Into the Woods – Page 129 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

The rewards of rural life

A concerned citizen speaks to the Stokes County commissioners.

Though I certainly enjoyed my 17 years in San Francisco, rural life is far from boring. One of the good things about backroads places such as Stokes County is that the American system of government operates at a small scale. People know each other. It’s easy to get involved. A few people can make a big difference.

In my political activities against fracking, I’ve gotten to know a good many people. Often the same people who show up to work for one urgent cause will show up to work for another urgent cause. In Stokes County, the newest urgent cause is preserving an enormously valuable 19th-century resort and keeping it in the hands of the public. The resort, Vade Mecum, belongs to the state of North Carolina at present and has been operated at a loss by N.C. State University. A few weeks ago, N.C. State informed Stokes County that they’re closing Vade Mecum, which had been used mostly as a seasonal camp for young people. Very quickly, the county’s leadership — both elected and unelected — have gone to work to come up with a plan that would get Vade Mecum and its pristine 900 acres into county hands and keep it open. Tourism is increasingly important to this county, and Vade Mecum adjoins Hanging Rock State Park, which is the most visited state park in North Carolina. So Vade Mecum and its land could become an important part of Stokes County’s tourism master plan.

The room was packed at a meeting Monday of the county commissioners. A retired farmer, in a 30-minute presentation to the commissioners that was simply the most entertaining and most effective presentation I have ever seen, outlined to the commissioners a plan for preserving Vade Mecum that was developed by a group of concerned citizens. The commissioners seemed to like the plan and have promised to act soon on preserving Vade Mecum.

Though dramas like this certainly happen at the state and national level, here at the county level everyone is up close to the action. There is a real sense of working together. I like it. And at this stage of my life, I’d rather live here than even in a place like Paris.

The main lodge at Vade Mecum

Winter pestos

I am still grieving for the basil of summer and the amazing pestos it made. Carrying pesto into the winter is greatly to be desired, not least because pesto is the best vehicle I know for delivering intense quantities of medicinal garlic. Kale, and, or, parsley are the usual winter substitutes. I can’t get excited about that, though I need to try it. This pesto is made from sun-dried tomatoes, plus the usual pesto ingredients — walnuts, parmesan, garlic and olive oil.

To be honest, it’s a little cloying. But that may be a good thing, because it reduces the temptation to eat too much.

It occurs to me that a bit of red miso substituted for part of the salt would be a good lick. I’ll try that next time.

Salad of clover sprouts and grated carrot

Sprout season has commenced

Clover sprouts

For a while I had forgotten about sprouts. But I remembered recently while at Whole Foods, puzzling over what sort of winter salad fixin’s were freshest and cheapest. Whole Foods’ salad fixin’s were fresh, but they weren’t cheap. So I ordered fresh sprouting seeds from SproutPeople.org, got out my sprouting jars, and got back into the habit.

If you order from SproutPeople, complain in the comments box at checkout that their shipping prices are too high. They’re trying to get everyone to order more than $60 worth to get free shipping. That’s a lot of seeds to order at once.

Digging ever deeper for human roots

Source: PNAS

There were many stories in the news this week about sequencing the DNA of a boy buried in Siberia 24,000 years ago and how the boy’s DNA links early Europeans to Native Americans. None of these stories mentioned that linguists have been looking for — and may have found — the same connection. This research by linguists is new and remains controversial.

All this is fascinating, and though I’ve read a good many articles on the linguistics involved here, much of it is too technical for me to understand. Here is a less technical article on how linguists have been able to trace languages back as far as 15,000 years.

The important thing to a generalist, though, is that DNA, language, and culture always migrate together. Culture, however, is fragile and can be stamped out almost overnight, while DNA and language (except when genocide is involved) are much tougher and change slowly at statistically predictable rates.

We grieve for lost languages, though languages are tougher than cultures. We also grieve for lost cultures, as I have been grieving for lost Celtic culture. This new genetic and linguistic evidence shows that the Native American cultures and Celtic culture have common roots if you go back far enough.

It seems to be an axiom of human history that, when cultures collide, the shittiest culture tends to win, and more gentle, naive, or nature-oriented cultures tend to lose. Take a look, for example, at a cultural element that Celtic culture and many Native American cultures had in common — the belief in reincarnation. Julius Caesar, who wrote extensively about his war against the Celtic Gauls, was very interested in the military advantages of a belief in reincarnation:

“They [the Druids] wish above all to convince their pupils that souls do not perish but pass after death from one body into another, and this they see as an inducement to valor, for the dread of death is thereby negated.”

