A Toast for this Mayday 2024

So, two years ago I gave a toast at our May Eve Dinner, — some of you were there — at our former home, Moonflower Farm — where among many other erudite references I quoted Plutarch claiming that at Delphi, which was mostly a temple of Apollo, they also worshipped Dionysus, but only for three months of the year, and that this was because the ratio of the world’s maintenance to its destruction by fire is 3:1.  I thought I was making a poetic reference to my mother’s cremation, which had recently transpired — but a little over a month after I proposed that toast, a wildfire had burned our home and all our possessions.

So last year I was afraid to give a toast.

But, this year, throwing caution to the winds:

 I was thinking about how some of us will be sleeping “under the stars” this weekend — and how actually we all are.  Actually we will all sleep under the stars tonight, both under them and over them, and in between them — tucked in.

I was thinking about how some friends of mine are excited to send humans out into space — as if we’re not already in space.  As if the Earth, and all of us on it, were not already hurtling through space.  Some 70,000 mph relative to the Sun — but then if you think about it, the Sun is also moving. The Sun — and the Earth with it — are traveling some 500,000 mph relative to the center of the galaxy.  And the galaxy itself — well.

So, the Earth may be hurtling; or I guess from another perspective it’s just drifting.  It depends on what they call the “inertial frame”.  But in any case, it is most certainly moving through space, and there is no doubt that humanity is already, and have always been, from our earliest ancestors, spacefarers.

As I was thinking about all of this, I came across in an old book the remarkable analogy that if you emptied Waterloo Station — which is an enormous building in London — of everything but six specks of dust, if you took out all the people, all the trains, all the furniture, the sandwich carts, and all that was left was six tiny specks of dust — it would still be more crowded, with dust, than space is with stars.

The emptiness all around us is truly vast.

This of course brought to my mind the story that Alan Watts told from time to time — which as far as I can tell he made up, there’s no record of it anywhere outside his lectures — of an astronaut, returning to Earth who said:  “I have seen God; and She is black.”

All of which made me think of the seventeenth century French Benedictine Friar Pierre Pérignon — who is remembered by the traditional honorific “Dom”, Dom Pérignon — a monastic at an abbey in the Champagne region of France — who was inspecting some of the abbey’s wine, which had begun to referment in the bottle, and was in danger of exploding, and is supposed to have called out, “Brothers, brothers, come quickly!  I am drinking stars!”

And so.  Sisters!  Brothers!  Come quickly.  Stars above us, stars below us; stars outside us, stars within; we hurtle, we drift, through the vast emptiness of space; together.

Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches Seven: A Dithyramb for this Mayday 2022

Plutarch — in a text called “On the ει at Delphi” — reports that Apollo, the deity moderns associate with Delphi, was not the only one worshiped there, but shared the temple with an older occupant, Dionysus — Apollo being worshiped nine months of the year and Dionysus three.  Plutarch observes that while Apollo is always depicted the same way, as a virile young man in the prime of life, Dionysus is represented in a huge variety of forms:  a young man, an old man; a bull, a snake, a thunderbolt; a flowering bush, a grapevine; in infancy, in death.  And very often, in some combination of those two conditions, for just as the archaic form of Dionysus, Zagreus, was torn from his mother’s womb and dismembered by the Titans, and his still beating heart was cradled in his father Zeus’s thigh — they say “thigh”, but everybody knows it means balls, Zeus kept his son’s heart in his balls for nine months of gestation, until he burst forth in a second birth —  which is why (they say) songs in praise of Dionysus are called dithyrambs, “songs of the double door”. Just so in Euripides’ Bacchae Pentheus, arch-rationalist ruler and denier of holy madness, dresses in drag in order to spy on the rites — and we recall that in the immortal words of Ru Paul, we are born naked and we die naked, and all the rest is drag — and is torn asunder by his own wife and mother, who mistake him for a wild beast — or so they say anyway. And indeed Orpheus, variously seen as avatar, enemy, and prophet of Dionysus, having lost Eurydice to the underworld by his backward-glancing lack of faith, was unable to shut up about it until maenads tore him in turn and scattered the pieces; in his case it was the head, not the heart that was preserved, even in death singing on the waters, a song we can hear to this day in the humming of bees.  Dionysus thus is somehow a divinity who is incarnated in those who deny his divinity — though this incarnation is their doom (and ours?).

Anyway, Plutarch explains that Dionysus is worshiped for three months of the year to Apollo’s nine because the ratio of the ordering of the world to its conflagration is held by the Delphic priests to be three to one.

So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about this Spring;  ordering and conflagration, hearts and heads, birth and death and drag; my mother died a few months ago, my wife will soon be pregnant; and I’d like us all to raise a glass in the words of Dylan Thomas, to “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives [our] green age”.

Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 5: The Mother of All Sorrows

Moments from the First West Coast Tantrik Psychedelic Druid Funeral, together with Various Observations on Technocapitalist Death Practices, and Some Notes on Grief

First Day

My mother died, aged 96, in 2022, Late Winter, 2º Lunation, Waning Crescent Moon, on Tuesday 25 January at 8:24 am.  Actually she probably died earlier than that; the precision of the time of death is an artifact of bureaucracy.  Staff at her care home were supposedly checking on her every hour, and at some point that morning someone noticed she wasn’t breathing and called the hospice nurse to come pronounce her dead — I think the time recorded by hospice on her death certificate is the time they were notified.  Hospice is required by law to inform a funeral home, and I had requested that they tell the funeral home not to come immediately, as we wanted some time with the body first.

Originally, when Mom had been living with us, we had arranged to have her body stay with us after death.  I had never discussed this with the care home, so when it became clear she was dying, I asked if we could hold vigil with her body in her room there, expecting them to say no; usually such places have a policy that bodies must be removed within hours.  To my pleasant surprise the director replied immediately that while no one had ever requested this before, she had no problem with it, and offered to assist in any way possible.

However, a week or so before Mom died, she had a difficult night, tumbling out of the hospital bed they had insisted on installing, breaking her side table, and badly scraping her shins and forearms.  Some kind of arcane bureaucratic rule prohibits residential care homes from treating open wounds beyond a certain “stage”, which is determined by a hospice nurse, and likewise prohibits insurance from paying hospice for the care of those wounds; the upshot was that a social worker called to inform me that Mom would have to be moved to a skilled nursing facility, at first nicely, and, when I balked, insistently, eventually threatening me with taking the decision out of my hands by calling Adult Protective Services, a government agency.

 For those who may not know, “Skilled Nursing Facilities” are depressing and very profitable warehouses for old people which proliferate across the suburban landscape, usually converted schools, nunneries or other institutions.  The usual end-of-life trajectory in America, which I had already avoided several times for my mother, is that an elder suffers an injury, is sent to a hospital, and then moved to a SNF (pronounced “sniff”) for “rehabilitation”.  SNFs are, of course, breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant pneumonias, so most contemporary Americans die of morphine administered to keep them “comfortable” while afflicted by pneumonia subsequent to a broken bone or soft tissue injury.

This is what Arendt memorably described as the banality of evil.

However, unpleasant as this all was, it got us to thinking:  If Mom was doomed to die in a SNF, they were most certainly not going to allow her body to remain, which meant our only option for holding vigil with her body would be to somehow transport it to our home, in the middle of nowhere at the end of miles of gravel and dirt roads, in a dirt-floored building with neither electricity nor running water.  The end-of-life doula we were working with had never encountered such a situation, but said there was nothing we could do but ask.  So I did; after several unanswered messages eventually contacting someone at the funeral parlor who, just like the care home, said that while no one had ever requested this before, she didn’t see why it couldn’t be done.  They charge a flat fee for transporting a body from the place of death to the crematorium, and they just agreed to bill me twice, once for transport to our property and once for transport from it.

So it was that my wife and I found ourselves driving into town to meet two end-of-life doulas, along with two dear friends, one with her teen child in tow, at Mom’s care home apartment, a hastily-scrawled “Do Not Disturb” sign taped to the locked door.

Death is a funny old thing (as is life).  Mom’s head and hands were cold and stiff; her neck and back were still warm and supple.  The doula asked if I would like a moment.  I leaned over and held my mother’s dear head in my arms and burst into breathless hysterical sobs.  Once I was able to speak, all I could say was “Thank you”, over and over, overwhelmed by unutterable gratitude for the mystery of my own existence.  When I looked up, I saw the doula had kneeled, head bowed, behind me.

Eventually I got myself together and we began to organize things.  Two basins filled with water, one with essential oils added (we had chosen frankincense, clary sage, and myrrh) and a second for rinsing; a stack of washcloths; diapers; wipes.  It turns out that much of the lost art of preparing a body for a wake has to do with the fact that, upon death, various sphincter muscles lose their tone and the intestine and bladder their contents.

Mom’s bladder kept leaking small amounts of pee and we kept having to change her diapers and wipe her clean again.  Here, I was grateful for the doulas’ presence.  Over the weeks prior, as Mom had spent more and more time sleeping and become harder and harder to rouse, I had come to see her as less “person” and more “body”.  I was especially fortunate to have been sitting with her a few nights previous when the night hospice nurse, a very nice, capable, and eccentric ex-hippie named Anne, came to change the dressings on her bedsores.  Anne was alone, so together we rolled Mom from one side to another, and my desperate sense of helplessness in the face of her frail old form abated somewhat.  Still, wiping her nether regions would have been hard.  I was able to hold one leg in the air a bit to help.

As each friend arrived I could see them go through some of the same process; from shock, to embarrassment and mild disgust, to compassionate practical assessment of the job at hand.  We washed her face, her feet, her hands and arms; between her toes, her body’s creases and wrinkles.  Eventually it was time to dress her.  My wife had chosen a beautiful black kaftan, which my ex had brought Mom back from the middle east, and in which Mom had always looked especially elegant; in recent years she had taken to wearing it, with a witch’s hat, at Halloween.  Mom’s first halloween at the care home she actually won the prize for best costume and you would think she had won a Macarthur Fellowship — her innocent pride was so sweet and comical — for weeks afterward she kept saying, “I can’t believe it!  I’ve never won anything in my life!”

Anyway eventually the doula suggested we just slit it down the back in order to get it on, as Mom was going to be supine from then on, and the garment was to go with her into the flames anyway.  At first it proved difficult to wrestle her arms into the sleeves, as they had gotten quite stiff (especially the left one), but after massaging them for a few minutes they became more flexible again:  Another of the lost arts of care for the dead.

For of course, it is only very very recently that our society has forgotten what death is and how to handle it.  Death in hospitals (and more recently, SNFs) only became common in the 1940s, and is unknown in most of the world even today.  Only a few short centuries ago, every adult would have been around occasional dead people starting in childhood, and how to wash a dead body would have been common knowledge in much the same way as how to wash a live one.

Interestingly, Mom’s left arm rather quickly returned to its original bent position and stiffened up again.  Her right eye, too — when we arrived it was open, as was her mouth.  Often, in the hours immediately after death, mouths are tied shut for decorum, so they stiffen that way.  We decided not to do that with Mom, as her mouth was in more or less the position it had been for several days as she slept.  But her eye, gleaming there, was a little unsettling.  I sort of liked that and a couple of times when I found it closed, I pulled the lid open again; eventually my wife saw me doing it and laughed, saying she had been closing it, to make Mom less scary.  In any case, the eye seemed to have a mind of its own; and in the event, as it became duller over the next few days, it stopped being so noticeable.

The timing was just right, as Mom was dressed when our friend with her teen child arrived.  I think hanging out in a room with a dead body was probably squiggy enough for them — a naked old lady dead body probably would have been too much.  The teen’s mother had, among many things, been Mom’s hairdresser off and on over the years and she cried softly while brushing and arranging Mom’s hair, spreading scarves to hide the bandages on Mom’s arms.  My wife trimmed the hairs on Mom’s chin, something she had also sometimes done in life.

The manager of the funeral home was also driving the van that day, many of the employees being out sick with covid; the care home instructed her to bring her gurney in through the “cupcake room”.  It was the first time I had heard about the “cupcake room” but apparently it also serves as a secret final exit from the care home; of course it would be bad for business to remind the other residents too viscerally of the manner in which their residency will most certainly come to an end.

So, the funeral home van, our friends, and we, snaked in single file along the increasingly narrow and windy mountain roads to Moonflower Mahasangha.  I can only assume it all seemed increasingly weird to them; but they gave no sign, calmly and professionally wheeling Mom’s gurney onto the raw dirt floor and transferring her onto the bed beneath the huge skylight of our Big House.  Once the job was done, they exclaimed over the beauty of the building (which is, indeed, very beautiful) and took their leave.  No papers were signed, no money changed hands; they merely instructed us to call when we were ready.  No liability waivers, no transfer of responsibility, no safety inspection — they just left us alone with my mother’s corpse.

Over the next three days, I asked several people who seemed like they might know, “What happens if I never call to have her picked up?”  Other than baffled affirmations of its impossibility, I received no satisfactory answers.  Home cremation, home burial, are undoubtedly against the law, certainly without mountains of paperwork — but exactly how those laws are enforced, it appears no one knows.  The very idea is simply so beyond the pale that what cannot be thought does not need to be enforced.  There is a principle in here which West Coast Tantrik Psychedelic Druids should take to heart, and this area is clearly ripe for further research.

The doulas had procured dry ice and some ice packs on the way; we put them under the body beneath the lumbar, thoracic and cervical spine areas.  The dry ice worked great and lasted, in Winter, for about 24 hours — you have to wear leather gloves and break it with a hammer, and wrap it in heavy brown paper — but one could certainly use ice packs, frozen peas, or any such thing.  The principle is simply to chill the digestive areas and the brain, and keep them cold; the doula also emphasized wrapping the ice packs in cloth, to avoid condensation.  Each night she instructed us to place another ice pack on Mom’s belly.

We cut some large branches of manzanita and sprigs of rosemary and surrounded Mom with these along with cut flowers and peacock feathers.  Mom had (still has as of this writing, her cremation won’t take place for several weeks) a tattoo of a peacock feather on her left shoulder which she got around age 65.  Her love of peacocks originated with a medieval recipe she found somewhere titled “To Roast a Peacocke with All His Feathers”, a very elaborate preparation which includes lighting camphor in the bird’s beak so it appears to be spitting fire, which delighted Mom so much she ended up making eight or ten one-of-a-kind illustrated calligraphic hand-bound books of it, each more elaborate and surreal than the last and you know, it is really only as I write this that I am coming to understand how delightful, irreverent and eccentric she was; it is difficult, maybe impossible, to really see the people we love, to really understand what it is we love about them, until they are no longer here.  Strange.

Mom after she got her tattoo

Surrounded thus, with candles lit, Tibetan prayer beads twined in her fingers and a radiant chunk of amber around her neck, her white hair loose and flowing over her shoulders, Mom looked like what she was, what she is now:  A Baltic warrior witch queen, even stronger and more beautiful in death than she had ever been in life, perhaps in some sense more fully herself than she had ever been in life.  Anyway that is how it seemed to me.  It seemed, when the arrangement was complete, that that she had been, herself, transformed into a work of art, that her death had been transformed into a work of art, that her death might be her last and greatest work of art — may all our deaths be thus.

Second Day

Several friends came to visit and sit with Mom.  Having people around was a godsend, but if I had it all to do over again I would curtail my instinct to play host.  By the afternoon, after a full day of alternately grieving and interacting, I was so drained I wasn’t sure whether I was going to need cremation too.

An observation, on this and subsequent days, was that my attitude to the whole ritual was pretty laissez-faire — I basically felt that there was a dead body around and people should take advantage of the opportunity to freak themselves out.  My friends, of course, were there for me (or possibly even for Mom?), and were looking to me for guidance on what to do and when.  I am pretty good at holding space, but am often reluctant to lead other than by example, which is probably a fatal flaw.  So be it.

When everyone had gone, I had soaked in a bath for an hour, and my wife and I had dined, I put on warm clothes and opened a beer and walked the quarter mile back to the Big House.  Frogs were singing loudly as they do this time of year; the Moon was still a sliver and too near the Sun to be seen.  I entered Mom’s space with the resigned trepidation that I have felt many times going back down to the Zendo at night when everyone has gone to bed, or walking to the Maloca to drink ayahuasca — the sense of crossing over, of leaving normal life behind and embarking on a journey into nowhere.

That night, I sat with her quietly, occasionally weeping; eventually I sat on the bed with her, hugging her and kissing her ice cold forehead and cheeks, crying until snot and tears dripped on her face.  During her final weeks, I had kissed her forehead in just this way so many times, hoping that some sense of my love would reach her, and offer her some comfort in the dreamy delirium in which she was wandering.  I held her cold stiff hand, sobbing, begging her to squeeze my hand back as she often had a week or two before; but she did not.

I began then to ask Mom some questions.  I asked her why she never remarried after my Dad died — she told me that when you love someone like that, no other love can measure up.  I think she was not being completely frank, but that is what she said.

