Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
A friend in Black Mountain is experimenting with making tinctures. The alcohol is organic grape alcohol. The ingredients include all sorts of herbs and flowers. Also, below is the film version of the recent daffodils shot.
These are both film shots using Fuji Velvia 100 reversal film in the Mamiya RB67. The tinctures shot is with a 90mm K/L lens; the daffodils shot is a 250mm K/L lens. The tinctures shot is at f/32 with an exposure time of 45 seconds.
The Enchanted Forest, John Anster Christian Fitzgerald, 1819-1906
Where have all the fairies gone?
We could ask this question two different ways, depending on how you see the world. If you believe that fairies exist (or used to exist), then the question is literal. If you don’t believe in fairies, then there is still a serious question here, a cultural question. Why were fairies once such an important part of human lore? When did we lose interest in fairies? Why?
A friend who lives in France and who knows about (and shares) my interest in the Celts recently sent me a book, The Celtic Twilight, by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. The book was first published in 1893. Yeats was a mystic, and I’m pretty sure he believed in fairies — or at least very much wanted to. In this book, he travels in rural Ireland and asks people to tell him what they know about fairies. Faeries were already fading then. But they were still very much a part of rural life and the Irish belief system.
I am certainly not the only person to wonder where the fairies have gone. I Googled for the words “where have all the fairies gone” and got a number of little articles. Most are like this. Those articles use words such as “spirit,” “vibration,” “devic,” and “plane.” Though it is harmless, this type of credulous, too-magical thinking makes me cringe. But I also found this, a much smarter and more thoughtful piece. The author thinks that we reached peak fairy around 1926. He thinks that it was the automobile that ruined the world for fairies. This is not just because cars are noisy and are made of metal (fairies hate iron), but because we stopped walking. In particular, we stopped walking in quiet places where nature is still unspoiled.
Though it’s bad manners to quote authors’ last paragraphs, I’ll make an exception here, because I think it’s important: “So, I’m pretty sure cars killed off the fairies and reduced the trove of local stories. And I’m also pretty sure of this: these could be revived if only we got out and about by foot more often, especially where the pavement ends.”
Rational as the author is, clearly he wants the fairies back. I do, too.
Often I stand in my upstairs windows, which face into the woods, downhill toward a little stream. Many times from those windows I have seen the white deer. I have seen an owl perched in the huge old beech tree that overhangs the big rock. The owl flew away on enormous wings when it saw me watching. The white deer, I believe, sleeps under the big rock sometimes. I have seen the trees crowded with hundreds of crows. The crows increasingly seem to like those woods — a positive sign, I think, of something. Noisy as the crows are (they come almost every day), I love the sound they make. The crows also nest in the woods. During the spring I watch them gliding in and out to their nests through holes in the heavy green canopy. One year, a mama fox raised two cubs in those woods. Out of the woods come squirrels, who sometimes get onto the roof of the house, and possums, for whom I leave snacks on the deck. In the spring, the bottom of the little valley is densely strewn with May apples. After a heavy rain, the stream almost roars as the water cascades over the rocks. The water, which at times has been cloudy, is remarkably clear and clean at present. These upstairs windows face west. The full moon sets in the woods, early in the morning. The wind in the trees sounds very different in the winter than in the summer. But particularly in the summer, the wind in the leaves sounds remarkably like the sea. The woods go on and on for miles. You’d have to cross some roads, but I’m pretty sure that one could walk all the way to Quebec from here, up the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, without really leaving the woods.
And so, reading W.B. Yeats’ carefully curated fairy stories from the 19th Century, I ask myself: Shouldn’t there be fairies in those woods? Should I hide the cars up the hill? Would I have to squint and look for them out of the edges of my eyes? Should I try taking naps on the big rock, under the beech tree? Would I have to eat some mushrooms? What sort of fairies might they be? Would they like me? Should I post a little sign, “Fairies welcome here”?
But seriously, the cultural loss is devastating. The 19th Century Irish country people whom Yeats interviewed about fairies were nominally Catholic, but I get the strong impression that Catholicism was a very weak force compared with the ancient folk beliefs. Priests were to be made fun of, but you’d better listen to what the fairies say. Whereas, if I hiked to the north and interviewed some neighbors, they’d know plenty of church talk, but they’d be utterly empty of imagination. And how many of them still walk in the woods?
