Brit Rock Star, Wife Destroy Civilization

Meet the Geezers:

Name: Tommy

Instrument: Rhythm Guitar

Height: 6’ 2”

Hair: Gray

Eyes: Blue

Ideal Date: Barbara

Pet Peeve: Rich Liberals

The March Yoga Journal has an interview with Sting and his wife, big-deal British movie producer (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Trudie Styler. Styler has a yoga DVD to flog, so the two chat about their introductions to yoga, its effect on their lives, and famous yogis they have known.

F’rinstance, the late Ashtanga Yoga founder, K. Patabhi Jois visited the couple’s Tuscany estate and scolded Styler when she complained about being stiff: “Bad woman. Body not stiff, mind stiff.” He was a famous and talented wog, though, so she could allow certain liberties.

I do asana -- what we call “yoga,” you know, the weird poses -- five or six times a week, and every once in a while, I see if meditation works yet. Yoga, which I very casually...no...which I’m marginally aware of, is a way of life based on Patanjali’s “Eightfold Path.”  I’m too much of a sensualist, and I like my anger too much, to get further than maintaining a capable body, and behaving well enough to stay married and out of jail.

Patanjali (pat-Angelie) was one of those historical presences, like Moses or Lao Tsu who left us something valuable, but whom we don’t know outside later hagiography and their written work. Patanjali may have been contemporary with Lao Tsu and the Buddha, or with Jesus, a five hundred-year anachronism. He studied medicine and grammar, but we know him for the eight limbs of yoga.

(Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, descended from the same lost tongue, spoken in what is now northern Turkey, as the modern European languages. The word “yoga” comes from the same root as “yoke,” and means “union,” union of body and soul, self and god, man and nature.)

The Eightfold Path includes five Yamas and five Niyamas, disciplines for social harmony and emotional stability; Asanas, postures to cultivate strength balance and flexibility; Pranayama, breath exercises; Pratyahara, withdrawal of the mind from sensuality; Dharana or concentration; Dhyana or meditation; and Samadhi or enlightenment. I like the Yamas and Niyamas a lot. They’re sort of a yogic Ten Commandments, but they cover the same territory in a way that is both more flexible and demanding. Isvara Pranidhana is devotion to God; Svadhyaya is self study, examination of conscience and application of scripture to our paths; Tapas is austerity and rigor; Santosa is acceptance; Sauca is hygiene, including mental hygiene. Those are the Niyamas. The Yamas are Ahimsa, or non-violence; Satya, truthfulness; Asteya, recognizing that there are things which are not ours; Brahmacharya, recognizing the full humanity of our sexual partners and conserving our energy; Aparigraha, non-covetousness, but more importantly, the reluctance to burden ourselves with things which don’t help us follow our paths (Aparigraha is the one to remember for this essay).

In grade school catechism, we learned that there was more forbidden by the Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” than the lethal, special case. Mere anger was a sin against it, as were gluttony, or even the apparent virtue in which, say, a daughter sacrifices her chances of family or career to care for an infirm and manipulative parent. There have been at least two Vatican encyclicals in the last century and a half which have included injustice toward labor among the sins against life (Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno).

The Yamas and Niyamas are more positive than the Commandments. They are disciplines (“yama” means discipline) rather than prohibitions, practice rather than obedience, something you can get better at. The Christian notion of sin derives, no doubt, from ancient social reform (and possibly from intuited understanding of a relationship between virtue and mental health), but the most grievous sins aren’t necessarily the ones with the greatest consequences; they are the ones in which we consciously reject God’s grace. The Yamas and Niyamas assume grace as a sort of natural resource, which can be cultivated. We don’t need to walk on eggs, avoiding sin, or depend on Jesus’ ransom, paid on the cross.

Sting (nee Gordon Sumner) is a baby-boom singer and bass player, an advocate internationally for justice, and a former tax exile. He is married to Trudie Styler, an actress and producer, likewise born in postwar England. In the Yoga Journal interview, Sting says that he does 60 to 90 minutes of yoga a day. Styler does yoga three times a week, and meditates twice every day. Sting says, “Yoga is a great way to offset the downsides of touring by bringing much-needed peace and sanity into what can be a hectic life.”  Styler says her morning meditation “sets me up for the day and gives me a great sense of calm. I can go into meetings feeling calm and empowered. I can stay clear and really listen to what’s coming up.” Together they founded the Rainforest Foundation Fund to preserve the disappearing rainforest, and seek justice for its indigenous people.

Styler produced a film called Crude. She says “yoga has given me a lot of courage to fight injustice.” Crude documents the disease and displacement of Ecuadoran Kayapo Indians due to oil drilling.

When asked where she got her sense of justice, Styler answered, “My mother. We lived in government housing and had no money.” She continues, “When I was two, I got hit by a truck.” The company tried to avoid responsibility for Styler’s injury and disfigurement, and her mother took them to court, “and got some money to compensate for this severe injury that I sustained. So this voice has been active in me for many years. My mom had a great sense of justice and compassion.”

Hmm. Two year old hit by truck. Mother sues responsible party for medical costs and rehabilitation, and becomes example of compassionate justice. Maybe litigiousness meant something different in 1956 England than it does now in Minnesota. And where was National Health?

They own homes in Wiltshire, the Lake District, New York, Malibu, and Tuscany. Sting’s net worth is estimated at more than a third of a billion dollars. Did I say he used to be a tax exile?

In 2007, a British employment tribunal found that Styler had been responsible for the discriminatory dismissal of Jane Martin, one of her cooks. Martin had become pregnant, and ill. Styler’s management firm had done the actual firing, but the tribunal found that Styler was the “driving force, manipulating others to perform her dirty work.”

The Stings appealed. An appeals tribunal upheld the finding, and awarded Martin twenty-five thousand pounds. This tribunal’s transcript quotes Styler as saying, “Who the fuck does she think she is? She is my chef in the UK. She needs to be available when I need her, or she needs to re-think her position.”

Boil an egg, honey.

Of course a family worth nine figures is de facto a business, and the homes are places to network. Sting has said that bars and clubs are the shop floor of the music business, and he’s apparently been promoted to the board room. Jane Martin’s pregnancy was more than a personal inconvenience; it interfered with Trudie Styler’s deal making. In a way, she must think of herself as the leader of a tribe, with responsibility for the cooks, and lawyers, and blue-jeaned chanteuses who make the beds and entertain the grandkids. If a member of the tribe doesn’t pull her weight, she needs to rethink her position.

Styler needed Martin’s cooking to entertain artists and backers, provide a relaxed entertaining atmosphere in which the next movie could find funding. Crude brought information to its audiences about injustices visited upon other human beings for the sake of fueling the developed world. Styler’s yoga video, Warrior Yoga, was “created for everyone, but especially for women who are in the battlefield of life.”

The thing, though, is that authentic tribal membership is automatic and permanent. Organizations like Sting and Styler’s (or the Cosmodemonic Bus Company or your employer) usurp the prerogatives of the tribe, but are indifferent to the humanity that make them run. Tribal leaders are part of their tribes, not the tribes’ owners. Besides that, the system which told us about Indians poisoned by oil companies runs on stolen oil. Styler greases the wheel that grinds the real tribes.

Rich liberals depend on the system that they abhor to maintain the way of life to which they have become accustomed. You can’t put more into the system than you take out, gatekeepers don’t create wealth, they distribute shares, and if the system is essentially entropic, quit trying to pull my leg. Money equals fuel equals money. From now on we’ll be pumping less and less gas and oil, and it appears that burning any of it alters the climate to which our civilization is adapted. If you’re rich, you own more fuel than I do, and I defy you not to burn way more than your share.

