Who Ya Gonna Serve?

The final authority in this culture is its technics and not the health of the land base. We serve the former before the latter. It's pretty fucking scary.

“My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East , right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other [hu]man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.”--Lewis Mumford

Half-gods and Devils

Sitting with a couple of books before I head out to plant some more posts in the ground for our pole shed. I've called it a barn in the past but it's actually only half the size of your average barn. We're hoping to have the framework up and the roofs on before the snow flies.

One of the books I'm sitting with this morning is The Conduct of Life, by Lewis Mumford. I like this quote out of it: "When the god in him is repressed, the half-gods and devils take possession of man." Another one of the books that I'm sitting with is, of course, Lament of the Dead. And in it the authors explain how the half-gods and devils appeared to Carl Jung in the form of figures in his active imagination. He named, had conversations with, and sketched them. From what I understand so far this is essentially what Jung's Red Book is about.

A Brief Reflection on The Insolent Chariot

How do I define pain? Having to go to the bank to pull out cash to buy a vehicle. Lewis Mumford wrote this back in 1966: "Only war can claim so many premature deaths; for the death rate from motor cars is greater than the combined death rate from falls, burnings, drownings, railroads, firearms, and poisonous gases, plus some two thousand other deaths from undefinable causes. And though only roughly half as many Americans were killed outright by autos in the last four-year period as were killed in our armed forces during a similar term in the Second World War, nearly three times as many were injured."

I imagine it's only gotten worse.

A Slice of Morning

Aristotle once said, "It would seem that experience of particular things is a sort of courage." I think I know what he's getting at. There was a period in my life when on a daily basis I'd just go sit in the woods behind my house for half-n-hour up to a half a day. I'd take in all the surroundings and activity with my senses. In other words, I payed attention. And it had a revolutionary feel to it when I was out there on a weekday when everyone else was at work. I eventually quit, though. Why? I didn't want to go broke. There is no money in it. And besides how can one pay attention to particular things if one is living in a system that, as Lewis Mumford so eloquently pointed out, is based on "order, power, predictability, and above all, control."

The system has to go. But I'm hoping I find the courage Aristotle is talking about before that happens.

#

Today, I work with wood. I'm either going to get a load of firewood or work on my son's bunk bed. Working with wood, I've noticed, grounds me.

#

Conversations with 13yr. old son.

Son: Are we going anywhere today?

Me: We're journeying to the center of the universe.

Son: What!?

Me: Haven't you ever heard of that song from sixties or seventies? (I hope I'm not just imagining this. For some odd reason I'm think the Moody Blues had a song with this lyric)

Son: No.

Me: Yeah, it came out during the sixties. When your grandparents were young. You know, when a lot of them were doing acid to find out the meaning of life. Or, like Robert Bly has said, they were trying to dynamite the water out of the pond.

Son: Oh yeah, instead of bucketing the water out.

Connecting the Dots

A few years back I posted this quote about mining and war by Lewis Mumford:

"From the earliest times, as Mircea Eliade points out, blood sacrifice had been a ritual accompaniment of metallurgy. The curse of war and the curse of mining are almost interchangeable: united in death."

Yesterday, on the mail route, I thought of this quote and realized that Martin Prechtel might have some answers in how to lift that curse:

So, just to get the iron, the shaman has to pay for the ore, the fire, the wind, and so on — not in dollars and cents, but in ritual activity equal to what’s been given. Then that iron must be made into steel, and the steel has to be hammered into the shape of a knife, sharpened, and tempered, and a handle must be put on it. There is a deity to be fed for each part of the procedure. When the knife is finished, it is called the “tooth of earth.” It will cut wood, meat, and plants. But if the necessary sacrifices have been ignored in the name of rationalism, literalism, and human superiority, it will cut humans instead.

All of those ritual gifts make the knife enormously “expensive,” and make the process quite involved and time-consuming. The need for ritual makes some things too spiritually expensive to bother with. That’s why the Mayans didn’t invent space shuttles or shopping malls or backhoes. They live as they do not because it’s a romantic way to live — it’s not; it’s enormously hard — but because it works.--Martin Prechtel

A.E's Aphorism

Reading through some old notebooks that are full of quotes and notes from books I've read in the past. Wrote this down back February of 2010: "A man becomes the image of the thing he hates."--A.E's aphorism, Pg. 361, The Myth of the Machine Vol.ll

Chilling.

Entertaining Ideas

I just want to say that I stand with anyone working toward recalling Governor Scott Walker. Right now, I'm entertaining this idea. And, as some of us know the mind loves to entertain ideas. Anyway, I'm a wage slave that is trying to survive in Western Civilization. In other words, I'm an exploitable resource. And if the exploiters could find a way to pay me less for my work, or ship my job off to another place where people are willing to work for less, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

I think Lewis Mumford was onto something when he said this about Karl Marx: "He realized that the French revolution had divided society artificially into two spheres, the political, in which man functioned as a tolerant, liberal, egalitarian citizen, and the economic, in which he was either a grasping capitalist or an exploited worker." [Pg. 203, Interpretations and Forecasts.]

