OUR METHODS DEMAND BASICS

U of Chicago Div School

“What’s your method?” was always the first question at U of C Div School.  The idea was to establish a stream of precedents that were already known, so as to impose limits and a sort of spine, a line of thought.  In the best of worlds, that strategy would yield an essay that was coherent and intelligible.  Of course, if you chose a method no one liked or understood, you were doomed.

This morning on Aeon.com I ran into a new question:  “Then what?”  In Div School terms, this is teleology.  It depends on what your goal might be.  

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=feca0f6557-Daily_newsletter_weekend_edition_16th_January_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-feca0f6557-68600437  

Lewis Dartnell

What happens after the accepted methods of our civilization — like exploiting fossil fuel and centering everything on profit — are exhausted, no longer apply?  What methods will save us?  When one is on territory unknown (terra incognita) the question becomes even sharper but the methods benefit from being fuzzy, wandering, and mixed.  This Aeon piece was derived from a blog based on “The Knowledge”, a book or series of books or nested blogs that seem to have their source in a man named Lewis Dartnell.  He’s handsome, young, and smart enough to star in a BBC series and my only question is “why isn’t he?”  The title, of course, is from the knowledge of London streets a taxi driver must have to pass a certifying test; it’s a “where are we going” question.

But here’s where I’m really hooked.  It’s a subject I met in seminary: the wilderness in the city.  Most of my classmates thought of it in terms of people: savage mental pygmies, I guess.  But like many others I’ve always been easily seduced by what some call “ruin porn.”  That is, abandoned industries and housing that are being reclaimed by the “natural” world.  http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ruin-photography/  This link should take you to examples of how transient anthro-construction can be.  We’re used to seeing Aztec pyramids and Asian mega-statues overwhelmed by jungle, but now we’ve added catastrophic evacuations (Chernobyl) and resource-exhausted communities (abandoned mining towns in the West).  It's not hard to imagine the U of C quads as ruins.

In fact, strictly speaking, my own buildings qualify, since two of them were temporary knock-ups used during the rebuild of Swift Dam, one a shop and the other the caretaker’s shack.  Nature and time are dismantling them, as well as this modest house built in the Thirties with an add-on bathroom and garage.  But my earliest and most vivid images are from the trail in Macleay Park in Portland where my family went to hike in the Forties and Fifties.  It was a WPA project with a lot of stonework, including a little bathroom which became a sin center and then was burned and buried, though the stone walls and arched entrances remain.  Our teenaged babysitter hanged himself nearby, in an earlier wave of alienation among young men.  Our movie horizons are full of post-apocalypse landscapes. 

Macleay Park

A periodical related to this complex, called “Ernest Journal” ,(http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk) guides this line of thought with optimism:  how would we rebuild?  Actual practical information.  How to make glass.  How to make breakfast.  How to survive an asteroid strike.  I have a friend who’s a bit of a survivalist — he just survived major cancer surgery and is restored to his health of years earlier — which means being a bit of a pack rat.  The secret here is knowing which rat to pack, and that means a grasp on basic technologies like electricity wiring, water piping, and gardening.  

Here in Montana where the grid is thin and weather gets cold (it’s generally already very windy at any temperature) one learns quite a bit about dust physics, insulation, smoke management, cooking over fires (the coals, not the flames) and other dynamics.  The traces of earlier civilizations — drag marks of travois, bits of metal or glass beads on the hill tops where bodies were left for the sun to take back, pictographs on stone — are either durable or gone.  They are not likely to be smothered by vines but the boulders are embroidered by vivid lichens, plant extremophiles.

In England which is wet and sitting on what once seemed an inexhaustible mountain of coal, the industrial revolution got a good headstart on a lot of forces that have ended now: colonies, factories, railroads. ships — all of which led to a demographic shift, an influx of people not accustomed to industrial life, a demographic apocalypse that will be the irresistible force that changes immovable Britain.