There was a brilliant piece in last Sunday’s New York Times by E.O. Wilson, the biologist. He is arguing for the Half-Earth project, which he believes is necessary if the human species is to survive. The Half-Earth project calls for setting aside half of the earth as habitat for other species. Humans would keep to their own half, and in a sustainable way. That’s a brilliant idea. Maybe, then, there’d be room enough on earth for the fairies, too. Meanwhile I’ve got a little spot for them to help tide them over, if they’d like to have it.
If E.O. Wilson is right, and if we don’t make room for earth’s other creatures, then we’ll be next. It was just that the fairies went first.
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Back in 2014, I posted photos of a caboose that was for sale. At the time the caboose was located in a private park near Madison, North Carolina. Last year, the town of Stuart, Virginia, bought the caboose and moved it to Stuart.
I’d have to say that I was pretty disappointed when I drove by to check out the caboose a few days ago. It’s now parked in a falling-apart old industrial neighborhood near the Mayo River. The caboose looks ill-at-ease and a little embarrassed to be where it is. The restoration work has been so-so. In fact, no work has been done on the interior at all.
The residents of the abbey actually briefly considered buying the caboose and renovating it as a B&B. The price of the caboose was reasonable, but the catch was the cost and hassle of moving it. Apparently the only effective way of moving something so heavy is with an industrial crane. So the cost of moving the caboose would have been greater than the cost of the caboose itself.
Still, I can’t help but think that the caboose would have been much happier here, tucked up into the woods above the orchard, nicely landscaped. There’s already water, electricity, and a septic tank connection at that spot, because that’s where I parked my camping trailer while I was building the house.
Oh well. Maybe a tiny house someday.
You’d think that radical centrists, whose perpetual wrongness is exceeded only by their perpetual smugness, would give up and go away. But their latest project is harassing the New York Times’ op-ed pages for “lack of opinion diversity.”
We liberals are said to live in a bubble, you see. We are regularly scolded for failing to “reach out” to Trump supporters. We are said not to understand Trump-supporter grievances and Trump-supporter views.
Here I need words for maximum contempt, maximum derision, and a healthy burst of anger. To say what I actually think would be too rude. But the truth of the matter is that I understand Trump supporters perfectly well. There is no need to “reach out” to them, because no bubble could possibly be good enough to prevent us from hearing all about what they think. We are fully immersed in it, even after we clean them out of our Facebook feeds. I know exactly what Republicans are going to say before they say anything. I know all their talking points. Name an issue, and I’ll tell you what Republicans think. And it’s 98.6 percent horsewash, an ugly mix of distortion, denial, fallacy, meanness, corrupt theology, and constantly repeated lies.
The idea, then, is that in the name of “opinion diversity,” the horsewash that saturates the right-wing media and that has warped the minds of about 40 percent of the population should also be allowed into the New York Times. It is alleged that this would somehow improve the minds and politics of we liberals who read the New York Times. It’s medicine we need that the Times ought to give us, an antidote to our lefty “partisan” views.
But this is exactly how we got to where we are today. When Fox News came along 25 years ago and learned how to make a profitable billionaire-owned business out of brainwashing ignorant old white people without a pot to piss in into becoming ever-angry foot soldiers for the billionaire agenda, the mainstream media were caught off guard. Often, those in the mainstream media knew a lie when they saw one, but to say that something was false and intentionally deceptive was not permitted on grounds of “balance.” And so, for 25 years, the mainstream media’s line was “opinions differ on whether the world is flat.” Thus the mainstream media was paralyzed and was unable to report, as a matter of plain fact, that Donald Trump is a corrupt and dangerous madman. Terrified of being accused of lack of balance, the mainstream media remained easily manipulable and thus actually wrote much more about Hillary Clinton’s emails than about Donald Trump’s criminal history and foreign entanglements. A media catastrophe enabled a political catastophe. Now we’re on course for a constitutional crisis and a catastrophe for the American democracy. And yet we’re told that we need yet more of what got us here.