The February Yoga Journal had two items that seem apposite. First a full page ad for the mPulse Smart Sauna. Under the headline, “Want to generate Tapas?” is a photograph of a woman performing some kind of lunge, taken through the glass wall of a very large and beautiful free-standing sauna. (You’ll recall that Tapas is one of the Niyamas, and means austerity, and I wonder how many of these boxes Trudie and Gordon own.) The other is a quote from one Douglas Brooks, “a Tantric scholar and professor of religious studies at Rochester University.” In a philosophical article, “Aim High,” about something that I won’t bore you over called the Purusharthas, the author quotes Brooks as saying, “Wealth is not a bad thing, and there is no zero-sum game.”

Buckminster Fuller once pointed out that there are three things, matter, energy, and intellect. He was saying that human ingenuity could make it possible for the whole world to survive comfortably, each one realizing his or her potential. Douglas Brooks, the tantric-econ professor,  must be saying something similar, but there are zero sum games, and contemporary commerce is one. There’s only so much fuel, and people do starve.

Exxon, or whoever, is pumping oil out from under the Kayapo Indians to fly the Stings from Heathrow to Malibu, and deliver their Tuscan honey and olive oil to Harrod’s. NATO is in Afghanistan for Sting and Styler’s three hundred and some million. My friend Greg Klyma, a talented musician and witty lyricist, the “Rust Belt Vagabond,” tours endlessly and kind of scrapes a living, because some guy in a suit figured he could get a cut if Sting were rich, and life was harder for journeyman rockers. Who knows how many very low-budget movies didn’t get made or distributed because Trudy Styler hogged the gravy. Making a living and making a killing: Maybe they're more than just figures of speech.

In a 2003 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald’s Neil McCormack, Sting said, "I have no excuses. But this is a conundrum faced by anyone who has a car, central heating, air-conditioning. I don't know how to alter the paradox. I could go and live in the middle of Hampstead Heath with a blanket around me and eat grass. Maybe as a gesture that might be heroic and even considered useful."

Sure. I’d vote for that, but why take the blanket. The cops would eventually chase you out of Hampstead Heath, though.

He’s right though, about the conundrum, and, with a household fortune about a thousandth of Sting’s, I wonder if I’m on the venal side of the privilege line. I don’t have air-conditioning, but I live where the scorching weather doesn’t last more than a couple of weeks (yet), and I do my asanas in January wearing nothing but a pair of trunks, not unlike the little blue number Sting wore to fight Maud’Dib in David Lynch’s Dune. I’m privileged, and so are you.

Fuller said that if you want to get rid of something, replace it with something better. So what would I do with Sting’s unimaginable treasure? Sting’s three-and-a-half zillion dollars isn’t his. He owns a share of it, but so do you and I and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Still, Sting’s in possession, and I won’t make him disembowel himself, if he does the right thing. Here it is -- no charge.

There’s a ninety-one year old architect in the Arizona desert. His name is Paolo Soleri, and forty years ago, he wrote a book that could give you a hernia, called City in the Image of Man (if you follow the link, scroll down a little more than halfway). It’s not the first adult book I ever read, but it’s the first book I read as an adult. Soleri’s thesis was that replacing sprawling cities with ones that were, in his ballsy neologism, “neogeolgical,” would be a form of miniaturization that would be the appropriate next step in evolution. The book's cities were human-made mountains. This would free up land that’s currently under concrete for agriculture and wilderness; it would reduce logistical costs, because everything would be in this sort of giant parking ramp covered with tipis -- okay, a shabono for Sting; and it would increase creativity by putting us comfortably closer to each other. Soleri is actually building one of these bungalows. It’s called Arcosanti, and it’s about zero-point-zip percent done. Soleri has said that he’d have it finished by now if he’d had the price of a single 747.

Now, 747s cost between two and two-and-a-half zillion dollars, so if Sting moved into Arcosanti, and dumped his fortune -- "sorry kids, you’re not exactly out of the will, there just isn’t one" -- on Soleri, or whoever winds up running the show next, they could build a really good city in the image of man. (Note to James Cameron: Sorry I haven’t seen your latest yet. I hear it has kind of an environmentalist message. Maybe you should have skipped the message and took the cash to Soleri.)

Don’t like that one? Same deal for Wes Jackson at the Land Institute. How about John and Nancy Todd’s Ocean Arks? The Buckminster Fuller Institute. Bill Mollison or David Holmgren? How about first blowing a couple million locating the thirty-year old whose PhD thesis has an answer to our situation. And trading him your fortune for a (small) annuity.

‘Cause, I tell you, it’s not about the planet. And the Kayapo are no innocents. We don’t recognize it, but we’ve made war on the Kayapo. They’ve been on both sides of the rapine and murder, since long before the oil and timber companies came on the scene; they just never came up against as formidable enemy as Homo corporation. We will either wise up, and the Kayapo can go about their business, or we’ll take ourselves out, and they can go about their business. It’s about civilization, and justice for eight billion people. You and your tribe are in the way, Macbeth.

(Today’s picture of me in front of Macy’s was taken in November by a downtown beggar. He had some genuinely clever patter that involved slight of hand with a War-era zinc penny -- two pennies, if the truth were known.)

Local Grouch Only One Who Knows

I'm grouchy and impatient today, working on a longer essay that is coming slowly, and which I'm not sure is entirely creditable. Meanwhile, I've torn my drawing technique apart, trying to get a more painterly style. It's more painterly, but it's clumsier and takes longer (it should be quicker and give me better likenesses). People on the street and in authority seem stupid, and bent on frustrating anything besides the conventions that are stampeding us to the abyss. Inanimate objects seem to have sinister agendas, and I feel clumsy and incompetent.

I’m posting a scan of a cartoon by Michael Phillips from the Summer, 1977 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly. The theme for that issue was “voluntary simplicity,” and these three panels became a beacon for me. I e-mailed Phillips, asking for permission, but he didn’t get back to me. Probably an oversight.

The panels say, “The first year of ecology I changed my spending. More services and less products. I got Rolfed, saw a psychiatrist and hired a gardener.” "The Rolfer, the psychiatrist, and the gardener then bought summer homes at Lake Tahoe." "The second year I saved my money at Citizen's Savings." "Then I found out Citizen's is the biggest lender on condominiums at Lake Tahoe." "The third year I gave the money I didn't spend to my church." "Now they're building a retirement home at Lake Tahoe." "I know what to do now." "I'm reducing my income."

In modern language, your income determines your carbon footprint. Scary. A well meaning westerner has a choice between hypocrisy and marginalization. Blessed Saint Garrett Hardin, pray for us.

Decades later, I’ve thought of an exception. If you could divert a large income to developing a just and sustainable world, the large income is okay, but that itself is a vocation, and skimming is cheating.

More Constant Battles

Continuing with LeBlanc’s Constant Battles, I’m realizing that it’s useful, despite its thesis’ "going without saying." We’re beings which seek resources, as all do, and will plunder to get them, if that’s what it takes. There’s a pornographic appeal in reading about pre-historic atrocity, or stories from aboriginal sources about torture killings. If there’s value, though, in following LeBlanc’s grim telling of our past, it has to be that, in seeing our situation with new clarity, we can design a future that sidesteps the old horror, perpetrated with modern genius. Ka-boom!

We get out of ecological balance when we exceed our territory's carrying capacity, then we go to war so we can continue in our profligate ways. (I’d guess that the people we call conservatives have a more pressing sense of this than liberals, but lack the vocabulary to allow understanding and correction. Consequently, they’re morally content with empire, and practically confuse liberty and regimentation.)

Toward the end of Chapter Three, LeBlanc spins a scenario that resonates with Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons. He tells us that a given period’s competitors will have approximately the same technology, and that the larger population will prevail. (Bad news for the developed world, and -- from a limited point of view -- a sensible reason for the double standard over who gets to own nuclear weapons.)