This belief in reincarnation is found all over the world, particularly in gentler cultures. In reincarnation, it is assumed that people themselves work through their foibles and destinies, over time. It is chiefly the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which frankly I regard as inferior religions — that abhor the idea of reincarnation and prefer to let their often angry and vindictive sky god sort people out after death and reward them or punish them appropriately.

It is very hard for me to understand that many people celebrate, rather than grieve for, lost cultures. Here is a chilling quote from Theodore Roosevelt, from Hunting Expeditions of a Ranchman:

Above all, the extermination of the buffalo was the only way of solving the Indian question. As long as this large animal of the chase existed, the Indians simply could not be kept on reservations, and always had an ample supply of meat on hand to support them in the event of a war; and its disappearance was the only method of forcing them to at least partially abandon their savage mode of life. From the standpoint of humanity at large, the extermination of the buffalo has been a blessing.

A blessing for whom, and for which god?

The proofs are in

During my career as an editor and as director of editorial systems for newspapers, I have ushered millions of words into print. I also have helped authors get a good many books into print. But today for the first time I held in my hands a book with my name on the cover. Awesome.

At this point, I have only the five proof copies. They’re being dispatched to the first readers. Then revisions will follow. The book is still on track to be released for sale in December.

Publishing is undergoing a revolution. Those lucky authors who have book contracts and who work within the traditional publishing industry are probably not as enthusiastic about this as the rest of us. The barriers to publishing are now very low. One consequence of this, of course, is that a lot of low-quality work will get into print. Though traditional publishers also put out a stunning amount of mass-market trash. To some degree, online reviewing systems such as Amazon’s help readers sort the wheat from the chaff. I am now anticipating those online reviewing systems with much terror.

One of the biggest categories of beneficiaries from the new order in publishing will be niche markets for writers and readers. Some of the material in those niches is bound to be quite good, but the market was just too small to support it in the old order.

An excellent restoration

A neighbor out on the paved road recently finished renovating one of his tobacco barns. He used high-quality board and batten siding. The siding was sawed on-site by one of those portable sawmills that I have written about. The trees that went into the siding were trees that he had cut to build a house.

It’s really nice to see people valuing, and taking care of, the outbuildings on the old farms in this county. Many have already fallen in and disappeared, and many others are in different stages of decay.

This neighbor also displays a No Fracking in Stokes sign.

Fugue in Ursa Major: now in the proofing stage

My novel, Fugue in Ursa Major, is now in the final stages of production. Proof copies are being printed this week. As soon as the proof copies arrive, I’ll immediately get them to my distinguished first readers. And are my first readers ever distinguished! They are:

— Ken, already known to readers of this blog. Ken is often referred to these days as a new literary sensation. He’s also a tough critic, which I know because we’ve watched many movies together, then reviewed them the next day.

— James-Michael, an old friend who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and who works for the state of California.

— Dean, an old friend who holds a Ph.D. in media law and is an assistant professor at a university in North Carolina.

— Doug, a retired engineer.

From these four first readers, I’ll get some good advice that will go into the final revisions. Then the book will go on sale, probably in December and probably in time for Christmas. The trade paperback version will be available at Amazon, tentatively priced at $11.99. There also will be a Kindle version, tentatively priced at $1.99, and a version for Apple’s iBooks.

Update: I’ve added another first reader: Pam, former managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner.

Gaulish, Latin, and the French language

Notre Dame de Paris

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the almost complete destruction of the Celts in Gaul (which had roughly the same boundaries as today’s France). I mentioned that this genocide was so complete that the Gaulish language was wiped out, though linguists have worked hard to recover what they can of Gaulish. I also reflected a bit on how arbitrary our cultural inheritance is, dependent on the twists and turns of history.

As it is with culture, so it is with language also. Language and culture follow pretty much the same tracks down through the ages. Elements of the past are always there, right under our noses. This is particularly true of language.