The world is not flat. If an op-ed policy that refuses to coddle lies and distortion makes a bubble, then who would resent that bubble other than those who have lies to sell and those who enable them with their centrist apologetics?
Radical centrists see politics as inherently symmetrical. If there are irrational partisans on the right, then radical centrists assume that there must be equally irrational partisans on the left, in equal numbers. If partisans on the right lie and distort, then partisans on the left must equally lie and distort. Only centrists, they believe, can see things with objectivity and clarity and avoid partisan excess. Yes, there are those on the left who think that we have some sort of religious duty to “reach out” to Trump supporters. Let them alight from their Priuses and actually get some Trump-supporter spit in their faces, rather than sermonizing about it on Facebook, and see what they end up learning from those Trump supporters.
The right-wing media and right-wing politics have dug a very deep hole. With a still-unknown amount of foreign help, we have all fallen into that hole. “Opinion diversity,” which really means tolerating lies and disguised agendas, is not going to get us out. It’s how we dig the hole deeper.
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Flowers can be remarkably hard to photograph. The problem is holding the subtle range of color and texture in all the parts of the flower. A little bit of backlighting helps. And the exposure has to be just right.
This is a digital photo, but I’m about to shoot the same flowers with color film. Soon: fruit tree blossoms.
The Washington Post has a funny story this morning about how keeping chickens is now a status symbol in Silicon Valley. The status of having well-kept chickens, the story says, is “on par with driving a Tesla.” The story is “The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens.”
Spending $20,000 on a chicken coop is a bit extreme. Nor does one have to pay hundreds, or thousands, of dollars for fancy-bred hens. Ordinary chickens from a good farm supply store will be just fine. Still, despite the excess, I’m all for it. I’m all for anything that gives chickens better lives and raises awareness of how important chickens are to us — not to mention what sweet, highly conscious creatures they are.
Meanwhile, for some very sad reading, the Intercept has this: “Consumers Are Revolting Against Animal Cruelty — So the Poultry Industry Is Lobbying for Laws to Force Stores to Sell Their Eggs.”
The way chickens are treated by the chicken and egg industry is almost unimaginable in its cruelty. The whole point of it is to make eggs and chicken meat cheap, with no regard for the chickens.
I believe that everyone with a conscience should have a rule: Don’t eat chickens raised by the cheap-chicken industry, and don’t buy eggs from the cheap-eggs industry. Why not find a source that gives the chickens decent lives. Yes, it will cost more. But the reallocation of consumers’ egg dollars will force the industry to change. Every egg laid by a happy chicken is one less egg that has to be laid by a miserable chicken.
And for those whose living situation allows keeping chickens, do it! Keep as many hens as is practical, and sell or give away your egg surplus.
There are many people who believe, ostensibly as a matter of science, that there is no nutritional or health advantage in organic foods. I beg to differ.
For years, I searched for organic chicken feed and couldn’t locate any. A horticulturist friend who helped with the search reported that a feed maker in Virginia said, “We could make organic chicken feed, but nobody would be able to afford to buy it.”
Then, a year ago, I discovered that Tractor Supply stores sell two types of organic chicken feed. I believe it was a relatively new product then, but I’m not sure when it became available. Last year’s new chickens also came from Tractor Supply. A sign near the baby-chicken area said that the chicks had been raised on organic feed. We continued to feed them organic baby feed until they were big enough for the adult laying mash. The abbey has never had a generation of such healthy, good-laying chickens.
It’s possible, of course, that it’s not just the organic ingredients that make the chickens thrive. It’s also possible that the feed is better and more expensively formulated, since it sells for twice the price of inorganic feeds. But here’s the thing. The abbey’s chickens never really used to like their inorganic feed. We tried several types. Always the chickens would pick through it, get the bits they wanted, and flick the rest on the ground for the voles to eat. I believe they wasted half their feed. It’s remarkable, but feeding the hens organic feed actually has ended up costing less, because they like the feed and don’t waste it. In particular, it was the corn in the inorganic feed that they didn’t like. That was certainly GMO corn. When the chickens were on inorganic feed, we also had a chronic problem with soft egg shells. Feeding the hens oyster shells helped. But the eggs shells on the organic feed are perfect — almost too strong — with no need for oyster shells as a supplement. There also are never any red spots in the eggs anymore, meaning, I’m sure, that their ovaries are healthy.