He imagines two neighboring cultures. “Assume for a moment that by some miracle one of our two groups is full of farsighted ecological geniuses.” They keep their population far enough below carrying capacity, that they can survive minor changes in weather or climate.

“The second group, on the other hand is just the opposite -- it consists of ecological dimwits.” They don’t control their population, and operate right at their territory’s carrying capacity. They get a bad year, and raid the geniuses next door. Over the decades, the dimwits eliminate and replace the geniuses. It’s high school all over again, unless everybody does the right thing.

Hardin’s solution was “mutually agreed mutual coercion.” Figure out carrying capacity, and regulate reproduction. It’s a little more complicated with a global culture that converts fossil fuels into food, but avoiding catastrophe is the agenda for the rest of your lifetime, and mine.

Gregory Bateson: Atheist Prophet Of The Sacred

The following, starting with the story of the oak beams, is a collection of Gregory Bateson quotes. Bateson was a fourth or fifth generation atheist, fascinated by the sacred.

By default, I guess I'm an atheist, but I imagine there's a high correlation between atheism and Asperger's Syndrome, and I'm fairly empathetic. I wonder what is sacred, and what do we owe to it? Is there anything more important? It must be timeless, and unchanging. Esthetics and ethics must square with it, and those are definitely situational. Bateson seemed to understand.

The teachings of traditional religions become mere metaphors, from an informed 21st century perspective. An expanding universe, evolution, and a periodic table of the elements, filled in like a crossword puzzle, are the beginnings of a hard-won global understanding of existence. Archaeological and anthropological reconstruction of scripture's anecdote, show us the feet of clay, or even emptiness where we had imagined footsteps. We analyze scripture itself for vocabulary and diction to identify and date its authors. How far did Jesus have to ascend before he got to heaven?

Here is a story that Gregory Bateson told.

New College Oxford is of rather late foundation, hence the name, It was probably founded around the late 16th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top, yes? These might be eighteen inches square, twenty feet long.

Some five to ten yars ago (circa 1960), so I am told, some busy entomologists went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife, and poked at the beams, and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays.

One of the junior fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be non College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the College itself for some years, and asked about the oaks.

And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well, sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the college was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became bettly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for four hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the Colege hall.”

A nice story. That’s the way to run a culture.

***

I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits together the entire biosphere or creation.

***

Love is contrary to conscious common sense, because love involves the total systemic mind.

***

We never see in consciousness that the mind is like an ecosystem -- a self-corrective network of circuits. We see only the arcs of these circuits. And the instinctive vulgarity of scientists consists precisely in mistaking those arcs for the larger truth, i. e., thinking that because what is seen by consciousness has one character, the total mind must have that character.

***

Magic is what the vulgar and purposive consciousness snipped out of religion.

***

The point is that even before modern technology, something had to be done about the innate split between consciousness and the rest of mind, because the unaided consciousness would always wreck human relations.

***

Religion is what they did.

***


Because the unaided consciousness must always combine the wisdom of the dove with the harmlessness of the serpent.

***

Here is “The Garden of Eden” -- the myth in biblical form (as is so oftent he case) upside down. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of knowledge, an apple high on the tree. They had to place one box on top of another to reach it. They then ate it -- the sweet reward of a successful short-sighted scheme, consciously planned. This made them drunk with partial arrogance.

The arrogance was partial in the sense that what they were arrogant about was that miniscule part of themselves which achieved the consicous plan (no arrogance is total)”

In this arrogance, they threw out all the rest of themselves -- thus breaking up the total systemic thing they called “mind.”

I. e., they threw god out of the garden.

***

After that, the ecosystem of the garden got out of kilter -- because God is the inner and outer systemic character of everything -- mind and garden. So they said, “It’s a vengeful god.”

***

Cain was, appropriately enough, an inventor. He invented agriculture. God (Cain’s total systemic mind, or the systemic human ecosystem in which Cain lived) refused the cabbages which Cain sacrificed. God then told Cain that Abel loved him (Cain). “His desire shall be unto thee, and thou shalt rule over him.” (c. f. the curse on Eve in the previous chapter -- “Thy desire shall be unto thy husband and he shall rule over thee.”) This was the last straw because love is precisely that to which the pragmatic headstrong purposive consciousness must be allergic.

***

Eve began to resent the process of coition and reproduction, which always somehow reminded her of that larger life which Adam had sacrificed in order to buy her a washing machine -- which she had asked for.

***

The lineal arguments of human purpose necessarily conflict with the cybernetic arguments of physiology, sociology, and ecology, and that therefore, following his purposes, man almost ineveitably messes up his own physiology, social sytem, and ecology.

***

I suggest that one of the things man has done through the ages to correct for his shortsighted purposiveness is to imagine personified entities with various sorts of supernatural powers, i. e., gods. These entities, being fictitious persons, are more or less endowed with cybernetic and circuit characteristics.

In a word, I suggest that the supernatural entities of religion are in some sort, cybernetic models built into the larger cybernetic system, in order to correct for non-cybernetic computation in part of that system.

***

We shall have to ask, for example, what sort of corrective is introduced into an otherwise purposive system by the Mass.

Constant Battles: It Goes Without Saying

I’ve begun Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles. This is the book by the archaeologist from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline suggested reading list. Brand quoted it to show that we -- not Gaia -- are imperiled by global warming.

LeBlanc shows archaeological examples of fortification, genocide, erosion, extinction, etc., demonstrating that warfare has been a human activity from forager times until today. He eliminates the idea of our ever having had an Edenic or noble-savage existence using examples of modern forager cultures, in which a quarter of the males die in combat, and the behavior of our nearest primate relatives, the chimps. His thesis is that the pattern is one of each population’s expanding beyond its range’s carrying capacity, then doing what it must -- conquest -- to survive. The existence of war is evidence to LeBlanc of life out of harmony with its environment: if people were fed and comfortable, there would be no incentive for war.

(Fuller, writing during the Cold War, said that the ideological battle between Communism and Capitalism was over whose strategy would best allocate scarce resources. Twenty or thirty years ago, I quoted this to a guy at a party, who reminded me of the religious war brewing between us and Islam. Maybe some zealots can go to war over religion, but most people’s faith isn’t that deep. They go to war over resources, and blame it on God.)

Population is the villain. LeBlanc talks about a Samoan chief, Sila, from his Peace Corps days. Sila complained that the fruit trees didn’t bear the way they did when he was young. For LeBlanc, the problem was that the same harvest needed to feed more people. Slow population increase is the problem. Survival becomes more difficult gradually. There are occasions when the difficulty becomes apparent abruptly, as in the case of natural disasters, but it’s pretty much the case of the frog slowly brought to boil.

I believe I’ll finish Constant Battles, but I didn’t really need to crack the book to say, “Of course!” Organisms move toward nutrients. Why should we be any different? But -- and here’s the ray of hope -- we are the organism that can see the pattern, and organize to avoid the painful parts.

Here's the deal with extinction. Species aren't bad or in the way of some divine plan. What happens is that they are adapted to certain conditions, then the conditions change. But maybe we can notice what's happening, and adapt on purpose to the new conditions.

It won’t be easy. As a species, we are adapted to the global economy, and every one of us -- excepting people like the Yanomamo and !Kung -- included. The people in Brazilian favelas have cell phones, I’m waiting for the bone to heal around an implant for the installation of my new, four thousand-dollar molar, and the hygienist told me she had seen people who have twenty-eight permanent prosthetic toofers. There are people whose immediate struggle for survival is so urgent that they can’t think of anything else, people who haven’t caught on to the Copernican Universe yet, and people with weird, cobbled-together weltanschuaungen, that would see this essay as rankest heresy. And there are villains and demagogues.

