Packed in a lot for this bi-monthly installment, with absolutely no attempt at even minimal coherence of theme. In this issue i.) updates on our small farm ii.) an update on the Chattanooga food forest proposal, iii.) some personal reflections on end of life care and the role of culture, infrastructure, and ecological implications iv.) on material close reading of books, followed by the usual features of v.) a musical offering, and vi.) a poem.
i. on and off the farm
We’re in the transitional period between summer proper and the real onset of fall, the weather alternating between autumnal coolness and reprises of summer heat. The leaves are changing colors, though it’s as much due to the limited rainfall of late as anything. That said, there have been some genuinely chilly nights, and the last of the summer heat is hopefully in view. A few weeks ago I put in a new section of the garden, mostly planting in autumn and winter crops—mustard greens, turnips, lettuces, that sort of thing—plus a final round of squash and zucchini, which have somewhat to my surprise turned out pretty productively. I’ve finally begun to turn my attention to my thus far neglected muscadine vineyard (well, three vines thus far!), which lies at the northern edge of our property. One of the things I’ve really discovered in tangible fashion is the degree to which a piece of land feels much bigger and more complex when worked entirely manually. Work is slower, but also more deliberate and attentive to small differences of slope, soil, distance, and relationships of existing plants, crops, and animals. For the most part it’s a wonderful way to work, especially when one has the luxury of not being particularly dependent on the outcomes of one’s labor, but it also means some sections get a bit neglected or downright forgotten.
For the fall and winter, we hope to remove most of the rest of the now non-functional but very much still an eyesore chain link fence that partially encircles our property, and start transitioning the edges into something more beautiful and productive. For one thing, it’s rather difficult scything grass and brush when there is a chain link fence hard against the space you’re scything. My dream—perhaps totally unrealistic at this juncture but then dreams usually are—is to turn the north end of our property into a de facto little neighborhood edible park, with the muscadines and a couple other fruit bearing small trees at the center, edible perennials in beds, and so on, perhaps a bench or a swing set placed in an open available space. Stay tuned!
In other news, I’m launching—for real this time!—a monthly podcast, which will basically be an extended monthly book review/discussion, though I hope the end product will be considerably more interesting than that sounds. I had originally hoped to do an online reading group oriented around radical agrarian and rural history, but frankly just do not have the time and bandwidth between my day job work (including running a twice-weekly reading and working group on Islamicate manuscript culture) and all the other things with which I’m involved these days (such as the above and the below). Does the world need another very niche podcast? Probably not, but I hope the topics discussed will be of interest, and if I am half-way successful I’ll consider doing another podcast series in the future.
ii. planting the food forest seed(s)
In my last monthly update I mentioned a community food forest project that I wanted to get off the ground (well, first off put in the ground, as it were, then see where things grow from there, pardon the terrible pun) here in and around Chattanooga, and I am happy to say that we have made some progress on that front, including being able to say “we” without mere recourse to literary affectation. For the moment things are looking very promising: we have a core group of participants, including individuals with a great deal more experience and knowledge in the relevant fields than I can claim, and we have an approved location for what we envision as our “demonstration plot” with which to start off, learning as we go and providing a visible, tangible template for others to see. Our current site is quite small, only about a quarter acre or so, and right now features a long slope of grass bordered by a wooden fence, an early 20th century garage type structure, the top edge of a retaining wall, and a line of cedars. The best asset of the site is its location: next door to a church (which owns the lot we’re going to be working on), and adjacent to a much-frequented greenway.
There is a lot of work ahead of us: water runoff is a major issue, there is nothing but lawn grass covering the soil right now, and we expect there to be issues with the soil composition, fertility (or lack thereof!), compaction, and overall health and toxicity. But there are ways to work around and with such constraints, and I’m hoping that the lessons we’ll likely learn can be applied at larger scales in the future. Chattanooga has a lot of vacant land that was once industrial or residential, and so is often highly degraded biologically, requiring a lot of remediation work if it is to be made productive again (or even safe for humans to interact with it). Forest gardens are one possible route to such remediation, towards a restructuring of urban spaces and of the social and political structures therein. Anyway, we’ll see where it goes—I hope to have more and more substantial updates in the coming months, good Lord willing!
iii. end of life care, infrastructure, and ecology
I don’t make a habit of talking about certain things online, either because of the privacy of others or because there are things that need not be shared for other reasons (cf. St. Matthew 6:3-4). My volunteering work with hospice care falls into both categories: I’d rather not share the details of the lives of the folks with whom I work online, and I don’t want to come across as a better or more pious person than I actually am. Since my teenage years I’ve genuinely enjoyed working with the elderly and, yes, the dying, not even primarily because it’s something that ought to be done but because I love to talk and I love to hear the stories and recollections of the elderly, it’s the same impulse that drives me to study history, really. All that said, there are a couple things that have been gnawing at me lately and which I think need to be said. When one sees these things up close on a regular basis, it’s hard to avoid the sense that the world in which most Americans live is almost cruelly structured to act against the elderly, the dying, the very poor, or really anyone with limited mobility and limited means, and this structuring is very much a political choice, a decision to expend public and private resources in particular ways. Much of this has been the unintentional effect of our fossil fuel powered economic and technological structure, which has so deeply shaped—in conjunction of course with many other factors—everything else.