I asked about the scars on her thighs.  Mom had (again, still presumably has as of this writing) terrible scars on her upper thighs, visible to anyone who helped her dress.  Once, when I was 10 or so I suppose — maybe younger? — and she did not know I was there, I saw her break a glass on the floor, then hike her skirt up and slash angrily at her thigh.  She said something to me about it when she realized I had seen, I am not sure what, the memory is a little vague — but we never spoke about it again, ever, for nigh on 50 years.  I do not know how well she remembered that time in her life, whether she thought about it.  It was a dark time, a difficult time for me and obviously for her; it was mostly pretty awkward to talk about, and we didn’t.  But that night I asked her about it, stammering, trying to find the words.  And I received an answer, in the way you learn things sometimes when tripping, or alone in the mountains, or sitting zazen.

I sat with Mom a long time that night — I do not know how long.  I turned the electric candles off and sat with her in the dark.  Eventually I put an ice pack on her stomach, walked back down the path to our cottage, and crawled into bed with my sweetie.  She felt so strange.  Her warmth, suppleness, her beating heart and pumping lungs and dewy skin, all felt wrong somehow.

For I had been to a land where everything and everyone is cold and stiff and dry and unmoving.  I had become acclimatized to death, to the land of death, dim and shadowy, still and sad.  It took me a while to come back, and at first I didn’t really want to.

One of the strange things I have noticed about being with dead bodies is that they seem to breathe.  I always think I see their chests rising and falling — and then look again and realize they are not.  I think we are deeply unconsciously aware of each other’s breath, that we are monitoring it or resting on it or interpenetrating with it all the time, and one of the things that makes dead bodies so unnerving is their breathlessness.

Third Day

An old friend of Mom’s, mother of my nursery school besty, who now sits on a number of boards including that of a funeral industry consumer advocacy nonprofit, came to visit.  She was great, brought us hands down the best almonds I have ever eaten, which she grew in her orchard and roasted herself — but the funny thing  was that, while she advocates for the right to hold home funerals like ours, her discomfort with the actual presence of Mom’s body was palpable.  She did not look at Mom, did not examine any of the ephemera we had gathered, just talked non-stop the entire time she was in the room.  Only when getting in her car to leave did she acknowledge to me that she had never been to a home funeral before.

The moral here is that allies come in many varieties.  Nine bows to her for working tirelessly on behalf of what she may not fully understand.

Several friends gathered that afternoon and evening to spend the night.  Dear friends who drive for hours, clear their schedules, bring delicious food to share.   Ride or die friends, who can be difficult as can all people when you come to know them well, and, when the rubber hits the road, are always there to help.  Friends who saw, in my mother, what I could not see, because she was my mother:  The possibility of growing old creatively.

This is the vision:  That death be a community project, an opportunity to cut against the grain of technocapitalist atomization, to reconnect to the Earth and its all-embracing heartache.

We ate together, speaking happily of old times, polishing off a couple bottles of sparkling rosé, and then made our way to the Big House.  One friend had brought a formal tea set, a bell, and some books of Buddhist sutras.  We sat in meditation, circling Mom’s body, for 20 minutes or so.  At one point he bumped into some cowbells hanging from a rafter and I observed, “There are bells of order, and bells of chaos.”

Our dear friend led us in chanting, intoning in a deep gruff Rinzai growl.  We chanted the Heart Sutra in Sinojapanese and then a very old magic spell, chanted in the Chinese approximation of an older Sanskrit original, called the Daihi Shin Dharani, the Great Compassionate Mind Dharani; it is traditionally chanted in memoriam, and has been for two thousand years or so.  Since we didn’t have a printout of the Heart Sutra in English, I recited as much as I could remember, so Mom could hear it, and so I could too.  “Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form.  Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form.  Sensations, perceptions, formations and consciousness are also like this.  Shariputra, all things are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease.  Given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no realm of sight, no realm of mind consciousness; no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path, no knowledge, and no attainment.”

Another friend had brought delicious homemade bourbon balls which we snacked on; and another marshmallows.  Mom’s face had always lit up with childlike glee when she was offered a marshmallow.

That night we left the electric candles lit, and crawled into our respective beds around the property.  Some slept in the Big House with Mom — I believe they all had a quiet night.

Fourth Day

I was anxious when I awoke.  The death doula was texting, asking if I had made arrangements for pickup with the funeral home, which I hadn’t yet; I had to bustle around and find the forms they had left me and call my uncle to get some facts required for the death certificate.  I say “facts”, but in the event my uncle and I just settled on likely answers, as neither one of us knew the real answers for sure.  A friend observed that this is how history gets written:  A couple of men sitting around and saying, well, that’s probably about right.  And then it is filed with the government and signed in triplicate and lo and behold, it is the truth.

My wife and I put on nice clothes, not too formal, but we both looked very handsome.  I was still feeling anxious so I fussed around the Big House, sweeping, getting music ready to be played.  I put on Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which is the music I would like played at my memorial; the bass’s ringing “Dunkel, ist das liebe, ist … der … tod (Dark is life, is death)” bringing the first tears of the day to my eyes.

By the time everyone had assembled — the death doula came too — the final section, Der Abschied, was playing, and I was crying uncontrollably, gasping “no, no” from time to time, almost unable to breathe.  People read poems, someone read the passage from John Crowley’s Little, Big where the protagonist, Smoky, collapses with a heart attack and his life spirals around him, which brought yet more tears welling up.  I read the English of the libretto of Der Abschied, “The Farewell”, but the words felt empty in my mouth.  I read a poem to Mom written by my ex’s elder daughter, who had been close to Mom but hadn’t spoken to any of us in years and as I write this, I remember Mom explaining to me that you only use the superlative when there are three or more items in a collection and so if there are two daughters and five sons you say elder daughter but eldest son.

I remember her teaching me how to punch down bread dough after it has risen, how to roll out a pie crust; arguing with me about nuances of grammar; listening to my Patti Smith and Can records while she cleaned house.  I remember how desperately lonely it felt when she dropped me off for my first day of kindergarten; how she wrote me letters at Poste Restante in various European cities when I was bumming around; how she came to our apartment and read the entirety of Wilde’s Salome to my first girlfriend and me while we were still in bed.  I remember sitting on her rocking chair with her when she read me the whole Lord of the Rings Trilogy at least three times through.

The funny thing about losing a parent, different from losing a friend, is that it is a loss of context.  My mother was always there, the ground upon which my figure was defined, from the first moment of my consciousness until a few days ago.  The loss is existential.  For me, there were a few weeks during Mom’s dying when I felt that in some sense I was losing the audience for which I had been performing my whole life long.  Even things Mom would never see, or never understand or appreciate if she did see, seemed somehow pointless without her.

To lose context, to lose purpose, is also of course to gain freedom.  Owing to intricacies of my childhood, in a certain sense my one job in life has been to keep my mother alive, and, having finally failed, 56 years into it, there is an enormous amount of psychic and emotional energy available suddenly for other things.  But it is a bitter freedom.

Mostly, now that a few days have passed, I am highly functional, but grief still descends on me, often when I am driving alone.  At those moments I find myself sobbing again, strange cries pulled forth from my mouth, the cries of a child whose sole support and reason for being has been lost, phrases like “Mama, mama, this can’t be happening.”  Sometimes I have to pull over and wait it out.

There is something pure and clear and overwhelming about this grief.  When it comes on me I feel that every moment of despair in my life was in some way a facet of this loss, a tiny piece of it, was preparation for this tremendous unbearable sensation which I can’t even really name — it is a sorrow beyond sorrow, a frenzied sorrow, a boundless despair.  Every heartbreak, every disappointment, every unrequited love, was only a foreshadowing of the vast sorrow and rudderlessness and refusal I am experiencing now.  Perhaps even this is only a part of the yet bigger disappointment of my own death; we shall see.

Anyway, the memorial continued and I continued to weep.  A few more poems were read and a few more people spoke to her and touched or kissed her.  I spoke; I told my mother I forgave her for the difficulties of my childhood, realizing in that moment that, while objectively speaking did a terrible job (from a certain perspective), the ways that she was a terrible caregiver made me the man I became, and so by being a bad parent she was also somehow a good parent.  I thanked her for undergoing pain I cannot even imagine, for visiting dark hell-realms no one should have to go to, on behalf of the rest of us.

I put on the mad music from Donnizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which Mom adored, and we began wrapping her in her shroud, on which she had been lying these three days.  Enshrouding a corpse is just like wrapping a burrito; I believe it is similar to swaddling an infant, with the important difference that the infant’s head is left exposed.  You start by folding the shroud over the feet, then cross one side over the legs and tuck it under, then the other side, and work your way up.  When we got towards her head I began to panic, and said to my wife that I didn’t think I could do this.  Then I remembered that two younger friends of ours, who had known Mom well, had requested that we play her a song (The Crane Wife 3 by the Decemberists), and I wanted her to be able to hear it.

They had said they wanted to imagine the song swirling around her while she flew away into the sky like a crane.  We used to call Mom the Egret Witch, which was how she seemed in her last years, her luminescent white hair flowing around her shoulders or gathered on top of her head.  Another friend had had a similar vision while driving up to our place, seeing Mom in a cloud, one foot forward and taking off and dissipating into the sky.

Hearing the song reminded me again of how Mom had, on her own, learned to love some of the experimental rock records I listened to when I was a boy, and I saw, somehow for the first time, how her openmindedness, irreverence and independence had encouraged and produced my own; I told her this.

My wife sat on the side of Mom’s bed then, crying and talking and tucking things into her shroud.  She tucked in three roses as requested by my uncle, a picture of my father, saying tearfully “this is for your sweetheart”.  She tucked in a small letter embroidered with yarn, sent to Mom right before she died by a lesbian artist Mom had gotten close to in her last years, saying, “this is for your love and inspiration for young people, especially women”; tucked in some of those good almonds and a marshmallow, saying, “this is for your gusto for life and food”.

Then we were ready to enshroud her head.  Like a burrito, you fold the shroud down over the head first, then finish by tucking the two sides of the shroud under.  It was terrible to see her disappear, but astonishing the transformation that occurred.  Just like that, the face we had all been gazing at, petting, and speaking to, gaunt, mouth open, dull eyes, was gone.

We all gathered around her busily then, wrapping six scarves tightly around her body to hold the shroud on and tucking flowers and peacock feathers in.  She became more and more unearthly and beautiful as the process continued.  Eventually we remembered the marshmallows and tucked them carefully into each of her scarves.  Mom would have absolutely loved the humor of sending marshmallows into the crematorium to toast; she had a dark sense of humor, though she didn’t like being told so.

Finally, I took an old twig broom that was leaning near the door and tucked it into the scarf around Mom’s waist, saying, “I think she may need this”.  She looked astonishing, mysterious, sacred and profound.  The friend who was photographing decided to climb a ladder to get a view from above and while up there, she got a stony bemused gleeful look on her face and said, “I really suggest you all take a look from up here.”  So we did, one by one, ascending the ladder and making a small bow, appearing to those on the ground as if Mom’s bed were a pool and Mom the reflection of someone about to ceremonially dive in.

As, indeed, is the case.

As we were taking turns standing on the ladder, the  Rainbow Bridge Music from Wagner’s Das Rheingold came on — the music that depicts the gods leaving our world behind and entering Valhalla.  Shortly after that the funeral home van arrived, the friendly staff apparently eager to get another look at our place.  They bundled Mom onto their gurney, assuring us that everything would stay just as it was until Mom’s cremation; as they wheeled her out we struck the big bell three times.

The change in the emotional tone of the room as Mom was wrapped in her shroud was astonishing.  We all went from paralyzed by inconceivable grief to joyously celebrating our dear departed friend.  Though I’ve always liked the shift in tone at, say, a New Orleans funeral procession I really understood it then — the celebration is the continuation, the transcendence, the completion of the sorrow.  Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, our joy at our own lives and happy appreciation of Mom’s life was only the natural result of all the weeping and despair at her loss.

༺ 𐂂 ༻

So, I hope these few words may encourage others to make their friends’ and parents’ deaths, even their own, an opportunity for practice and celebration in this way.  When I first conceived the idea, I assumed it would be impossible, since we are not a recognized religious institution, and it took a while to find anyone who could tell me anything about what would be required.  As it turns out, the laws governing dead bodies are pretty vague and a lot is up to individuals:  To funeral directors, care home staff, van drivers, families.  Some funeral parlors will allow you to transport a body in your own vehicle; they do not advertise this on their websites!  Some funeral parlors, on the contrary, insist on visiting you in your home to sign a paper contract before death and make it difficult to avoid an expensive casket.

The death doulas we worked with were wonderful, but honestly not much help in navigating these strange and tangled microbureaucracies.  I had to call and email, sometimes repeatedly.  Luckily my wife and I had grown adept at doing this in advocating for Mom with the ridiculously, criminally inefficient bureaucracy that is health care in America, particular for the elderly.  But I think for me the moral is that death is such a taboo subject in America that our practices around it are unclear; there are a limited number of things that people do, simply because they do not know what to do, have never thought about it, have been encouraged not to think about it, by their religious and most of all medical professionals — and a variety of unscrupulous entrepreneurs take advantage of this.

When my aunt died, in hospital, the hospital asked me which funeral home we were using and when I said I didn’t know, they looked dismayed and said, “Well the body can’t stay here.”  My aunt had been told by doctors that she might “beat her cancer”; they kept telling her that until her hospital-caught pneumonia got to a stage where the nurses were giving her enough morphine that she never had an opportunity to realize she was dying — with the result that she and I had never had a conversation about her wishes after death.

I vaguely remembered that she had told me something about being a member of the Neptune Society, which I understood was an organization which you prepay for eventual cremation and scattering of your ashes at sea; when I told this to the nurses they looked at me blankly.  I googled and found a phone number, called the Neptune Society and asked them what to do; a sleepy-sounding person checked their records and could find no record of my aunt.  Eventually they agreed to come and pick her body up anyway, as the hospital was becoming agitated.

A day or two later I got a call from the Neptune Society, confirming that they did not in fact have any record of my aunt being a member, though they did have her body.  When I said I was sure she had been, they asked, “Has she lived anywhere else?  This is the Neptune Society of Oakland, might she have been registered with another Neptune Society?”  I said, “Are there more than one?” “Oh yes,” they told me, “there are hundreds.  All independent private companies.”  Shocked, I asked, “Well if she was registered with one of the many other Neptune Societies, what do we do?”  “Well, you can pay us for cremation — it’s $1600” they said.

Finally I found someone who agreed to check with some of the other local Neptune Societies to see if my aunt was registered with them and, as luck would have it, they found the correct Neptune Society rather quickly.  There was some haggling over the body, as I recall, because, of course, the wrong Neptune Society had transported and stored the body, normally a rather expensive procedure, but they sorted that out among themselves (I suspect this situation must not have been all that uncommon), and eventually we were handed over some ashes which were allegedly my aunt’s.  I now know that, in addition to all the Neptune Societies, there are innumerable Nautilus Societies, Poseidon Societies, and who knows what all else — all of whose business models are based on confused elders, bereaved survivors, and a general inability to openly discuss the matter of death.

༺ 𐂂 ༻

 Clean dead bodies are not dangerous or disgusting, not in the days immediately after death.  They are, however, very eerie.  It is the confrontation with this eeriness — as much as the opportunity to grieve viscerally, and in your own way, on your own time — that is so profound about spending time with the dead.  I am convinced that there is a deep and precious teaching in it; that this is a gift we can give each other by dying, a teaching we can offer, merely by being as we are, our whole selves, our simple inert selves, after we die.

It would be a crime to limit this teaching by putting it into words, but I will say that one facet of it is appreciation of life and of the living community of comrades and beloveds with which we are blessed; I am methodically contemplating each of you as I write this.  Be well, stay free, and don’t give up.

2022, Early Spring, 3º Lunation, Waning Gibbous Moon

Turtle Island, California, Nisenan Rancheria, San Juan Ridge, Moonflower Mahasangha

Touch Fucking Moonflower

Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 4: On Property

In

In everyday speech we use the words “my” and “mine” a lot.  What do we mean when we say, “my wine glass,”  as in, “I think you are drinking from my wine glass?”   What do we mean when we say, “my husband?”  “my country?”  “my house?” “my teeth?”

By

By “my wine glass” we mean, “the wine glass I have recently been drinking from.”

By “my husband” we mean “a person with whom I have entered into a complex legal agreement (called ‘marriage’).”

By “my country” we mean “the very large area in which I was born” — or possibly, “the very large area of which I am a legal citizen.”  This last abstraction we can explore more later.

By “my house” we mean “the house I currently live in.”

By “my teeth” we mean “the teeth that are part of me.”

Do

Do these uses of possessive pronouns indicate legal ownership?  Sometimes. A wine glass can be owned, though this is not how the possessive is used casually.  It would be rude and weird for the host to reply, “Well actually this is my wine glass — they all are.”

People cannot be owned, under the legal system that currently obtains.  Until very recently, however, and still in many places, “my wife,” did indicate a kind of ownership.  Even here and now, echoes of this legal regime remain.   “My husband” and “my wife” are two different kinds of possession.   Setting that freighted history aside, while these terms functionally indicate participation in a legal agreement, in common parlance the most important meaning is one not usually spelled out in such agreements:  Sexual exclusivity.  Depending on intonation, “my husband” is very likely to mean “a man with whom you may not have sex, and with whom I may.”  This is regarded as “sexual possession” — the “ownership” of the right to sex with a person.  And, to reiterate — while it is nowhere spelled out in the vast majority of marriage contracts, nor included in the vast majority of wedding vows, it is de facto the single most important implication of the relationship.  What a mess!

