ART

a painting is more than just a vase of flowers. it is art that may or may not contain a vase of flowers.

a novel is more than just a story. it is art that may or may not contain a story.

a painting is made of marks that make shapes and colors. they must be beautiful marks even in the making of an ugly painting.

a novel is made of words that make ideas into sentences. they must be beautiful sentences even in the making of an ugly novel.

IED (NOT YOUR USUAL IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE)

My sister judy and I shared a quality more or less identically, even though she was a shy quiet ‘good girl’ and I was an outspoken somewhat arrogant loner. (we were both ‘nice’ in our different ways.)  we both suffered increasingly into adolescence with Intermittent Explosive Disorder. This in spite of the fact that she was shy and quiet and obedient in church, in school, in the family, and as far as I know among her friends, and I was challenging and rebellious everywhere.

And when both of us became teenage parents in emotionally difficult circumstances this disorder was exacerbated and became very hard on our spouses and especially our children.

Neither my dad, who was mr. steady, nor my mom, who was shy and somewhat emotional and, I think, chronically slightly depressed, ever showed any signs of this disorder — neither did my shy older brother or my rather vivacious and talkative younger sister. Why, with all the genes we shared from a common gene pool, this should have so equally afflicted my sister and me and no others I have thought hard and long to understand. But still I do not. 

I do think that in some ways we haven’t developed in molecular genetics well enough, that the answer to this behavior still lies there, rather than in birth order or any other situational explanation.

SINK OR SWIM

there is a little bit of sink or swim in every aspect of the human world. at the risk of veering toward the fran liebowitz model, as harsh as it may seem, in the end it’s hard to be honest about the prospects of real people without admitting that some of them, through no fault of their own, are going to fail. they are going to fail in the usual (and unusual) ways that people do, in mundane (and spectacular) ways, and no amount of well-intentioned intervention is going to save them.

whether this profound result is unfair is beside the point. it is actual. darwin, in his infinite if accidental wisdom, explained more and broader aspects of the whole cosmic enterprise than he knew. it turns out that wherever you look, from higgs bosons to slugs to black holes, the lesson is endlessly there.

 IN PRAISE OF SUGAR

when i read the ‘information’ posted on various platforms online - even when i look at books about nutrition in a bookstore - i am struck by the lack of basic knowledge the average author has about the operation of the human body - an animal that shares the basic chemistry of life with all animals, from as small as a fruit fly to as large as a blue whale. all earth animals burn the same fuel to animate their lives and all the systems in their bodies. that fuel is glucose - grape sugar. there are supplemental needs, like protein for cell repair and production, fat for enzyme production (including cholesterol) and many trace minerals, but the basic moving and thinking and regulation of all the autonomic functions of the body, whether you are a fruit fly or a human, is fueled by sugar. so is your ability to think and read and understand these words.

i hear voices saying ‘yes, of course, but what about all the sugar added to the human diet?’ well, if the added sugar adds too many calories to an animal’s intake they will gain weight. yes! weight gain is just caused by a caloric intake from all sources greater than the expenditure to maintain daily activity. (think of a bear gorging on sugary fruit in the autumn.) but increasing sugar intake does not make a person sick by itself. sugar is not toxic to the human body (or any other body). we know this because it’s easy to get mice in controlled experiments to eat more sugar, or even only sugar. and their organs do not immediately fail, nor do they get sick.

this does not mean you should try living on pop, ice cream and candy. but people on their own will not crave that kind of diet and it is not seen outside controlled experiments. humans, like all animals, naturally know what to eat and managed to live healthy lives for millennia before the first ‘expert’ arrived to ‘save’ them. trying to make the general public forget this history is one of the prime demands of the so-called health movement. dogs and bears and fish and bugs are lucky they don’t have such a nuanced language and can’t read. and to my knowledge there are no dog or fish experts around to tell them what to do anyway.

so what should be our takeaway from all this modern industry, this wellness industry? it is corrupt and entirely self- serving and not to be trusted. ignore it all - you will only be ignoring someone else’s ignorance, not your own.

SIDES

There is something i learned early on — in my twenties — from having discovered Albert Camus and The Plague, that has remained more or less intact after a long life lived — that it is usually hard to understand what is going on in the world around you when strife is upon the land, but at the very least one should try not to be on the side of the executioners.

Suppose you walk into a mall with your daughter by your side and for no immediately apparent reason someone shoots her and she dies in your arms — what do you do? What is the most appropriate response? 

I don’t think there are many, given even a moment to consider, who would include taking an automatic weapon and shooting everyone in the mall.

