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.