In an odd way, the influence of the Gaulish language lives on in the modern world. French, of course, is a Romance language. Like all the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian), French developed out of Vulgar Latin in places beaten down by the Roman empire. Latin is not a dead language. Far from it. It merely changed over time into something bearable and sustainable. Latin was too complicated and too dry, so, where common people were forced to speak it, the language changed according to the linguistic habits of the conquered people. Only the church retained formal Latin. Only the Roman church, frankly, could stand a language as stuffy and arrogant as Latin.

And so, today, insofar as the French language differs from Latin, the differences mainly reflect the linguistic preferences of the Gauls. I am going to quote a long paragraph from a classic work in linguistics, The French Language, written in 1933 by Alfred Ewert of Oxford. Ewert’s political assumptions would not pass muster with most Celtic historians today, and that’s one reason I want to quote this passage. It reveals the habit of Rome-worship that persists in many quarters even today, and it reveals the degrading attitude toward the Celts. After all, the conquerers get to write the histories. The very first sentence is hugely revealing, because it refers euphemistically to the “romanticization” of Gaul:

The romanticization of Gaul, which may be taken to begin with the formation of the Provincia Narbonensis (120 B.C.) and the conquest of the rest of Gaul (55 B.C.), brought with it the substitution of Latin for the native idiom of the Gauls. The latter was a Celtic tongue which it is impossible to characterize in detail, as only a few inscriptions of doubtful interpretation have come down to us. The examination of Celtic elements in various languages and the historical study of Celtic languages and extant Celtic monuments have not yielded results which place beyond doubt the contention that certain developments in the Latin of Gaul are to be ascribed to the persistence of linguistic habits of the Celtic population. We do know that the language of the Gauls presented affinities with Latin, and this fact accounts in part for the readiness with which they seem to have abandoned their native idiom. Among other inducements to do so one may cite the advantages of Roman citizenship, the hope of advancement and material benefits generally, all of which were contingent upon the adoption of the official tongue. To these must be added the fact that with the spread of Christianity the diffusion of Latin was furthered by the Church, which employed Latin solely, at first in the form of Vulgar Latin and subsequently in the form of Low Latin. Before these combined forces the native idiom, inadequate for the new conditions of life and identified henceforth with an inferior culture, yielded ground rapidly, although it lingered on in the country districts as late as the third or fourth century.

Roman citizenship?? Celts were carried off as slaves by the tens of thousands. And of course there is the usual stuff about the inferior culture. Whatever. But Ewart is right when he sticks to his field — linguistics, though he hedges the point a bit because of our lack of knowledge of Gaulish. But it boils down to: Insofar as the sound and structure of the French language differ from Vulgar Latin, the difference can largely or mostly be attributed to the persistence of the Gaulish tongue.

Once I realized this, my fondness for the strange music and the grammatical and syntactical logic of the French language greatly increased. And ever since the Norman conquest, when the French conquerers exerted a major influence on the English language, a touch of Gaulish came to be found in English too.

The magic of feathers

Click on image for high-resolution version

People often ask me if I worry about the chickens getting cold during the winter. Actually, no. The breeds are supposed to be New England hardy, and the girls huddle up on the roost. Summer heat seems much harder on them than the winter cold, and they go right on laying in winter.

Now the poor tiny birds, that’s something else. Chickens have a much more favorable surface-to-mass ratio and dense layers of feathers. Whereas the tiniest of birds have a relatively large surface area and can afford only so many feathers if they hope to fly. But, somehow, the birds get through the winter.

I’ve often meant to lurk outdoors on a winter evening with binoculars to observe just where the birds sleep. I do know that they love cedar trees. There are lots of wild cedar trees nearby, though there can’t be enough to go around. Plus we’ve planted 17 arbor vitae trees, large and small (mostly large) at the abbey, and that should help.

Sometimes on the coldest mornings I’ll make an extra large batch of grits and serve them to the girls while the grits are still warm.

The lost Celtic civilization: does it matter today?

A detail of the Gundestrup caldron. Source: Wikipedia

The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts. By Graham Robb, W.W. Norton & Co., 2013, 396 pages. Published in Britain as The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe.