WHAT CANADIAN VOICES I ENJOY HAVE IN COMMON

i hear many voices commenting on current events in my usual radio wandering and there are a few that i really always appreciate:

the already mentioned michael byers from ubc; louise arbour, a jurist who has held many important positions in canadian and international law including justice of the supreme court and chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in the hague; and bob ray, an experienced political veteran who has been premier of ontario and subsequently held many offices representing canada at the federal level. 

what these observers probably most have in common is a belief that justice is the most important element of governance at every level and so, at this time in our political evolution, that interest is best served by principles operating most effectively in states and world organizations that ascribe to a policy of social democracy with a distributive economy. the largest body with an overall framework that supports that system is the present european union, a body not often credited with the great success it should be in ultimately overcoming the less noble ambitions of many of its members.

THREE SUSPICIOUS IDEAS

There are three ideas being promoted in discussions about combating global warming that I continue to be suspicious of — green hydrogen production, carbon capture (with the exception of trees and other natural solutions) and nuclear power. I have a hard time imagining anyone really wants to pursue these ideas who isn’t propelled by some ulterior motive (ultimately our favorite motive, the profit motive.) If you are not engaged in the present energy economy in more than just a consumer role the arguments made in favor of these ideas seem thin and wishful to the point of dishonesty. 

Next time you hear or read one of these voices do a quick background check to find out who they are and who they speak for. They certainly don’t speak for me and I don’t think they speak for the honest reality of the global situation we all face together.

A SIMPLE FACT OF ARRESTING CLARITY

lately i’ve been reading about the history of the middle east over the 65000 years since humans first came out of africa into the fertile crescent and it has basically been 65000 years of tribal thinking and warfare. closer to our time i have also read the history of the league of nations between the world wars and the active period of the UN during reconstruction, including the marshall plan, after the second world war, up to the present. with notable exceptions (the marshall plan for instance seems to have been enlightened even if almost unintentionally) it is sad how selfish the history of humans has been. in the current bloodbath, as always mostly of civilians, no matter how insistent and even rational some of the principals sound i can’t help being reminded of a simple fact of arresting clarity delivered to most of us by our parents by the time we were six years old - that ‘two wrongs do not make a right’ .

TIME

There is P-time and U-time. P-time is personal time. It started when you were conceived and it ends when you die. U-time is universal time. It started in this universe at the moment of the big bang and it will stop when all activity stops. I don’t think, at least superficially, this is a particularly hard concept to grasp but it does play hard with just about every religion I’ve ever heard about. 

Curious, that.

TIME IS RUNNING

if you are looking to find the least evolved most tribal people in the world, especially among our so-called leaders (as we are once again seeing at the moment) there is a woefully plentiful number of candidates. if, on the other hand, you are looking to find the calm intelligent rational pragmatists among us there is an unfortunate dearth of them in our time and, I suspect, really, any time in the past.

whether or not we will survive much longer depends on people being willing to identify with no group smaller than all mankind, including the biosphere, with all its varied life that sustains us.

I will leave the odds of that happening to your own imagination. but time is running out.

😶

i’ve always frowned on shameless self-promotion - i think i was intended for some slightly different planet - so you are probably not reading this, as you are probably not reading anything i’ve written over the course of these many years. 

TIME HAS NOT BEEN WAITING AROUND

when a cosmos commences it is a bound system whose rules of behaviour are being created simultaneously. there is no prior plan, no blueprint. the plan develops as the cosmos develops, influenced by local stimuli, so every cosmos could be different. and just as matter and energy are basic elements of our cosmos time is also a fundamental element. 

when all gradients in our universe have been resolved there will be no more energy remaining to cause further movement and when all activity ceases time also ceases. whether this will be because space has shrunk to nothing or thinned to zero density or in any other perhaps inconceivable way, time will cease. 

time has not been waiting around for something to happen. there is no time until something happens. time is created only and simultaneously as activity is created and it ceases when activity ceases. 

the cosmos is essentially a form of biology. 

INSIGHT

this life-long enquiry that has excited me and sustained me has led to some useful conclusions that can be credited to a basic combination of influences — darwinian evolution followed by the development of precise observations in molecular genetics has unlocked the fundamental principles of not just the origin of life and how life self-assembles but how everything in the universe, including the universe(s) itself, self-assembles. 

though we have invented zero, a profound limitation in human conceptual thought makes it difficult for us to imagine nothing. avoiding and ignoring this limitation has been the single most important obstruction in the advancement of our understanding of everything and realizing this has opened what could become a flood of reliable and useful information about concepts like space/time and how to live successfully on a finite little orb in the midst of an incalculably large and energetic event.

A LIFE

there is a certain constancy to my life, from this morning reading in my cabin, a newly minted old man, stretching back to some of my earliest and most persistent memories as a very young child — I have always wanted to know what is real, what is not just my own musings or the disorganized musings of others, but what is actually out there, hiding in other crania and other galaxies. and somehow, through selfishness and good luck, I have managed to be able to do that.

and that has been so satisfying — perhaps even a good definition of happiness — being able to pursue one's own peculiar obsession. it does surprise me that in the end, given the opportunity, we all seem to be so very much our original selves.

