Greed and Lust
December 4, 2022 4:26 pm
December’s darkness still gains a little daily with the Earth’s gyre reaching solstice soon. Another remarkable footnote in the history of mankind!
Yes, the naked ape is driven by those two undeniable motivations: gather all the resources regardless of the consequences to anything bigger than the individual and pass on the genes to another generation which will suffer from the same limitations as those who came before. Repeat ad infinitum. This is the story of humans. You can quit with the art and literature…I’ve just given away the ending!
The Gods of the Larvae
December 6, 2022 2:07pm
It was very foggy this morning and a light mist has been falling all day. It’s too wet to lay brick so I went to the barn to work on black walnuts.
I have a few still in the hulls – some of which are like black mush infested with some kind of larvae. They don’t get into the nuts, but they love the mushy hulls…. until the Gods wreck their home, destroy their food, and slaughter them by the hundreds – at least that’s what I imagine they think.
Anyway, the nuts are drying, and I’ve cracked a few in the vice and picked out the meat…. which is very tasty this year.
I will spend hours on this tedious chore on days when it is too cold or wet for brick/stone work. This is a particularly dangerous task for me; it requires no focus so my mind wanders to questions I cannot answer; the ones that drive me to the edge of – something …. what is it?
Have you done more than spend the day working on black walnuts? Have you destroyed anything in the process? Will anyone care what you did in a week, a year?
As for me, at least someone will enjoy a hot-out-of-the-oven black walnut cookie, that’s about all I can hope for.
As A Man Thinketh
December 11, 2022 11:20pm
We went to an estate sale Saturday and my wife showed me a little soft-bound book titled, “As A Man Thinketh.” There was an inscription on the inside that said, “Miss Uterbach X-mas 1926 From Mrs. H. Kullman.” I guessed that this little book of wisdom was a gift from a grandmother to a granddaughter, but we’re left with uncertainty. In 1926, they couldn’t know what lay before them – a depression, the rise of European fascism, and a World War. Shall we guess and fear for our own future? 2022 feels much the same as we approach the Christmas season 96 years after the little book was inscribed.
What became of these mystery people in the inscription? What were their lives like? Did they both follow the tenet of the little book which proposed that we are the sum of our thoughts, and we will become what we think about.
I fear that our culture does not promote spiritual virtues of any kind. Forget religion, all of us should occasionally look deep inside to objectively access who we are and what we’re about. But, as Nietzsche predicted, we are well down the path toward killing God and it seems that all spirituality will die with him, leaving us just regressive barbarians with no morals and no laws, living in a land of relative ethics proclaimed as final truth by the loudest faction of the ignorant tribe that we are becoming. I would like to say, “God save us all,” but I don’t think that’s going to happen…. you know, seeing as how there is no God.
By the way, I bought the book. One American dollar for the wisdom of the ages! Truth is, I bought it just as much for the inscription and the mystery that lays behind it. The two ladies are no doubt resting in their graves but let’s hope they lived the good life described in the little book. I hope the same for all of us.
Merry Christmas from Miss Uterbach, Mrs. Kullman, and myself….I feel certain that they wouldn’t mind this liberty.
Emotion and Hog-Killing Time
December 18, 2022 8:33am
Where to begin? The Word made flesh, hog-killing time, emotion and the nature of human-ness. Time, in its inevitability, hobbles toward destiny. Can there even be time if the universe ends in some sort of equilibrium with nothing at all happening? Does no change equal no time?
Anyway, advent is upon us. Soon we will celebrate the birth of the Son of God…the Word made flesh. Perhaps you don’t believe this happened. Still, this is why the day is celebrated. At the very least, a man came into the world and taught a new lesson.
What does it mean to be human? If we love our neighbor, does that make us weak? To discover new truth, we must first question old truths. Once, it was said that the strong take what they will; the weak yield what they must. This was understood by all. Defeat meant subjugation and enslavement.
Christ and a handful of others suggested a new paradigm. The first requirement is to look deep inside and assess our behavior and, indeed, our very thoughts. Are we motivated by sacrificial love? What is the evolutionary purpose of love and other emotions? Are they just constructs of a consciousness seeking meaning? Are emotions just the descendants of instincts? Do animals have complex emotions? Are emotions central to who and what we are as a species? Without emotion are we just coldly calculating automatons?
A 450 lb. hog is slated for the killing floor today or tomorrow. It knows fear of change but does not understand death. We think we understand death but few of us do more than scratch the surface. I think that an emotional grasp of the forever loss of consciousness and the tiny, tiny part we’ve played in the drama of an eternal and infinite universe is central to understanding death in all its dimensions.
If you have never stabbed someone, let me explain what it feels like to kill a hog. In the abattoir, on the killing floor, run the hog into a chute. The floor drops leaving the hog wedged in the vee-shaped chute. You stun the hog with an electrode (on the farm, you’ll just shoot it with a .22 between the eyes and an inch and a half higher.) The goal here is to stun the hog, not kill it, you want the heart pumping so it will bleed out completely. If you used the chute, dump the hog on the floor. Cut a slit right above or below the hock between bone and tendon, insert a gambrel (otherwise use a chain or rope), and raise the hog. Insert your knife under the upper end of the sternum and cut the carotid artery. You expect this knife-work to be more difficult but with a good sharp knife, it’s literally like cutting hot butter. Let the carcass bleed out and proceed with skinning/scalding, gutting, and butchering.
The first time I did this, I had some difficulty pushing the knife into a living animal and cutting the carotid….I mean emotionally not technically. Those pesky emotions again! I think more people would be vegetarians if they were required to kill their own meat and I predict that one day, we meat eaters will be seen as ancient barbarians.
Once, I feared death
now it seems there
is little difference
between living and dying.
We are all in the abattoir. Time is the knife and fate the executioner. It’s just that most of us are in denial, ignorant just like the hog.
This all puts me in mind of Hard Time Killing Floor Blues by Skip James. Watch the Chris Thomas King version!
“People are driftin’ from door to door
Can’t find no heaven,
I dont care where they go” – Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James
The Unreliable Narrator
December 20, 2022 10:04am
That would be you….or us….me too.
Memories are the stories told by the person we were to the present. Do you trust that unreliable narrator? Do you believe the myths, the poor recollections, the cover ups, the shifting blame? No? Well, with no valid memories, you have no past and no identity.
Who are you but a lost soul on a lonely planet.
Incessant Clock
December 28, 2022 6:31pm
The December sky to the northeast was rosy at the horizon, graduating to a faint blue at the zenith. The barren winter limbs standing starkly before the gentle colors of a soft sunset somehow impressing the fragility and fleeting nature of our time. It is shorter than we think and gone before we arrive.
Darkness chasing us back to the house, breathing in step, thoughts on the road, the air seemed somehow new and unused. The whole winter scene and the remnants of Christmas past, a reminder of a recent death and the incessant clock hands.