Prospero's Books

A vast freedom we have not known since Newton

From Stuart A. Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred, which I've just finished and recommend highly:

If we reinvent the sacred to mean the wonder of the creativity in the universe, biosphere, human history, and culture, are we not inevitably invited to honor all of life and the planet that sustains it? As we unleash the vast extinction [that] accompanies our global ecological footprint, we are destroying the creativity in the biosphere that we should rightly honor . . . .

Can I logically "force" you to see the sacred in the creativity in nature and join in basing a global ethic on that sacredness? . . . No, I cannot logically force you. But I can invite you. The very creativity in the universe, the wholly liberating creativity in the universe we share and partially cocreate, can invite you, for that creativity is a vast freedom we have not known, since Newton, that we shared with the cosmos, the biosphere, and human life. Accepting that invitation, while recognizing the evil we do and that happens, may be wise for us all (275-76).

The slow work of growth and death

I've just rediscovered "The Work of Local Culture," the 1988 Iowa Humanities Lecture given by my former University of Kentucky colleague and friend, Wendell Berry. The lecture is available online at the E. F. Schumacher Society site.

Wendell begins by describing an old bucket hanging on a fence post on his family's farm. He writes:

I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on inside that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is a microcosm of earth-making.

He continues:

The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two.

This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

A couple of paragraphs later, Wendell returns to the bucket to help him make the central point of his lecture:

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account.

(Portrait by Robert Shetterly at AmericansWhoTellTheTruth.org)

Our breaking and slashing of God

Kester Brewin, at The Complex Christ, has been posting an interesting series of reflections on, among other things, the shift in power that occurs when hunter-gatherer economies are replaced by agricultural economies. From the latest in that series:

Bread is not the simplest thing to make. Leavened, it requires careful control of yeasts, and to make in any quantity, a good supply of grain and a means of controlled heat.

Wine requires more technology still. Large quantities of grapes need to be harvested, and these need proper storage to age and mature.

In other words, the Eucharist as we know it contains hidden within it symbols of our domestication of the earth and its resources and thus, connectedly, symbols of the domination of one life-style - settled food production - over another - hunting and gathering.

Perhaps this is benign, being so long in our history in the making, but I wonder if, in these times when our relationship to the planet is so fragile we might reflect on the Eucharist as a sort of lament for our abuse of the world, just as we might use it to lament for our breaking and slashing of God.

The course of true love . . .

This week my students and I are reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and talking about systems. I gave my students a copy of Barry Commoner's "four laws of ecology," from his pioneering 1971 book The Closing Circle:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.
2. Everything must go somewhere.
3. Nature knows best.
4. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Shakespeare understood all these.The four plots of Dream are intricately intertwined, and what happens at one level of the play affects the other levels. Everything is connected to everything else.

One of the most familiar lines of the play--and arguably the line that best summarizes the whole work--is Lysander's, in the very first scene:

The course of true love never did run smooth.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Make the path as you walk

Several years ago I sat in on a colleague's course in 20th century Spanish literature. The course pushed the limits of my Spanish, but it was worth the effort, in part because it introduced me to one of my now favorite poets, Antonio Machado.

Monday, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore quoted Machado:

Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.

Gore continued:

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures—each a palpable possibility—and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

Chalkdust in the atmosphere?

Muji, a chain of stores in Europe and Asia, is selling the beautiful, wooden Blackboard Globe, apparently available by mail in the continental United States, Canada, and the EU for 6.95 British pounds.

An ordinary globe just sits there; there's nothing we can do--short of destruction--to change it. The Blackboard Globe looks like a wonderful way to give children--and adults, too--a big-picture sense of the Earth as something with which we interact, something on which our actions have consequences.

It also looks fun.

(Thanks to moleskinerie for the tip.)

Time to dress for fall

Autumn has come late this year to Indianapolis. Only today did I begin seeing truly spectacular reds and yellows in the trees.

North of here, around the Great Lakes, fall colors come earlier, of course. The European Space Agency has posted a striking photo, taken by the Envisat satellite on September 23, of leaves beginning to change around Lake Superior.

(The title of this posting is from the beautifully erotic lyrics of the song "The Summer Knows," with words by Marilyn and Alan Bergman and music by Michel Legrand.)

 

Ways that we can all win

President Bill Clinton, in the December 2000 issue of Wired:

Martin Luther King said the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. [It's] sort of a reverse social Darwinism: The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win-win solutions instead of win-lose solutions.... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well - so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other. And, on balance, that's a humanizing and elevating development.

(Thanks to Pop Occulture and Wikipedia for the link.)

A time for the natural rhythms of the organism to assert themselves

In his always gorgeous style, Chet Raymo writes:

Walking is the one thing that connects us to the deep past. Food, drink, clothing, shelter, sex, childbirth have all been transformed by technology, mostly for the better. But when we walk, we might as well be on the savannas of East Africa two million years ago. . . .

And later:

I'd rather think of walking as a spiritual activity. It has nothing to do with keeping the body fit, although that may be a convenient side effect. Walking is a time for the natural rhythms of the organism to assert themselves -- limbs, breath, heartbeat, thought -- a smoothly functioning unity honed by natural selection at a time when we were still a part of the natural world, not masters of it.

A death every fortnight

Every two weeks, a language dies. So says the Enduring Voices project, a group whose mission is to

• Understand the geographic dimensions of language distribution
• Determine how linguistic diversity is linked to biodiversity
• Bring wide attention to the issue of language loss

When a language dies, so dies a way of seeing, and thinking about, the world. And right now the world needs all the viewpoints it can get.