Most people — certainly most Americans — never stop and reflect on culture, as though somehow the way we live (and the way we think) today was somehow inevitable. But a bit of travel, a bit of history, and a bit of reflection make it pretty obvious just how arbitrary culture is. Many of us despise American culture. Western culture as a whole is seriously screwed up, though there have been many gifted people over the centuries who have, in large and small ways, managed to make Western culture a little less ugly than it otherwise would have been. But culturally we remain what we are, and some of us don’t like what we are. Our relationship with nature is completely broken. All the magic has been driven out of the world. Our culture and religion have warped our psyches and trampled our instincts (just ask Freud). We are a mess.

A Mozart or a Thomas Jefferson or an Einstein have only a limited effect on culture, the grandeur of their individual achievements notwithstanding. But there are major turning points in culture. One such turning point in Western culture — and I would argue that it was the most important turning point, though it happened 2,000 years ago — was the almost total destruction of Celtic civilization by the Roman armies and the Roman religion. If this had not happened, we in the West would be living in a completely different world today. I think it would be a better world.

The Roman destruction of Celtic culture — genocide is not too strong a word — was so complete that we know very little about the Celts today. Long after the Roman armies had defeated the Celts in Gaul (France) and Britain and hunted down and killed the Druids, the Roman church continued the work of cultural annihilation. The destruction of the Celts in Gaul was so complete that their language was wiped out. Today, we have two main sources of information about the Celts. The first source is the record left by Greek and Roman historians, including a history by Julius Caesar himself, who spent several years away from Rome with the army, waging war against the Celts. But this written record must be interpreted very carefully, because much of it was anti-Celtic propaganda meant to justify the destruction of the Celts. Plus, many of those historians never set foot outside of Greece or Rome or even met a Celt. They just repeated what others had written. The second source is archeology.

Anyone who is seriously interested in the Celts must include a disclaimer, so I include it here. I am not interested in the neo-Druids, the people who put on white robes and show up at Stonehenge at the equinoxes. There is a vast body of romantic, imaginative and speculative material about the Celts and the Druids. We must ignore all that. And by the way, Stonehenge is not even Celtic. Stonehenge is thousands of years older than Celtic civilization. Celtic civilization was contemporary with classical Greece and Rome.

Graham Robb’s book is one of the most important new books about the Celts to come out in years. It is meticulously researched, with something like 500 sources cited in the notes. Robb’s focus is on Celtic astronomy and geometry, and how those things affected the physical layout of the Celtic highway system and Celtic towns. But along the way, Robb’s story touches on many other areas of Celtic life and Celtic culture.

Were the Celts primitive compared with the Romans? Ha! In many ways, Celtic technology and Celtic science were superior. The Celts already had a well maintained system of roads and bridges, which is one reason the Roman armies could move so fast and why it was so easy for the Romans to lay down Roman roads on top of existing Celtic roadways. The Celtic wheeled vehicles were so technically superior to the Roman vehicles that virtually every word for wheeled vehicles in Latin comes from the Celtic language. The Celts’ communications system was faster than the Romans’. The Celts could transmit news from one end of Gaul to the other in a matter of hours, using a network of acoustically well-placed shouters, with protocols for ensuring accuracy. The Romans used runners, which was slower. Robb makes it clear that the Druids were scientists as well as politicians, religious leaders, and diplomats. Celtic society, says Robb, was an intellocracy. It was governed by people who were selected for their merit and who spent as much as twenty years in training.

Why would the Romans (including the Roman church) have gone to so much trouble to completely wipe out the Celtic civilization? The answer, I think, is clear. It was because the Celtic way of life, the Celtic way of thinking, and the Celtic religion were deadly dangerous to the Romans. The Roman culture and the Roman religion simply could not have survived unless Celtic civilization was destroyed. If the Romans had not destroyed the Celts, those of us of European descent would be very different people today.

The abiding ugliness of Roman culture and the Roman religion is an important theme in my novel Fugue in Ursa Major. I’ve had to do a great deal of reading about Rome, and the Celts, to make sure that what I’ve written is historically defensible. Graham Robb’s book, though it was published while Fugue in Ursa Major was undergoing its final editing, was a godsend, not least because it gave me greater confidence that I was on the right track.

So, today, as heirs to the cultural poverty and systems of hierarchy and power bequeathed to us by the Romans, is there anything we can do to retrieve what was destroyed when the Celts were destroyed? There may be. The first step: read. But be sure that what you read is from serious historians. Then, when you have a good foundation in Celtic history, use your imagination. How might your life be better if Celtic, rather than Roman, ways of thinking had prevailed?