All four of last year’s new girls are going strong in spite of multiple unsuccessful hawk attacks. I’m hoping that the hawks will just learn to stay away, not least because I do my best to watch the chickens like a hawk.
All the chickens lay an egg a day. During a very cold spell in December, they slacked off a little. But after the weather warmed up they went right back to an egg a day. I give away the surplus eggs. They’re very much in demand. The girls have lots of pasture and get lots of greenery such as clover. Soon the new grass will be in. And of course all the abbey’s grounds are organically fertilized. So abbey eggs, for the last year, have been 100 percent organic. Even $8 organic, “free range” eggs from Whole Foods are nowhere near as good, with pale yolks and thinner shells. Every pound of organic food that comes in to feed the chickens ends up on the ground as chicken poop fertilizer. Year by year, the soils builds. I can’t imagine not having chickens.
The hen in the photo above, by the way, I call Fiona the Second. Like Fiona the First, who is now in chicken heaven, Fiona the Second is totally in love with me. She’s also the top chicken in the pecking order, though they never peck each other. I’m pretty sure that, when hens are not crowded and not stressed, they’re particularly nice to each other.
I have a clear memory of the first book that I ever checked out of the public library. It was Space Cat, by Ruthven Todd. It’s a short (72 pages) science fiction children’s novel.
Whether I was in the second or third grade, I’m not certain. I think the book would have been within my reading ability in the second grade. I doubt that I could have been kept away from the public library until I was in the third grade. I would have been eight or nine years old, and the year would have been 1956 or 1957. I recall that it was a weekend afternoon. After we got home, I went straight to my room and read the book. I finished it well before suppertime. I believe I cried when the story was over. I begged to go back to the library for more books, but my father said, sorry, not today.
I’ve thought about this book often. For some reason, last week it was in my mind long enough that it occurred to me to check and see if the book could be bought from a used book seller on Amazon. Indeed, there were many copies available. They’re not cheap, because I saw from the reviews that I’m not the only person who remembers this book from childhood. I got a good copy that had been discarded from a school library. It cost me $44.20.
Ruthven Todd, I was not surprised to learn, was a Scotsman, from Edinburgh. He had a bit of a dissipated life, it seems, and became an alcoholic. Space Cat, which was published in 1952, made him some money, enough that he wrote a few sequels. The American version was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York.
Tonight I think I’ll drink a toast to Ruthven Todd and read to the cat a few lines from Space Cat:
Slowly, ever so slowly, the bright moon started to climb up the sky, and Flyball twitched a possessive whisker toward it. That was his Moon. None of the others really knew anything about it. He purred gently to himself, basking in the admiration of the earth-bound. Then he burst into a cheerful song:
The Moon is only the start,
Says Flyball the flier.
We’ll reach the stars yet
Going higher and higher.
We’ll voyage right round space
To the ends of the sky.
Oh, no one ever can guess
How far we will fly!”
Even for those of us who don’t deify Billy Graham, it would still be hard to say anything bad about him. He never preached hatred. In fact he was friends with Martin Luther King and once bailed King out of jail in Alabama. Though he meddled in politics, he was reasonably nonpartisan about it. He refused to join the odious Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” in 1979 and said, “I’m for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice.” How many white preachers have ever talked about social justice? When televangelist Jim Bakker was sent to prison for fraud in 1989, newspapers looked into Graham’s finances the same way they had looked into Bakker’s. Bakker was a con man, but Graham was always found to be squeaky clean. He was married to one woman for almost 64 years.
The Washington Post reports that Graham will lie in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol from Feb. 28 to March 1. It will be almost like a state funeral.
And so it’s not surprising that the media have been filled with panegyrics for Billy Graham. I have seen only one piece, in the Guardian, that looks at Billy Graham from another angle. That’s “Billy Graham was on the wrong side of history,” by historian Matthew Avery Sutton. Sutton writes, “Graham had good intentions, as his work desegregating his crusades demonstrated. But when his influence really would have counted, when he could have effected real change, real social transformation, he was too locked into last-days fearmongering to recognize the potential of the state to do good. We are all paying the price.”