THE GREAT HALL OF ADULTHOOD

sometime around when I was eighteen, already a father at seventeen with a mother who was sixteen, I had a kind of vision of the world that lay waiting for me just ahead that I can still see to this day. there was a long corridor stretching into the fading distance that contained a row of doors, all the doors leading off it on the same, the left, side. on each door there was lettered a title. I knew I was looking for one that could be for me, one that I could open to enter into an interesting future. what I didn't want to do was follow my dad, a decent guy by any metric, through the door labeled 'business'. I couldn't imagine caring about the things he cared about — which dish soap was selling the best, or toothpaste or laundry detergent, it all seemed so silly — but I thought a door labeled literature, or art, or music or theater or film, or even science, might be more like it.

the first one I came to said Art. I opened it and cautiously stepped into the short hallway it opened onto. at the other end was an open passage. I walked the few steps forward until I could see into the space beyond. the hallway opened onto a great vaulted room high and long, and in there on the floor, giant letters extending far along to my right spelled out B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S. so. I thought some moments before turning around and walking back the way I had come, carefully shutting the door labelled Art behind me as I reentered the original corridor.

in succession I opened the doors on the left ahead of me — Literature, Music, Theater, Film, Science. They all opened onto the Great Hall of Business.

I was at a loss. Then I had some serious thinking to do. 

in a way, I am still doing it.

SELF-IMPROVEMENT

improving extant versions of democracy and capitalism is a little like brain surgery — you have to make what could amount to massive changes while keeping the host alive during the process. this seems to me easier, safer and perhaps the only way to make changes in the present world order. the idea that we can throw out major chunks of the brain and drop in new ones while somehow keeping the host alive seems fraught with much greater danger and much less (diminishing to zero, really)   opportunity for success. in my time I have seen what war and depression and revolution does. no matter what gains are promised and even eventually made toward a more rational distributive order, if indeed there are any, the costs have proved enormous. any amount of discussion, however prolonged, in the final analysis will prove to have been safer and cheaper by any measure, including the cost in both lives and treasure. ditto our host planet.

STUMBLING ON SOMETHING OF A SURPRISE

after finishing The Bell Jar on my kindle, which was beautifully constructed of beautiful language, if maddening, the next book in the library turned out to be one of my own, Letters of Acceptance, and so I started in to reading it. I quickly discovered that it too was beautifully constructed of beautiful language, as unique in its way, and so I read on.

I am surprised at the number of languages I have constructed for the number of works I have written. as I say that my mind, if not my face, is smiling.

TIME WITH OTHERS

for as long as I can remember I've always had to pump up for humans. they are too stimulating. I want to engage but I think I appear as too intense, or even manic. it is just my way of hyper-vigilance and is natural to me. it causes a sudden rise in blood pressure and glucose and oxygen consumption, a kind of super-awareness that is expensive to maintain. 

I am probably somewhat along the spectrum for autism and so I have always been someone who needs to spend a great deal of time alone, where I have room to inhabit my own thoughts and grow in understanding this life - my life - and time to relax my body and mind fully. 

but I still cherish time with others.

THE JOB OF THE HUMAN

the job of any young human is to try to figure out who you inherently are and then find a way to make that useful, if possible.

you have been dealt a hand. you cannot turn it in to the dealer for a different hand and the devil is that one of the cards you have been dealt is the ability to play a hand, any hand, well or badly.

good luck, amigo.

MAN'S LEAVINGS

the massive ruins of man on earth are the embarrassing remains of a primitive and presumptuous ego. I would rather look for the farms and fields of necessity. they are not only useful, they are naturally more beautiful .

PANDEMIA

to put today’s pandemic in perspective i think it helps to compare it to the last one, the nineteen-eighteen-nineteen influenza just over a hundred years ago. at that time the earth contained one and a half billion humans. the number of people infected with the virus amounted to one in three persons, or about 500 million; the number of deaths was around 50 million. if the figures are adjusted to reflect the present human population of earth, about 7.5 billion, the numbers we can expect from this pandemic look like 2.5 billion persons infected and about 250 million deaths. that would be more deaths than were caused by all the wars of history, and this in just two years.

there is only one reason to presume our outcomes will be much less damaging than these projections and that is our vastly increased knowledge in molecular biology, medicine and science in general. we have a vaccine, something impossible to imagine a hundred years ago. the risk of death in taking the vaccine seems to be running at about one per million. the risk of infection for not having (or taking) the vaccine seems to be about one in thirty.

the fact that some people are trying to equate these risks represents one of the most mindless and stupid blunders in human history. and if large numbers of people refuse to be vaccinated, they represent a considerable risk to the general wellbeing of all the humans of earth, for now and the forseeable future.