Still, there’s hope. The Garden of Eden, and you and I as noble savages, are in the future, not the past. And the alternative kind of sucks.

Open Letter To Representative Jim Davnie

Tuesday was Minnesota's night for precinct caucuses. Precinct caucuses are Minnesota's version of primary elections, although we have those as well. Citizens get together with other members of their parties to choose candidates for office. It's an off year; there's no presidential election until 2012, nationally no senators are running, and our Democratic House member -- Keith Ellison -- is pretty much of a shoo-in for re-election. There were a few resolutions in our precinct, including one that the DFL (Minnesota Democrats) support a Constitutional Amendment stripping corporations of personhood (passed unanimously). The main reason we got together was to choose among us who would go to the next meeting and choose candidates for governor and school board. Even then gubernatorial candidates come out of a primary, and the convention only endorses a candidate, who may or may not win the primary. I went because we are promoting the notion of transition towns, and the caucus seemed like a good place to invite people to our Sustainability Fair on the twenty-seventh.

Among notables who visited our gathering was our Representative to the Minnesota House of Representatives, Jim Davnie. I liked him, but his response to one question bugged me. I wasn't interested in sidetracking the caucus, but my own question remained. I e-mailed Representative Davnie what follows.

Dear Representative Davnie:

I appreciated your visit to my precinct caucus (9-6), and was impressed at your presentation, and at how organized your thoughts were. Your response to one man’s question was surprisingly frank, but left me with an even larger question.

Perhaps you remember the question I’m thinking of. It was a rambler, and you said that you hadn’t followed it all, but thought you might have caught the gist. You offered an answer and the option for the questioner to correct your understanding. Nice!

The question itself amounted to “How are poor working families supposed to accomplish what we need to in this economy?” You expressed understanding and sympathy, but pointed out that Democratic leaders have limited resources, and sometimes must ask their friends (your word) to wait.

I believe your answer satisfied the questioner, but it reminded me that poor families who lose their homes, or are thwarted in the pursuit of education, etc., ultimately won’t be satisfied. Wait for what?

There seemed to be an unspoken assumption, in your answer, that things will get better, that the trend in human progress will continue to be toward greater quality of life for more people. I wondered if you really believe that. If you do, how do you justify that belief in light of what I believe are facts, and which I will list in a moment. If you do not believe that things will get better, why not say as much, and why not be aggressive in remaking Minnesotan, American, and world society?

The “facts” which I claim are various trends, but they all argue that economic progress has stalled and will remain stalled (creating a needy, tractable population) until there is an economic sea change, be that change purposeful human integration with the ecology from which we came, or disaster.

The trends I see are:

* Human Population Approaching or having reached Carrying Capacity;

* Global Warming, and other pollution;

* Peak Oil, and Asian industrialization, changing the energy auction from a buyers’ to a sellers’ market;

* Debt;

* Concentrated Wealth;

* Offshored Manufacturing Base;

* Absurdly Extravagant, even imperial, Military Spending;

* Aging Population, and consequent changes in spending (putting this one next to Overpopulation is sure to bake your noodle).

There are no doubt other trends I have forgotten to include, but these outline the picture I see. The demographic trends should be enough to forestall real recovery for a decade, by which time the others will have put humanity in a genuine bind.

To a certain extent, this letter can’t help but be rhetorical, but, deep down, I don’t believe you need the facts of life outlined for you (nor, I think, does Barack Obama, who increasingly seems more like a rich lawyer, and less like a community organizer). I’m genuinely curious about how you guys -- meaning liberal elected representatives -- rationalize what appears, to this sixty-year old, as the end of the time during which humanity made progress.

What’s up? Are poor people, and most of the rest of us, out of luck?

Groundhog Day And The Rube's Liturgical Calendar

The folklore regarding today is that the hibernating groundhog (Marmota monax) leaves its burrow. Should said rodent see his shadow, it will be frightened and return to hibernation, portending six more weeks of winter. Leaving aside the fact that winter is already pretty close to gone in the Gulf States, and that the tilting planet can tease points not too far south of here with “false spring” in late January, you’ve gotta wonder what a sunny February 2 has to do with weather prediction.

Weather folklore is pretty common. “Red sails at night, sailor’s delight,” etc. “March comes in like a lamb, and goes out like a lion,” which can easily happen, given that the seasons are changing as we approach the equinox, or “A March that comes in like a lamb, goes out like a lion,” which is a much riskier proposition.

I like St. Swithin’s Day, July 15, which is unique, I think, to the United Kingdom, one of those cloudy gray rocks where the Gulf Stream enters the North Sea.  They say you can predict the next forty days’ -- almost six weeks’ --  weather by the weather on St. Swithin’s day. It even has a ditty:

St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.'

(Should Billy Bragg be reading this, mentioning promises made on St. Swithin’s Day, is apt in a song about lost love, but how does the Battle of Agincourt, associated with an entirely different saint, whose feast is three months later, fit?)

February 2 is also Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification of The Virgin. A Jewish mother of two thousand years ago was considered unclean for forty days after giving birth. She went to the temple on the fortieth day, sacrificed a lamb, received the priests’ prayers, and was clean once more. When Christianity became the Roman Empire’s official religion, Candlemas replaced Lupercalia (celebrated on February 15, the day after our St. Valentine’s Day), the feast of the god Lupercus, the Roman equivalent of Pan, which is getting closer to the real sense of Groundhog Day.

In the Celtic pagan calendar, Groundhog Day coincides with Imbolc, which is a feast of purification and returning warmth. In ancient Britain, people would watch, shivering in hope, to see if animals emerged from their dens, predicting an early spring. In fact they usually did emerge, even if the people kept shivering. This is a time when beasts and birds mate, and we have been hearing songbirds trying to hook up, here in Minneapolis, for about a week.

One of Sam’s grade school teachers pointed out to me, that a clear sky means a high-pressure area, and that warm weather won’t move in, until the high passes. Which doesn’t explain the six weeks business, but contains a reductionist kernel of sense.

Lee Bonticou: Channeler With A Welding Torch

 

 

 

 

Sue was looking at Barbara’s copy of the catalog for Lee Bonticou: A Retrospective (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2003, New York) Tuesday night. I was hosting drawing group, and I put it out to see if Sue would notice. She said she loves Lee Bonticou. Sue runs a gallery in the Corcoran Neighborhood, and a lot of her own work involves fiber or fabric, or drawings of it. Jules, our model for the evening, was not wearing any fiber.

I told Sue that I had seen my first Lee Bonticou at Chicago’s Art Institute, on an Eighth Grade class trip. Actually, it may have been two years later on a Biology Club trip to Chicago. Split the difference and call it 1964. I thought, “That thing is really neat. What is it?”

Bonticou is the woman in the photograph, and the piece I saw was a sculpture, about four feet square, of a kind of kiva-looking thing, made by stitching used canvas onto a frame of welded steel. The thing was lined with black velvet -- no landmarks, no reflections -- making the inside seem infinitely deep: the void.

Here I’m scanning photos of some of Bonticou’s work. This woman draws with a welding torch. No, really. I’m not being hyperbolic, or making some obscure connection between sculpture and drawing. Bonticou (born 1931, Rhode Island, United States) discovered that her torch made soot if the mixture was too rich. She liked it, and started using it to make pictures. I’m also including pictures of Paolo Soleri’s (born 1919, Turin, Italy) Arcosanti, drawings by Roger Dean (the guy who did the Yes album covers, born 1944, Kent, England), a sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy (born 1956, Cheshire, England), and some sketches by Cheech Wizard cartoonist Vaughn Bode (born 1941, New York State). They all seem to share an aesthetic. Barbara says that it’s puncture wounds, and she couldn’t look at any of them when she was pregnant. Maybe. Each one displays an environmentalist theme, and resonates with my own, psychedelically formed, aesthetic. I’m particularly interested in the resonance between Bonticou and the two more commercial artists, Dean and Bode. It seems like Bonticou is channeling something.

