My first job downstairs is to open the back door and get a big breath of fresh air - rain or shine, winter or summer - I just copy the cats and dog, that’s what they do - that’s how the ‘read’ the day, nose up, what’s in the air? What smells different? Clear out the night-lungs. Start again. Meanwhile the kettle is boiling. I grind the beans. That smell of fresh ground beans. Oh wow! Then I am at the back door again, or in the yard, in my pyjamas and wellies, just with a little time to align myself with myself - and to align myself with this different, new day. It’s a little bit of Tao. –Jeanette Winterson: Mind Over Matter (Substack) - “Spring Equinox”. Hat tip to Austin Kleon.
ideas
I immensely enjoyed this 2017 article about Tanya Amyx Berry and her life in Kentucky with Wendell Berry and their family and community.
As for “wild,” I now think the word is misused. The longer I have lived and worked here among the noncommercial creatures of the woods and fields, the less I have been able to conceive of them as “wild.” They plainly are going about their own domestic lives, finding or making shelter, gathering food, minding their health, raising their young, always well-adapted to their places. They are far better at domesticity than we industrial humans are. It became clear to me also that they think of us as wild, and that they are right. We are the ones who are undomesticated, barbarous, unrestrained, disorderly, extravagant, and out of control. They are our natural teachers, and we have learned too little from them. The woods itself, conventionally thought of as “wild,” in fact is thought of and used as home by the creatures who are domesticated within it.
Wendell Berry, This Day - Sabbath Poems, 1972 - 2012 - Introduction
If you want to jump in on the side of humanization, join the Great Conversation. This is the tradition of debate that stretches back millenniums, encompassing theology, philosophy, psychology, history, literature, music, the study of global civilizations and the arts. This conversation is a collective attempt to find a workable balance amid the eternal dialectics of the human condition — the tension between autonomy and belonging, equality and achievement, freedom and order, diversity and cohesion, security and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion. The Great Conversation never ends, because there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting place that works in this or that circumstance. Within the conversation, each participant learns something about how to think, how to feel, what to love, how to live up to his or her social role.
The world is built on relationships, not leverage, and relationships are built on reciprocity and respect. It is not Trump’s genius to recognize America’s unused strength; it is his blindness to see that our strength was a function of our restraint.
For Kolnai, however, what attracted the young to fascism was not so much any real practical concern, nor any really coherent philosophy. It was, rather, a kind of boredom with the peace and orderliness of liberal times. Distinctly lacking in liberal societies is the kind of enmity, battle, conflict, and esprit de corps that a conquering master-nation can provide.
– Nathan Beacon, “How Not to Be a Fascist: How one Hungarian philosopher resisted the Nazis through ‘civilization.’”
Sounds a bit like ICE thugs, eh?
I’m hopeful that
to save its own species,
the tiger will become a poet,
the way dinosaurs became lizards,
And the poet, occasionally, a tiger
Remember how after 9/11 Katha Pollitt told her 13-year-old daughter she couldn’t fly the American flag, because “the flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war”? Pollitt was wrong. But this administration is making her seem less so.
By hijacking the language of patriotism for this nationalistic, statist, militaristic horseshit, the right is picking up the baton of the left by signaling to millions of Americans that America’s heritage—and the people who talk about it—are precisely the kinds of people who see the American flag the same way she did.
Tom Friedman in the NYTimes makes an excellent point: Trump’s toppling of Maduro provides Xi another precedent for invading Taiwan.
We live in a world where violating taboos is monetizable and confers enviable status. I like taboos— not all of them, of course. But I respect the role of taboos in society. Good taboos are the guardians of settled questions. They sit like gargoyles at the mouth of dangerous caves and warn against spelunking in dark and dangerous places. …
The riot of taboo-violating and dogma-disinterring is an invitation to consequences few have the courage or the basic knowledge to apprehend.
If … you conjure a world where there is no external truth, only a riot of competing, equally valid perspectives, then you create a Nietzschean world where the only arbiter of “truth” is the one with the will and the power to impose their truth on everyone else.