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| I took the day off. Instead of reading and recapitulating and cogitating, and sitting there costive at the computer, I conferred with K about the compost contraption he's conjured up. He sketched and explained--two tanks strung along a spinning bar, hung over a pile of humus with a fence around it. I wonder whether having them hung in mid-air would keep the compost from getting as warm as it would hugging the ground, but it's not my prerogative to quibble with vision. I took to the pile of spare wood and started figuring out how I could make this vision real.
Four hours of measuring, cutting, drilling, screwing, and retouching followed. It's been a long time since I've made something out of wood, and I had to relearn the way you handle it. I do woodwork not with the coddling care people attribute to artists infatuated with their pieces, nor tossing the boards pell-mell, but the I-mean-business firm grasp of a 2x4 and a wailing machine that pushes through the uncertainty of can I do this? toward turning an idea into a thing that accedes to the properties and dimensions of matter.
Function precedes form, not dictating it but urging it. I have to make sure that the frame sticks to our shed's wall and that the vertical boards stay parallel and hold up that rod. I need some redundant connections--an extra screw, a patch board--and some buttress supports. But the task allows for the symmetry I want to see. I am not a pro, but I get the thing done, solving here a quandary of fit and there a question of how I can get this board to fit at that angle.
So I keep on working, intent that this inconsequential thing in our back yard should meet an aesthetic standard of working comeliness. No one will care except that it holds up. But for me it's a task that can have a clear and satisfactory result if I keep at it and do well. This is quite unlike the scrawling and scrapping of drafts I do day after day. Even when you're well into a project it's murky and unshapely. You have an idea where you're going, but you can't see the end. Academic work is tedious and goes back and forth between being fabulously rewarding and vacuously irrelevant and opaque. (Is vacuously opaque an oxymoron? If so, a good one!) But I can put together a shelf or rack in a couple of days, and the process has a series of rewarding points of accomplishment, when I can pause and smile at the sturdy joint I've just attached.
I'm reading a collection of Zen Buddhist stories in Chinese. Several of them have instances in which a young monk shows up at the master's place and begs for the secret of enlightenment. At this point the master goes off into a field and starts hoeing and weeding with quiet resolve. The young one stands aside waiting, or asks what the hell is going on. And then he gets a talking to, or just kicked out the door. The point being that the secret is most often found in concerted manual labor, when you're not worried about finding a secret or figuring out some abstruse problematic, but just working through one task after another, deeply in touch with your tools and the dirt, plants, wood that you are handling.
That's the satisfaction in craftwork: a chance to be singleminded and in touch. I should at the least take more time for this kind of thing. But what I really need to do is figure out how to make scholarly labor into the same thing: a careful, driven effort to get a thing right in a way that's aesthetically satisfying as well as useful and accessible to people.
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| . . . I can read about paresthesia and The New Republic (neither of which I know much about) on Wikipedia, while listening to Keith Richards sing, "She's my little rock'n'roll!" while Elisa suits up for a cocktail party. I have my brown velvet three-piece suit on. Things are as they should be. Good evening!
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| Should I read another book? Should I stop and email someone on my mounting list of friends who deserve attention? Should I go back to writing the paper, since I've really already figured out the gist of the book? Should I exercise to clear my mind? Should I read the editorial page of the New York Times, or the next chapter of War and Peace, or this article about people who keep ferrets as pets someone posted on Facebook? Should I rock out on the guitar? Should I cook a five-course meal, or make this week's hummus? Should I have something to drink tonight to help chill out, knowing I'll be a chump tomorrow if I do? Should I stop and listen to what Elisa is saying? Should I write a poem, or work on one of several scraps I've started and stashed? Should I call my mother? Should I watch a movie? Should I sit on a cushion and count my breaths? Should I learn about ancient Chinese history and Buddhist philosophy, should I push to comprehend ecosystem dynamics, or should I spend time learning about ways to talk to people and understand how they live and work, and how they feel about that? Should I stick with the conviction that I'm right in a certain argument and being slighted, should I listen quietly and perhaps a bit smugly as struggling only brings more strife? Or should I call it off and retreat for some time to meditate in hopes of learning to listen with care and equanimity? Should I act on my intention to journal daily, developing my style and thoughts as well as the ability to write and think on prompt?