Countries cannot be owned.  Here we rub up against an odd aspect of possessive language:  It can, though does not always, imply a sense of belonging to, rather than possessing.  Of being contained by (“my tribe”) rather than containing (“my teeth”).  When someone says “my country” they are indicating an immutable fact about themselves; similarly with “my parents.”  Very different from “my hat!”

Homes can be owned, though the possessive doesn’t necessarily indicate that.  What exactly this “ownership” consists in we can explore shortly.

Teeth can be owned, as a legal matter — but oddly enough only if they are removed from the body.

Well

Well then, what is “ownership?”

In the case of portable objects, such as wine glasses (or other peoples’ teeth), it means that you have a legal document which proves your right to use or sell the object.  This could be a deed, title, certificate of ownership or it could be a receipt showing that you exchanged money for it.  In practice, it mostly means that you believe you have the right to use or sell the object and that you can convince other people of that.  When you go down to the pawn shop, what matters is that the wine glass is in your hand; they are not going to ask to see your certificate of ownership.

Husbands and wives, as we observed, cannot be owned.  I will note that, despite the marriage contract being silent on “sexual possession,” courts will mostly regard the contract as being voided by evidence of “extramarital sex,” which is sex with someone outside the contract.  Indeed something very strange is going on here.  An alien anthropologist might decide that it amounts to “ownership,” at least of some of a spouse’s faculties.

Countries cannot be owned, however “citizenship” is a complex legal fiction endowing a citizen with certain rights and curtailing others.  As with marriage this relationship is murky and seems to fall short of ownership; in the limit case though we might say that my country owns me, and not the other way around.

Houses are a very interesting case, which clarifies the nature of “ownership” in general.  Let us examine several different people who all use the phrase “my house”:

First, a squatter.  This person has no legal right to stay in “their” house.  However they do so anyway.  At any moment they may be forced to leave.  Any person who is troubled by their occupancy of said house may, at any time, call the cops, who will evict them, with violence if necessary.

Next, a renter.  This person has a legal right to stay in “their” house, but they must pay another person in advance each month, and obey a large number of other rules; failing this, they are subject to police violence as above.  The person whom they must pay is the landlord; this person also refers to the house as “my house.”  However they mean something altogether different by the phrase.  In general, the landlord is the only person whom the renter need fear calling the violence of the state down upon their heads; no one else is privy to the relationship.

Next, a homeowner.  In the vast majority of cases, this person has a legal right to occupy “their” house, as long as they pay a company in advance each month, and obey a relatively small number of other rules.  The eviction process, should they fail to pay, is much more drawn out than for a renter; only after much cajoling and threatening will police violence be used.  In other words, the legal relationships of renters and homeowners with “their” houses are formally identical, different only in details and degrees.

A vanishingly small proportion of homeowners have no mortgage.  These people have a very reasonable expectation that they will be allowed to stay in their homes.  They cannot be made to leave, unless they attract the violence of the state in some other way.

Two

Two of these cases are considered “ownership”; two are not.  All four people speak of “my house.”  Granular investigation like this shows us several things.

First, that what most people mean by “my house” is, “the house I occupy and where I store “my possessions” (the objects I am able to convince other people I have the right to use); a house which I will have to leave in a matter of months if I run out of money or break certain arbitrary rules.

Second, that violence is distributed and ubiquitous in our society.  The threat of violence is constant.  “Ownership” is, under the capitalist state, a defense against that threat.

It is not the landlord who will come for you if you don’t pay your rent, nor the mortgage holder.  If so, it would come down to a contest of strength, or of firepower.  But state power is a kind of sword of Damocles hanging over every head, and it is there, first and foremost, to protect the interests of landowners.

The

The idealized vision of a state would have that it protects from violence; it “guarantees property rights” and the “rule of law.”  But the reality is somewhat different:  The state generalizes the threat of violence; it produces a situation in which near-infinite force may be brought to bear against anyone at any time.

This leads us to a third observation:  The overwhelming majority of people live under constant threat of homelessness.  It is ridiculous, of course, to imagine that the living earth, our home and mother, can be carved up into parcels and become property of humans.  But the legal fiction of ownership obscures the basic fact that, under the capitalist state, almost no one — neither squatters, nor renters, nor owners of mortgaged homes — has any realistic expectation that they will be allowed to stay where they are.

Each of these classes lives in marginally lower precarity, but each of them also has significantly more at stake.  A squatter has invested only sweat equity, and likely owns only what can be carried; a homeowner will likely have spent tens of thousands of dollars on building and property which, once foreclosed on, are forfeit.  Thus, each of these groups is under increasing pressure to conform.  A small increase in security incurs a tremendous cost in narrowed options; a renter can simply pack up and move, a homeowner cannot risk the loss of status.

A population of squatters is dangerous to the state and landowning class, a population of homeowners is too invested in the status quo to consider challenging it.

In our example, it is only a tiny minority of the old or eccentric, who own their homes outright, who have any realistic expectation that they may be allowed to stay put.  The psychospiritual impacts of this state of affairs are massive.  It is well-nigh impossible, under technocapitalism, to form a relationship with a place, for the simple fact there is never a time when the threat of eviction is absent.

Here

Here we might briefly meditate on the words “house” and “home.”  As we have observed elsewhere, legally home is where you shit.  But in common parlance, home is the place where living happens. To be without a home would be to die, for living must have a location.

Under technocapitalism, an anomolously large proportion of living happens in other places actually; almost everyone spends a majority of their waking hours at a place called a “job,” which we don’t have time to go into now.  One or more meals a day are often taken at restaurants.  Technocapitalism aspires to a condition in which home is for sleeping and storage — and actually the compulsion to consume has reached such a pitch that many people cannot afford homes large enough to contain all their possessions — hence the profitable industry of “self-storage rentals.”

Still, psychologically, home is more than a sleep chamber and storage unit.  It is a place of refuge, a place where you can exercise some minimal control over the environment — wall color, music; a place where, at any moment, you could go; and a place where no one else can go without your permission.

“Homeless” people actually do continue to live.  They eat, sleep, shit and fuck; they have possessions, and store them.  They find places to to take refuge.  However, they do all these things under immediate and constant threat of being violently evicted.

Homelessness is the limit case of technocapitalist precarity.

Returning

Returning to our considerations of the word “my” in normal speech:  We observed that “my” can indicate an object we have recently been using, and intend to continue using; an object to which we have title or which we can otherwise convince others we have the right to use; a person we have some relation to and intend to continue; a place we inhabit and hope to continue; a physical part of us; an unchangeable fact of our personal history.

In some of these cases, it would clarify things to speak, rather than possession, of relationship.  Instead of “my wine glass,” we might say “the wine glass with which I am in relationship.”  Instead of “my hat,” “the hat with which I am having a relationship.”  “My boyfriend” could become “the male-socialized front pole with whom I am in relationship.”  And “my property” would more correctly be “the parcel of land with which I am having a relationship.”

To actually say this would be ridiculously awkward of course; I do personally make the internal translation on the fly to clarify my understanding.

It is further interesting to ponder just what these various relationships are.  I am drinking from this wine glass, sure; but there is more to it than that.  It and I are coexperiencing, cocreating, doing a dance together.  It may last a few minutes, it may last a lifetime.  I am wearing this hat, but what does that mean?  It is part of my body, and I am part of its body.  Ah, the possessive crops up again!  Perhaps better to say we are embodying together.  Dear me, now really no one is going to know what we are talking about any more.

This masc-behaving human being — well I have had sex with him repeatedly and expect to do so repeatedly in the future.  But further, I trust him, he makes me laugh, we know each other’s secrets (and by “each other’s” here I guess I mean — not that we own these secrets! — but perhaps that they are facts about ourselves we do not share widely).  He is not me, but he is not not me either; we are not one and not two.

“My”

“My” teeth, “my” parents, “my” country, “my” name:  Here the relationship is harder to articulate.  For these things are part of me, or I am part of them, or both at once.  But the above meditations on relationship can shine a little moonlight on the situation.

For indeed, just as with the boyfriend, I could exist without my teeth, and they without me, but … together we make up, more than the sum of the parts let us say.  Separated from my teeth I am less than half the man I was, nor do they have much of a future without me.  And while, indeed, I could not exist without “my” parents, nor would “my” children be here without me, I think what the possessive is doing here is something different, something more equivalent to the “my” in “my name”:  What I mean to say, when naming “my” parents, is, these people are a fact about me.

These teeth, these hands, this hair or lack thereof; these parents, these children; this birthplace, this word in a passport, this name; these are all contributions to this phenomenon we will agree to call “me” for want of any better terminology.  While, toothless, hairless, we might still refer to “me,” it is in the same sense that we still refer to “me” when the parents have passed away, when the birthplace has been destroyed by flood, when the country has been colonized, when the name has been changed.

This phenomenon of “me” is path-dependent; it has, or better is, a history.

And

And finally, “real property.”  This piece of land and I are deeply embroiled and ever becoming more deeply so.  My eyesight, my awareness, fill it up; I smell its smells every day; I wake up and fall asleep here.  My shit and piss are part of the soil, contribute to the growth of the plants here; I have eaten plants that grew from that soil, and their nutrients are now incorporated into — my body? — no, this body, let us say for now.

This piece of land is making me, and I am making it.  We could exist without each other — but we would not be the same without each other.  We would not be what we are without each other’s input, for good or ill.  And indeed, the criteria for determining “good” or “ill” here are lacking.  We are simply making each other happen.

But look deeper!  When I say, “my property,” “this place with which I am in relationship,” it denotes more than lines on a map!  It is geological characteristics, myriad soil organisms, hydrological regimes that change seasonally; countless mycelia, grasses, forbs, ferns, shrubs, trees; innumerable insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds of all sizes, predators and prey; patterns of flow (of air, water, fire, topsoil) which, by erosion, over millennia create the conditions of their own flowing.  (And by “their own” flowing, I mean:  That flow by which they may be known.)  And all these things, and many more, are engaged and codetermined and entangled in detailed and infinitely complex webs of communal association.  And ultimately, you see, it is the webs and flows that make the place.  

And I, by virtue of living here, am a node upon that net, am a conduit for those flows — and I become more and more richly connected to all the other members of the community that is this place with each breath I draw here.  What I am is more and more completely determined by all these relationships and — perhaps more importantly — I become a building block — my entire being becomes a contribution to the creation of the phenomenon that is this place.

As

As we observed above, under statist technocapitalism, the difference between “ownership” and “rental” of property is slight; and maybe, if the paragraphs immediately preceding this were not too overblown and poetic, we can catch a glimpse of the ontological implications of this.  It is no small thing to be of a place, for a place to be of oneself.  It is, I would say, part and parcel of identity.

And yet, and yet — in the social, economic and political conditions under which we find ourselves, it is well-nigh impossible.

Almost all of us are being allowed to occupy the place we do on sufferance, as it were.  Our right to stay might be revoked at any time, for a variety of reasons — most significantly, were we to fail to hand over sufficient slices of the devil’s pie some month.

We cannot trust the place we are to continue to cradle us.  We cannot trust the interdependent community of which we are a part to continue to flow through, involve, and subsume us.  Nor can that community trust us to continue to do our part in the dance that is its very nature.

This means that our being, and its being, and in the end these are two names for the same thing, must always be tenuous, provisional; not because of the natural evolution that is migration or nomadism, but because of arbitrary rules imposed by the imperative that money accrue.  The flow of money, somehow, interrupts and distorts all other flows.

And

And by “their own” flowing, I mean:  That flow by which they may be known.

Finished 30 June 2021

Touch Fucking Moonflower

Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches III: On Shit

“I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as it is.”

-Anne Boyer

In the technocapitalist world, home is not where we fuck, sleep or cook.  It is where we shit.

This is why it is against the law to camp, even on land you own yourself.  (Did you know that?)  “Camping” means sleeping, fucking and cooking in a shelter which has no flush toilet.  The place you fuck and sleep and cook may be as elaborate as you like, it may be a bespoke yurt with stained glass windows and a $4000 professional range, but if it lacks a flush toilet you are camping — and that, technocapitalism does not allow.

“Homelessness” is not, if you think about it, the absence of a place to cook — nor a place to fuck or sleep.  “Homeless” people may have tents and campstoves.  “Homeless” people are people who cannot flush their shit.

But what does it mean to “flush,” then?  Left to their own devices, people, like all other mammals, shit on the ground.  (Foxes like to shit on rocks — foxes are tricksy and nasty.)  We shit on the ground, bacteria decompose it into its component parts almost immediately, and our shit provides nutrients which plants need to grow and survive.  This nutrient cycle is a fundamental aspect of life on planet earth.

But is this “flushing?”  No, it is not.  It turns out that “flushing” means shitting in water, and then, by means of infrastructure comical in its extent and complexity, moving the shit-filled water around in a baroque ritualistic manner, the details of which we can examine in a moment, but:  This is very strange.

It seems commonplace to us, living as we do in the midst of this system, but its strangeness becomes apparent upon a little consideration.  No other animal shits in water, excepting those that fuck and sleep and eat there too.  No other society in human history has ever done such a thing.  And not only do we shit in water, we shit in clean drinking water.  We have specialized ceramic appliances in our homes, kept permanently full of fresh water — not because we are fanatical about having cut flowers around, not so guests can wash their fingers after eating, not even, as would be quite civilized, to wash our buttholes after shitting — no, we habitually keep bowls ever-full of fresh clear drinking water so we can shit in it.

Once you start to really think about it, the perversity and raw yuck factor can kind of freak you out.

One of the biggest expenses involved in building a house in the country (in America today) is plumbing. The soil and underlying rock have to be tested by an engineer, to make sure your sewage won't contaminate the groundwater; a septic field must be excavated; all used wash water must be combined with perfectly good drinking water mixed with human “waste” (there is actually nothing wasteful about it — unless you waste it), and all of it channeled into a septic tank, which has to be pumped out every few years and the septage trucked to a treatment facility; standpipes for sulphurous gases from this morass and vapor locks and backflow preventers must be installed to keep any of this blackwater from contaminating the house water supply; etc.

Want me to keep going?  Oh, I will.  Yes, modern houses are — must be, to be legal — plumbed in such a way that all used water is combined.  This has the effect that all the water that flows out of a house has raw sewage in it and is a source of disease.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  It would be perfectly simple to, for instance, use greywater from the sink or shower to fill the toilet tank, thus halving water use; or to install separate plumbing systems for blackwater and greywater, and use the greywater on site — assuming you want to keep shitting in a bowl of water, for some reason.  But somehow these simple stratagems are outside the conceptual horizon of technocapitalist life; and so, because of the way our houses are plumbed, every drop of water we use is mingled with our feces, and must, for safety, be transported away.

And where is “away?”  If you live in a city, “on the sewer line” as they say, then huge pumps working 24 hours a day suction all your household water immediately out of your house and through huge pipes big enough to crawl down, on a journey of typically several miles to a vast building the size of a parking deck, where shitty water is subjected to several chemical processes to separate the shit out, compost it, and sell it to compost companies, who bag it and truck it to garden centers, where you can buy it back to make your peonies grow.

This is what happens when technocapitalist engineers set themselves the problem of managing a biogeochemical cycle.  It is a kind of cartoon of ecology, hilarious in its wastefulness.  And it turns out that “away,” as we always suspected, is actually another word for right here.

For of course, there are good intermediates between shitting in drinking water, piping sewage through a labyrinth beneath our feet, treating it with chemicals and buying it in bags; between that and simply shitting on the ground like a bear.  For those who live near where they garden (by which I mean, who shit near where they garden), the “slop bucket” or compost toilet or, as we like to call it at Moonflower Farm, the Poopoo Shelf is a great and time-tested alternative.  Shit in a bucket, add dry carbonaceous material (we use cedar shavings, a waste product of the timber industry); keep the full buckets around for a few months; add the resulting inoffensive slurry to the center of a hot compost pile and cover it with more carbonaceous material (chipped brush); and all the nutrients are conserved onsite, while disease organisms (bacteria, viruses, and worms) are utterly eradicated by decomposing bacteria and the heat they produce.

Many years ago, when I started working as a landscaper, the signature field of my emails said “GARDENS ARE REVOLUTIONARY INFRASTRUCTURE.”  That’s certainly true, but recently I’ve come to think it even more true that SHITTERS ARE REVOLUTIONARY INFRASTRUCTURE — because a garden is not really enough for food sovereignty.  Without any inputs of fertilizer, a few crops of corn are enough to denude the land they’re planted in.  And it’s not financially feasible to buy back your own composted shit in bags — no, the only way most farmers make it is by using chemical fertilizers, which are a petroleum byproduct, worldwide a significant driver of oil consumption.  And of course, the crazy thing is:  humans produce a lot of shit.  Tihkal and I fill a five-gallon bucket a week, like clockwork.  Composted, it’s beautiful rich slow-release nitrogen fertilizer, which, combined with kitchen scraps and the manure from our hens, supplants any need for petroleum inputs to our gardens.