when humans fail it is not likely to be a technical failure. we are great at technology. the errors that threaten us are always errors of understanding and intention, philosohical errors. for that the only cure is a more thoughtful and honest education, rather than the indoctrination that so often masquerades as education in this world of competing nation-states.

humans have not come to dominate earth because they learned to compete. all animals do that. humans have come to dominate this planet because they learned to cooperate in increasignly subtle and elaborate ways, and that trend will absolutely have to continue if we are to prevent the next devastation awaiting us on this little blue orb — global warming. it is past time to indulge in nation-states that seek to dominate others — or dominant individuals either. in that light one could view the present pandemic as a rehearsal of what is so shortly to come, a world more ordered and harmonious than humans have so far demonstrated their ability to sustain. and without an early and thorough grounding in logic and a discussion of all forms of prejudice, including especially groupthink and confirmation bias, i don’t think we can do it.

THE TROUBLE

the trouble with religion is that today as always it treats people in the aggregate  and that is not illuminating. what people are is really interesting mammals, animals of earth easily confused and then overwhelmed by egoistic thought.

but hey, though the so-called intellectual and spiritual musings of man are tainted with an embarrassment of ego, confirmation bias and flawed observation, they are not the culmination of human effort or the embodiment of rational understanding but merely a waypoint on a continuing journey which at length will move past errors in favour of evidence-based  observation, both at the individual level and finally, collectively.

 

SEPARATENESS

the human being is not a walled construction. the asymmetry created by the membrane separating any animal from matter outside itself is porous, permeable, and it is necessarily, essentially so. the really tiresome philosophical notion of separateness, of isolation, that inhabits nearly all of so-called modern philosophy, unravels like an ego-driven useless tangled ball of string in the face of simple logical questioning. yes, there is ‘me’. and yes, there is ‘everything not me’. but ‘me’ includes the collected surviving strategies from the past, inhabiting us from conception, integral to us through our genetic inheritance; also our physical nature and presence, including not only our bodies but much of our perception, behavior and thought. the whole notion of an individual is in a larger sense a rather dubious proposition, and along with that realization should come a serious uneasiness about free will and the division of actions into intentional and inherent. 

in this quest for singular uniqueness we are attempting to punch way above our pay-grade and it will never produce anything better than this tangled ball of string we presently still call 'philosophy'.

 excerpt: WHAT THE MAN IS

he couldnt help it he felt proud of her. the eagle was a thief intent on stealing the big fish caught square by the skill of the osprey. he knew that was the skill of the eagle, that it took courage at least equal to the osprey’s to take it from him. and could the eagle invent another way? so he wouldnt refuse the eagle. what about the courage of the osprey’s mate to dive on a dangerous foe? there was no chance he would refuse her. but why values? why an order? a hierarchy? why did he favor the vultures, in comparison to eagles so patient, so polite? wasnt that just a tactic? to avoid danger? werent they all just expressing their genes? and he who had long ago given up killing any animal, even his cabin houseflies, out of some human form of respect, how did he make evolutionary sense of that? for he believed absolutely that darwin above all had got it right. so what genes of his was that expressing? or was it possible to step beyond? to perhaps employ the greater information stored in the memory of his experience, to override genetic expression. but even the ability to do that might be just an expression of another genetic capability, so that free will, if not intentionality, would once again have to be questioned. the idea of islands, of each man being an untouchable island, began to chafe. more and more he had observed his thoughts and actions to be largely genetic. and where free will really ran into trouble was when one faced that influence honestly. it blurred the line most uncomfortably between inherent actions and intentional actions. it could be argued that dna did not really belong to us, we didnt initially and could never during our lifetime choose anything about it, it came down to us as merely the collected surviving strategies of our species and what that really led to was not a discussion of free will at all but a larger and more radical discussion of what exactly constituted an individual. this individual, upon which the moral and governing principles of our modern western states was based, was itself a fiction. there really was no such thing — a person existing unbegotten, without issue from other people or the collected experience of the past, both externally and most importantly, internally — genetically.

WITHOUT ENEMIES

i have spent a great many of my adult years to cultivate a life without enemies. i can’t imagine why it is not a common path. confronting life directly rather than through association seems to me a simple and truthful proposition. there is me, a physical manifestation of the cosmos, and there is everything not me, also physical manifestations of the cosmos. 

what earthly good would the fracture of this simple unity provide?

THE NATURAL FALLACY

just as it is false to think of a person as embodying a brain/body dichotomy, it is also false to think of a nature/human society dichotomy in a larger context. 

first, the brain is physical and literally a physical part of the body — thoughts are physical also, in the same way actions are. life is physical. death is physical. ideas about life are physical. ideas about death are physical. 

society is equally part of nature, as are all things in the cosmos. cosmos includes within it the word ‘nature’. just as our brain is not separate from our body, there is no nature separate from us, nor is there anything we can view from a distance. nature surrounds us, including us, our insides, our brains and our thoughts, and the limits we may perceive of nature out there are merely the shadows of our own conceptual limitations projected onto it.