The usual dissatisfactions accumulate. These have to do with wanting to do more things than I can do well. That, much less do well and enjoy it. One hour I'm concerned that I'm not getting enough information, or enough of the right information efficiently, organized to do well professionally. The next hour I'm irritated that I haven't let this or that person know some congenial thoughts. On the off chance that I do pick up my guitar, it's great rollicking fun, but it would really be great if I could pull off some finer licks on a regular basis. I flip back and forth among them (and like so many I kill time--BANG!!!--with compulsive checking of email and all those Web 2.0 applications), with the result that my attention is divided and what does get finished (never mind those five bookmarks sticking out of unfinished texts) gets done in a way that's sufficient and not unpleasing, but mediocre. Not satisfying.
There are choices here. Lots of these things I have no reason to forsake, but there are also some parts of myself, visions I'd had at 8 or 18 that, in the interest of realizing some potentials fully, that I might best set aside. Doing that requires figuring out which are the most valuable things for me to stick to.
It's these kind of choices I've congenitally shied away from making. I like hearing people say you've got to leave your horizons open, be open to whatever comes, spread your wings, yadda yadda, but I also think that having a manageable number of horizons keeps the ones that are open opener. Bottom line: making choices is hard, even--especially--when there's always the chance to take it back and pick something back up. Days and lives are not seized, nor relationships brought to fruit, by scrambling among dropped and splitting strands, but through concerted effort.
Or so I think. Time to put the treads down.
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| It is hard for me to stay on topic. I get distracted by everything. Like the live band in the Rathskeller pub here in Memorial Union and the string quartet on the speakers here across the hall and reverberations of "Paradise City" heard as I biked over here. These digressions can be useful. I don't usually edit them out, because they remind me and readers that the world is full of disruptions. Even in a library study room doors open and close, and people sniffle. In your bedroom at night photons slip in, and you can't help registering vibrations as a car drives past.
But the tendency to want to throw a pinch of everything into the pot gives you an unsavory mishmash. A dish with one or two dominant flavors often tastes better. You can serve it alongside another different one and appreciate the contrasts. Likewise, an ordered sequence of statements with clear subjects can often be a lot more rewarding than an undisciplined splatter of sensations, even if the latter is more exciting--and true to life. (But I wouldn't throw out rapturous ejaculations of verbiage entirely. I have enjoyed James Joyce and Tom Wolfe. Still, even Bitches Brew has a contained sequence of ideas.) You don't have to act like the real world comes in neatly wrapped pieces. But recognizing that everything is complicated and intermingled, you can adjust the focus to get a better idea about one bit or another.
I'm writing this after reflecting upon something I read recently. It's by Donna Haraway, a heavyweight feminist scholar who writes mostly about science, its role in social life, and how . Her stuff is hard to read. Take this bit from an essay she wrote:
We, the feminists in the debates about science and technology, are the Reagan Era's "special interest groups" in the rarefied realm of epistemology, where traditionally what can count as knowledge is policed by philosophers codifying cognitive canon law. Of course, a special interest group is, by Reaganoid definition, any collective historical subject who dares to resist the stripped-down atomism of Star Wars, hypermarket, post-modern, media-simulated citizenship. Max Headroom doesn't have a body; therefore, he alone sees everything in the great communicator's empire of the Global Network.
(Haraway, Donna. 1999. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In: M. Biagioli ed. The Science Studies Reader, (New York: Routledge), 172-188.)
The essay is about how important it is to take seriously women's (and other non -white, -male, etc., persons') perspectives without throwing out the good things about science, like generating credible, useful knowledge. And it's written in this way to make a point: by cutting everything in peripheral vision out, authoritative scientists make up a stylized way of seeing the world that doesn't look much like the real thing. Feminist science, she thinks, should take into account all the sticky, slimy stuff on the edges that doesn't make for clean or infinitely replicable studies, but does need enough focus that you can figure out what's being said.