Examples by Soleri, Goldsworthy, Bode, and Dean are in the previous post.

Shared Esthetic: Bonticou's Peeps

Biomimicry: Detox For An Addicted World

I read an interview with Janine Benyus in the September, 2009 Sun. Benyus is a biologist, the author of both the term and book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. The idea of biomimicry has a lot of appeal to me. (Benyus has a website, asknature.org, where you can ask how nature would accomplish some task, removing salt from water, say, or cleaning an oil spill.)

The Sun is a monthly, nonprofit magazine, published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Carrie gave me a subscription as a thank you gift for letting her give me the MMPI or some other psychological test when she was working on her PhD. She’s been working in chemical dependency for a dozen years or so, and the selection of the Sun seems apt. It’s about fifty pages thick, and full of stories, poems, and black and white photographs by readers. Maybe you noticed the slogan, “Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-free.” above the name. It’s all those, the political being an environmental-leftist bent, but if I were to choose a word to describe The Sun, it would be “Vulnerable,” and vulnerable in a way that frequently jibes with Alcoholics Anonymous’ “Twelve Steps:”

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

(By way of disclosure, I personally smoked enough pot over twenty-five years to stabilize the state of Michouacan’s trade balance, but the habit seemed to fade on its own. Scotch, bourbon, gin, vodka, and vermouth reside in my cupboard, but they’re usually safe from me.)

The September, 2009, Sun contains, beside the Janine Benyus interview, an essay by the late Passionist priest, Thomas Berry, four personal essays, including one recalling the author’s thoughts the night after learning she had cancer, and that she would be in surgery the next day, three poems, and a short story told, by an urbanized Inuit, about confronting himself among his still-traditional kin. The “Readers Write” monthly feature is a collection of anecdotes from readers, in September about being in “The Middle of Nowhere,” both literaly and metaphorically. A world traveler docks the Flying Dutchman to listen to coyotes in the wilderness; a Vietnamese boat refugee comes to America; a harbor seal guides two divers out of a fog-bound kelp forest; three writers suffer three different kinds of abuse from lovers; a driver finds beauty, broken down on a sparsely traveled road; an American Jew experiences kindness from a gruff Egyptian cabdriver in the Sinai  desert; a stroke victim waits by the hospital door for her ride; a teenager repeatedly runs away to the airport, then returns home to abuse; naive college graduates become counselors at a desert boot camp for juvenile delinquents; two hitch-hikers find a sign announcing the middle of nowhere in the desert; a religious-nut father takes his children into the sticks to await the rapture, then changes his mind; an Alzheimer’s patient has a moment of lucidity; a woman has her first orgasm house-sitting a trailer full of show dogs.

I think you get the idea. My inner Bogart thinks it’s kind of cloying, but probably apt, and any reservations are his own problem. “Yielding is the way of the Tao.”

Biomimicry is the idea that we should borrow design principles from nature to make the things we use. Permaculture, about which I’ve written a lot, is an example: mimic and integrate with the local ecosystem. Examples include adhesives based on the ones mussels uses to anchor themselves to rocks, self-cleaning paints, and ceramics based on abalone shells. Biomimicry has helped scrub smokestacks at cement plants, and reduce the power used to manufacture cement. Benyus says, “People are looking at how we can use solar energy to split hydrogen and oxygen for use in a fuel cell. Every leaf you see is already doing this.”

The word “addiction” doesn’t appear in the interview, but Benyus would probably accept a diagnosis of human addiction to poison, high heat, and pressure. She says she believe that we discovered fossil fuels before “our consciousness had evolved enough to know what to do with all that energy.” We are “mesmerized” by internal combustion, “enthralled” by fire. “People think all we need to fix our predicament is a free source of energy, but I think we need to change our behaviors. More energy would just help us deplete the earth’s lifeblood faster.”

Benyus mentions researchers’ studying how spiders spin their webs. Here’s a little animal that extrudes something with greater tensile strength than steel from its body. In a different part of the interview, Beyus points out the amazing thing about this. “(Chemist Terry Collins) has said that industrial chemistry uses every element in the periodic table...and employs brutish simple means to force these elements together.” She goes on to stress the ecological novelty of these compounds, and the disproportionate waste that comes from their manufacture. “And then you have nature’s chemistry, which, instead of using every element in the periodic table, uses a small, life-friendly subset and employs elegant recipes to combine them. It’s all done with water as a solvent.” And every product of each process is an input in another.

The Elegant recipes are the hitch. Darn it, I wish I hadn’t taken the Stewart Brand book back to the library. I may have the particulars of this example wrong, but the argument is something like this: Nature does indeed do marvelous things using just a fraction of the 92 non-human-made elements. It goes without saying that this is desirable, but it is/would be a monumental engineering achievement, were we to cut our use of the elements back to the ones that the rest of life uses. The spider’s thread, for example (here’s where I’m not sure of the particulars), is a composite, combining strands from three separate organs. Spiders can do what they do, because of countless adaptations over unimaginable lengths of time. The interference of three separate organs to produce the thread, and the chemistry within each of the three, is a puzzle that would tease a lot of researchers for a lot of years.

Which isn’t to say it’s out of reach. Computers routinely whip the John Henrys of the chess world, forty years after it was a commonplace that myriad possibilities would overwhelm a machine at each move.

An article in the May 4, 2009 New Yorker, “Open Channels,” by Jerome Groopman, discusses a promising treatment for cystic fibrosis -- and potentially other genetic disorders -- developed because computers could look for both the responsible gene and the compound that would correct for its mutant disability.

Cystic fibrosis is a fatal genetic disorder, in which the responsible gene fails to produce a protein which channels chloride ions. The sufferer’s internal organs become clogged, preventing nutrition, and limiting respiration.

US and Canadian researchers located the cystic fibrosis gene, in 1985, using a technique called “chromosome jumping.” In 1998, other researchers began to use a robotic technique called “high-throughput screening” to find a way of moving the harmful ions. In 2008, patients showed dramatic improvement in lung function in a test of a drug produced by Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

It seems ironic that we would need computers and robots to mimic nature, but there’s also the problem of an infrastructure that’s adapted to great gobs of energy, and a population of seven billion, headed for eight, that needs to eat. You and I are in touch via a network of who knows how many computers. Benyus, herself, lives out in the sticks where she can apprentice herself to the trees and coyotes, and that takes energy. Of her firm, she says, “It’s a challenge to make sure I...spend time by myself in the natural world. To facilitate this, everybody in our company gets to choose one month each year in which he or she will not travel.” In other words, the author of Biomimicry uses a lot of jet fuel.

There’s no more important human task before us, than mimicking and integrating with nature. We may, just, be able to do it. It’s a priority, and we can’t turn up our noses at any tool.

Whole Earth Discipline

I finished Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatism Manifesto three or four weeks ago, and put off writing about it. I enjoyed reading it, and it challenged me. Brand says that his opinions are loosely held and forcefully stated, and his Four Environmental Heresies talk is a pretty fair outline of the book. I wrote forcefully about that talk in late July, and I find myself wanting to eat my words, but not entirely convinced.

Maybe what is happening in my skull is not that I’m unconvinced, but think that conversion to Brand’s program is too easy and would betray fickleness on my part. Brand’s thesis is that human-caused global warming is genuine and civilization is at stake. He says that Gaia can take care of herself, and that environmentalists are coming to see, and should see, our business, not as protecting the environment, but preserving civilization. Brand’s program includes urbanization, replacing coal with nuclear power, genetically modifying seed to increase yield in starving parts of the world (and to keep carbon in the soil), and adding sulfur dioxide and water vapor to the atmosphere to increase its albedo.