IT WOULDN'T ALL BE GONE

i was out on the south deck just now doing my first morning stretches, looking around at the grass, sky, mountains, sea, the cap cloud resting lightly on mount baker in the morning sun, trying to imagine it all gone, everything, the result of my mortality. 

i realized i was smiling, quite benignly. of course it wouldn't all be gone. why should mount baker disappear just because i can't see it anymore? why should the grass? the soft autumn air? the drone of a passing plane far off? it would all still be here. the other creatures around me, my family and friends not far off — all still here. 

how proper. how correct. how wonderful!

this mortality is only an imaginary calamity. we just bump up against the wall of our cranial capacity, like any creature of this earth; we cannot imagine nothing.  

but we don't have to. there is no nothing to choke our benign serenity. there is a vast continuum. this story is a chain reaction. nothing may be a long time coming for the cosmos. and even after that...

it wouldn't all be gone.

BRUCE

what is it with the universe and endless repetition? why this endless duplication, of people, fruit flies, of stars, black holes and galaxies? i can’t get my head around it.

i remember bruce bacon, a kid i went to junior high school with who wound up at RISD in the same class as me. he was a terrible painter, a terrible drawer that everyone kept rooting for anyway. something about him made us all yearn for him to succeed. and when he did, finally, with an oil portrait that was really great, we were beside ourselves with excitement and relief. ‘so now you know you can do it!’ i said with great enthusiasm. he looked at me with a combination of flatness and an expression of philosophical ennui. ‘isn’t that great?’ i said, my forehead furrowing slightly. 'your reward is that you can keep going, brucey; this is just the first one.’ ‘why would i do that?’ he said. ‘i’ll never do that again. i proved i can do it. i’m done.’ ‘you’re not serious’ i said, slightly astonished. but looking at him i saw that he seemed to be.

he committed suicide soon after. 

so maybe you think he was crazy. maybe he was, by the usual definition. but maybe there is just a way of seeing things different than the way we seem to be collectively seeing things.

AMERICA VS REALITY

one of the more depressing aspects of american foreign and military policy is that, as it has been for most of a century, it is still based entirely around energy hegemony, and that means, to the americans, oil; this at a time when anyone with a brain larger than his wallet understands that oil is done, that it is toxic to the planet, the world economy and all the inhabitants of the biosphere.

who is going to fight this world view? not the brits, not the soviets. i can think of a couple of candidates: the european union and china. 

i am naive enough not to be prejudiced toward any future saviors of this little orb, though i have a very clear favorite; the european model is the wounded beginning, along with the undermined united nations, of the only possible future of a civilized mankind.

THE MISSING COMMANDMENT

thou shalt not hate. 

KARMA

there's one time when i understand karma; when humans suffer self-inflicted wounds. i've been hearing too much from the US lately — too much of the political discourse, which unfortunately will likely affect the entire globe. the level of ignorance, the level of error and falsehood blanketing the entire public sphere, cannot augur well for anyone's future. at a time when the anthropocene era is threatening to end life as we know it, the primitive thinking involving both some leaders and many of the public, is as shocking as a look back into american history can be.

this is one thing i am afraid mr whitman got wrong; the US is not the great nation of the world. it has not been the great experiment in democracy (although it was a large-scale experiment in capitalism). if it keeps on its present course it will be the great threat to democracy's survival.

COMPARISONS

this morning i have both watched the final episode of a series from denmark called Rita and finished the final chapter of a book titled This Life, by martin hagglund. I found one affective and effective, the other neither affective nor effective. 

the problem with books by academics is that their authors seem to have spent too much time reading books by academics and not enough time looking around. if mr hagglund had looked around much, one of the first things he would probably have deduced is that the universe is profoundly darwinian, profoundly ad hoc, and does not follow anyone’s preconceived notions but develops notions as a product of assembling itself, just as every organism within it does. the building instructions do not come first but are part of the construction and are a natural consequence of the act of building. 

that is not only the way life in the universe assembles itself, it is also the only way social changes occur. for anyone to become so enamored of their own ideas, a version of themselves, that they truly think they have written a directive for change — which is a spontaneous and continuing, neverending quality of cosmos — is folly. 

i will forget mr hagglund and his outdated notions soon, Rita not so soon. 

i hope to remember this lesson too.

ENDS AND MEANS (AGAIN)

the old end justifies the means argument rests on the assumption that neither one is fictional.  in reality the means are everpresent and ruefully if not brutally real while the ends never arrive, but are always just one more action away, retreating apace as the troops advance, like the mirage they are.   