Confirmation here comes from the acknowledged authorities on revolution:  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  Marx notoriously wrote in Capital I (Section 6) of a “metabolic rift with nature” — there is an entire genre of ecosocialist analysis which arises out of this analogy, the “Metabolic Rift School,” associated with John Bellamy Foster and the Monthly Review.  But Marx was influenced by the chemist and proto-ecologist Justus Liebig; and Liebig understood this rift mainly in terms of soil fertility.  He was concerned, in particular, that the process of urbanization deprived the soil of human waste, because town-dwelling (literally “bourgeois”) humans no long shit on the ground!  So we see that the “rift” is indeed “metabolic” in the most basic sense!

And let us note in passing that the metaphor of a metabolic totality encompassing the spheres of both culture and nature is one way of approaching the Buddhist notion of emptiness, or what we call nonduality around these parts.

The study of Liebig’s writings is also why Engels wrote (in Anti-Dühring):  “The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease”; a sentiment with which I could not agree more heartily.

Technocapitalists pity and look down on the underdeveloped world, where people use “pit toilets” and “squat toilets”; well-intentioned donors pave their road to hell installing indoor plumbing in villages all over the globe.  Users of pit toilets, meanwhile, look aghast at our personal hygiene.  For near every pit toilet, the world over, there is a pitcher of water, or even a bidet, to wash the butt after shitting.  It is unimaginably gross — to people outside the solipsistic and self-aggrandizing regime of technocapitalist fantasy — to leave the butthole only as clean as dry paper can make it.  No wonder, they exclaim, those people smell that way!

Thus we see that the mindset of technocapitalism, with its optimizations for short-term gain, its engineering for “efficiency” defined as efficiency of exploitation, has led to a kind of dark age, where the very production of food is unsustainable because unexamined cultural prejudices rob our gardens of nutrients, and instead of washing with water, we leave our ass dirty and waste unimaginable amounts of water trying to hide from ourselves and each other the fact that we shit, as well as sleep and fuck and cook.

Shitstick Shikantaza

A monk asked Yunmen … or was it that Yunmen asked the monk?  No, the way I heard it, a monk asked Yunmen:  “What is Buddha?”  Yunmen answered, “a dry shit stick.”

This is — for obvious reasons?  — one of my favorite Zen stories.  It is not much discussed, and sometimes not even included in lists of Yunmen’s sayings.  Much more often quoted is his response (to himself) in Case 6 of the Blue Cliff Record:  “Every day is a good day (日日是好日).”  Which is also one of my favorite Zen sayings, and probably would be better to concentrate on — but it is neither so assonant nor so funny as the dry shit stick.  And somehow I feel they point in the same general direction.

(I am going to comment on the “every day is a good day” story anyway.  The whole story:  Yunmen said to the assembly, ‘Without even bringing up the days before the 15th of the month, what of the days after the 15th?’  When no one answered, Yunmen responded himself:  ‘Every day is a good day.’

This story becomes a good deal less enigmatic when we realize that 9th Century China followed a lunar calendar — and so the 15th of the month is another way of saying, the Full Moon.  And when we learn that the Full Moon is a Chan analogy for enlightenment, we become even less puzzled.  Yunmen is simply saying that enlightenment is the beginning, not the end, of practice.

American Zen students whose teachers make them concentrate on stories from over a thousand years ago and halfway around the world are often put in this position, to my mind foolishly.  All that can result from breaking your head over a story to which you are denied the context is a big failure experience — which is one way of breaking through to insight into reality but only one among many, and, more importantly, not the intent of the stories.)

This story — the shitstick story — is Case 21 of the Gateless Gate, and the commentary of Wumen, the compiler, is worth quoting in full:  “It must be said of Yunmen that he was too poor to prepare even the plainest food and too busy to make a careful draft.  Probably people will bring forth this dry shitstick to shore up the gate and prop open the door.  The Buddha Dharma is thus sure to decay.”

And so indeed it has turned out to be.

There is a robust scholarly debate on the meaning of the characters used, 乾屎橛 (gānshǐjué), which you can read about on the Wikipedia page for “shitstick.”  The syntax of the classical Chinese allows for the same ambiguity as the English — Buddha may be a dry shitstick, or perhaps a dry-shit stick.  Which, honestly, and in view of the discussion above of hygiene methods the world over, I find it pretty hard to condone the idea that medieval Chinese monks or anyone else used sticks to wipe their butts, at least not habitually — you know, from time to time I can see it, any port in a storm, but, it’s not like they didn’t have pitchers of water available, not to mention paper, which was after all invented in China.  So, personally I come down firmly on the side of those who maintain that a shitstick is actually composed of dried up shit, not merely covered in it. Shades of Fazang’s “Golden Lion!” IYKYK.

Alright, enough of shitsticks.  What of Shikantaza?

Shikantaza is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese 只管打坐 (zhǐguǎn dǎzuò).  The “za” at the end is the same za from the word zazen.  In our last letter we observed that “Zen” is a series of misunderstandings of a Sanskrit word meaning “meditation,” and zazen is seated meditation — the Chinese 坐 , zuò (pronounced “za” in Japanese), represents two people sitting together and just means “to sit.”  With 打, dǎ, a verb meaning to hit as a ball or punch as a key, it means “do sitting.”  (Chinese verbs don’t like to be alone, they need a secondary or helper verb to keep them company.)  只管 (zhǐguǎn) means “merely.”

So:  shikantaza, merely do sitting.

The word owes its use to Dōgen Zenji, the 13th Century Japanese importer of the Caodong school of Zen, who claimed he got it from his Chinese teacher Rūjing.  Since then, absolutely unbelievable rivers of ink have been spilt trying to make the concept harder to understand, both by its enemies and its partisans — and yes, the idea of “just sitting” has enemies!  Shrug emoji.

I will try not to add to the nonsense too much.  I will just observe that, when one sets out to “just sit,” one quickly discovers that one is doing all kinds of other things (like daydreaming) in addition to sitting; and if one tries not to do any of those extra things, that exertion is yet another extra activity, added to the heap.

And then one ends up falling asleep, which, Dōgen is clear about this, is a totally different thing.

So, there is something deeply paradoxical about this practice.  Something which words are not going to do anything to resolve, nor to heighten — and so we gratefully take our leave of words and move on.

Here at Shitstick Shikantaza we are happy merely to shore up the gate and prop open the door.  Beyond that, we trust our relatives — our human and non-human relatives — to lead the way.

Touch

finished 25 December 2020

Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 2: Thoughts on Labor

Thoughts on Labor

This is not — obviously? — an exhaustive catalog of other people’s ideas about labor, work, and commodities.  This is just a quick trip through some ideas that, when I encountered them, I thought, “Yes, that — that is how it seems to me too.”  Scattered and fragmentary as it is, it’s still too long.  I’m sorry about that.

We begin by asking what the two Karls, Marx and Polanyi, thought about the subject, continuing to discuss patron saint William Morris and his crew; then some poetic notions of the Sixties New Left, and the Sixties counterculture; articulate important feminist critiques, and wind up by looking at labor from the perspective of movement, and of Zen Buddhism.  Eschewing simple conclusions, we do allow ourselves to wonder what it all means, and to look back over the path taken.

Marx & Polanyi

One reading of Marx’s Capital is that it’s a “Labor Theory of Value”:  A theory which understands the value of a commodity as determined by the labor (what Marx called “socially necessary labor time”) which produced it and is thereby embodied in it.  This is in sharp distinction to the value theory of bourgeois economics, which sees the value of a commodity as a function of supply and demand, revealed by the free working of the market.  To get some perspective on this, though, it’s helpful to ask what a “commodity” is; and how humans might share the products of their labor if not as commodities.  Capital is ultimately a critique of the commodity form. In Marx’s well-known, bleak, and terribly succinct formulation, through the commodity form society is reduced to “material relations between persons and social relations between things,” i.e. exactly the reverse of what we might want.  So our consideration of labor immediately involves us in questions of economics:  Are there ways of exchanging the fruits of our labors other than as commodities to buy and sell?

In what are called the Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, written 20 years before the composition of Capital, Marx articulated the concept of “alienation” (entfremdung), a word he got from Feuerbach.  The concept, though not the word, continue to be important in Capital (unless you believe Louis Althusser, who taught that Marx went through an “epistemological break” shortly after writing the Manuscripts.  I know, who cares, right?  Well, some people seem to.  Personally I care enough to disagree).  In the Manuscripts, the term is somewhat metaphysical; it means what it might in conversation today, to feel alien or unwell somehow.  Marx also, simultaneously, uses it in the technical economic sense of, basically, theft; when something is alienated from you, it no longer belongs to you but to someone else.  The “economic” part of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is an analysis of how, under Capitalism, one’s labor (which, as Polanyi observed, is nothing other than one’s very life, one’s breath and blood and movement) becomes alienated; is no longer one’s own possession.  The analysis in Capital is much more complex (and it is 100% worth reading and understanding), but a basic way of understanding what Capitalism is from a Marxist standpoint is that:  Under Capitalism, labor becomes a commodity, because everybody accepts or is forced to behave as if it is; when labor is a commodity, which can be sold to the highest bidder, it is no longer one’s own possession; and labor is one’s very physical being, one’s life.  This is what people mean when they say they are “looking for work”; they are trying to sell their lives so they can have money to live.  So, under Capitalism, the lives of a large majority of the population (those who have nothing else to sell) are for sale to a tiny minority (those who do have something else to sell, and who decide to try to increase their possessions by exploiting others).

The question of how some people ended up with nothing but themselves to sell is a long and sordid one which we can consider some other time; but an important aspect of it concerns the Commons — resources which are socially understood to be available for use by all members of the community, under complex and highly locally specific social rules — and how they are redefined as property, the property of those who become the buyers of the commodity called “labor time” under Capitalism, while all those who formerly made their subsistence through the common use of the Commons are suddenly without property and become sellers of their own labor which is all they have left.  This is the second of Karl Polanyi’s three “fictitious commodities”:  land, labor and money; Polanyi’s “great transformation” (the title of his best-known book) is the acceptance that any of these things can be commodities.  Anyway I’ll write more about that later.

Morris, Kropotkin & Carpenter

William Morris is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, as a wallpaper designer — or even just a wallpaper brand.  He deserves this fame; his designs are amazingly beautiful, psychedelically complicated traceries based on closely observed details of the natural world.  But his designs emerge from his philosophy of work, which emerge from his politics, totally unknown to those on whose walls his papers hang.

Morris was a lifelong Socialist, founder of several Socialist organizations and funder of several long-running Socialist papers.  We should probably insert a digression here on the word Socialist:  the word has been used in recent decades to indicate some kind of hybrid of Communism and Capitalism, and these days in American politics to describe a brand of Capitalism with a strong State and enhanced social safety net.  This usage seems to begin with Lenin, who used the word to name his claimed first phase of post-revolutionary society, in which the State ruled in the name of the proletariat; in Lenin’s theory, or fantasy, the second phase, called “Communism,” would occur after the State withered away of its own accord.  Of course, in the “actually existing Communisms” of the Twentieth Century, the second phase never arrived.   Anyway, in Marx’s and Morris’s time the two words were used interchangeably.  Morris vigorously denied being an Anarchist; however, he was adamantly opposed to those Socialists who wished to seize State power in order to catalyze utopia; for Morris, Socialism and the State were incompatible.  He studied Marx, and was close friends with Peter Kropotkin, and with mystical Anarchist Edward Carpenter, about whom more below.

Morris came to Socialism by an interesting route, however, and one we should examine closely.  He began from a hatred of the ugliness of industrial commodities.  In this, his mentor was art critic John Ruskin, whose love of beautiful handicraft led him to empathy with the newly proletarianized humans who had until recently been its producers; Ruskin famously wrote (in Modern Painters II), “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a [person] of [them]; you cannot make both.”  In this, he foreshadowed Marx, who also observed that machine workers in a factory were reduced to the existence of machines themselves.  Ruskin, however, was deeply conservative, deducing naïvely from these correct observations that, since the old ways are the good ways, it follows that the proto-Capitalist paternalism of Medieval England is a just social system, to which we should return.

Morris, on the other hand, was a revolutionary.  He believed that a system both so ugly and so unjust as Capitalism could hardly sustain itself for long, though it might require a little bit of violence to dislodge those who benefited from the status quo.  Morris believed, and lectured widely to all and sundry, that Capitalism drains the world of beauty, not only for the working class, who are exploited into penury and death and can afford neither objects of beauty nor the time to produce them for themselves, but also for the ruling class,  whose homes are filled with ugly simulations of half-remembered craftspersonship, made by people who are miserable, hungry, angry and know they are being underpaid to produce ugly garbage.

This is the sense in which we should understand the Arts and Crafts Movement, of which Morris was a founder — not (or not only) as a return to the artisanal, but as a leap forward into an artisanal future, in which the joy of making and sharing replaces the commodity form, and the world is no longer polluted with cheap mass-produced crap and its byproducts.  That, in any case, was the vision:  that small scale artisanal production could be a form of revolutionary practice (in Marx’s phrase, more on that below) which could be a stepping stone to a classless and stateless society of free association and mutual aid.

Morris, then, was not a conservative — or maybe we should say his outlook on the past and the future was dialectical.  This is summed up in his statement, which has continued to grow more profound to me the longer I have thought about it, “The past is alive in us, and will be alive in the future we are helping to create.”  Put that in your pipe and take a long deep puff and see where it gets you.

Morris can be thought of as a hybrid of Ruskin and Marx, but maybe more important influences were his friends Peter Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter, both of whom loom large for me as well and whose thought is fundamental to why I want to start a rural community in the first place.  If you haven’t encountered Kropotkin, to me he is absolutely fundamental, a polymath and lifelong revolutionary who did hard time in several prisons and was exiled from country after country purely for his ideas. He called himself a Communist, or an Anarchist Communist; his idea of Communism is based on mutual aid, and his book, Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution, which you should read, is a masterpiece which has still not been completely digested by the scientific community.  In it he argues against what was already in the 1870s becoming a vulgar simplification of Darwin’s theory of evolution:  that organisms are in constant competition with each other for scarce resources, and mutations that give one a competitive edge are retained.  Kropotkin points out what Darwin also did, that cooperation is just as often the best way to survive and reproduce, and proceeds to present examples from every plant and animal kingdom, from human prehistory, history and even the Capitalist present.  There’s much else to say about Kropotkin’s deep and diverse interventions in a variety of topics, but the notion of mutual aid is the one that’s important for our purposes at the moment.

Edward Carpenter deserves an even bigger shout-out, if that is possible, because he is almost completely forgotten, though in his era he was as well-known as Kropotkin or Morris.  He is sometimes dimly remembered as author of From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta, a journal of his travels in India; from India he brought back the first pair of sandals seen on English soil, and proceeded to begin the small-scale artisanal manufacture of them on his communal farm, where he lived openly with first one and then two male lovers, and a variety of bohemian friends.  It is because of Edward Carpenter that I usually say my profession is “sandal-maker.”

A gay rights and intersex advocate long, long before those words existed, Carpenter was also author of several books on sexuality, influential essays on Anarchism and utopia, a discussion of the mythic origins of Christianity, and a wonderful little book with one of the best titles ever, Civilization, its Cause and Cure; which, just as it says, argues that civilization is a disease of societies, often fatal, but which it is possible for them to recover from and go on.

Carpenter may be said to have cocreated a philosophy of labor with Morris and Kropotkin.  Carpenter’s articulation is the most poetic.  For Carpenter, the desire to make things of beauty with the body is as basic as any other desire, and the hobbyist — the gardener, the home cabinetworker, the amateur musician — who goes to work again, in the evenings and on weekends, after having worked for an employer — is the true artist.  “And all work,” Carpenter writes (in Towards Industrial Freedom, p. 54), “of course ought to be of a similar nature — that is of the nature of an Art.”  He goes on:  “Artists, in the wide sense of the word, are the only natural and healthy people, and in line with the rest of creation — with the trees and the animals.  They are indeed happy.  But to confine the name to those who dabble in paints or letters or music is foolish.  For the greatest of arts are the arts of Life; and the washer-woman who takes a real pride and interest in her work, to make it as perfect as she can independently of any so-called profit or gain which she may derive from it, is an artist in her way, and indeed more truly so in the essence of things than many a man who merely paints pot-boilers for the Spring exhibitions.

“Everyone” (Carpenter still) “ought to be an artist and to take pleasure in his or her work, feeling that the work was a true self-expression and self-liberation.  There would be joy over the land.”  And before we rush to ridicule the romanticism of Carpenter’s proud washer-woman, we should consider the question he poses with the next sentence:

“Is the song of a lark work, or is it play?”

There is a remarkable memoir, published in Gay Sunshine Magazine, which you can currently find here:  Gay Sunshine.  You should read it, it is by turns delicately poetic and loopily perverted, but it basically alleges that Walt Whitman had sex with a young Carpenter when he came to America to study with the great poet, Carpenter then as an old man took occultist and weirdo Gavin Arthur to bed, and Arthur later had sex with infamous straight dude, hero of Kerouac’s On The Road and Acid Test participant Neal Cassady, who had sex with Alan Ginsberg (an event recounted by Ginsberg in a beautiful poem which I can dig up for you sometime if you like), and so.  Good times!  There is hope in the world.

Anyway, yeah.  Edward Carpenter, people.  Don’t let his memory die out.