Urbanization has already happened, but Brand speaks primarily about the slums in the global south. This is the best part of Brand’s TED talk, and the initiative and ingenuity we see in his slides show why the slums that house a sixth of the world’s people appeal to the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand says that there is a better livelihood for the slum immigrants than there was in the countryside, and writes, in the book, at some length about commerce, education, and quality of life. What the slum dwellers need from us is safe legal electricity, clean water, public safety, and security of tenure. He also would make sure that power and cell phone service reach the countryside.

Coal is the major culprit in changing the climate. We depend on it for baseload power, power that we can count on 24/7/365. Wind, sun, tide, etc. are dispersed unevenly over space and time. We can’t count on them to power a world of seven billion and more. A gigawatt year of nuclear power yields twenty tons of waste, about two casks worth; the same amount of coal power broadcasts 8 million tons of waste. The nuclear waste is where we can watch it; the coal waste is out of control, in the atmosphere where it can cause mischief.

People have starved because environmentalists interfered with the delivery of genetically modified seed. We can take genes that provide desirable qualities in foods without those qualities -- say, vitamins or the ability to grow in drought or flood -- and add them to those foods. (Another kind of genetic engineering allows us to hang onto our soil, and keep carbon in the ground, by breeding crops -- “Roundup ready” -- that survive herbicides, allowing no-till ag. Genetic trading happens frequently in the microbial world, and we ourselves are colonies of symbionts in our cells. Groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have lobbied in their own countries and in developing countries to restrict access to genetically modified plants. In Mozambique, seed was kept from starving people because officials believed that genetic engineering was a genocidal colonial plot. One fear I have about genetic engineering has nothing to do with health: genetically modified seed is identified with a few large companies, and will concentrate wealth. The technology is accessible enough for serious hobbyists. For about a thousand dollars and a few weeks time, you too can engineer E. coli that smells like strawberries. It’s been done, and that means genetic engineering is a genie that’s out of the bottle, and not the property of a few big corporations.

Geo-engineering is Brand’s least forcefully held or stated heresy. In 1992, Phillipine Mount Pinatubo put 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, resulting in the planet’s cooling half a degree, increasing Arctic ice and the polar bear population. It’s cheap enough that Bill Gates, for instance, could take matters into his own hands to stop global warming. The trick is coordinating a global effort to restrict the ultraviolet radiation penetrating the atmosphere. Brand, himself, says that this strategy’s chief weakness is that efforts to limit warming by changing the atmosphere’s albedo would make us complacent about fixing the problem at its root, our production of greenhouse gases.

Throughout the book, Brand backs conservation, organic agriculture (he buys organic), and permaculture, but believes that these by themselves are not enough, and will be more productive combined with the heretical technologies.

I had planned on including Brands recommended reading list, but that, and his footnotes are at this address

http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html

Today’s illustration is a portrait of Harold “Stoney” Stone, from Monday’s drawing co-op. I’m getting back into charcoal after a half-year hiatus (I was spooked). I took a picture of the drawing -- on 18”x24” paper -- because it wouldn’t fit on my scanner.

The Revolution: Coming To A Crossroad Near You

We had our weekly Transition Town meeting at Joe’s house. We’re getting ready for an open fair on February 27, and it’s taking longer than we’d thought. Organizing the fair itself will go pretty smoothly, but it’s who we are and what we’re talking about that’s hard. We were going to have a January 30 meeting that would include the vendors and organizers we’re inviting to the fair, but that seems premature, and we couldn’t come up with an agenda. It looks like the meeting on the thirtieth will be for us, and facilitated. We will probably approach the invited presenters personally.

I had written a piece for the Corcoran Neighborhood News, that describes the affair we’re planning. Here it is:

Corcoran neighbors are coming together to support each other’s efforts towards prosperity in changing times. “Trends like global warming and more expensive fuel don’t have to seem quite so threatening,” said Joe Hesla, one of the organizers. “There’s only so much that politicians or businesses can do to fix things, but we can be there for each other in our efforts to feed and shelter ourselves well, and have fun.”

A growing core group has met weekly since a chilly, October 17, get together at the Midtown Farmers’ Market, in response to a News article, by Hesla.

Now that group has a name, “Corcoran GROWS” (Grass Roots Opens Ways of Sustainability), and is planning a free and open Sustainability Fair, for February 27, 10:00 AM until 2:00 PM, at the Corcoran Park Building, 3334 20th Avenue South. The Fair will have information about community garden spaces, food production and edible landscaping (this would be especially appropriate for households that are receiving arsenic abatement this season), urban-rural communication and the Midtown Farmers’ Market, canning and other food preservation methods, composting, solar energy, chickens, bees, tool and skill sharing, home-grown fun, and open-source communications technology. There will be snacks and fun child care.

During the meeting, Sean Gosiewski, who is organizing a March 12 and 13 conference for the entire Twin Cities area, had the slides from his keynote speaker’s presentation showing on his laptop. I had bumped into Sean a week earlier at the presenter, Portland, Oregon architect, Mark Lakeman’s presentation at the May Day Bookstore, and had seen the slides and heard the talk.

Lakeman’s main thesis is that the “Roman Grid,”  the way that we lay out our streets, destroys community by appropriating community space for transport and commerce. He asks, “How can you have freedom of assembly when there’s no place to assemble?” and contrasts a city map with an arial photo of a Dogon village, the village laid out to create spaces between buildings and fences. Intersections have traditionally been places where people meet. His European example is the Piazza del Campo in Siena, where roads from northern Italian cities merged on the way to Roma.

In Portland, Lakeman has been active in what he calls “city repair,” and “intersection repair.” The point of the exercise being to bring people together. Neighbors come together, and brainstorm about how they’d like to live, and design modifications to an intersection to begin the change. These seem to all include painting some kind of mandala where the streets cross, and have been accompanied by permaculture plantings and the construction of various sculptures and small structures, including benches and teahouses. Initially, this was an outlaw, ask-forgiveness-not-permission enterprise, but the city has come to support the effort, and every neighborhood in Portland has at least one repaired intersection.

Similar efforts have occurred in other cities, including St. Paul. Portland’s city repair has grown beyond intersection repair, to include the Tea Horse and Tea Pony, truck-mounted tea houses that look like things from Roger Dean album covers, multi-story cob and straw bale cat clubhouses, full of catnip stuffed pillows, and Dignity Village, an area of small cabins for homeless people.

Has the revolution begun?

Critical Thinking In A Free Society

We were talking on break at the Monday drawing co-op. Somebody mentioned conspiracy theories, and that turned into people who make a cult out of the Book of Revelations, or the Mayan calendar. Somebody else said he thought that those movements happen because we’re all doing a kind of intuitive calculus that shows us at a great, and maybe catastrophic moment in human history. None of us has a vocabulary that can describe it perfectly, but the moment -- with its apparently paradoxical explanations -- staggers some, and the enormity of our situation seems to demand religious explanation.

Jesus must be about to return, or Mayans in flying saucers will arrive, two years hence, to save us from ourselves.

Think of the craziest notion you can, google it, and you’ll find somebody organizing to support it. The Copernican Universe as a Jewish plot? Got you covered.

(The theory anyway, not the universe itself.)

After the devastating Haitian earthquake, Pat Robertson used his television show, not to explain how deforestation and an already feeble infrastructure made the havoc worse, but to say that the Haitians had made a pact with the devil in 1804, to free themselves from slavery.

