23, various god characters), and actual (life cycles and seasons).
Gradient reduction.
http://www.eoht.info/page/Eric+Schneider
http://www.integralworld.net/visser90.html “into the cool”
As for “meaning” more generally, this is where so many poets who don’t know it live, breathe, contribute to gradient reduction – albeit in net counter productive ways. At least so far.
Paradise, they called it. Some are hardwired to scrutinize, soften up, those wires. But many more just dangle, twitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgmxl_TvEVE
“…the Second Law also demands that nothing can do anything without consuming concentrated energy, or fuel, and then dissipating it as unusable waste heat. For example, the Earth “consumes” concentrated sunlight to power weather and the water cycle, and then radiates unusable thermal energy to the cold of space. Like the weather in our atmosphere, all economic actions and motions, even our thoughts, must also be propelled by a progression from concentrated fuel to useless waste heat. The economy would grind to a halt absent continued energetic input. Buildings crumble; people die; technology becomes obsolete; we forget. Civilization must constantly consume in order to sustain itself against this constant loss of energy and matter…” ~ Tim Garrett
I forget. So there’s room to remember.
Probably for the same reason we taste things instead of just ingesting flavorless calories, take joy in the accomplishments of our children instead of assuming it has no value beyond the moment, or love someone deeply instead of just fornicating.
Meaning is a thing and it’s one of the most valuable ones we ever have the privilege to experience.
Maybe that’s why we’re wired to look for those patterns and meanings.
Or not.
What HS said..
Of course there are “rewards” to be had. Otherwise we wouldn’t chase the carrot.
Meaning is a byproduct of the system, not its driver.
Byproduct of each individual system. “We” are as gods? Dissipated systems hang onto “the” system. Or maybe they dissipate themselves thereby. But being ½ animal & ½ symbolic is a high tension wire, for sure. “No why.” Much better, truer, than the briefly popular “no fear.”
“all economic actions and motions, even our thoughts, must also be propelled by a progression from concentrated fuel to useless waste heat. ” -Garrett
“Stop apologizing for being conservatives. You don’t apologize to these people, that’s a big mistake. They read apology as an admission of guilt. You don’t apologize and you don’t back down.”
“So the first thing you might want to note about post-modernism is that it does not have a shred of gratitude. And there’s something pathologically wrong with the person who doesn’t have gratitude especially when they lived in what’s so far the best of all possible worlds.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhPUxmrQqS0
My problem with Jordan Peterson is that I’ve run out of YouTube videos of him to watch.
He did a long session with Joe Rogan very recently.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI
I love JP, but gratitude assumes one has someone *whom* one is grateful towards. I am grateful to my parents, but in the larger scheme of things I don’t find (what is an ultimately religious) personified gratitude to be a useful construct.
I guess other non-believers might be grateful to “the State” or “the collective”, but as I see it, states and collectives arise to take advantage of power and resource gradients just the way crystals form—given a certain temperature, pressure, and molecular concentration. Think of civilizations as crystals in four dimensions rather than three.
Gratitude is an emotion. I have felt it occasionally. If actions subsequent feelings convert emotional fuel into a verb, so be it. But when gratitude as an action – a magical action was\is the pitch – became popular amongst self-improvers, I started seeing empty gas tanks, parked on shoulders, making “vroom-vroom” noises.
“I love JP, but gratitude assumes one has someone *whom* one is grateful towards.”
This is rubbish. You can have gratitude for circumstance, opportunity, ability, consequence, etc. No “someone” necessary.
Peterson’s remark is that post-modernists have a *specific* approach to the circumstance they seek to destroy which ignores the necessary elements which make their ability to destroy in the first place possible.
“This is rubbish. You can have gratitude for circumstance, opportunity, ability, consequence, etc. No “someone” necessary.”
Why would I have “gratitude” for being born white, and in a currently-prosperous nation? Why would I have “gratitude” for having a high IQ, or for having four currently-operating limbs?
*TO WHOM* is this “gratitude” OWED?
It is merely the luck of the draw.
I think you just don’t understand the ***meaning*** of the word “gratitude”, versus -what?- “appreciation”? “acknowledgement”?
Words do still matter to us somewhat, although it’s normal in an energy-decline scenario for words to lose their communicative power.
Whom applies sometimes. Your examples, imagine them lost, taken away, or reduced. Then returned. Feelings of gratitude might be oceanic. Even a saving luck of the draw in cards could, I suppose, spark the emotion. Maybe the takeaway close sets up, scratches a gratitude fix. I’m not grateful for Smokey, but glad, appreciative, he did his thing.