The New Left: Herbert Marcuse and Norman O Brown

Fast forward 30 or 40 years, to the West coast of Turtle Island in the late 50s, where the big intellectual issue was figuring out how to square Marx with Freud — sort of like how physicists for the last century have been trying to square relativity with quantum mechanics, to have a Grand Unified Theory of Everything.  Actually, while Carpenter was still alive famed sexologist and major nut job Wilhelm Reich had been one of the first to try this; his early writings on sexuality and politics actually bridge the gap somewhat more successfully than Brown and Marcuse, and anticipate their theories.  However, Reich was already more interested in sex than he was in economics, and his emphases don’t really help us understand labor better —  If I get around to writing on matriarchy, monogamy and free love experiments in American utopian communes of the 19th Century we can circle back to Reich.

Norman O Brown, who was called “Nobby” by everyone who knew him, wrote books which are, if you haven’t read them, great crazy sprawling collages of the entire history of world literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis, full of lines like “All work is women’s work.  Every commodity is as Marx says, a fetish, that is to say a non-existent penis,” — and so on and so on (from Love’s Body, a section called “Trinity.”)  I frankly love it but it is also a little rich for my blood.  Herbert Marcuse was the youngest member of the Frankfurt School, living in exile, like his colleagues, in America.  His writings are much more linear than Brown’s, which at times makes them more staid, and at times more radical.  They both ended up teaching at UC Santa Cruz, publishing a series of books which leapfrogged one another, pushing one another further and further out as the maelstrom of the Sixties accelerated; culminating in two astonishingly bleak utopian retrospectives, Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation (1972) and Brown’s “Dionysus in 1990” (collected in Apocalypse and / or Metamorphosis), which embody Gramsci’s dictum, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

Between them, they elaborated a notion of Capitalism functioning as Freud’s Reality Principle, restraining the Pleasure Principle and perverting the inherent delight of physical action into fatiguing, back-breaking alienated labor.  Capitalism, for them, channels and deranges the libido, replacing the erotic drive with the drive to accumulate wealth, play with work, joy with toil.  Marcuse uses (but he probably got the idea from Brown) Freud’s term “polymorphous sexuality” to name what he felt was a new Reality Principle, appropriate to a Socialist, not Capitalist society:  “to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor.”  For both Brown and Marcuse, the force of pleasure, the drive to create, is incompatible with Capitalism; pleasure, felt completely, and the unrepressed libido are, themselves, the force of revolution.  The idea is not so much that “after the revolution” work will become play, more that Capitalism turns what ought to be play into work; that human flourishing is inherently creative and pleasurable, and Capitalism denies us access to our inborn creativity and pleasure, replacing flourishing with repressive affluence, the false riches of industrial product.  And further:  That this repression is inherently unstable, as the repressed desire for the simple physical pleasure of existence bursts forth in revolution and ecstatic violence.

1968: Situationists and Diggers

It occurred to me recently that it took the Situationists toxic amounts of alcohol, combined with the early writings of Marx, to get to where the Diggers got with just LSD and no books at all; be that as it may, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, on opposite sides of the globe, two groups of disaffected young people formed “provisional microsocieties,” “creating the conditions they described,” in almost total obscurity before exerting immense influence during “the events” of May 1968 (in France, the general strike; in California, the Summer of Love), and strategically choosing to remain mostly anonymous and collective, disappearing from view again.

Another parallel, which I don’t think anyone but me has ever remarked on, is that both groups are responsible for profound slogans that became so popular they seem corny, until you think about them, and the origins of which are long lost in the mists of time:  “Think globally, act locally” (Situationists), and “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” (Diggers).

The Diggers (technically, we should say Diggers mark two or something — the original Diggers were a super-interesting group of 17th Century English radicals, which the 20th Century American Diggers named themselves in homage to — later, if fortune smiles on us, we will get to know them and their comrades the Levellers, Quakers, Ranters and Luddites; “Digger” was also a racist term for California Native people used by early European settlers) didn’t have what you would call a “philosophy” — instead of a philosophy they had “the Free thing.”   Like they might say that somebody “got hit with the Free thing,” and dropped out and started helping the Diggers.  This had to do with giving out free food in the park, and a sculpture they carried around called “The Free Frame of Reference,” which was like a doorway, and once you walked through it you saw that everything was free — as they liked to say, “It’s free because it’s yours.”  So they set up free stores — the free boxes in Bolinas and Peoples’ Park in Berkeley are descendants of those — and a free clinic, from which other free clinics around the country are descended, and free newspapers and a thing called the Free City Collective, and eventually a network of communes with a newspaper called Kaliflower that carried news between them.  If you want to know more about the Diggers there’s a rich archive of broadsheets and ephemera at The Digger Archives Home Page, and Jay Babcock of Arthur Magazine has been transcribing his oral history project at https://diggersdocs.home.blog/.  The Diggers are important, to me anyway.

For our purposes here, the important thing is their concept of the Life Actor.  This was an extension of their origins in the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical political street theater collective that still exists to this day.  The Diggers kind of grew out of the Mime Troupe, when some troupe members realized that the implications of “guerrilla theater” went beyond art and agit-prop — that once an actor realizes they are not limited to acting on stage, their art form is not limited at all, and there is no reason to maintain a division between art and life — the division was illusory all along.  Thus the Diggers aspired to becoming what they called Life Actors; putting themselves in peculiar situations to see what would happen.

The word, “situation,” brings us around the globe, to where a small group of avant garde poets began by making poetry out of just letters, instead of words (what would come to be known as “Concrete Poetry”), then moved beyond the page, to absurdist / political interventions in society.  These women and men, who came to be known as Situationists, always careful to maintain that there was no Situationism, only Situationists and their actions, developed this activity into a political praxis, arguing that, in a post-Capitalist society, work and play would be indistinguishable and would consist in a kind of total art which they called “the construction of situations.”  While, in an alienated society, the creation of situations in this sense was not yet possible, they did what they could, in a provisional way.  In this they somehow brought together the most radical anti-art strands of the avant garde, Dada and Surrealism, with the most radical elements of Marx, in particular the wonderful “Theses on Feuerbach”; wherein Marx writes that altering society for the better is not and cannot be the work of an elite who educate the masses, but that is is a bootstrap process, in which “it is essential to educate the educator [them]self.”  This process of simultaneously changing economic conditions and human understanding, Marx continues, “can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”  Elsewhere he calls this “practical-critical” activity, and ends with the famous dictum, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Here would be a place to enter a digression on Aristotle and the distinction between ποιεσισ (poiesis) and πραχισ (praxis), making and doing, but I will spare you.  The point is that the Situationists foresaw that in a non-capitalist, pre- or post- or extra-capitalist, environment, work would not be distinguishable from play any more than art would be distinguishable from life, that instead of any of these kind of limited activities humans would engage in the creation of situations, what Guy Debord called “poetry necessarily without poems”; and that, while within a Capitalist system this is still impossible, it is possible provisionally to behave in this way, which is revolutionary praxis, leading toward that “Revolution of Everyday Life” (Raoul Vaneigem) which would bring the possibility of truly Situationist activity into being.

Heady stuff.  But inspiring, and it is this basic hypothesis that underlies the slogans widely scrawled on walls across France in May of 1968, slogans such as “Never work,” and “Beneath the paving stones, the beach.”

While the Diggers faded into the woods, becoming active in back-to-the-land utopianism and bioregionalism, and eventually losing a separate political identity, the Situationists followed a much more austere and tragic path; obsessively and almost comically expelling each other from the “Situationist International,” until eventually Guy Debord had expelled everyone but himself — and, having drunk himself into a state of chronic ill health, he ended by expelling himself as well, with a bullet to the brain.  That said, my contention would be that the revolutionary practice of both groups is an essential signpost out of the world of alienation.  And if you want to know more about the Situationists, for we have only skimmed the surface of their thought and action here, a quick note:  I’d advise against reading the books about them in English, which for a variety of historical reasons tend to drastically misrepresent them in various ways.  Much better are the writings of the Situationists themselves:  Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life are both quite readable.  The great bodhisattva Ken Knabb also has translated a huge trove of Situationist writings which he keeps available at Situationist International Anthology.

Feminism:  Wages for Housework and Social Reproduction Theory

Somehow it took until 1969, a year after the two groups above rose briefly to prominence and then disappeared from view again, in a kind of weird article by feminist Margaret Benston published in the New Left Monthly Review called “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” for anyone to observe an interesting gap in Marx’s theory of labor:  that some work, which in 1969 could reasonably be called “women’s work,” while undoubtedly work, in Marxist economic terms is not labor because it neither produces commodities for sale, nor is itself for sale, not being exchanged for money.  I believe bourgeois economists still to this day regard it as a “paradox” that “if a man marries his housekeeper the GDP goes down” because her labor will no longer count towards it.  Marx gestures towards this in acknowledging that Capitalism requires not only production, in the form of alienated labor, but also reproduction — young proletarians must be born and kept alive until they are old enough to be exploited, or the system will grind to a halt.  Marx doesn’t really look into this very deeply however.  Benston goes on to take the somewhat surprising step of defining women as those people whose labor is not paid, thus leapfrogging several decades of debate around gender, identity, essentialism, etc, and proceeds to draw some conclusions which need not concern us here (because I disagree with them!).

Her article was mostly unnoticed within Marxism and the American left; its greatest influence was felt in Italy, where several women (including Selma James, wife of the great Trinidadian Marxist anti-colonialist, historian of the slave revolt in Haiti, and author of the best book ever written about the sport of cricket, C L R James) (but I digress) associated with the Autonomist and Workerist (Autonomia / Operaia) movements — which very briefly are in favor of workers’ self-government, and emphasize the role of wages in class struggle — founded Wages For Housework in the early 70s.  This movement, mainly active in Italy, France and the United States, argued that a large swath of the activities performed by (often female) human beings were both required for Capitalism to function, and unrecognized by the Capitalist system.  Their definition of housework was broad enough to anticipate much of what third wave feminists now call “emotional labor”; witness Silvia Federici’s striking axiom (in “Wages Against Housework”), “More smiles? more money.  Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.”

Wages for Housework was both a serious practical movement, with demands and calls for general strikes (observing that no strike up to that point had been truly general, but in fact had only ever included mostly male wage workers), while simultaneously being a consciousness-raising tool, designed to make the invisible half of labor visible, by the modest proposal that it be compensated.  Feminists like Federici did not so much want women to become proletarianized and exploited, as to change the entire system (hence, “Wages Against Housework”).

Of course, the historical irony of demanding “wages for housework” is that neoliberalism was only too happy to comply, and now much housework in the overdeveloped world is in fact waged: performed by immigrants, women of color, and other marginal populations whose wages are kept artificially low by the lack of political representation, the constant threat of expulsion or jail, and other similar stratagems, and who, simultaneously, perform unwaged housework in “their own” houses (which is to say, the houses in which they work for free), or are forced by the demands of their jobs to rely on even more marginalized relatives for, for instance, childcare.  Federici, for one, was not blind to this as it was happening, and spent most of the 80s and 90s organizing in the global South, in ways that have born liberatory fruit of late in movements like Ni Una Menos.

This unfortunately did not represent the majority feminist response in the neoliberal years, as mainstream feminism lost touch with its radical roots and began to concentrate its efforts more on “equal wages” (which is to say on drawing the reserve labor army of women into the workforce to meet the demands of Capitalist accumulation) and on cozying up to the State with a variety of judicial initiatives.  Thus the groundbreaking work of sociologist Maria Mies and her circle was mostly ignored in its time.  Mies, in Patriarchy and Acccumulation on a World Scale and The Subsistence Perspective, articulated fully and clearly the mutual reinforcement of Capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and exploitation of nature, drawing on Marx as extended and corrected by Rosa Luxembourg, who we will hopefully meet again if we get around to discussing the Commons.

Mies describes the economy as an iceberg, the tip of which is Capital’s domination of wage labor.  This domination, which is all that is visible to bourgeois economists and orthodox Marxists alike, rests on a vast invisible base comprising the informal sector, homeworkers, the work of subsistence peasants, housework, care work, sex work, external colonies, internal colonies (immigrants), and finally what Marx called the “free gift” of nature.  (Marx’s take on nature is actually a good deal more complex than that, but his followers mostly didn’t get the memo — all of which is a topic for another time.)  As Mies presciently observed, the aims of both mainstream feminism and development are “raising the iceberg,” in the name of “the end of poverty” and “equality,” the alleged goals being to raise subsistence farmers out of poverty by incorporating them into the market system, and make women’s condition equal to men’s by bringing them into the labor force.  And in fact, to this day, “improving the condition of women” and “ending poverty” are the two main smokescreens used for the expansion of neoliberalism and State power, through mechanisms like microloans, aimed mainly at women, and many others.  However, as Mies also predicted and has in fact come to pass, what actually happens is that the iceberg sinks:  wage earners are increasingly forced into positions of precarity, as a result of class war in which the deck is stacked (by the State).  Mies called this process “housewifeization.”

In more recent writings (such as https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/PatriarchyAccumulationOnAworldscale_Revisited2005_MariaMies.pdf) Mies has tried to articulate a possible way forward, calling for a new moral economy based on a subsistence perspective and new definitions of the good life.  I agree with pretty much her whole program, but useful here is her succinct formulation:  “Today subsistence production subsidizes the market economy.  This must be reversed.  Wage labor and the market must subsidize subsistence production.”

The writings of both Mies and Federici have been enjoying a great renewal of interest lately, along with other “Social Reproduction Feminists” like Susan Ferguson, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Cindi Katz; an aspect of this analysis we haven’t touched on here is that not only does Capitalism require workers to reproduce themselves, it requires that social relations be reproduced.  Capitalism cannot continue, essentially, if people aren’t trained to accept its normalcy. The roles of parents and teachers in this are obvious; but children and students, not to mention coworkers, suitors, housemates and friends all play their parts.  It is  work to reproduce Capitalist social relations — it also requires effort to stop, to break the chain of social reproduction and widen the cracks in the Capitalist system; a hopeful prospect.

Movement:  Another Perspective

Finally — or, well, somewhat finally — movement educator Katy Bowman offers another way of thinking about labor, labor-saving, and the exploitation of the global South.  I haven’t read any of her writings actually, she kind of seems to have something for sale, but I heard her on the much missed Liberated Body podcast here:  Movement Matters with Katy Bowman (LBP 064) — Liberated Body, and it really made an impression on me.  She argues that, along with suffering, the overdeveloped world is exporting our movement, to the detriment of physical and mental health (which are the same thing obvi but that’s a topic for another time).  She implies a connection between two seemingly irrational aspects of life under neoliberalism:  On the one hand, affluent citizens of overdeveloped Northern countries might, for instance, have a child and then both leave the house to trade their labor for money to pay an immigrant from the underdeveloped South to care for that child, because they are not able to do it themselves (because they are working to make the money to pay a caregiver to do it), while that caregiver must rely on the unpaid labor of a grandparent or someone to care for her own children (because she is leaving the house to trade labor for money to the affluent couple); and on the other hand this same affluent couple might, also, drive their cars to businesses called gyms where they pay to be allowed to ride stationary bicycles (which are bicycles that don’t actually go anywhere).  The list of such paradoxical behaviors could be expanded at will.  Dogs are walked and hot meals are delivered; pre-washed spinach is sold in plastic clamshells.  People sit at desks or slump on sofas pressing buttons; boot camps and power yoga are growth industries.

To really explore this topic very deeply will take us far afield into the critique of technology or what I call “technocapitalism,” but briefly:  When we are told a device is “labor-saving” or “convenient” we should consider the examples above; likewise when we are told an activity is “laborious.”  When there is apparently irrational behavior, we should follow the money.  If someone stands to turn a profit from, for instance, our belief that we do not have time to ride a bicycle to the gym, or that mopping the floor is “backbreaking” and beneath our dignity. we must at least acknowledge that there is an economic component to our beliefs and behavior.  Bowman is not a philosopher, and she, probably for the best, does not use words like “biopower” and “necropolitics”; those familiar with those kind of words could spend a little time considering the implications, before dropping the whole line of reasoning and returning to some simple questions:  How much movement am I getting today?  Who else is moving so that I remain sedentary?  Who benefits?

This is also one of the many reasons why the Moonflower Mahasangha will be home to both the Psychosomanautical Research Institute and the William Morris Center for Anticapitalist Arts and Crafts.  All the reasons — the parallels between holistic, non-hierarchical anatomy and mindbody practice, nondual spirituality, and horizontal politics — will take decades for Tihkal and me to speak.  The process of articulation, embodiment and practice-realization of these parallels is what the Moonflower Mahasangha will be and already is.

What does Zen have to do with it?

Baizhang Huaihai — Huaihai means “embracing the ocean,” Baizhang means “100 zhang” or about 1200 feet, and was this person’s “mountain name” (Zen teachers are known to posterity by the name of the mountain they lived and taught on) — was a semi-legendary Tang Era Chan teacher.  (Zen is the Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word Chan.  Actually as I am fond of saying “Zen” is the American mispronunciation of the Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit word ध्यान, dhyāna, “meditation”; it thus contains the entire history of Buddhism in it, a portmanteau of misunderstanding.)  He is mythically associated with the establishment of rules for communal life in Chan monasteries.  Most of the stories about him are hackneyed Zen nonsense about people inexplicably yanking each other’s noses, but there is this:  “Baizhang toiled hard whenever he was engaged in manual labor.  The monks, feeling this was unseemly and maybe unsafe, hid his tools and begged him to take rest.  Baizhang said, “I am a person without any virtue.  How can I cause trouble for others?”  He then went to look for his tools everywhere, but was unable to find them.  Seeing this, Baizhang refused to eat, saying, “A day without work is a day without food.”