I'm an exploited worker that is becoming more and more intolerant of grasping capitalists therefore as a "tolerant, liberal, egalitarian citizen" I'm going to fight the grasping capitalists.

I love to entertain ideas

More on God

More childhood question answered. Lewis Mumford on God:

"For mark this: if one puts God at the beginning, as the creator of all things, he becomes a monstrous being, as the God of the Old Testament in fact seemed to the sensitive Manichees, who took note of his irrational angers and his bloody commands long before Voltaire. That God is a god of matter, bestiality, darkness, and pain: not a god of love and light. If, on the other hand, one attempts to unbind deity from responsibility for having produced a world half lost to the powers of darkness and death, by promising some redemption, at least for man, in an eternal future which will balance up accounts and make love prevail: if one does this one seems to turn a brutal god into a demented one, a creature capable of condemning human beings to an eterneity of torture for sins committed in the briefest of lifetimes: a savagely disproportionate system of punishment repulsive to reason and justice. If the God who permitted the slaughter of the innocent in the Lisbon earthquake shocked Voltaire, what would he have said to the God who permitted his creatures to invent the insane horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz?

Neither faith nor reason could bring such complete defilements and miscarriages of life within the compass of human acceptance, if a divine purpose actually presided over all the occasions of human life. Plainly, if there is a loving God he must be impotent: but if he is omniponent, truly responsible for all that happens within his domain, capable of heeding even the sparrow's fall, he can hardly be a loving God. Such contradictions drive honest minds to atheism: the empty whirl and jostle of atoms becomes more kind to human reason than such a deity." [Lewis Mumford, Pg. 71, The Conduct of Life]

Happened Again

Yesterday, I wrote: "There are times when I'm reading a book and I will notice a different author has said something similar. I will then head over to the bookshelf, pull down the book, and look for the quote. This morning it happened."

Well, this morning it happened again. I started out with Lewis Mumford and ended with Robert Bly's book about Henry David Thoureau.

"The new attitude toward time and space infected the workshop and the counting house, the army and the city. The tempo became faster: the magnitudes became greater: conceptually, modern culture launched itself into space and gave itself over to movement. What Max Weber called the "romanticism of numbers" grew naturally out of this interest. In time-keeping, in trading, in fighting, men counted numbers: and finally, as the habit grew, only numbers counted." [Lewis Mumford, Pg. 278, Interpretations and Forecasts]

"To many Americans in the generation of the 1840's it felt as if the United States had fallen into mesmeric attention to external forces and a shameless obedience to them. The swift development of the Northeast, with its numerous factories, its urban workshops for immigrants, its network of free-acting capitalists, its centralized industry, showed that external forces can and do overwhelm forces of soul and conscience, changing everyone's life for the worse. To many in New England it felt as if some sort of Village King had been killed; the ancient, grounded religious way was passing; a new dispensation had arrived, The sovereign of the new administration was not a king or a human being, but what Blake called "a ratio of numbers," and this ominous, bodiless king lived in the next county, the next state, the next planet. Living under the power of a bodiless king is a bad way to live." [Robert Bly, Pg. 3, The Winged Life]

Control of Nature

While reading Lewis Mumford's perspective on Karl Marx I came across this quote: "At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy."--Karl Marx [Pg.204, Interpretations and Forecasts]

Moving Forward

I ran across this bit of wisdom in Lewis Mumford's Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972:

"When we reach the present and seek to move forward, we are in the realm of myth and projection." pg. 376

It's clear that our fate is not predestined. In other words, the plan isn't the plan.

The Curse of Mining

I'm reading Lewis Mumford's Myth of the Machine.

Here is a quote with a certain degree of chill and truth off from page 239.

"From the earliest times, as Mircea Eliade points out, blood sacrifice had been a ritual accompaniment of metallurgy. The curse of war and the curse of mining are almost interchangeable: united in death."

Voices

The voice of Lewis Mumford usually finds its way into my head when I'm writing in my journal.

"On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by 'going with' its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man's vital organs will be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine's meaningless existence."--The Pentagon of Power

Agatha Christie then comes to save the day:

"'There is always a brave new world,' said Poirot, 'but only, you know, for very special people. The lucky ones. The ones who carry the making of that world within themselves.'"

Labor Saving Devices

"Men have become the tools of their tools."--Henry David Thoreau


"We spend more time working for our labor-saving devices than they do working for us."--Ed Abbey

"By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed." --Lewis Mumford