Well, thanks for recognizing that the emotion is not the thing. Our emotions are important to us, but have nothing to do with the outside world which will dictate our travails and our end.
It’s like the parable of the Chinese farmer, whether we should be “thankful” or not:
When the farmer´s horse escapes and the neighbors say “Oh, that´s terrible!”, The man replies: “Maybe.”
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=5625\
Gratitude is an emotion is the thing. Helen Keller for example, plenty travails, seemed to feel the emotion. I like her take on security, too: an illusion.
Nervous system prevails. Slides along gradient. Disappears. Taoists are born, not made. Stoics, etc, too.
Almost got shot by a star, the other night. But it was gone before it got to me…not a close enough call to gin up gratitude, if at my feet even would have. Prolly woulda distilled some adrenaline, tho. As did the star that pulled me over recently. No gratitude gratuity that day, either. But another kind of gratuity was extracted.
http://www.azquotes.com/author/7843-Helen_Keller/tag/gratitude
“Words do still matter to us somewhat, although it’s normal in an energy-decline scenario for words to lose their communicative power.”
Yes… and Gratitude, by definition, does not require being owed to anyone. Gratitude, by definition, is being grateful for what one has, or has received.
You can be grateful you have a high IQ. This means you have gratitude for having a high IQ. You don’t have to be grateful to be born with functioning legs, but you can, and this is the precise meaning of the word.
I challenge you to provide support for your assertion that gratitude requires a WHOM to direct it toward.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gratitude
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grateful
https://infogalactic.com/info/Gratitude
https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/gratitude
“Gratitude is an emotion expressing appreciation for what one has”
“…a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive.”
“appreciative of benefits received”
I really dislike taking words outside of their meaning.
Then you shouldn’t have done so. By definition, gratitude requires no whom. You’re the one trying to degrade its meaning into something specific to your preferences.
I always have a strong sense of nostalgia this time of year. It brings me back to my days when I was still in elementary and middle school. This time of the year signaled the end of summer, and the beginning of a new school year.
For me it was an exciting time, of growth, and new challenges. I don’t think school-aged children above 10 feel this way anymore. Maybe some do.
As the new school year began, I felt that my “job” had begun. My job being going to school, doing my homework, and getting good grades because I wanted to and my parents encouraged me to.
Then I had my first real “job” working at a restaurant. That taught me the value of money and responsibility, and I remember my parents telling me, “now you can buy your own clothes”. I wasn’t mad, or felt like “how dare they!”. I was proud of myself, and felt more independence.
I feel that nowadays the lessons of life, whether they be on a farm, and learning the life cycles, animal husbandry, and growing your own food, or growing up and knowing your place in the world, how to become a man or woman, earning a living, is lost on this current generation.
School now is just a place to learn you are 1. Ether a terrible white oppressor, or worse a terrible white MALE oppressor or 2. You are one of the oppressed.
There’s no sense of just doing the right damn thing for it’s own sake, and it’s all “us against them” mentality.
Of course generations cycle, and things grow, thrive, and then eventually fade away to be replaced by something else and the cycle starts all over again.
As humans, we pine for the past, and shiver to see what the future may bring and destroy all we have wrought.
I am 45 years old and probably will live to see the end-game of whatever this craziness is.
“Change for the better doesn’t mean it’s better for everyone”.
Realestatepup? That’s a headscratcher.
I am 55. You and I either share a generational label or we are at odds. Born in 1961, I am a child of a generation that saw a lot of Negative Firsts in this country. REP (RealEstatePup acronym per Maggie’s directive… send out a memo) First bunch of schoolkids school in a “desegregated” system with my local school merging the tiny little black school into the elementary I attended in 1966, just one year before I entered kindergarten.
First bunch of kids to see a President assassinated on a newsreel again and again, though it wasn’t until 68 when RFK and MLK were also killed and made assassination newsclips something we all needed to see as much as possible. First bunch of kids exposed to the idea of Roe v. Wade being the law and used as an alternative to abstinence or birth control methods. First bunch of kids exposed to exponential growth in television sales… with upwards of ten thousand sets sold daily throughout the 1960s. First bunch of kids who shopped in malls and ate fast food from drive-through burger joints. First bunch of kids who used a Guaranteed Student Loan Program to attend college.
