Winter Reflections

left, a milking barn; center, future hay barn; right, hoop house

 

 

There were many cold days and nights this winter.  It seems that for weeks the only logical chore was to split cordwood for the night's and day's fire. On the few nice days we debarked eight tree trunk sections, 7 foot in length or so, and after cleaning them, painted them with a couple of coats of latex paint, and put them into holes set in concrete, two rows of four timber posts, salvaged deadwood from the Wallow Burn, all douglas fir of about 6 inch diameters -- except for one which is aspen, by mistake.  I assume it prefers to be a fir, like the rest of its cohort in utility.  Those nights were still freezing, so there is a frostbitten, broken layer of concrete around the poles at ground level.  No matter; the holes are deeper than two feet, and filled with strong concrete gravel mix all the way down.

Frostbitten concrete around a pole setting. meh

My friend Laura is an architectural genius; she has pioneered many applications of 1/4" galvanized welded steel cattle fence panels by erecting half-pipe rows of these; resulting in semicircular tunnels of welded mesh, strong enough to resist bending and maintains its strength when bent and held in place. So far she has used this method to construct a hoop house for vegetable gardening, a chicken coop and covered yard, and a goat milking shed and shade barn.  The barn that we have been setting poles for, between snows, will be covered in the same way; and indeed those panels are already in place.  Only lacking the covering layers, the floor, the loft, a few more elements...the work goes on.

Multum in Parvo

Hey I have a blog!  Have had for years, whaddya know.  Life has thankfully changed completely since my first few "posts" here.  What was going on with me when I last posted?  Apparently I was barely functional!  I think I was trying to write a blog in 2007 because I had completely isolated myself from the world, and needed to know that I could still communicate.

But what to say? I had little in mind worth discussing, it seems.

I was at the end of a decade in which I had given up mathematical bohemianism in order to "grow up" and have a significant other relationship in my life and the stability of a career.  All, it seems, for nothing.  No, for less than nothing -- for the opportunity cost of pursuing other options!  I coulda been a no-contender, dammit!  Instead I wasted my savings on a useless degree in Business Management and my time on a few long software development projects.

It is because he does not contend
that he is without reproach.  
-- Lao Tse

My family motto, "Multum in Parvo" translates "Much in Little". Yes, we're a clever lot.  But there is much in me, not that this blog would demonstrate it historically.  My point isn't to prove myself up to the creed of my clan, but simply to say that I feel it as naturally as breathing.  There is much in me; not that I can say anything constructive about what it is or what it means.  I contain galaxies; my experience appears as All in All of Everything, even though I don't understand a mote of it.  I know that's egotistical, and my objective self knows it is solipsistic and false except insofar as it goes -- inside of my own experience.  So does that make sense?  I'm not asking you to validate or believe there is much in me, but just letting you know, that is my experience, a part of my experience.  Part of who I am.

To recap, I am returning to this blog after five years of absence, five years during which I have completely changed my relationship to life, the world, other people, to almost everything.  I will describe those changes and my current mode and direction of life later; but first I am kind of fascinated by the mirror image  of that younger self who made these earlier posts.  He was lost, dazed, confused, depressed, trying half-heartedly to offer something of value to the world, to pay the rent; that man had woken up and found that his life was being swallowed by a psychic sinkhole, had been swallowed by it, had been being swallowed by it.

I am grateful for the ongoing economic collapse in a selfish way, because it confirmed my suspicions that the fish stinks from the head; that my extremely distasteful experience in the corporate world reflected upon the depraved corruption, turpitude, and moral and practical repugnance of the whole organ of international commerce, most significantly in banking and "financial services."  Ha! At least these days, most people will understand what I mean when I say that calling what big banks do for their "clients" by the moniker of a "service" is the most monstrously audacious con that has ever been propagated on the public.

What can I tell you about business?  I have a degree with a very high GPA; I paid some attention.  I can tell you, the status quo is quite broken.  Irremediably broken.  The only question is the form that the denouement will take: war? Huxleyian systems of fascistic control of human worker drones?  Happily, I can finally say that I don't care.  It's coming, it will come, it must come; the only question that applies to me is, what will I do?

Let me just state the case clearly: I am a dissident of the modern order.  I believe we are heading for doom, but also that it is probably inevitable and evolutionary.  Is something dying here, or something being born?  I don't have any idea, but I like the idea of babies.  In general.

Thing is about babies: things can and do go wrong.  A friend with a broody hen related to me this evening the story of how her mother had taken her and her sister into the closet where incubated eggs were hatching under an incandescent bulb.  Mother directed daughters to help a chick out of the egg, picking aside the pieces of shell to assist the chicks emergence.  Such chicks almost always die.  Mother taught in visceral fashion, at the small cost of one egg, the lesson that helping doesn't always help.

I have come to this view of the world. Perhaps something farther beyond our ken than the everlasting question of chicken and egg is being born in us, through our crazy consumptive suffering greed run amok.  Who can say?  I do know that it is best not to peel away the pieces of shell that are seemingly obstructive, but functionally, mechanically, necessary to survival.

The financial crisis was underway five years ago.  Today, it is much worse, and partly it is worse because people have been made to believe that it is better.  Truth is, we seem to be headed for a wall as a global culture.  Seeing this unfold five years ago, I was depressed and paralysed.  I didn't know what to do, but I was tired of being a wage slave.  Computer programming jobs that once sustained my mathematical bohemian lifestyle have long since moved to India or China.  But more than any practical considerations, I was just tapped out and heartsick over the entire culture of money, corporate business, lawlessness, long-term irrationality, of expected greed and self-centeredness.  I refuse to support that world anymore.  I can't say that I am out of it completely, but I am as out of it as I can get. 

Nor do I think anymore in terms of saving the world.  Or helping it.  For one thing, the people running things now are hideous and evil monsters and I want no truck at all with any of them.  For another thing, if something beautiful is poking its beak out of the mire, I don't want it to die, and so I am very hesitant to try to help.

And I am happy with that.

More about that later.