SEEMS SIMPLE

I've been watching a number of miniseries lately, as I have written one based on a novel of mine, THE UNSAID, and I am discovering a fairly simple principle that seems to have escaped much of history (and entertainment): you can't make a good world by doing bad things.

READING THE PLAGUE

am re-reading Camus' The Plague after many years absence. I see once again what I learned a long time ago when I first read it: for a serious writer there are two jobs; one is to tell the truth, the other is to know what the truth is.

THE BOOK OF MY SURROUNDINGS

i am sitting in the teak chair 
on the grass in front of my cabin 
a place i go often to read. 

but today no book accompanies me. 
it is january and as it has been most of the month 
it is springlike today. 

the nettles in the draw 
are big enough to eat. 
all the grass hills are green. 

i listen almost more than looking. 
i love my eyes 
what they can bring to me

but as much as that 
it is the sounds that reach me 
the tiny pressure changes. 

i think taken together it is a book 
always new always familiar 
the book of my surroundings.

DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

there are nasty people in the world. i have no business with them. i have no interest in writing about them. they do not fascinate me. they teach me nothing, except to perhaps remind me of what i am not. 

david adams richards can have my share. he seems to favor them. 

me, they just bore me.

RIGHTS OF PROPERTY

we have rule of law in canada. this includes limits on the rights of property — all property. it is not a racial issue or an issue of injustice when the government expropriates land for the common good. it often involves rights of way, usually highway expansion or other infrastructure initiatives. the idea is to respect the right to be paid for value given/taken, and in the case of pipelines and hydro grid often the title of the land does not transfer to the government or private ownership and the government or company involved compensates for the agreed devaluation of the land by paying to attach a covenant while leaving title in the hands of the original owner. 

the first nations in BC have made claims to more than 100% of the land in the province. this does not reflect either the present reality of life in this province or even the history of land use here. 

there is a common good that most people can agree with. without that, governance would break down and rule of law would be threatened. large-scale projects will continue to be developed in this province for at least the near future and for a very small group of hereditary (read birthright) chiefs of first nations, nations who even in total represent only a very small cohort of the modern province in which we actually live, to block activity on narrow grounds and historical ambiguity is a flawed and ultimately doomed action. 

we all negotiate just about everything in our lives. absolutism, inflexibility and obstructionism are only successful in the long run when they protect something for which there is widespread agreement among the population as a whole. 

in the end, rule of law will be upheld in canada. for that, all of us on all sides of any issue should be grateful. the alternative, anarchy, which really just means the voluntary association of people, we are a (perhaps infinitely) long way from being ready for. we are selfish and not honest enough, kind enough or generous enough to make that a working reality.

WHAT THE MAN IS

an earth animal

a human

a male

an observor

a seeker of truth

of justice

a sometime loner in the midst of nature

in north america

in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

born middle-class

educated

white

against violence
against killing —

a survivor.

PATERSON

jim jarmusch has written a film which quietly puts the lie to just about every other film out there, that life is best portrayed as a series of large-scale extraordinary episodic events. his recent film Paterson depicts the mundane daily routine of an ordinary couple living modestly in paterson new jersey. it is repetitive in exactly the way life is, routinized and mostly unsurprising.

though it is unashamedly rigged and in some respects unlikely (as was de Sica's Bicycle Thief early in the neorealist movement), it manages to reveal an inner poetic and meaningful aspect of everyday life that anyone can relate to, because in one fashion or other, like all animals, we nearly all nearly all the time really live this kind of routinized life. and what that means is that we are none of us really ordinary, that life without embellishment is touching, rich and meaningful and, if you like, extraordinary.

to me that is still the most important use of film as a vibrant contemporary art form of singular importance in our time.

ASSUMPTIONS

out walking in a sunfilled late morning along a levee south of vancouver with a dear but departed friend (not expired, just gone from view) the topic of global warming and the future of humanity came up. she, who is degreed in biology, engineering and research ecology, decreed that humans are fucked. about this she was unequivocal. i had thoughts but initially said nothing, as the time and place were beautiful and i wanted to inhabit both a little longer. but i filed away my simple thoughts for perhaps another time and place.

it occurred to me that any talk of the future necessarily involves assumptions and i immediately noted two in her pronouncement: one, the notion that the technology needed to survive global warming will not continue to evolve along useful lines and: two, a corporate-dominated world economy and governance model is the last form of organization earth humans will ever employ.

the evidence for both these assumptions is just not there, in my view. on the contrary, i find ample evidence that: one, technology does continue to evolve along useful lines. but whether that will happen, and whether it will lead to solutions to the major existential threats to earth's biosphere — nuclear war and global warming — is not at all clear. and precisely because it is not clear, it is most useful to assume that something can and will be done about it. otherwise, why try? and two: there is a time for every organizing principle and i think a good case can be made for the time when competitive private enterprise and private capital is probably the most efficient way to exploit new conditions. but every time imposes on its people new sets of requirements that demand new solutions more suitable to the present and near future.

in our near future, global problems will need to be overseen by global institutions that ultimately have a controlling interest between and even within the corporations and nation-states of today. this is inevitable unless tragedy obviates the need for any governance of any kind. 

we don't need to learn these lessons from history, as any real thinker knows (with the possible exception of historians) but nevertheless the lessons are there for the concerned who need reassurance.