First hijacking and first hostage crisis. First loss of war in Vietnam. Let’s not even mention the whole Nixon thing, nor the raunchy crap that went on in the 1970s regarding the country’s military. What a disaster Carter was!
I always felt my generation was missing a greater purpose, with there being very little worth protesting about. And with Carter in office a significant portion of my pre-adult years, very little to brag about. I always felt I got robbed of the ability to really grasp a principle that I could call my generation’s “own.” Even the class song the year I graduation was a tribute to being lost and misunderstood. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”
@HS: You’re the only one I know who makes music with words. Thank you..
@Maggie: I was born in 1938 and I still don’t know squat about who, where, what, when, or why. Just try to be a good person and learn something new each day of your life and just – maybe – you’ll have a good time on the trip.
muck
Oh, it’s been fine so far, but am lamenting the great changes in our country.
I believe searching for “meaning” is perhaps the primordial mistake: what is, IS. I believe that as-near-to-total immersion in what IS, is the way to conceive “meaning” as it exists in a transitory self-reflective state of mind immediately following experience. Dip the toe into Heraclitus’s river and experience its presence rather than think about its flow.
Indeed. And don’t forget that conflicting ideas over meaning create strife (but that breaks down the energy gradients, too, so it’s “all good”).
Another “primordial mistake” is our anthropocentrism (human-centeredness): an enormous advantage evolutionarially speaking.. **until it isn’t** (like all evolutionary advantages, it works until it doesn’t).
I was listening to a “true crime” podcast yesterday, about a case in Australia where a woman had been strangled by a love rival, was assumed dead, and was stashed in the trunk of her own car, which remained in the Australian summer sun in a parking lot for 4-5 days. When police found the car, the stench of decomposition was overwhelming, the woman’s insides were liquifying in the heat, with malodorous “effluent” coming from her eyes, ears, nose, mouth, anus, vagina, etc. but since an officer found a heartbeat, the woman was rushed to hospital and was kept alive on machines for the six months it took for the courts to work out who had the right to compassionately withdraw “treatment”.
In another true-crime case, police searched a landfill for 20 days, *at a cost of $500,000 per day*, to recuperate the bodies of a wife and child murdered by a husband/father with a fishing speargun.
Whether anyone likes it or not, these are activities which will just not be possible in our upcoming reset-to-normal. No more mausoleums.. just a sky burial or a ditch and a shroud if we are lucky. But what does that even *mean*? What is the *meaning* of “lucky” after death? The officer in the landfill case described being driven on by the idea of someone’s burial place being a ‘tip’ (dump). Who cares, and why? When you’re dead, you’re dead. The “resting place” is important only to the living, to the extent that they can consume “surplus” resources to pretend that life extension or memory extension has “meaning”.
In Italy, November first (known in Mexico as “the Day of the Dead”) is a day when many families travel to personally visit graves of those who have passed. In earlier times, one would walk the 1-2km to the town cemetery, where ancestors are buried in graves (if they are buried in the first place) for 10 years or so before their bones are disinterred and shifted to “columbari” (“dovecote” ossuaries in appositely-constructed walls). Today, the faithful and family-minded criss-cross Italy in the same manner USAmericans do for Thanksgiving, so middle-class Romans will think nothing of traveling to Naples or Florence to honor “their dead” (source: personal experience). These travel outings will become a declining practice in step with Peak Oil.
Ernest Becker. “Immortality projects.” Existential dread. Animal, meet symbol.
“to lend my hands to the bigger process that works ceaselessly around us whether we see it or not, whether it benefits us in the short term or someone else who we will never know a hundred years from now because that is all we can do.” That’s about as good as it gets. Thinking like that will keep you from being devoured by the insanity in the air these days. Muck’ s piece was extraordinary. One of the best on here. Just remember, HSF, you aren’t bound to do anything. An old cow can take up space if having her around makes you happy. Not everything has to make sense. Gratitude isn’t a burden, as some here suggest. It’s a way of life, and a damn fine one.
As I sit here in the woods at camp, engulfed by the dancing light from the sun bouncing off the pond and through the glistening hemlock boughs as it rises over pennyroyal hill, German shepherd by my side, I cannot help but feel grateful for this moment God has provided. What does it mean, who knows. With all that is going down in the world today, I have an overbearing sense that a day of reconning is soon to be upon us. When that time comes I will still strive to have gratitude and not become one of the scoffers.
Good food for thought HSF, I am up here today and tomorrow, give me a buzz if you want to come by and fish.