This phrase has passed into the Zen oral tradition as exemplary of the basic flavor of Zen practice.  一日不做，一日不食。One day no work, one day no food.

Two other stories spring to mind.  When Shunryu Suzuki, in his 70s and already ill, was helping to build the stone retaining wall for the deck at Tassajara, a student asked him, “Roshi,” (they called him “Roshi”), “why don’t you ever take a break?  Aren’t you tired?”  Suzuki responded, “I do take breaks.  I just take lots of small breaks all the time.”  And I remember Mark Lancaster, who is now abbot of a Zen center somewhere, telling me that one day he had a practice discussion with Mel Weitsman, founder of Berkeley Zen Center, which just went on and on, and finally Mark asked Mel, “Don’t you ever get tired?”  And Mel said, “No, I don’t really get tired.  I just do the next thing.”

Once, many years ago, I was sitting in a seven day silent meditation retreat, and there was a work period of about an hour in between periods of sitting, and the work leader kept giving me the same job:  Clean the downstairs bathroom, day after day.  The first couple days I did the basics, sprayed vinegar solution on the toilet handle, took out the recycling, mopped, but by the third day it was pretty clean.  And something shifted in me, and I started really looking at the bathroom.  I inhabited that bathroom.  And the bathroom became my universe; I got a chair and climbed up and cleaned the soot off the top of the water pipe that ran close to the ceiling, went outside and cleaned the weird little window that gave onto the courtyard.  Every day I looked forward so much to returning to my beloved bathroom; I scrubbed the grout, I daubed at corners of shelves nobody would ever see.  I still go to that Zen center sometimes and when I happen to use that bathroom I always feel a slight surge of homecoming.

Poet Gary Snyder famously defined Zen as “sitting meditation plus temple cleaning.”  I think that’s pretty good.  I personally feel that temple cleaning is given short shrift in most American’s understanding of Zen, maybe other people’s too.  We can talk about what else I think about Zen later, including what “Shitstick Shikantaza” means, but:  If I leave behind a Zen lineage, it will be a lineage in which temple cleaning is emphasized, the temple is the whole universe, and “cleaning” is a process which does not end in a state called “clean.”  Of that you can be sure.

Summary

Through the commodity form society is reduced to “material relations between persons and social relations between things.”

-Marx

Land, labor, and money are fictitious commodities.

-Polanyi

“The past is alive in us, and will be alive in the future we are helping to create.” 

-Morris

Mutual Aid

-Kropotkin

“Is the song of a lark work, or is it play?”

-Carpenter

 “To make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor.”

-Marcuse

“It’s free because it’s yours”

-Diggers

“Poetry necessarily without poems.”

-Debord

“More smiles? more money.  Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.”

-Federici

“Today subsistence production subsidizes the market economy.  This must be reversed.  Wage labor and the market must subsidize subsistence production.”

-Mies

How much movement am I getting today?  Who else is moving so that I remain sedentary?  Who benefits?

-Bowman

“A day without work is a day without food.”

-Baizhang

And as so often we will give the last word to Karl Fucking Marx:

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Discussion

I’m not going to try to summarize or shoehorn these ideas into one another.  That would be boring and cheap.  I will note a few further implications.

1. Labor is a site of ideological conflict.  The Protestant work ethic has been for 200 years and more a justification for Capitalist exploitation, to both exploiters and exploited; just so constant competitive proclamations of one’s busyness help make sense of the long hours demanded of contemporary professional classes, and mantras like “Rise and Grind,” “Ever’ Day I’m Hustlin,” are perfectly suited to the mingled life / work of the Millennial precariat.

2. The physical activities involved in work can be pleasurable, both in the sense of the pleasure of a job well done and just as the pure sensations of movement, exertion and play.  No matter how lazy we may be (and I am among the laziest people I know), it is not sedentariness we crave.  What is it that we crave?  People who say, “I’m lucky, I do what I love” are not really being very forthright.  People who do what they love and keep insane hours, live in constant insecurity, are disrespected by their own clients don’t say that, no matter how much they love what they do.  A hypothesis:  If one’s shelter and food are secure, one feels respected, is fairly free to manage one’s own time and prioritize one’s own production, labor is ecstasy.

3. The distinctions between art and craft, art and life, work and play are products of the development of Capitalism and industrialization; they are not innate.  We intuit, but cannot quite name, undivided activities beyond those distinctions, which we sense in the pre-Capitalist past or predict in the post-Capitalist future.  More important, perhaps, is how we make space for those intuitions in our lives within and against Capitalism.

4. Division of labor by gender is not a Capitalist invention.  It is found worldwide.  Exploitation, however, is not.  Can we draw any morals from this?  One possible moral would be:  That the way gender is constructed in Capitalist societies, which is used as a justification for the divisions of labor prevalent in Capitalist societies, is part of the ideological underpinning of those societies, i.e. is socially reproduced.  Challenge Capitalist gender and you challenge Capitalism.  There are likely other implications I haven’t thought through yet.

5. Work as spiritual practice:  This is called “karma yoga” in contemporary spiritual milieux.  This phrase has a dark history which I can run through sometime if you like.  But anyway.  While it is clear that attentive work, performed with others, without attachment to a goal, is not only deeply satisfying but also enlightening, we must always examine the social relations.  Profiting from most “karma yoga” I have encountered, there is a guru of some kind, who does not perform the same labor as his or her students.  If not a guru, there is almost always some kind of priestly class, whose “work” is claimed to be their priestly duties.  This division — into those whose work is prayer and those whose prayer is work — I find highly suspect.  This is, for me, part of the import of the story about Baizhang; his insistence on being treated as a person without virtue, modeling the imperative to starve rather than exploit others on the basis of imaginary virtue, is an exemplary form of counterpower.

6. It matters how the products of labor are distributed.  The pleasure or displeasure experienced by a worker depend on more than the physical activities of work.  It is very different to work knowing that everything you produce is the property of your boss, who then sells it, than it is to work knowing that you will own whatever you produce, and can do what you want with it.  This is as true for cappucinos as it is for spreadsheets, for blood pressure readings as it is for gardens, for silk scarves as for orgasms.  Even harder for us to imagine, from within Capitalist society, is what it would be like to work knowing that what you make is not commodities; is not for sale at all.  I think the best way to begin imagining this is to start from simple banal experiences we all have had, like sharing, like borrowing, like owing a favor.

7. Work deeply conditions our experience of time.  The clock was not unthinkable before Capitalism, but it was unnecessary.  E P Thompson wrote a wonderful article about this which you can find here: [link]; and as Marx wrote, “moments are the elements of profit.”  The laborer’s time is something that can be stolen, wasted, killed; the capitalist is forced, by competition, to think in terms of short-term profit, which inevitably leads to long-term disaster.  There is nothing normal about behaving as if an hour — or a month — of a human being’s life can have a price put on it.  Hours cannot be bought, sold, priced, traded; they are not commensurable with one another, between people or within one person’s life.  To treat labor time as a commodity is obviously completely insane.  Once we awaken to this fact, it becomes impossible to participate in the Capitalist charade with a straight face.  Participate, at times, we must; but from this moment forth we do so ironically, subversively, with other ends and other means in mind.

Finished May Day 2020, Winters California

Touch Fucking Moonflower

Deaths from Ceremonial Snake Handling

Photos by “haunted eclipse”

Photos by “haunted eclipse”

(This is the transcript of a talk I gave at Trampoline Hall, San Francisco, on 16 July 2024, with a semi-fictionalized version of the Q&A session afterwards.)

My wife and I used to live in rattlesnake country, and so I got kind of interested in snakebites — and I came across this quote from a herpetologist, who said that most poisonous snakebites are a result of a combination of two chemicals:  alcohol, and testosterone.

A question we can ponder in what follows is:  To what extent does that insight hold true in the case of ceremonial snake handling, which results in a significant proportion of the annual fatalities from snakebite.

I’m going to paint a picture for you now — (a slide I would have shown if this event had slides) — a simple low-slung clapboard shack, tin-roofed, down a dirt road near Birchwood, Tennessee.  Nailed to the eave over the single door, a crudely painted sign proclaims:  “The Dolly Pond Church In Jesus Name Miracle of Salvation With Signs Following — EVERYONE WELCOME”

This is the spiritual institution of George Went Hensley, a bootlegger, drunk, thief, serial adulterer,  father of 14 children and, like his father before him and at least one of his sons, a preacher man.

Hensley was probably not the originator of the practice of snake handling, though he claimed to be — even he said he got the idea because he saw it done in his youth —  but there is no doubt that he was a charismatic advocate of the practice; by the time he founded that church, he had been peripatetically traveling around the Southeast for some 40 years, procuring snakes locally and revealing them to the assembly at the climax of a service which usually featured one of his wives reading from scripture — as Hensley was illiterate — and occasional drinking of battery acid or cyanide. All of which is signaled by the phrase “signs following” in the name of his church; the signs are those of Mark 16 (verses 17 and 18):  “And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them …”  A passage with which Hensley was apparently obsessed.

A longer version of this talk might digress here to discuss David Abrams’ claim in his beautiful book The Spell of the Sensuous, that shamans and healers in places like New Guinea and the highlands of Nepal are engaged in a cocreation with their patients, where both parties are “in on the joke” in some sense — and a certain willful suspension of disbelief is mobilized by everyone in attendance, to leverage the power of the placebo effect.

But — we don’t have time for that kind of speculative philosophical mumbo jumbo!  Let’s get back to the snake handling!

After leading the faithful in snake-handling services for half a century (and sustaining, so they say, many bites), in July 1955 Hensley showed up in the Florida panhandle, where he was preaching out of a blacksmith’s shop, leading meetings without snakes for several weeks before relapsing into his old ways, and procuring — from somewhere — a 5’ eastern diamondback, which he removed from the lard can in which it was stored and carried with him, wrapped around his neck, while he preached, rubbing its face on his; when attempting to return it to the can, it bit him on the wrist, and he was dead within 24 hours.

Hensley, however, was not the first believer to die after one of his services, for already in the mid 30s he had high-tailed it out of Florida after a young man was bitten twice during one; but not before holding the young man’s funeral, at which, according to reports, snakes were again handled.

The practice did not die out with Hensley — not at all.  And here we should briefly digress on the headless and anarchic nature of American Protestantism.

Another slide I would like you to imagine in your mind’s eye:  A complex diagram including names like “fundamentalism,” “pentecostalism,” “Evangelical,” “charismatic,” “foursquare” — which, the details are unimportant but, upon examination, it becomes clear that these designations are, first of all, not arrayed like branches of a tree, but rather vague, overlapping ovals; and second, that they are mostly exonyms, not to say slurs, but names that one group gives to another, in a process anthropologists call “schismogenesis” or, on a long enough timescale, “ethnogenesis,” but which begins in a kind of narcissism of small differences:  “I believe they do that kind of thing in the next valley over; we don’t do that, here.”

So, as a result of the origins of American Christianity in the rejection of any kind of overarching organization, nobody knows how many churches today practice snake handling; there is no authority that could command it, nor any that could prohibit it; nor is their any governing body to which they could or would report.  And so, we really are dependent on the researches of academics, of outsiders; and, since the practice is frowned upon if not illegal in most jurisdictions — the box of snakes is probably not brought out if unfamiliar faces are in the congregation.

Deaths, however, we have a record of; and as I said, while people do die of garden variety mishaps and stupidity, intentional, ceremonial snake handling, as a test of faith, is the cause of a significant proportion of fatalities — about one a year — right up to the present day.

In 1936, the same year as the first death in Hensley’s church, in Virginia Reverend Harvey Kirk handed a snake his pregnant wife, Anna Kirk, who was bitten thrice; after the general practice of her faith, she refused medical attention — either for the bite or the pregnancy — went into labor, and gave birth, without medical intervention; she and her baby both died of the venom.  Reverend Kirk ended up serving three months in prison for involuntary manslaughter, but not before skipping town and being tracked down three years later in Florida.  It is not recorded whether Kirk continued leading handling services on his release.

(Kirk’s case, by the way, brings up another confounding factor which is that deaths from ceremonial snake handling are not normally recorded as crimes.  The overwhelming majority are recorded as “accidental deaths,” with perhaps 5% considered manslaughter and a small few considered as suicide.)

Shall we do some more?

[Audience:  Yes!]

Okay, let’s talk about Jamie Coots and Punkin Brown.  

Here’s a diagram — in your mind’s eye — of the complicated interrelationships between three generations of Coots’s, and three generations of Browns.  The outline of the story is this:  In 1995 Melinda Brown, wife of Punkin Brown, dies of snake bite received in Jamie Coots’s church.  The state threatens to take their five children from the father, Punkin Brown, because he also leads handling services and keeps a room full of venomous snakes in his house.  This problem is soon resolved, though, when Punkin dies of a bite received in one of his own services three years later; custody of the children is granted to Punkin’s parents, and again challenged because they are also believers and are taking their grandchildren to handling services.

And what of Jamie Coots, in whose church the children’s mother was bitten?  He was himself a third generation snake handling preacher, and the church had been founded by his grandfather.  His father and grandfather both died of natural causes — but Coots was not so lucky, or perhaps his soul was not so free from sin.  In an attempt to promote the understanding of his faith, he agrees to appear in a tv program about snake handling, which is canceled — when, tragically, Coots is bitten in a service and dies.

The full plot is byzantine enough to warrant treatment by Tolstoy — or maybe Garcia Lorca.  But I think we can draw two conclusions from this story:  First that death by ceremonial snake handling is, in some sense, heritable, or anyway the risk is — actuaries take note; and, more subtly, that the snake handling church is the anchor of an internally coherent and insular microsociety, with its own standards and morals.

One final example.  This one does not involve a fatality, though it easily could have — and it is rather dark.

Glenn and Darlene Summerford were co-pastors of the Church of Jesus Christ with Signs Following in Scottsboro, Alabama.  One night Glenn fell to drinking, and in a drunken rage he held a gun to his wife’s head and forced her to put her hand in the cage where the couple kept the canebrake rattlesnake they brought out for services.  She was bitten, and as her hand swelled and blackened, Glenn forced her to write a suicide note to their children, then to put her hand again into the cage, where it was bitten again.

Fortunately for Darlene Summerford, Glenn eventually passed out, and Darlene was able to call her sister who sent an ambulance, and she survived.  Glenn Summerford is still in prison for that crime.  Had she died, though … it might have been the perfect crime …

So — what to make of all this?  Can we draw any conclusions?

I want to be clear to start that, as a card-carrying member of the coastal elite, it would be easy for me to stand up here and poke fun at people with names like Punkin getting bit by snakes they themselves chose to hold — and as much as possible I want to avoid that kind of cheap mockery.  There is, of course, a part of me that wishes I had such unshakeable faith.  In anything.  There is a part of me that wishes I was enmeshed in such a tight-knit and homogeneous community.

And there are, also, other parts that are grateful for my doubt.  That are grateful for my relative freedom from social pressure.

Anyway, I think this phenomenon raises some interesting questions, many of which are summed up in the title of I think a beautifully titled paper published in the West Virginia Law Review some years ago:  “Protecting the Faithful from their Faith.”  I wanna just let that title hang there.  Protecting the Faithful from their Faith.  What does that mean, in a country founded on the right to freedom of religion?  Are there other kinds of faith from which we might wish to protect our fellow Americans?  Indeed, are there some who might wish to protect the faithless from their lack of faith?

Who protects?  Who decides?  Who defines the harms?

I don’t have any answers, but … in closing I’d like to paint another picture for you.  A low-ceilinged room, the back of an auto mechanic on the outskirts of town, on a Sunday.  We — all of us — are attending service together, and the presence of the Holy Spirit is palpable.  Some feel it more than others, but no one can deny that something electrical, something important, is moving in the room.  People are falling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, speaking in tongues.  The music is rising to an ecstatic pitch.

And then comes the moment, which we have all been awaiting with mingled dread and exaltation:  A wooden chest is lifted from behind the pulpit.

Within, writhing, several kinds of venomous serpent.  I hold one, a five foot copperhead, while I continue to speak, but you can no longer follow what I am saying.

I hand the snake to you; and you accept it, without thinking.  You don’t even really know why, but you take it, and hold it in front of you — and gaze, into its cold, alien, death-dealing eyes.

Thank you.

MC:  Wow, that was great!

Hap [shivering a little]:  Yeah, I got a little high on my own supply at the end there.

Audience:  When was a time when you felt something akin to what you describe?  The fear, and the unshakeable faith?

Hap:  Well, in a certain sense right now.  It’s scary standing up here!  And I have faith in all of you.

But if you really asked me, the nearest analogue in my life is probably drinking ayahuasca.  I have really come face to face with death on ayahuasca, I’ve really died.  And it’s a kind of bedrock to rest on.  To know, to really know, what death is … that’s something unshakeable, in my life.