As it happens, I know quite a lot about molten metal and even a bit about ceramic kilns   In Oregon there were always glass-casters nearby.  They liked to build their studios near the beach for the sake of the cool breezes, the same as we used to prefer casting bronze in the winter, during weather just like this: snow on the ground and zero temps.  With the big fans going, the furnace and the protective gear were bearable.  Technology at this primitive level does not depend upon instruments, except maybe a pyrometer until you learn to tell temp by the color of the molten metal.  It’s a matter of human senses and internalized knowledge that comes from experience.  Less dramatic is woodwork or pouring concrete, or maybe animal husbandry which adds the dimensions of empathy and persuasion.  These are “methods.”

Sci-fi loves this sort of thing, and so do the paleoarcheologists who try to imagine the steps between the last hominid and the first modern human.  Of course, there is no “step”, no “break”, but a series of small developments that folded back on each other, became culturally contagious, used the environment instead of just surviving it.  Some of those uses were glass, stone and metal.  These survive even humans and the pre-ag aeons are named for them.  (Aren’t we the Glass Age, if you count silicon and sky scrapers?  I’ve never forgotten photos of an experimental house built only from scavenged car windshields.)  And now we turn to gravity energy in the tides, solar energy on the roof, volcanic energy in Iceland, and microbial energy in our sewage lagoon.  Clearly, energy is where you find it.

The biological energy we have not mastered — maybe I should say supported — is human beings.  What a waste for people to be drowning in the Mediterranean, starving in Syria, dying of exposure in the streets of American metropolises.  Why can’t we figure out how to address this gradual apocalypse?  This erosion of life?  What if our goal was not to restore the world as we know it, but to find a new way to be in the world.  This is not the first time the question has been asked. It’s teleological. 

Darnell embracing a Martian friend

Here’s Dartnell speaking:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbbvf-GkJcA

"FELT" MEMORIES

The stone ruin on the Macleay Park trail

This is a powerful idea that was never been put into words until my mother was dying.  Even then the idea was mostly hints until I realized that they explained phantom feelings.  In her last year or so, in an effort to understand her life, I asked her why our street in Portland, NE 15^th between Alberta and Killingsworth, had such a coherent group of women, mostly housewives, who kept close track of each other and sometimes partied together.   (They played "Cootie" and "Bunko" for cheap prizes and had dessert.  No drinking.) They called each other by their last names: White, Onslow, Gross, Hartwig, and McClain.  My mother seemed somehow to be a leader.  Later she was active in the PTA and her church, but this was different.

Now she said it was because in the late Forties McClain’s son had hung himself in Macleay Park.  She and other women thought that McClain, who was older, Catholic and had more children than usual, needed support through her grief.  They organized to go to her house to have coffee every day.  Suddenly I remembered that when we were about that age my mother insisted one day that she and we kids go to hike the trail through the Park.  I had thought that it was because in those years my father worked at Montgomery Wards, which was close to the beginning of the trail.  But it was unusual, both because my father was not on the hike and because there was some kind of urgency.

My mother’s motto was, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”  I inherited it.  Sometimes it was intense enough to be labeled “counterphobic,” which is to say, driven to go straight at danger and disarm it by knowing it.  Not a comfortable trait, but a useful one -- so long as one took precautions.

Macleay Park had the usual features of Oregon forest trails.  It followed a stream and was a “soft” trail, not paved.  But some stone work had been done as WPA projects, so there were occasional built structures along the trail, very much like the stone work along the Columbia Gorge highway.  One of them was a 1929 stone building equipped as a restroom.  I remember how tense and alert my mother became when we approached this building.  My brothers wanted to go in and use the facilities, but she was reluctant to let them and stood right by the door, making sure no one else was in there.  She and I did not use the female side so I don't know what the facilities were like.  

In those days, especially during the week, the trail was deserted.  I don’t remember ever meeting anyone.  Now I realize that the bathroom was probably a meeting place for clandestine purposes, like gay interaction.  Now I connect this ruin to the boy who hung himself.   The building was not just allowed to rot but also at one point was filled with dirt.  I had wondered why the boy chose that trail for his demise.  The trees are mostly doug fir with no branches low enough to be convenient for a rope.