It isn’t just the religious right that’s to blame. There have been stories recently in The Nation (a very left-wing monthly) and the New York Times (the country’s “paper of record”) about wrongdoing on the part of U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials (secret and illegal detention centers, and abuse of prisoners, followed by cover-up). Democracy Now (left-wing radio show) followed up on these stories with interviews and discussions. It was apparent, without the disestablishmentarian spin, that the ICE officials might as well have been Nazis, but the presentation by the commentators was disingenuous, as well, papering over a government’s legitimate interest in regulating immigration.

You do get into some relativistic territory here. Bolivian President Evo Morales has said that you can’t impoverish Latin countries, and then punish those who come to your country seeking livelihoods. It’s almost enough to make you start looking for Space Mayans, but we can understand what’s going on, if we pay attention, and burn a few calories thinking.

I’d thought about situation ethics for a long time in terms of the Playboy Philosophy, and not much more. In other words, I thought that morality derived from conditions in the real world was basically libertarian. Don’t rob banks, but enrich yourself; no rape, but have a good time. In fact, the responsibility is greater, because the harm we do can happen in that vast but foreshortened territory beyond the horizon.

Here in the U. S., we have taken the notion that our charter documents give us the unalienable right to believe any tomfool notion we want. The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for the redress of grievances,” and there are people who go to church to sacrifice chickens or handle rattlesnakes, so I guess it’s true.

But it ain’t necessarily responsible. Staying informed and thinking critically about events is a responsibility of citizenship. You get to be wrong, but there’s no unalienable right to stay that way.

The Declaration Of Independence And The War on Terror

We were supposed to evacuate the Guantanamo Prison this month. We won’t. The new president, Barack Obama, made an issue of this and vowed to shut it down by January 23, giving ammunition to hawkish opponents. On December 15, Obama signed an order that the remaining prisoners will be transferred to the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois. Some Yemeni prisoners have sued to remain in Gitmo, since the Illinois prison is more, well, prison-like. Over 400 of a total of 775 prisoners have been released without trial, 215 remain, and the government expects to prosecute 60-80.

Without rehashing the dubious case for some of the individuals’ imprisonment, commenting on conditions and treatment (I don’t know), or on the possibility of exacerbating the terrorist threat against the United States by depriving innocent bystanders of liberty, let me offer my take on this affair, and on comments like that of retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who told Fox News that 18-28 year old Muslim males should be routinely strip searched at airports.

The United States Constitution, in its Amendments, particularly the first ten, the Bill of Rights, guarantees citizens

* Freedom of religion speech and assembly,

* The right to bear arms,

* The right not to be obliged to house soldiers,
* Privacy of houses persons papers and effects without a warrant sworn that there is probably cause for believing we have committed crimes or are concealing evidence of a crime,

* Freedom from arbitrary arrest and trial, to not be tried twice for the same crime, from testifying against ourselves, and from losing property for public use without just compensation,

* Rights to know what we accused of if arrested, face our accusers, subpoena witnesses, have counsel, and have a speedy and local trial, the right to a jury trial for civil suits,

* Freedom from excessive bail and excessive fines, and cruel and inhuman punishment,

* Rights other than those enumerated,

* Powers not delegated to the federal government.

Later Amendments made slaves citizens and enfranchised women.

The Preamble to the Constitution states that it is written to “...secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” In other words, the above rights are sort of a premium for citizenship, but another of our foundation documents, which does not have the force of law, gives a clue to the soul of the nation that the founders envisioned.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, beginning the period when the United States “assume(d) its place among the powers of the world.” There had been armed skirmishes between American colonists and British armed forces, and Samuel Adams, brother to future president John, asked, “Is not America already independent? Then why not declare it?” Richard Henry Lee, an uncle or cousin of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, said “These United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and independent states.” A committee that included future presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration.

There is a lot of what you might call “boilerplate” in the Declaration, documenting injustices on the part of English King George III, but the meat says something about the rights of Man, and their universality:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation of such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Upon Giving Jason a Picassoid Drawing

I gave this drawing to Barbara’s business partner, Jason, who had admired it. I drew it about a year ago for a group show of art based on the human figure. The characters of the Minotaur and Sculptor came from a Picasso etching of a Bacchanal done in 1933. I find the Picasso picture appalling, and to my chagrin, arousing.

I’m not a great draftsman, but a lot of the virtue in my drawing I owe to Picasso. If you think that Picasso was taking shortcuts to avoid the hard work of getting a likeness, disabuse yourself of that notion (Ken). The failings of Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Cipriano Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso lay in other directions. There are abundant examples of Picasso’s stunning conventional representation, and anecdotes about his faking other artists’ styles to put critics. who preferred their art, in their places. For me, it was seeing Georges Cluzot’s The Mystery of Picasso that made me realize how skilled my man Pablito was. So free, so expressive. I kept saying, “I didn’t know you could do that.”

Cluzot directed Mystery in the summer of 1954, with Claude Renoir -- son of the painter, Pierre-Auguste -- operating the camera. In the film, Picasso draws with inks that bleed through paper stretched on a special easel. This allows us to see the drawings appear as if by magic (later in the film, editing allows us essentially the same experience, as paintings appear on canvas). Toreros, bulls, models, artists, clowns, and acrobats assemble in scene after meaningful scene. One critic commented that the film was a gift, “generous,” and I certainly was glad to watch the master at work.

Exchanges between the artist and director, a certain mimed tension on Cluzot’s part, and the incongruity of a little subplot about running out of film, in a picture that couldn’t have happened without an editing suite, tip the film makers’ hands that this is a bit of modernist hagiography. The septuagenarian hero creating in his underpants, his comments that he doesn’t mind being tired, and that he wants to “go deeper,” Picasso’s discarding a large painting of a Mediterranean resort, after countless revisions, only to replace it with another revision on a second canvas, all play to the image Mr. P. and his sycophants wanted to leave behind.

The Bacchanal has the Minotaur and Sculptor toasting each other, apparently after having worn out two sprawled and nude models. Picasso was a libertine and a sadist, though not a sadist in the consensual, top-bottom sense of modern fantasy play. There really are no minotaurs, so both male characters are alter egos for the artist himself, and the models’ names are Dora and Marie-Therese. Both were Picasso’s mistresses, and their tenures overlapped. Marie-Therese was the earlier of the two, a very young woman when Picasso approached her on the street, an athlete, and not, reportedly, profound. She was the mother to Picasso’s daughter Maya. Dora was an artist, photographer, and poet, muse to the surrealists. She documented the production of the anti-war, anti-fascist mural Guernica, and was rumored to have produced some of the studies for it. Picasso may have discovered the pleasure of dominating others earlier, but it grew with the much younger and submissive Marie-Therese, and came to full flower with the chance to practice on Dora, the stronger ego. The game was to charm the mistress, convincing her that it was she alone whom he loved, and then arrange for her to catch him with the other and to snub her. There were two other women on the scene at the time, estranged wife Olga, who was too much of a nudge to be any fun, and Francoise, who came close to losing her soul, but survived. Picasso once put a cigarette out on Francoise’s cheek.

If ever a painter needed a loving kick in the shorts, it was Picasso.

Picasso died at great age, leaving behind a shamble of confused exes and offspring. Marie-Therese, second wife Jacqueline, and grandson Pablito committed suicide. Son by Olga, Paulo, died at 54 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Picasso, with Georges Braque, was co-inventor of Cubism, which means modern art. Cubism began in 1907, and lasted until after the First World War. In Cubism, the subject of a painting is represented from multiple points of view, and the resulting picture is a shallow, flickering pattern, usually in limited value and color. Before Cubism, there was a half-century of experimentation with representation, beginning with the Realists and Impressionists, and erupting with the Post-Impressionists, at the turn of the century. Cubism liberated artists from narrative and anecdote, but wasn’t inane: paintings continued to be about something. The problem was that what a painter could say about reality wasn’t nice -- was incomplete. This probably seemed apt for a century in which humanity seemed to have slipped its religious moorings, and upon which was visited such abundant pain.