Audience:  Snakes?  Dicks?

Hap:  Yes!

Audience:  What made you want to give this talk?

Hap:  It seemed like a funny title for a talk.

I have come to realize that I like naming things — and I really like making things that serve as delivery systems for the payload of their name.

For instance, I wrote a book called “A Provisional Manual of West Coast Tantrik Psychedelic Druidry.”  And in a certain sense the book is a delivery method for the memetic payload of the title.  I mean, it’s a whole book, too.  I don’t want to sandbag people, I followed through on the promise of the title.  But — if all somebody ever reads is the title, I’ve still accomplished something.

And, this talk is similar; like, once you’ve heard the title, you could kind of give the talk yourself.  Like you know this is a practice, and it has some kind of history, probably pretty colorful, pretty picturesque; and you know there are deaths, because it’s right there in the title, so you know there will be some anecdotes.  Again, I tried to follow through on the promise of the title, and toss in a few curveballs here and there.

It reminds me a little of something my old poetry teacher, Robert Duncan, said — he said, “Once you’ve called a poem a sonnet, it would be redundant to actually write it in sonnet form.”  Which, he was half right.  You don’t want to do too much cutesy false advertising.  But you can get away with a little.

MC:  I’m curious if you want to expand on what you said about the imaginary longer version of the talk, and — was it David Abrams?

Hap:  Come on man.  I’m not giving that talk.  I gave the talk I gave!  That’s the whole rhetorical trick — as you are well aware — get your audience to do your thinking for you.  If I were smart enough to give that talk, would I be wasting my time here in Trampoline Hall?

Audience:  Why snakes? What is the fascination with snakes?

Hap:  Well I mean — it’s biological.  You know, there’s a deep fear of snakes that’s prehuman, probably pre-primate.  Snakes appear in people’s dreams; some people have an uncontrollable panic around snakes, which is probably adaptive.

Audience:  What’s the closest you’ve come to a poisonous snake?

Hap:  Well — actually, I did meditate with one once.  I was hiking, some friends and I were backpacking in Southern Nevada, and I went off by myself, off trail, scrambling in the back country.  And up on top of this mesa, I came upon a rattlesnake, coiled.  So I sat — out of striking range, you know — in full lotus posture, and meditated with it, looking into its eyes.  I’ve always felt a kind of personal kinship with rattlesnakes.

MC:  You feel you have a … kinship with rattlesnakes?

Hap: Yeah.

MC:  That … makes sense.  But I’m curious to hear more.

Hap:  Well, uh — something you don’t know about me is, I’m a Zen priest.  And there’s this thing about frogs, in Zen.  Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, was fond of frogs.  He said that zazen is sitting like a frog, still but — ready to, you know, snap your tongue out and catch a fly.  And, I kind of, because I have this personal kinship with rattlesnakes, I kind of feel that zazen is more like being a coiled rattlesnake — perfectly still, but completely engaged with all your senses, flickering your tongue, you know, tasting the wind, hyperalert — but deeply still.

Audience:  Why don’t they defang the snakes?  Do you think it could have the same effect?

Hap:  Well, actually, there have been some scandals, where people were using defanged snakes.  But no, the point is not just to handle snakes.  It’s to handle deadly snakes.  It’s a confrontation with mortality, but, that’s not so much the emphasis within the belief system.  For the faithful, it’s a test of faith, of purity.

From an outsider’s perspective — you can put together a theory.  You know, venomous snakes don’t want to bite large predators.  Prey animals, they bite, and use their venom, and the venom is enough to incapacitate their prey pretty quickly.  But something big … it’s not going to be incapacitated quickly enough.  So if a snake bites a large predator, the snake is almost certainly going to die in the encounter as well.  Snakes are slow and they don’t have any other defenses.  So the large predator is very likely going to kill the snake, maybe eat it; and then be incapacitated and possibly die itself, hours or days later.

So, it’s, from an evolutionary perspective it’s a mutually assured destruction game.  The point, for the snake, is to let the predator know, “You can kill me — but you will die, and I don’t have much meat on my bones, so it’s really not worth it — go pick on somebody else.”  And that’s why rattlesnakes have rattles.  To let everybody know.

Anyway, so snakes don’t want to bite anybody, unless you’re really egregiously harassing them.  You can carry one around, rub it on your face, all that, and your chances are pretty good.  Especially if you’re a member of the congregation, if you engage in this behavior once or twice a year — your chances of being bitten are very slight.

If you’re a pastor, though — or a pastor’s wife — and you’re doing this every Sunday, week after week — your odds are a little worse.  But still pretty good.

So here you have a very real chance of death, which seems, for evolutionary reasons, much more dangerous than it is.  You know … there are people in basements, doing shots of vodka, playing Russian roulette.  Because they’re addicted to risk, maybe.  I don’t know, I don’t have a theory about them.  But they have a one in six chance of getting shot.  Snake handlers have much better chances.  But it feels dangerous.  And if you survive — which you almost certainly will — you feel as if you passed a test.  You know, like it says in that passage from the book of Mark:  “These signs shall follow them.”

So that’s kind of a cynical theory of what’s going on under the hood.  They’re not leveraging the placebo effect, so much as basic human inability to reason probabilistically.

Audience:  More on the personal kinship with rattlesnakes?

Hap:  Uh … well if you really want to know … so my wife and I used to live in rattlesnake country, as I said, but I also grew up in rattlesnake country, in the hills of southern California, and one day, when I was quite young, maybe four or five, a rattler came down out of the dry hills to this little fishpond that we had, and — you’re not supposed to do this, it’s bad luck — but my dad killed it.  He chopped off its head with a shovel.  And my mom — she was a terrible mother in many ways, truly awful, but she was also completely amazing in other ways, and my mom, amazingly — she took the snake’s carcass, and she slit its belly all the way down its body, and skinned it, and actually cooked the meat for our dinner.  I remember it, it really did taste like chicken.  And she dried the skin, flat; and hung it on my bedroom wall.  With its rattle.  And it hung there on my bedroom wall all throughout my childhood.

And I remember gazing at it there, at night, as I drifted off to sleep.

MC:  Hap Savage, everybody.

Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 6: Budgets

Boundaries

The real hard problem of consciousness is how to draw a boundary around it.  Once we acknowledge that awareness is a distributed cocreation of an individual and an environment, then we can no longer speak of “individual” and “environment”; there is a system, with no center, in which all participants are equally important.  The question is:  What are the edges of a given system?  How many such systems are there?  Is it meaningful to look for edges?

Analogous problems exist in the framing of ecological and physical questions.  Newtonian physics rests on the abstraction of a Force Diagram, in which a system of interest, say a block and tackle or a planet orbiting a star, is diagrammed and forces acting within that system are enumerated.  In ecology, similarly, an ecosystem consists of a set of organisms and their interactions — caribou, pine trees and wolves are considered in light of their grazing, predation, and fluctuating populations, ants are observed to spread grass seed over a certain area.  In both these sciences, boundaries are drawn around a finite space within an infinite field of interactions, to better understand; the gravitational force of a distant star on the block and tackle is not considered, nor are ant and grass distributions factored in to the population dynamics of caribou.

These kinds of simplification are essential to understanding complex systems; when the system of interest is consciousness, since we cannot agree on what we are looking for, we cannot agree on where to look.  Once we accept that spiders are thinking as much with their webs as with their brains, can we deny that outfielders are thinking with the ball and sky — or indeed that ball and sky are thinking with the outfielder?  This is the current state of the science of biology; biologists and philosophers are desperately trying to invent definitions of extended, embodied or enacted cognition which are worded so as to keep out the participants which they believe it would be absurd to allow in.  Gatekeep as they may, one day the gates will crash and a rigorous science of ecological cognition will be the result — may I live to see it.

Inflows and Outflows

One of the interesting things about living in a remote location is you become more aware of the inflows and outflows.  In cities, we are taught to consider our budget, which is a Money Budget; water just comes out of the tap and flows down the drain.  When we neglect to pay the water bill, the water stops flowing; money, not water, is the flow of interest.

This is what it means to say that we are Off The Grid.  The Grid is a social and economic system that abstracts away all inflows and outflows from the home and masks them all as flows of money.

A Brief List

In addition to the Money Budget, living here we become more viscerally aware of:

• The Water Budget

• The Electricity Budget

• The Fossil Fuel Budget

• The Shit Budget

• The Food Budget

• The Time Budget

• The Waste Budget

• The Space Budget

The Water Budget

Globally, water is evaporated by the Sun’s heat and precipitated as rain and snow; through the force of gravity it flows cutting channels as it goes until it reaches the sea.  Most water that falls never becomes overland flow though; it is absorbed by soil and taken up by plant roots, or percolates down through topsoil and subsoil, in a process that can be as fast as a few days or as slow as many centuries, filling up underground cracks and cavities as groundwater.

Globally, water is effectively a closed system; with arcane exceptions, it is neither created nor destroyed, neither enters nor exits the Earth’s atmosphere.

Locally water falls as rain and is collected in two ponds.  The amount that falls directly on the surface of the ponds is negligible; the water that fills our ponds flows into them down channels that descend from the mouths of three culverts that were laid under the gravel drive that services our ridge.  Water enters those culverts from ditches at the side of the road.  Keeping the ditches clear, and the culverts open, takes Time.

As the dry season progresses, the ponds evaporate.  To supplement, we pump groundwater from 400’ down to fill several 5000 gallon tanks, from which water flows back downhill through pipes and tubes to irrigate our orchards and gardens, clean us and our dishes, and be drunk.  Pumping the water from so deep in the ground requires Electricity; maintaining and repairing the system takes Time and Money.

At present, we pump enough water from the well to meet our needs, with very little left over.  The amount of water available to Moonflower Farm is decreasing over time, owing to changes wrought by the Capitalocene.  Measurably less water falls as rain here than 20 years ago; the groundwater level is decreasing as our neighbors pump it out to grow Cannabis.

The Electricity Budget

Globally, electricity is an intercellular unit of account within all living things; it is discharged during sudden changes of atmospheric pressure in  a process which is still not well understood.

Electricity in the tamed form that is usable by humans is usually produced by spinning magnets.  The power to spin these magnets mostly comes from burning coal and other fossil fuels; some comes from wind or flowing water.  Increasingly it is also generated through the photovoltaic effect, a property of certain materials whose electrons, when exposed to light, enter a higher energy state.

Electricity, as such, does not enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Within the boundaries of the global system it can be produced in unlimited quantities. The problem, globally, is not so much the production of electricity as its storage. Three caveats apply: Electricity is not actually produced, it is transformed from other forms of energy, and this transformation is extremely inefficient, producing large amounts of waste heat which dissipates beyond the Earth system¹; Transforming potential energy stored in fossil fuels into electricity is tremendously toxic to living things and a primary driver of Capitalocenic climate change; and harnessing the PV effect requires colossal energy inputs to perform — absent the energy subsidy of burning many millennia’s deposits of fossil fuels, it would not be possible to manufacture photovoltaic devices.

Locally, we make electricity with photovoltaic cells, and by burning gasoline.  The solar panels that we inherited produce slightly less electricity than we use, and the remainder we produce by running a generator from time to time.  Once produced, electricity is stored here in a bank of batteries, which are old and inefficient; in using it, it is destroyed, or more accurately transformed into work performed (water pumped, light, computation) and waste heat.

Photovoltaic electricity production requires only light which enters the Moonflower Farm system direct from Brother Sun and Sister Moon.  The generator requires Fossil Fuel.  Maintaining and repairing the electricity production and distribution system requires Time; upgrading it, in hopes of meeting our Electricity Budget, requires Money.

The Fossil Fuel Budget

Globally, fossil fuels were produced in a majestic geochemical process over an unimaginably long time scale.  Their discovery, extraction, destruction and transformation into kinetic and electrical energy is the signature of our era.  The energy trapped within them entered the Earth system from the Sun and was originally stored by plants.

The energy, thus, arrives as a free gift and will continue to long after humanity is a bad dream from which the universe has awakened. The biochemical and geochemical processes by which that energy is gathered and stored are also ongoing. However, the time scale on which capitalist human beings are depleting fossil fuels is many orders of magnitude faster than the time scale on which they were and are still being produced. Planning for a post-fossil-fuel future mainly takes the form of wishful thinking².

Locally, some fossil fuels were stored at Moonflower Farm by the former owners, who were apparently preparing for a different kind of apocalypse than we are.  Large amounts of diesel fuel and propane, both of which store stably, are here in tanks.  One day these stores of fuel will be used up, but probably not any time soon.

Some machines (two-stroke engines, a car, two generators) run on gasoline, which is not stable in storage and must be purchased with Money.  Replacing these machines with diesel versions also requires Money.

Fossil fuels leave the Moonflower Farm system in the form of work performed (trees and grass cut, electricity generated, people and objects moved here and there), waste heat, and toxins dispersed into the local atmosphere.

The Shit Budget

Having written at length about this elsewhere³, I will concentrate on analyzing the flows, but a little bit of definition may be in order.

Globally, shit neither enters nor leaves the Earth system.  It cannot, because it is not a substance, but a symbol.  So technically, I suppose, when humans leave the stratosphere they take shit with them, and bring it back when they return.

To arrive at a more rigorous definition, we might generalize, and say that shit is metabolites, the products of the metabolisms of living things.  This definition would be a little more satisfying if the word “metabolism” had a clear definition (indeed, if “life” had a clear definition), but it’s the best we’re going to do today.  “Metabolism” is used to refer to a variety of transformations of the environment undertaken by living things or component parts of living things:  Individual bees metabolize nectar (a metabolite of flowering plants), producing honey and other substances used by other bees within the hive, as well as some substances which are useless or toxic to bees and must be removed from the hive; individual cells of each bee also metabolize compounds, some of which are used by the individual bee in various ways, some of which must be excreted by the bee lest they build up and become toxic to it; some products of cellular metabolism, further, are used within the cell itself, and some must be excreted by the cell.  Individual cells of our bodies likewise metabolize, and so does our entire body working together.  Furthermore, communities of single-celled organisms in our gut metabolize the food we eat, and we proceed to metabolize their metabolites, and refer to some of those metabolites as nutrients, others as, you guessed it, waste.

Hopefully⁴ it is becoming clear why shit is so interesting to me — simply trying to come up with a definition we find ourselves lost in a forest of unanswerable questions about flows, identity, community, the pseudo-separation between self and other, etc.

We might try to get a little more precise by defining shit as “excreta”, and say that plants shit oxygen, which is toxic to them but essential to the metabolism of us animals — and then observe that several billion years ago the explosion of aerobic bacteria on the face of the Earth, who shit the previously rare and caustic compound oxygen, caused the mass extinction of anaerobic bacteria, now found only in relict populations in places safe from oxygen pollution like deep sea vents, human guts, and the tanks of nuclear reactors.  We might even observe in passing that, prior to this first and most terrible mass extinction event, iron was commonly found on the Earth’s surface, and was black in color, because rust was unknown.

This attempt at a clearer definition, however, would be complicated immediately by questions: O2 is an excretion, agreed, but what of the dry leaves that litter the forest floor? The cast skins of snakes, the flakes of dead skin we wipe from our counters? What of the significant proportion of our shit that is actually the dead bodies of our own gut bacteria? Dead bodies in general⁵? Geologic deposits of phytoplankton skeletons that we call limestone, or, indeed, “fossil fuels”? What, finally, of the internal metabolites of gut flora or bees within the hive? Are these excreta or not? ANSWER ME.

Anyway, moving on; locally we do not import shit, we produce it.  Not from scratch!  Like electricity, it is a transformation.  We also do not export it.  Quite the opposite, we guard it jealously.  We stockpile it in five-gallon buckets for a few months to mellow, and then add it, layered with dry plant matter, to the compost pile; after a year it is spread on the garden plots, and the cycle continues.  Whether two people and our assorted livestock produce enough nutrients to cultivate enough food to keep the two of us alive is an open question; when you visit, please shit in the buckets, don’t go off in the woods.

Hoisting around and managing poop buckets and compost takes Time.  In the first months of this experiment, we were often short of buckets, but now we have enough to clean, disinfect in the sun, and reuse.

The Food Budget

Globally, food enters the Earth system as sunlight.  Plants (and blue-green algae) eat it directly; herbivorous animals (and fungi) eat plants; omnivorous and carnivorous animals (and fungi) eat animals.  Plants, however, can only use the red and blue ends of the spectrum.  About 29% of the sunlight that reaches Earth is reflected back into space; of the remainder, the vast majority is absorbed by land and sea and radiated as heat.

Locally, the plants that live here, as well as those we plant as food crops, get their food direct from the Sun.  As for us, we grow some of our food, but import most of it.  In addition to diesel fuel, the former owners of this property were stockpiling beans and grains, some of which we feed to our chickens, ducks and geese, whose eggs and bodies we eat in turn.

Buying food requires Money.  Growing food requires Time.  Were there enough time, we would grow more, and buy less, of our food.

The Time Budget

Globally, time doesn’t go or come.  It is, rather, a shape.  Relativistically, the universe is best thought of as a four-dimensional shape, with three dimensions of space and one of time.  The universe’s shape is currently thought to be an infinite hypercone, signifying eternal expansion in time — but I anticipate revisions to this.