Billy Graham’s focus, then, was on “salvation,” and you’d better come and get your salvation quick because the end is near. Saving the earth didn’t much matter. It was saving souls that Billy Graham was into, and he developed methods for doing it wholesale.
Not too long ago, I assumed that the idea of “salvation” must have been a Christian innovation. That is not the case. Max Weber, in his classic The Sociology of Religion, has a good bit to say about the concept of “salvation.” The concept has existed all over the world, in forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Hinduism and Judaism. What we need to be saved from, and the means of attaining salvation, vary greatly. But the demand for salvation, it seems, is perpetually strong. It’s a good business to be in. Most people never stop to think about the ridiculousness of the idea that some magic wand can somehow make the difference between eternal salvation and eternal perdition. The concept of salvation is useful only to those who have something invisible to sell.
In light of Weber’s ideas, one could point out three elements that helped make Billy Graham such a celebrity.
First, Graham represented the Protestant church, which meant that Graham could offer membership in the church. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the church there is no salvation. The church is, as Weber writes, seen as “vested with the control of grace.” The church thus has shelves well stocked with fresh salvation. Come and get it.
Second, the price is cheap. Weber writes, “The level of personal ethical accomplishment must therefore be made compatible with average human qualifications, and this in practice means that it can be set quite low.” Easy terms and no credit check, either.
Third, Graham was a “religious virtuoso” who added value and sparkle to the deal, absolutely free. Weber writes, “Whoever can achieve more in the ethical sphere, i.e., the religious virtuoso, may thereby, in addition to insuring his own salvation, accumulate good works for the credit of the institution, which will then distribute them to those in need of good works.”
So that boils down to millions of lost souls “saved,” because the church was seen as a warehouse overflowing with salvation and grace, the price of salvation was cheap, and the bestower of salvation was charismatic and famous to boot. Lost souls know a good deal when they seen one. Basic salvation, no Billy Graham sparkle added, would have cost them a great deal more if they got it from a Jim Bakker, or a Pat Robertson, or a Joel Osteen.
In Billy Graham’s 99 years, has the world gotten any better with all this affordable grace and salvation added to the world? But as Matthew Avery Sutton argues in the Guardian, Graham didn’t much care about the world. If people of little ethical accomplishment can get into heaven so cheaply, then why not let the world burn, and seven billion souls burn in it?
My opinion is that Alexa and Siri are useless. Last week, I met my first Apple HomePod at a friend’s house. Siri was a total idiot who knew nothing and who kept getting things wrong. I feel sure that HomePod buyers shout “Siri, stop!” much more often than they say, “Hey, Siri.” It was like trying to argue with a cat.
Yet a piece by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times this morning has the headline “Why We May Soon Be Living in Alexa’s World.” Not me!
Apparently tens of millions of people find Alexa useful. But I don’t play music as background noise. I don’t order pizza. I don’t want my thermostats, or my light switches, to try to think for me. I don’t need help ordering from Amazon, either.
Back in 1987, Apple sales folk had a video for their corporate customers called “Knowledge Navigator.” It was amazing. Clearly the video was Steve Jobs’ dream about what computers would be able to do for us in the future, and how we would interact with computers. The human in the video was a Berkeley professor. The person inside the computer was his knowledge assistant. There was no pizza, no thermostats, no light switches, no asking the computer to play music. Instead, it was about stuff that actually mattered.
When Alexa or Siri reach the point that they can actually help people with research, I’ll be interested. When they can get messages to me without my ever having to talk on the phone, I’ll be interested.
If Steve Jobs were alive today, I wonder whether he would be worried about the failure of his vision. We keep getting cheated out of the bright futures we were promised. The old Walt Disney “Tomorrow Land” television shows of the 1950s and early 1960s told us that robots and automation would free us up to live lives of comfort and leisure. But instead, people work harder than ever, and most people have gotten poorer. Computers haven’t made us any smarter, any more than television did. Instead, computers have dumbed us down and, like television, have trained us to be better consumers. With all that knowledge and information right under our noses, most people are more easily deceived than ever.
I am pretty sure that I don’t want to live in Alexa’s world.
