Daily Archives: May 27, 2013

Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Roots

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Beltane                                                                                  Early Growth Moon

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
Simone Weil

 

 

Not surprising this is an unrecognized need because for most people for most of human history being other than rooted was not an option.  You were born within the sound of a church bell or a muezzin or a farm dinner bell and never got beyond them.

(Jean-Léon Gérôme. A Muezzin Calling from the Top of a Minaret the Faithful to Prayer (1879)

It is only as the world has begun to urbanize that we have had to consider our roots, or the lack of them.  In the US only 5% of the population lived in cities in 1800, but 50% did by 1920.  80% do now.  This trend is global.  In 2008 for the first time in history over 50% of the world’s population live in cities.  Interestingly one website on urbanization made this point, since no more than 100% of a population can live in cities, urbanization will come to a foreseeable end.

It is, though, this great hollowing of rural areas that underlines our need for roots just at the point when we realize we no longer have them.  Or, rather, it is this realization that makes the need for roots evident.

Let’s stick to the vegetative metaphor.  Roots say where we are planted, where we have pushed organs for receiving nourishment deep into the soil, even into the subsoil of the place where we live.  Yes, you might want to talk about relationships and regular shops and schools and sports teams, yes, those things are part of a broad understanding of the metaphor, but I’m wanting to stay closer to the plant.

(I worked in this factory when I was in high school, 1968.  Johns-Manville)

If we eat local food, our bodies themselves become literally one with the earth in a particular locale.  Knowing where we are, not only in terms of street names and legalities, but also in terms of trees, food crops, fish, game, local meats, birds, flowers, grasses, even the so-called weeds is also part of having roots.  Embracing the weather, the local changes, as in part defining who you are, that’s having roots.

It is, I think, these things that disorient us the most when we move away from our home.  We think it’s the people or the customs or the new boulevards and highways, but in a deeper place, in the place where you know you are, it’s the Indian paintbrush that no longer shows up, the alligator not waiting in the pond,  the summer that fades too soon or lasts too long, these things make us not only feel disconnected from the place where we are; they are in fact the evidence of our disconnection.

(fall harvest, 2011, Andover)

If we have roots, we usually don’t know it; if we’re missing them, well…

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Music, Third Phase

Technology Is My Friend

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Beltane                                                                      Early Growth Moon

Repeat after me:  technology is our friend.  Again.  Technology is our friend.

A month or so ago I bought a 300 CD carousel player.  This dates me in so many ways.  In the first place to enter memos (we’ll talk about those in a moment) you can use a keyboard, but it’s not a usb connection rather it is the old male/female pin receptor.  Fortunately, in my ever increasing museum of used computing equipment I had one.  Score!

What that means is that I input a memo about each disk using the keyboard rather than the dial and point method necessary without it.  That would have found me tossing the discs in the thing.  Anyhow so I decide to put a memo for each disc because otherwise how could I know what it is?

Well, that means developing a system.   We have a faux Dewey Decimal CD storage piece that has 4 rows across and 6 down of small wooden boxes that hold anywhere from 12 to 15 or so CD’s.  So we named the rows A, B, C, and D.  That means that each CD has to have a box number, so A1 puts the CD case in the upper left hand corner box.  We’re keeping the cases for the liner notes.  But, wait, there’s more.  Each CD has to have its own number in the box so the first CD is A11 then the name of the CD in very short hand.

Another wrinkle develops with multiple sets of which we have many.  For example, we have a 25 CD set of the complete works of Chopin.   In this case, we’re now into the 3rd box, the number was for one disc, A316D24.  The D24 meaning D24 in the Chopin set.  In order to enter this data two buttons on the carousel player have to be punched, then the text entered, then saved.  300 times.  I’m up to 60 right now and have already begun chewing on my foot so I can escape the trap.

Now to the charming reality that this dates me.  First of all, who buys CD’s anymore?  I mean physical objects that store your music and take up space in your house?  What?  Second, you mean you have to manually enter the information about the music?  Why can’t the file just put it up like it does on my I-phone, I-pad, I-pod?  That’s way easier.  Not nearly so much work.  In fact, no work at all.

That’s the frictionless world most digital natives inhabit.  Their idea of a record collection weighs about 5 ounces and has ear buds.  If you want to listen to at home, you just drop it in a receptacle that links your device to your home speaker system.  Easy peasy.

Kate and I, however, inhabit the stubbornly physical recent past.  Which means we were born before this millennium for sure and far back in the 20th century, too.  This is probably the last time we will try to organize our music because if we decide to do it again, I’ll flee to the 20th century in my time machine.  I carry it right here on my belt.

Memories, US History

A 50’s Boyhood

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Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

As summer tries to take root, bringing heat to this winterspringsummerfall season we’ve
been having, Memorial Day arrives.  In my school days Memorial Day meant school was over until Labor Day.  The grandkids in Colorado go into June and start up again mid-August.

I recall those long summer breaks perhaps better than the school years they punctuated, especially at the elementary ages, grades 1-5.  They were hours upon end of baseball, bike riding, playing kick the can, hanging out at the field, a special place that could become a fort, a trench, a hideout, a bunker, an overnight camping spot.  This was kid world, immersed in the boiling mass of kids my age or so that lived on Monroe Street between 1952 and 1958-9.

To a young boy in Indiana this was the 50’s, the Atomic Age now lionized in Mad Men and  shops filled with retro furniture, plastic chairs with metal legs, formica tables, aluminum tumblrs, boomerang shaped end tables, blond furniture, poodle skirts and fancy aprons for high-heel clad cooks.

This was not our 50’s.  Our 50’s had sandlots, trips to the forbidden pit, the subtle ranking inevitable among groups of children, the magical evenings as dusk fell, bats swooped and we each found a hiding place behind an arbor vitae, an enclosed porch, a dark shadow beside a garage, waiting for the tag that would make us out or finding a chance for momentary glory when we could streak out, run like the wind and kick the tin can clattery clat clanging down the street.

Yes, we had homes and parents and bedrooms and breakfast but those were way stations, filling stations and kiddie hotels, holding us only until we could go out.  “I’m going out,” was a phrase common on our lips.

We knew the limits to our wandering which meant we could have, from time to time, the  experience of venturing beyond them, back to the old gravel pit now filled with water where instant drowning awaited–we imagined our sad funerals and weeping parents, or off into a far neighborhood, perhaps as far as downtown if we had pop bottles we had collected from the trash.

That all lay before us as Memorial Day came, with the legionnaire color squad straining and sweating in those uniforms that fit so well back in their service days, the band playing patriotic music and a few floats with a queen or two doing the wave.  Dogs barked.  Clouds rode high in the blue sky and war was in the past, something to remember.