The McClain siblings were in their teens.  They were often our babysitters, laissez faire, both boys and girls, but with their parents just down the street one block for backup.  At one point, “valorized” (Eliade’s word) in my memory as important, my younger brother -- still in a crib -- went into a crying storm and could not be comforted.  Whoever was the sitter finally called his or her parents, who came as a couple and were also baffled about how to stop the raging.  My parents were finally recalled from wherever they were.  Then the baby settled down.  Unaccountable storms in children at about that stage happen, evidently the result of some kind of brain growth that connects panic to behavior in a neuron misfire.  But the adults were worried and would not talk about it later.

I was a little girl much impressed that I was responsible, that I should protect, intervene, but without much instruction how to do that.  Both brothers objected to me acting as an assistant mother, which didn’t stop me from trying.  I never did understand what I ought to have done about my brother’s baby storm.  Now I’m wondering whether the boy who hung himself had something to do with it.

For decades, until I was safely sleeping with a lover, I would very occasionally wake up to see a ghostly brother and sister, adolescent, standing side-by-side at the foot of the bed.  They never said anything and as I woke up a little more, they disappeared.  Such figures are well-described in the literature as a phenomenon of half-sleep, but they are not neurologically explained except for a suggestion that they are memories never resolved.  Now I think they may have been our baby sitters.  But the essay appended at the end of this post suggests something more spooky.

I have no memories of ever being molested by anyone, but various counselors over the years have quizzed me about it.  We were trying to understand how I mixed obedient compliance with defiant opposition.  Even my seminary professors complained that I was such a supportive and enthusiastic student at first, but then at some point would switch over and find them seriously lacking, worth attacking.  It hurt their feelings. 

I recognized the behavior but couldn’t really account for it.  I thought it was just that I idealized them until I knew them well enough for their faults to be apparent.  It felt to them like defiance and criticism, esp. since at that point I was the same age as the professors, who had much less experience with authority.  I’d just come from being an animal control officer, an emergency responder.

The word was betrayal.  I think long ago I felt that my parents betrayed us by leaving us for the evening, that the babysitter betrayed us by somehow triggering my little brother’s outrage, and that I betrayed my little brother by not understanding and fixing things.  I think my mother felt that we had all somehow betrayed that hanged boy and was determined not to betray his mother.  She also wanted to understand what Macleay Park was about.  We were visiting a “crime scene,” a clue to lethal betrayal.  Eventually, at seminary I felt that my professors were betrayers because they knew so little.  But it was a pattern from my past, not their doing.

I can remember standing on the stairs inside the McClain house, looking at the simple 2X4 bannister.  I was overhearing something through the half-open bedroom door but not knowing what it was or what it meant.  Probably if I were hypnotized in an effort to bring back the words, my subconscious would produce something literary.  Like this blog post.  How much is memory and how much is invention?

5xx5 NE 15th

That block of the street, between Sumner and Emerson, had been built up with simpler, poorer houses than our block.  The families there were low-income, working class.  They were impressed by our house, not because it was so grand but because it was full of books and had a piano.  My father played classical 78 records loud enough for everyone to hear.  Across the street was Captain Reeder, who ran a tugboat on the river and whose son was a cop, but also a jazz saxophonist.  He played late into the late summer nights, all alone but somehow lamentingly sexy.  We never talked about it.  We felt it.  

"Amor Vincit Omnia" by Caravaggio

Arts are as close as humans can come to wordless felt meaning.  As a family we went to a Forties or early Fifties Portland Art Museum show of masterpieces that included Caravaggio’s  “Amor Vincit Omnia”.   It's quite a large painting; we were hustled right along when we came to it.  I felt this had something to do with the puzzle of the hanged boy, but couldn’t understand how.  For all the parental progressiveness and the stacks of sex education books, none of them resolved it.  I couldn't make the connections from naked to sex to transgression to shame.

Indeed, love and betrayal, secrecy and the ultimate secret of death, can’t really be understood.  It’s not possible to get to the bottom.  This is the real betrayal of any faith-based religion or seminary -- the idea that they are the only ones who know the truth or that it is even possible.  Anyway, I don't think they really believed what they professed.

_____________

Here's someone else's take on Macleay Park, even deeper, with historical references.  (Jaime Dunkle has a namesake website.  http://jaimedunkle.com)

http://psuvanguard.com/arts/double-double-toil-and-trouble/