NOTES ON PRIVILEGE

there is something in social/political/economic systems that enshrines privilege. this quality of inequity has various roots in surviving custom and by conscious design and is ubiquitous. why is that? is it inherent in the human animal and therefore inevitable? i don’t know the answer. i have tried to observe not only humans but also other animals of our planet, without conclusive results, but tentatively i would have to say that i think such a condition is most likely evolutionarily designed, that it is rooted in the individual and species’ common urge to survive and procreate.

ideas, like individuals, also compete. one idea that seems to run against the current is the idea of limiting ideas that compete with present mores. much effort is given to thwarting new thought by those who administer and profit from present assumptions and practices. this seemingly contrary behavior may endure because it promotes stability at the expense of adaptability, that change is in itself dangerous and needs to be controlled for the safety of the species. or it might endure simply because some are selfish and concerned more with their own survival, comfort and pleasure than their society in total. in my experience i would have to say the latter reason is supported by more evidence, though even if true it may have ineluctably produced increased fitness.

whether anything can be done to effectively make cooperation, more than competition, a fundamental first principle in the minds of the peoples of earth i am not sure, though i do think that, to the degree humans have survived to dominate the planet, that domination is not largely the result of competition, unbridled or otherwise, but owes its success much more to the continuing (and growing) influence of cooperation.

YES, EVOLUTION HAS AN ARROW

when defending egregious behavior among the humans, many resort to the claim that it is only human nature that men (especially men) do this or that, (like making war and other intimidation displays) as though somehow so-called human nature is not evolving continually like every other phenomenon in the universe, that using the past to justify the abysmal present is normal and correct.

it is not. it would be better for individuals, society and the prospects of both if we would try to consult the near future, with its obvious known challenges, in order to assess what behavior is likely to be the most useful, or at least the least harmful, in the present moment.

HALF A TWO-BIT PHILOSOPHY

here is one bit of two-bit philosophy for you:

i have watched over the years some people who are hypercritical of others, even and maybe especially their so-called friends. it strikes me that underlying this depressing behavior it is quite likely they are primarily and mainly critical of themselves.

these opinions of others are almost always framed around actions and motivations, and condemnation is justification for not liking or respecting them.

it took me many years to understand that it is quite possible to love people while not loving all the things they do.

i think that might be the same for oneself. the two cases are probably more inextricably linked than the hypercritical among us understand.

anyway, it's worth a try.

HEARING MR KAVANAUGH

hearing mr kavanaugh testify yesterday afternoon was a revelation. he sounded angry, childish, petulant, beligerent, uncomposed, unthoughtful, and worst of all, entitled. i suspect that is what he is.

those qualities may resonate with mr trump and people like him — including much of the republican old guard, who are themselves largely privileged men used to their eminence, but they are not going to resonate with the majority of americans because those are not the qualities america needs in its elected official representatives of the people, for starters, and they are certainly not the qualities needed to serve those same people on the supreme court, which is the ultimate judicial arbiter and safeguarder of american rights, both collective and individual.

HUMILITY NOW

mr pinker, in his poorly titled Enlightenment Now, has based his optimism on some dubious assumptions, the principal one being that mankind and the earth will both be well-served by humans becoming about ninety percent urban and that is where we are heading.

in this work there are a number of unsupported declarative sentences about the future (example: the sun will expand in a billion years). this book is better (but not unarguably better) at portraying the past, but in conceiving of the earth and humanity as a single economic system (though he is not an economist) and assuming the future is inevitable, he has polluted the entire roster of conclusions and remedies that might have made a book of this scope useful. real solutions lie elsewhere:
reducing the production of useless things to satisfy aggrandizing humans' consumption of both energy and material; reducing runaway expectation in favor of more thoughtful lives, more peaceful lives; reducing on a personal level one's own carbon footprint (something you can do alone without the need of meetings and endless talk). 

the problems are not technological. humans are great at technology. when humans fail, the failure is ultimately one of intent, of understanding what life is; the errors are philosophical and the remedies can be found in scientific enquiry.