In her biography of the great man, Picasso Creator and Destroyer, Arianna Huffington wrote, “With prodigious skill, complete mastery of the language of painting, inexhaustible versatility and monumental virtuosity, ingenuity and imagination, Picasso showed us the mud in our frog pond, and the night over it.”

In my drawing, the Sculptor rebukes the now sheepish Minotaur, too late for Picasso but not for the Picasso in each of us.

Thanks To LETS South

Yesterday's Chris Alexander post turned up in Goosebreeder/Von's blog, LETS South - Barter Group for Fleurieu Peninsula, illustrated by a lovely piece of backyard design. I don't recognize the species, but I don't think those are guinea fowl on the steps. Look at the size of the water tank and the mature tree above it, and think about how nicely the household uses the site.

It looks like summer, and Fleurieu is around 35 degrees south, about equivalent to northern Alabama. The buildings aren't parallel, but I'm going to guess that the house faces the cardinal compass points. I thought I could figure out which direction we were looking, but it was tougher than I thought. A good Junior Woodchuck ought to be able to. I'll guess that we're looking a little south of east.

Mutual Self Reliance Proposal

Our neighborhood mutual self-reliance group is planning a public meeting and conference for February 27. We are also forming an alliance with the official neighborhood organization, CNO. CNO is the group that is responsible for the Midtown Farmer’s Market, whose vendors and customers made it the fourth most popular market in the country in 2009.

I volunteered to write the proposal to the CNO Board. No doubt the proposal will change before we send it to CNO. In fact, I put the administrative stuff at the end together carelessly, throwing parts off the top of my head, and taking some from the CNO website. What matters is my thinking about the economic situation in the developed world, and how citizens need to proceed.

Proposal for Forming a Corcoran Neighborhood Organization Mutual Self-Reliance Task Force:

Several Corcoran Park neighbors are concerned about various trends we believe point to a contracting economy for the foreseeable future. We are organizing to support ourselves and other Corcoran Park neighbors in efforts to create abundance, as resources become scarcer.

Trends that are leading to a contracting economy include:

* Decline in worldwide oil production, subsequent to current or recent peak production;

* Global warming, consensus that warming is industrially caused, and the economic consequences of both;

* An aging population;

* More competitive bidding for resources due to Asian industrialization;

* Past and ongoing off-shoring;

* Superior organization to control resources on the part of concentrated wealth.

Initial work (2010) will be two-fold. Firstly, the Task Force will host an open neighborhood conference on February 27, introducing ourselves and a number of possible projects; there will be a neighborhood-wide spring (2010) project, possibly a group fruit tree purchase and planting or a rain garden design charette and planting bee. Secondly, the Task Force will write what is known as an Energy Descent Action Plan (EAP) for the Corcoran Park Neighborhood.

Energy Descent Action Plans are tools that have come out of the international Transition Towns movement. In producing an EAP, the Task Force will survey the neighborhood’s actual and potential resource consumption, and create a vision for a thriving Corcoran Park in 2030, proposing steps for accomplishing that vision using best estimates of (probably diminishing) available resources. The Task Force will publish and promote these steps and vision, and begin implementing them.

To make it easier to imagine what the Task Force has in mind, but without prejudicing our EAP, we offer these examples from our brainstorming sessions:

* Group purchases of tools, fruit trees, rain gardens, weatherization, and photovoltaics;

* A barter network or local currency (Ithaca Dollars)

* A neighborhood tool inventory or tool library;

* A library of manuals useful to our feeding and sheltering ourselves in a becoming manner, and to
providing ourselves with meaning;

* An inventory of neighborhood expertise;

* Canning bees;

* Socials and entertainment events.

Similar groups are forming in other Minneapolis neighborhoods and internationally. The Task Force will ally with them when there is a mutual advantage.

The Task Force will continue indefinitely.

The Task Force will function as a CNO committee, and be initially co-chaired (for example) by Joe and Anne. Subsequent chairs will be elected by a simple majority of Task Force members, and shall be subject to the approval by the Corcoran Neighborhood Organization Board of Directors.

The Task Force shall include at least five members. Interested Corcoran Neighborhood residents may attend meetings, and vote on resolutions after having attended two meetings within the last half year.

Members of the Task Force must be Corcoran Park Neighborhood residents, more than sixteen years of age.

Task Force meetings will occur on the first Monday of each month, or more frequently as decided by the Task Force at a regular meeting.

CNO staff or board liaison to be decided.

Permaculture Principles

The Permaculture Principles:

1. Observe and interact;
2. Catch and store energy;
3. Obtain a yield;
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback;
5. Use and value renewable resources and services;
6. Produce no waste;
7. Design from patterns to details;
8. Integrate rather than segregate;
9. Use small and slow solutions;
10. Use and value diversity;
11. Use edges and value the marginal;
12. Creatively use and respond to change.

Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language & Pattern Languages

The Whole Earth Catalog called Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language “possibly the most important book we’ve ever reviewed.” One of my teachers had studied with Alexander at the University of Oregon, and said that he communed with the gods of space.

The book is a collection of 253 “patterns” for designing human habitation, ranging from regional design (“Wherever possible, work toward the evolution of independent regions of the world; each with a population between two and ten million people; each with its own natural and geographic boundaries; each with its own economy; each one autonomous and self-governing; each with a seat in a world government, without the intervening power of larger states or countries.”), to the detail of home decor (“Do not be tricked into believing that modern decor must be slick or psychedelic, or “natural” or “modern art,” or “plants” or anything else that current taste-makers claim. It is most beautiful when it comes from your life -- the things you care for, the things that tell your story.”) Alexander (with colleagues) presents the patterns as hypotheses -- statements of possible truth needing testing, and possibly, refinement -- ranked by a system of asterisks, two for patterns in which Alexander is very confident, one for patterns in which his confidence is qualified, and no asterisks for patterns which solve problems that might be solved otherwise. (The first pattern above sports two asterisks, the second, one.)

My favorite pattern is Number 106 (two asterisks), “Give each (space surrounding a building) some degree of enclosure; surround each space with wings of buildings, trees, hedges, fences, arcades, and trellised walks, until it becomes an entity with a positive quality and does not spill out indefinitely around corners.” The idea is that we enjoy a sense of space, but don’t recognize spaces until they’re defined. Barbara made a beautiful little secret garden, with a pond, brick walk, and bench, in the slot between our shed and a corner in the cyclone fence around our lot. Early on, we’d planted bittersweet on the fence, making a hedge. Bittersweet is tough and pretty aggressive, and started popping up everywhere. I dug out the bittersweet, and the garden lost its charm. We’ve replace the bittersweet with less assertive species, but it’s taking time to get the nice sense of space back.

The idea is to involve everybody in design, by publishing a complete design “language.” Having the language, we aren’t bound to rely on authorities like architects and bosses for the infrastructure in which we live. (An individual project wouldn’t require coordinating the entire 253-pattern language, any more than an individual statement takes the entire English dictionary, and Alexander says that we can use the pattern language for poetry or prose.)

Alexander calls his book a pattern language, implying that there are others, or that others might evolve. These could be competitive with his 253 patterns, or they could be languages used in other kinds of design. I’ve noticed a number of patterns in my drawing, including “gauge the size of details against larger, unmoving masses,” and “use blacks to lighten darks by comparison.”

Permaculture is a pattern language, although nobody seems to have organized it this way yet. Some of the permaculture principles could be classified as patterns, but they might be a little broad, grammar than vocabulary. Certainly, though, “Obtain a yield by combining species to support each other,” “Arrange your plantations in zones in which those used more frequently or needing more frequent attention are nearest,” and “Trellis fruiting vines on fruit or nut trees” would be included in the vocabulary.