The subjective experience of time “passing” is probably related to another characteristic of the universe, entropy. Entropy is a measure of the degree of organization in a system, which in physics is synonymous with the degree of differentiation among parts of a system. A system which is the same everywhere is maximally entropic. In the universe as it is now, some regions are stars, and some are empty space — they are very different from each other. As stars burn, they slowly and inevitably come to resemble empty space. This is entropy. It is inevitable and ineluctable and is the only imaginable metric against which the growth and decay of living things and all other flows could be measured⁶.

Locally, time enters Moonflower Farm as cycles of light and dark, work and rest, heat and cold, life and death.  Summer days have many hours of daylight, but half or more are too hot to do any work in; Winter days are short and rainy.  If you want to think about it this way, a certain number of seconds are issued to each of us at birth, and we proceed to use time, kill time, borrow time, waste time, until, one day, there is no more.  Fucking, arguing, meditating, washing dishes, tending the garden, cooking and eating, writing these notes, sleeping:  All take time.

Rhythmic time⁷ is a way of experiencing time subjectively such that there is neither too much (requiring wasting) nor too little (requiring borrowing). In this way of living, time is neither experienced as a line nor as a circle, but as a rhythm, and any given moment — a summer afternoon, a gentle breeze blowing the gauzy curtain, such as this one, or a cold and groggy winter morning when it is a struggle to stoke up the fire — is itself and simultaneously all other similar moments, not just for past or future versions of “oneself” but for other people as well. Experiencing time this way does involve a certain abdication of personal sovereignty, as in a sense the decision about what to do next is made by the moment, and not by oneself; personally I regard this as a feature, not a defect.

Technocapitalism is based on the obscene pretense that time is fungible with money — the less said about that the better⁸.

The Money Budget

Similar to shit, money is a human symbol.  It neither enters nor exits the Earth system unless we do.  It is a polyvalent symbol, standing for both a unit of account and a store of value.

The standard narrative of the historical development of money — that it began as cowry shells or other counters used in exchange — is one of those anthropological myths that was invented to explain a contemporary phenomenon and is repeated despite there being no evidence that is true, as David Graeber convincingly argues in Debt:  The First 5000 Years.  Graeber suggests that humans are actually very good, within reasonably-sized communities, at keeping track of favors owed; it is only for trade far outside the community that a unit of account is needed.  Historically, money was only needed where trust was impossible.  Wherever the centralized state develops, however, money appears, as a tool of state repression and control.

With the dawn of capitalism, of course, money undergoes another transformation, into a distributed lever of alienation and hyper-fetishized ur-commodity, which you can read all about in Marx’s Capital and I suggest you do.

On the psychology of money:  In a former chapter of my life I was romantically involved with someone from a different, higher, social stratum, who had attended Stanford University based on “legacy admission”, because her uncle or somebody was a donor.  She had a therapist, whom she had apparently chosen solely on the basis of their shared status as Stanford alumnae.  My relationship to money was incomprehensible to my partner, and at a certain point she asked if I would have a session with her therapist, to discuss it.  This estimable lady lectured me on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and gave me a somewhat stern word of advice:  “Money is just an energy.”  I left, pondering the truth of her words, but also how much easier it was for a semi-retired white psychologist in the Berkeley hills to say them than, for example, an unemployed Black mother of two in the Oakland flats, and what a lot of work the word, “just”, was doing in her sentence.

I have had a variety of different experiences with money, maybe a little more varied than average. I have dumpster-dove⁹, and attended black tie charity galas; have filched cheese from art openings, and bought and sold apartment buildings. I don’t claim this has given me any better understanding of the topic than anybody else — probably it has just made me more mixed-up.

Anyhoo, money comes into the Moonflower Farm system by obscure and circuitous routes which I’m not going to discuss here. Most days, we spend much more than we make; some days, we make much more than we spend. There is also money stored here, in the form of “equity”, which means that we do not have a mortgage¹⁰.

Money leaves this system in trade for various flows, described infra, and also for other things:  Meals out, funny hats, artworks.  The society we, and you, live in is structured totally around consumption.  Our beliefs do not change that.  Not only are the overwhelming majority of social interactions mediated through consumption, but consumption is experienced as a need, and its denial as a deprivation.  In practice, this means that sometimes we just want to go into town and buy an overpriced juice and talk to the clerk in the juice shop.

This internal contradiction¹¹ constitutes a kind of death drive intrinsic to late-stage capitalism, and bears further investigation.

Subjectively, there is never too much money.  It is possible to have subjectively enough.  This requires managing both the flow of money, and the emotions and expectations of the people involved.

The Waste Budget

Carse¹² defines “waste” simply: “Waste”, he says, “is what we produce.” This brings to mind our discussion of shit, metabolites, and excreta above. Globally, I think we could say there is no waste¹³.

“Waste”, like “side-effects” and “by-products” and “economic externalities” is a way of revealing the speaker’s biases and perspective, without objective meaning.

Locally, waste enters Moonflower Farm mostly in the form of consumer packaging.  Of which there is an astonishing amount.  Cardboard boxes — bottles, cans, and jars — plastic bags and plastic clamshells — styrofoam.  In our former life, “on the grid”, all these would have been dutifully categorized as Trash or Recycling, stuffed into the appropriate receptacle, and forgotten.

On Moonflower Farm, of course, there is no Trash or Recycling — or there is, but its removal is extremely arduous.  It must be loaded into a pickup truck, driven half an hour into town, and either hidden in somebody else’s bins, or taken to the county dump, at which there is always a long line of other trucks, many with Trump stickers on them.  Doing this takes a lot of Time — and, at the dump, Money.

This leads to a perspective shift, from waste into what my friend Loophole Kid calls “hacker-class” or “sorcerer-class” resources.  We carefully clean bottles, jars, and plastic bags and reuse them in various ways.  An immense pile of cardboard is growing in the barn.  At first I was planning to build a temple out of it — recently I’ve learned that it can be used as a substrate for mushroom cultivation.  Styrofoam, once manufactured, is more or less eternal.  It makes very good insulation though.

And the plastic clamshells — I save them.  I don’t know what they may become useful for.  But I can’t send them, after a single use, into the trash stream.  Not in good conscience.

Cooked chicken bones are one of the hardest kinds of waste to deal with; animals (some of whom we consider “pets”) sniff them out, dig them out of the compost, and eat them, risking internal injury from the sharp points of shattered bone.  Maybe we can melt the clamshells and encase them in plastic and make some kind of sculpture.

In any case, when you come to see us here at Moonflower Farm, and bring washed salad greens in a plastic clamshell to share, take these musings into account.  For it is not only here that there is no “away”. There is no “away” anywhere.  It would be wonderful if we, as a species, could simply decide to stop making single-use plastic.  As consumers — and, under technocapitalism, that is most of what we are — we can only choose not to trade money for it — or failing that, at least to use it more than once.

The Space Budget

Globally, the spatial limitations of the Earth system are the fundamental constraint that renders the technocapitalist commandment of infinite growth untenable.  The atmosphere, oceans, mineral core are of finite volume; the Earth’s surface of finite area.  None of these spaces will ever change — once full, they will be full forever.

Locally, the same applies.  At the moment, it seems like a lot of space.  There is room enough to store those many things that would have been deemed waste when we lived in cities:  Hacker-class resources.  Building materials, firewood, diesel fuel, jars and bottles — all can be stockpiled.  There is plenty of room for us to live, and room for our friends to live too, part-time or full-time.  Many non-human beings live here with us.  Vast, forested areas extend beyond the inhabited zones which we haven’t even explored yet.

One day, just like the Earth, Moonflower Farm may seem to have reached its carrying capacity.  One day, we may run out of space for bottle-saving.  But for now, the spaciousness of our lives allows us to think and feel differently.  For now we can be both frugal and generous.

Stocks and Flows

During the above considerations, we have several times encountered the phenomenon of storage — that there are not only flows, but stocks as well.  Water rains and evaporates, is pumped out of the ground and used for irrigation — it is also held in ponds, tanks and geologic cracks.  Electricity is produced by generators and solar panels, but the real difficulty is storing it in batteries.  Diesel and propane may be stored in tanks — gasoline and lighter fluid must be bought and used in a timely fashion, or they degrade.  Shit is being produced all the time, and can be transformed into plant nutrients that are non-toxic to humans; but the hard part is having it sitting around in buckets.  Money comes and goes — large quantities are also locked up as equity.  Waste, if not dealt with, quickly becomes an aesthetic and practical hazard.  Space places a hard limit on the quantity of any of these flows that may be stored.

And time cannot stockpiled in any way.

Relative Timescales

This brings us to a consideration of the relative speed of various processes.  Composting, for example:  Pile branches and grass-clippings in a corner of the garden and let them sit and sit they will, for decades.  However, mix a pile of nitrogenous (poop or food scraps) and carbonous (dry leaves and weeds) in a ration of about 1:3 by volume, keep it about as moist as a squeezed sponge, and in a matter of months you will have rich black compost swarming with big red worms.  Fossil fuels taking literally millions of years to attain their form are being burnt in a few centuries.  Water purified by centuries of percolating into aquifers is being pumped to the surface and dirtied again in minutes — in fact its main use to human beings is not as drinking water but to carry “off” our excreta and toxins produced as “byproducts” of industrial processes.  Around 3 million tons of styrofoam cups are manufactured every year.  Exposed to sunlight, these will photodegrade into poisonous microplastics in 500 years or less.  There is, however, no known process by which they will return to the plant matter from which they came.  A hundred-year-old tree, cut, split and burned, can heat a house for a few days, no more.

As observed above, bacterial lifespans are five or six orders of magnitude shorter than those of human beings.  So, for Staphylococcus aureus (to take a topical example which has developed resistance to methicillin owing to the latter being proactively added to animal feed, though S. aureus is present in the gut mucosa of many mammals including humans and can infect them all) a human lifetime subjectively lasts 70 million years — about as long as since the K-T event when dinosaurs went extinct.

One single human lifetime.

70 million years ago our nearest ancestor was Plesiadapis sp., a nocturnal, arboreal, insect-eating mammal which is the common ancestor of tree shrews, flying lemurs, and primates.  That’s a lot of evolving.

The Sierra foothills, among which we live, are like a wave thrown up by the collision of the North American Plate and the Farallon Plate (which was subducted in the process), about 100 million years ago, or before the extinction of the dinosaurs and speciation of Plesiadapis.  (Our nearest ancestor at the time was Eomaia scansoria, ancestor of all placental mammals, if you are wondering.)  Their raising took a little over a million years, which on a geologic timescale is instantaneous.

Anyway, to begin to think ecologically, it is not only important to think in terms of stocks and flows, but of the vastly different timescales upon which different processes are occurring; and especially to try to conceive that astonishing temporal rupture that industrial capitalism represents.

To take one example:  The benzene in your styrofoam cup was reshaped from lignin in plants by way of peat formation and metamorphic geology over several million years.  It was mined in a year or so of human labor, the coal was baked into coke, throwing off coal tar, in a couple of days, the benzene isolated, reacted with ethylene to make a foam, and pumped into molds in an afternoon.  The resulting polystyrene can be burned, resulting in a toxic cocktail of carcinogenic and mutagenic compounds so complex that data are hard to come by — but what I do know is that it burns at about 1000º fahrenheit, the surface temperature of Venus.  As the Sun becomes more luminous, our Earth will reach this temperature in a billion years or so; however climate models have an unsettling way of predicting a vicious cycle or “runaway greenhouse effect”, within the next few centuries.  In which case — silver lining! — all these styrofoam cups will not be around that long after all.

A Map 

1. I wrote a note about this some 20 years ago which I will include here: “So let me get this straight — sunlight falls on all of us, all day long, free of charge; we proceed to manufacture, in a highly toxic process, incredibly complicated banks of silicon which use photons to push electrons down a wire, losing 95% of the energy received from the sun in the process; then force these electrons to jump across a gap between two wires, losing most of the remaining energy as heat, to release photons as a byproduct, just so we can read a magazine at a time when the sun does not happen to be shining? Is that really the best we can do?” I will note that this is exactly what we do at Moonflower Farm.

2. I wrote another note about this 10 or 15 years ago which I will insert here as I see no reason to disagree with it, except that now I would make a distinction between human nature and the economic system, capitalism, in which we are enmeshed: “1. Most, but not all, of the carbon in the earth will be turned into CO2 by humans. It will be stopped short of complete transformation by an epidemic combined with social and economic collapse which will, in turn, be caused by the rising price of getting the carbon out of the ground. 2. The epidemic in question has a simple cause which is overcrowding -- not overpopulation per se but the economic arithmetic which is leading to exponential urbanization around the world. Human monocultures combined with overuse of antibiotics will inevitably lead to epidemic disease, simply because bacteria and viruses have lifetimes several orders of magnitude shorter than ours and evolve that much faster. 3. No one knows what the effect on global climate of this catastrophic release of CO2 will be. The overall response of warming is fairly linear, and thus theoretically predictable. However the global climate is a non-linear system and thus inherently unpredictable even in the short term. Unpredictable literally means "un-predictable." No computer has been designed which can make a prediction about the effect of this warming on the global climate. The results of climate models run on computers -- positive feedback, leading to a surface temperature equivalent to that of Venus, a new ice age, or something in between -- are nothing better than guesses. These results cannot be assigned a probability, or a margin of error. 4. High tech methods, like photovoltaic cells, integrated fast reactors, “clean coal”, etc, will do absolutely nothing to stop this process. The fundamental reason for this is that humans are not smart enough to design foolproof systems. Any design-intensive solution will fall victim to the law of unintended consequences. Further, humans are only human neurosis writ large. We are a short-sighted species and, as long as there are profits to be made, long-term rational decisions will not be. This is because profit is a proxy for evolutionary fitness and we have no choice but to maximize it. Also, the non-linearity of the global climate system assures that hard evidence of climate change will not be available to us until it is too late to turn back. Photovoltaic cells, fast reactors, geoengineering, GM crops and the rest of it are brought to us by the same minds that brought us thalidomide, DDT, Chernobyl, the Green Revolution, and biofuels -- that is minds intoxicated by hubris and profoundly conditioned by greed and short-sightedness. Minds exactly like our own.”

3. In “Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatch 3: On Shit”, which should be required reading in all high schools.

4. :)

5. If dead bodies are shit, then meat and potatoes are too.

6. Entropy has a profound and mysterious relationship with “information”. Returning to our original question about the location of consciousness: Neurophysiologists, philosophers, and many others are very concerned with “information” — “information” about the world is said to enter consciousness and be used somehow in a process called “cognition”. However, as it turns out, the word is extremely ill-defined. I could have included an “Information Budget” on the list here, but — I don’t know what it is, nor how it moves, nor whether it can, and neither does anybody else. In the early 20th Century the mathematician and proto-cybernetician Claude Shannon provided what is still the only rigorous working definition of information, which he did using entropy. His definition begins with what he called “self-information”, the information a message (or other system) contains, which he defined mathematically as equal to its entropy — the amount of variance among its parts. A message which only contains the letter A repeated 1000 times is low in self-information, one with 26 letters spread randomly is too; a message with 26 letters arranged such that some occur much more frequently than others, is higher in self-information. Shannon, who was interested in code-breaking, then went on to define mathematically the probability that two messages contain the same information, which is high if their entropies are the same, and low if they have different entropies. Two things about this should leap out at us at once: First, that according to Shannon, the amount of information in the universe is perpetually declining; information is not conserved. Second, that there is no way, using Shannon’s definitions, to determine which message came first; information, for Shannon, does not flow. The information in one system is not “about” the other system. It is as meaningful, using Shannon’s formulation, to say that the world contains information “about” my mind as it is to say that my mind contains information “about” the world. You might want to think about that for a sec. Philosophers of language have tried, over the ensuing decades, to expand or replace this definition in order to get something closer to the naïve sense of “information” as used by cognitive scientists (and everybody else), without success, in a very interesting history which space does not permit rehearsing; and this is a big problem for all sciences of mind (though one they are happy to ignore). Again, my prediction is that a theory of ecological cognition, in which information may be shared but not gathered, perception does the heavy lifting, and the boundaries of individual cognition are very wide indeed, will eventually prove more convincing.

7. Which I have written about elsewhere: A Provisional Manual of West Coast Tantrik Psychedelic Druidry, “The Circling Dance of Sun and Moon”.

8. But I have, in fact, said a great deal about it, which is why I really would rather not think about it right now. See Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 3: Thoughts on Labor.

9. Dumpster-diven? It’s interesting that in English “dive” has lost the passive voice, and therefore has no past participle — I never noticed that before.

10. For more on what this means, spiritually and practically, see Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 4: On Property.

11. Following James T. Carse (in Finite and Infinite Games, a book I have read and reread and which has rearranged my sense of reality as much as any writing I have ever encountered) I reserve the word “paradox” for generative tensions — those characteristic of infinite, not finite, games.

12. op cit

13. Observant readers will note that I have several times used the phrase “waste heat” in this essay — and indeed, there is a cogent perspective from which heat that is not transformed somehow by life is wasted — is entropy. It is “wasted” in the sense that it dissipates, bringing the universe nearer to a condition of equal temperature everywhere; reducing its information content. If you want to think about it that way.