nuclear powerplants cannot fix this planet. everyone living in cities, removed from the natural world, cannot secure this planet or its people a future, at least not a future free of catastrophe. we should not blithely assume that large-scale problems will abate spontaneously, that markets somehow have a magic quality of super-intelligence. we need a different kind of attitude, a different more inquisitive, more open and patient response to our self-created problems. we need, not to tell the earth what we will do, more to ask the earth what we should do. and that inquiry, that is the real role of science, which predates and postdates the enlightenment with its emphasis on humanism. unless humanism is widened to include all life — something that was not done during the enlightenment and is not yet done today — it is itself just another form of blindness. 

the most satisfying part of this book is the section on science. the least satisfying part is the section on the environment. mr. pinker wants us to feel good about doing nothing, or doing the wrong things because they are generated spontaneously without informed guidance. if one really internalizes the assumptions of Enlightenment Now — that life on earth is all about humans — we are dooming all life here to oblivion. you could argue that one little nuclear picnic or a fatally polluted planet in the cosmos is a trifle of no importance on the grand scale of events, but i don't think that will comfort many in their quest for reasons to remain optimistic in the face of existential threats.

LITTLE THINGS AND BIG THINGS

this morning i am smiling because it has just occurred to me that i can put some gel insoles in my slippers, slippers i wear around the cabin during the morning and evening — which cabin has a cement floor and may not be the best for my ageing knees. 

writing at my desk, making notes wherever i am during the day, i spend time trying to wrestle the big ideas to the ground (though i don't waste much time on the questions that can never be answered) and i consider it worthy of my time, but the things i do that cheer me in the moment are more the little things — the things that improve and perfect my personal life. that is the best antidote i have found for the general malaise of our changing times. that is the balance i need in order to confront the big ones, which so often seem, sadly, to be retrograde.

I'M ALRIGHT, JACK — NOT GOOD ENOUGH

there was a time when private capital was the fastest way forward at the scale of nations (though one can point to some very fast, if brutal, forward leaps made in the early twentieth century by communism) but at the moment the effects of capitalism on societies at large represent a retarding force for progress. the system was never meant to produce equality — it is founded on the principle of inequality, which is the gravity in the system that makes things move — and the most pressing need now all around the world is a more egalitarian order, one that gives equal access and equal justice to all its members and produces less useless stuff and less movement of same.

for that, a whole new system of governance, production and distribution will have to be cobbled together from the remains of a shredded world order that has produced or at least not abated endless divisions, rivalries and hatred, and failed utterly in what should be the prime goal and duty of every nation and all nations collectively — égalité.

the costs of division are unmeasurably high; the costs of nations fighting nations both in trade and war, corporations fighting corporations, religions fighting religions, ethnicities fighting ethnicities, are killing the future.

we have an opportunity to free mankind from most tedious work, to free us from most disease, ignorance, prejudice, to free us from the past that clings to us so destructively, the past that retards the natural evolution to new and better paradigms and leaves us stuck on a path to destruction.

the old order is dying. we can try just endlessly fixing it but i am skeptical. the people in positions to do so are the very same people who have profited from the old system and few are willing to give up even a small modicum of privilege that all should have a better and more sustainable life, even if it means wiping out all of mankind in the bargain, themselves included. and you cannot reason with people who do not decide what to do based on objective reason or what is best for the planet.

a new order may emerge before the final calamity makes it all inutile. we can hope. it beats despair.

ONE SIGNAL BENEATH THE NOISE

can we cut to the chase here? at the base of a pile of problems deep enough to sink the planet is the inability of humans to identify with a group containing all humans, even all animals, all living things, all things both living and non-living in the cosmos.

there was a time (being a darwinian enforces this view upon me) when identity of origin, tribe, nation, religion, caste, ethnicity, politics, school ties and country clubs must somehow have aided our survival. otherwise, why have it?

but what i have seen in my time with my eyes is that all these divisions are contrary to natural sense and honest science. there is only one story called 'life' (thank you, molecular geneticists), there is only one animal called 'human' (thank you ethnologists). acceptance of others on equal terms with ourselves is the obvious conclusion of a less narrow understanding of life and in an increasingly populous and energetic world it is becoming obvious that these past divisions that cling to so many will only bring ruin on us all.

it's time to be honest. it's time to be fair. it's time for justice, truly egalitarian justice, to become the guiding principle of all human organization. 

a friend once exclaimed to me, 'i'm so proud of my grandchildren!' my automatic response was, 'i'm proud of everyone's grandchildren.'

STORIES

everything is too simple. stories. they all want to have bad guys and good guys. it's not really like that. we all do some bad things and some good things. sometimes we don't know which is which. not that we are confused. we just really don't know. we don't think we are confused. but we are. we really get it wrong. our good things are bad. or our bad things are good.

i want to read stories like that. i'm sick of simple bullshit. if we have to write bullshit, at least we could make it subtle. complicated. surprising. i want to read stories where you and the characters aren't so damn sure who is right and who is wrong. and when.