When I first read, her stuff was really hard to read, because it seemed like it was all over the place. Now that I read it again, I realized it is pretty disciplined--she says this crazy stuff but it's meant to drive home her point. Problem is that you have to really be in her world to know what she's saying. You have to understand postmodern critical theory and remember Max Headroom. Or know The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The grandest aspiration of philosophical scientists is to write something that anyone from any perspective can read and understand exactly what they meant. The feminist scientist says we can't escape from having perspectives: what in science looks perspectiveless actually takes a lot of training in a particular perspective to understand. ("A sample was taken via random selection from the population of households in each census tract. A questionnaire was administered. Multivariate logistic regression with a two-tailed, ninety-five-percent confidence interval, was conducted." Huh?) But at least we can tell people about our perspectives.
To do that does require some degree of self-discipline, and some degree of assumption about what your audience knows that you know. You can't tell people your whole biography, so you have to pick the details. Space and attention limit what people are going to keep paying attention to. (I have a feeling some readers left around the time Ronald Reagan's name appeared.) For my own benefit--as I learn to write for audiences I cannot assume to like late-60s jazz or early 20th-century stuffy fiction--I'm going to try and stick more to the point. As much as I would love to splatter paint all over the board while dancing and somewhat inebriated. Or be taken home where that grass is green and the girls are pretty.
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| Today I learned that . . .
The West is like a Lion looking at the Elephant of China. And, as the venerable saying goes, you know how Lions are with Elephants: They just can't get a clue.
China's main foreign affairs newspaper (very widely read) reports on other countries' actions regarding the festivities for the 60th anniversary of the Communist takeover. There is recognition of China as a growing power as well as voicing of ...concerns. "Chinese scholar Jin Canrong asserts that China's modern development has already surpassed the categories of Western thought. They do not understand that China is quite normal. It's like an elephant and a lion: the lion cannot understand the elephant."
Usually I would say something sarcastic about bluster, but maybe there's also something to get out of thinking what it means to take this talk at face value. After all, China looks pretty darn ascendant, especially from inside, and insofar as people believe that outsiders (1) misunderstand them and (2) deliberately try to thwart them (as has happened so many times in history), it's important to understand this mindset if one doesn't want to dig oneself into a nasty hole. This is important with me because there are people I like and generally respect who feel this way, and when I'm in China, I'm better trying to get a clue about it so as to discuss or change the subject rather than looking at them dumbfounded, thinking, "How can you swallow this bullshit?" This in the interest of keeping friendships as well as being a helpful intermediary between other lions and those inscrutable Oliphaunts. I'm no Horton, not even Lafcadio, I'm just a blunt-minded lion numbskull. Maybe Lambert, if he had a pachyderm-pelt.
(all this with the caveat that what the state-run nationalist newspaper doesn't match everyone's view -- but you can't ignore this without peril anymore than you can get by just ignoring Limbaugh and Beck as the hotheads they are)
Also, even though Lakes Powell and Mead behind the grandest dams (Glen Canyon & Hoover) in the U.S. southwest are drying up as the changing climate of the Rocky Mountain snowcap stops yielding snowmelt to roll down riverbeds, Chinese hydroelectric companies are booming ahead full-speed at tens, maybe hundreds, of dams in that country's southwest.
This isn't really news, but it's astounding. Hydro cannot not go forward, as dams are pre-eminent symbol of the power of governments and corporations to re-organize and put a leash on the elements. A pity that sooner or later those elements undermine the wall built.
The book of Laozi says, "Nothing under heaven is as pliant as water, and nothing can beat water for outlasting and defeating the strong." (Cherrypicking! I admit it!) That suggests a certain smugness: having seen the U.S. stop building and start decommissioning dams, and having made a selective interpretation of a deeply resonant text, I go and bemoan the dam-building from my office. But the dams go up--they must go up!--along with the planes with their chemical loads aimed to make and break rainclouds. (If only they had Superman and Richard Pryor.) Hoover and Glen Canyon stand as monuments. They and the newer walls cutting off the bloodflow of Asia, make electric power and they embody the power to make and move and maintain the illusion of control in the time of human lives. It's a fool who thinks anything but a massive disaster will turn the hands of those who need to exert that power.
And I'm bloviating, getting all grandiose and stuff. I always end up doing that in these meditations. Taking an extreme stand is one way to write stuff that inspires some. But it gets real hollow really fast. I think I will go downstairs and make some hummus.
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