Maybe it’s hopelessly idealistic and cliché, but the older I get, far from settling into some cruel “realism” about the world, I find myself asking more and more, What would a world in which the needs of the elderly, the terminally ill, of the very poor, the mentally challenged, of small children and single mothers, of the car-less and the home-less, were all put front and center? What would that world look like, and how do we accomplish it as best we can, here and now? I don’t mean programs and initiatives and funding bills—those all have their place, and for the moment they’re often all we have—but in the very infrastructure of things, in the fundamental values and goals that direct that which really matters, in the shape of that which really matters. If we expand our ambit and include—as we must, both for intrinsic value but just as crucially for the good of our fellow human beings—the ecologies within which we live and upon which we and our neighbors depend, we find a convergence. There is a basic homology in the ways that we have come to treat the elderly with the ways we treat non-human animals, and really everything on the planet: those that are deemed, through largely non-intentional social mechanisms, as disposable are pushed out of sight, often in huge warehouses, serviced by over-worked and under-paid laborers. We can pride ourselves on our humaneness to animals in the modern age because we never step foot in the chicken houses or hog farms or cattle stalls from which so much of our food comes; we need not encounter the dying nor see human death, as it is all safely pushed out of sight, apportioned off to the work of others. The fortunate few that we keep close benefit from resources and care unparalleled in human history—we genuinely do treat some animals far better than in the past, and some people do indeed enjoy better and more humane final days than any humans ever had. The exceptions keep us from noticing the rule, or make us feel better about the great unseen beyond our sight.
And to be sure I understand to an extent the impulse to try and put things out of sight, to not burden one’s self with the proximity and experience of death. It is hard. One of the elderly men with whom I have been working died suddenly a couple of weeks ago, and while I had only known him for a few months it was still quite hard, harder than honestly I’d expected. It is perhaps easier to avoid the dying and the hide from death, to avoid feeling loss if you can help it. When we are offered the chance to obscure that and those part of us would like to avoid all too often we take it. But we must resist it, we must practice love against all the structures and impulses that would gainsay, be they in the arena of the heart or in the daily infrastructure of material life. What I am really describing is of course the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of those who mourn and those who hunger; we cannot accomplish such a kingdom in any single given polity or action, but we can incline towards the realization of that Kingdom, we can—and must—work within the lines and towards the ends of the only kingdom that matters, the only city that will endure, built on love and on the refusal, to the bitterest ends, of cruelty and hate.
iv. the materiality of books and the practice of attention
It might not seem like an obvious segue-way, but I think there is in fact an overlap between how we approach other persons, other organisms and ecosystems, and how we interact with physical objects, most particularly books. In my day job I spend a lot of time looking at, thinking about, and generally working with premodern (mostly) manuscripts (well, digitized exemplars anyway). One of the things that has increasingly impressed itself on me is the degree to which material scarcity shaped the ways that premodern readers of books—participants in books, really, reading was rarely a singular activity contained entirely in the mind—interacted with, thought about, and even produced texts. Relative material scarcity helped to create relationships of love and attention between readers and their physical manuscripts: certainly there was actual monetary value to consider, but it worked at an emotional level as well. Books in their physical forms took on a greater meaning and charge, they became vehicles of connectivity and of tactile memory. To lose a book was often felt as a great blow and loss, in a way that I think is quite hard for us to appreciate today.
I suspect that textual scarcity also helps to explain the “depth” texts often took, both in terms of how they were meant to be read and how readers interacted with the physical substrates of books. Think of the popularity of anagrams in premodern texts, or the widespread use of chronograms, coded devices, intricate symbols and allusions, and so forth, all of which tend to rather grate the teeth of modern readers, but would have surely lended longer use and interest to premodern books, more bang for the proverbial buck/book we might say. The frequency of extensive marginal notations, readers’ and listeners’ notes, and entire additional texts copied into existing volumes or appended end to end, all of these make more sense in a world of necessarily heightened attention and care, of close readings and re-readings and of memorization and aural performance and collective engagements.
I don’t want to suggest that we need to go back to the pre-print world: short of spectacular civilizational collapse of some sort we’re not returning to the pre-typographic world, and anyway there are real advantages that the age of textual profligacy, not least the incredible blossoming of knowledge and culture of the last few centuries. Still, there are also things that we have lost, routes of attention and care and love that are worth recovering, this time via deliberation and intention, given that no one reading this is liable to be materially limited when it comes to accessing books and texts. The ways we related to the materiality of books is not disconnected from our relationship to other “resources,” to non-human organisms, and even to other human persons; to cultivate attention and care in our relationships with books and with textuality generally can translate into other relationships and areas of engagement.
v. music
This isn’t a new release but it’s been on my frequent rotation as of late, certainly has a distinctly autumnal feel so appropriate for the cusp of October I think!
vi. poem
For Elder Zosimus the Hermit
listen to the background sound, as the city walls creak with the sediments of blood and power, the harsh subscripts underwriting man’s glory so-called. take heed. take heed. this is no paradise, whatever encomiums the victors sing for themselves. you took to paleolithic lands without the pale, Elder Zosimas, stepped into the deep streams of things. with the wild you dwelt, and the wild held you in its life, Christ-bearer in the path of refuge. out rode the banner bearers of imperial pride, and caught you in their cruel net, paraded you before the city’s tribunal, and laid tortures upon your body. you tended the wild, and the wild came fast to tend you, great embrace of feline muscle and claw, lion of Judah, lion and the Lamb lying down, saying, this is not the end. this is not the end. you rest now in the power of the lion and the lamb slain before the foundations of the world, wild and free, and you will rise in the end.