On Home

I take a speculative walk around the house on a Sunday to gain a sense of the past. I’m amazed at the ability of the land and home to hold record of my work and of old work that came before my own.

Our house stands on a quiet street in the city. I suppose a realtor would consider it the kind of location that increases the resale value of your property: a good investment. It's a nice neighborhood if that's what they mean.  The houses around it are all different and some are quite unique perhaps even quaint which tells of a time on the outskirts of town when the homo police (That’s short for homogenous) didn’t tell you what you should like in architecture and color. Ours is quite boring in comparison and would probably pass the homo gauntlet easily. It’s square with a white exterior, a one car garage and green carpeted front steps with, to my great chagrin, no front porch. Two, fifty year old trees, a maple and a locust, dominate the front yard. These are our coup de grace, planted quickly after the house was built in 1952. We’re only the second owners. There is a certain level of awe associated with that statement. The rarity of it becomes apparent almost immediately whenever I mention it. Reaction spans the spectrum from, "Wow that’s amazing and only a stud could live up to that kind of Wendellianism," to, "Ever heard of capital gains bitch."

When I work on this house I see the work of Mr. Baide and the men who, in 1952, built my home.  They are most of them probably dead now.  I tip my hat to them, the builders.  It's a well made house.  I hope they took pride in it. 

Mr. Baide was a gardener not a builder and most assuredly not an electrician.  The unfinished basement was his tinkering area for fifty years and when I took over ownership it resembled the Minotaur's maze: a dark labyrinth of wood paneling, multipurpose floor drains, dead end storage nooks, molding toilets and concrete walls.  Sara and I moved in with just us and as we added to our family boy after boy, I forayed deeper into the dark abyss below us to claim square footage for the motherland.  While there I found extension cord wiring, large electrical junction balls of black tape that blew holes in linesman pliers that only looked at them, washing machine floor drains that backed up into tunnel tsunamis, shower pans caulked to the concrete, and the list goes on.  These were, in a manner of speaking, palimpsests as Wendell names them.  They are the foibles and misanthropic madness's of the owning man. 

In the soil, Mr. Baides genius shown.  We've done a good share of killing on our land - all 8000 square feet of it.  When we moved in, there were six long rows of massive raspberry bushes in the back yard.  They gave buckets of berries our first summer.  There was a wild flower garden by the shop that just grew thousands of flowers without us touching it.  They'd come up in droves.  We bought in March and by the end of May we were in an edenic paradise.  And then the weeds moved in.  All the flower beds were bare soil and the weeds flourished.  I'd spend hours pulling the little bastards till one day I got fed up and mowed it all down. 

That's a hard confession.  I regret it to this day.  It wasn't very Berry but it was also eight years ago and what the hell did I know.  I miss those raspberries.  I miss those free flowers that came around all summer long for nothing with no planning.  Ours was a wilder garden.  The flowers are gone and the berries but there are still remnants of the past.  Every year the tulips come back in the front with big yellow bulbs.  Horseradish grows wild on the side of the house and poppies come back like weeds around the lilac.  The peonies and roses all bloom despite my contemptible displays of husbandship and the virginia creeper attempts each year to take more of it all for itself.  These are none of them mine.  They are the palimpsest of our land. They mark the passing of the man who planted and husbanded before I.  They are the reminders of a fifty year relationship of a newspaper printing machine mechanic and his dirt. 

The 4th Sabbath in March

The Name of a Fish

by Faith Shearin

If winter is a house then summer is a window

in the bedroom of that house. Sorrow is a river

behind the house and happiness is the name

of a fish who swims downstream. The unborn child

who plays the fragrant garden is named Mavis:

her red hair is made of future and her sleek feet

are wet with dreams. The cat who naps

in the bedroom has his paws in the sun of summer

and his tail in the moonlight of change. You and I

spend years walking up and down the dusty stairs

of the house. Sometimes we stand in the bedroom

and the cat walks towards us like a message.

Sometimes we pick dandelions from the garden

and watch the white heads blow open

in our hands. We are learning to fish in the river

of sorrow; we are undressing for a swim.

Piss on Decent Lunches

It seems I'm capable of only one decent lunch a week.  I'm not surprised.  Enough of this useful crap and onto the more philosophical demands of Berry and growing mutant cucumbers.  Till next week then.

Lunch Today

Whats for lunch today?  One brown bag o Lucky Charms, a half gallon of milk and a bowl.  You unhealthy swine you say?  Read and weep you granola masticating treehuggers.  I do not advocate it for a decent lunch contest though.  Pretty much a failure in that regard.  Sweet and filling and lazy. 

The BB Challenge

So I managed to get my Pastrami to work yesterday.  It was delicious.  Here's to a little self congratulation.  Hoorah.  Made a honey ham, cream cheese, muenster cheese, and pineapple sandwich for today.  This was a bit of experimentation on my part which is rare.  I mean rare like a black polar bear in bermuda.  I don't experiment.  For one thing I lack the gastronomical imagination and for another I lack the guts.  My inner gormond is screaming like a little girl, "Oh Lord What If This Tastes Like Offal!"  (High pitched and hands flailing.  Its a terrible thing to subconsce.  Is that a verb?)  But, regardless, I pressed on and it tasted good.  If it hadn't, I figured I could remove each of the ingredients and eat them solo.  I liked them all enough as they were. 

Making a sandwich at 6 in the morning is torture though.  I can barely focus on the fridge handle to get it open much less arrange my thoughts enough to put two pieces of bread together.  It made me just want to bang my head against the counter till lunch was a pile of mush and slide it into the bag with a spatula.  Done.  I'm going to avoid that experience again if at all possible.  Just have to remember it in the morning.  I almost forgot my bag on the counter right after I'd spent ten minutes getting it ready.  I had to go back for my keys and saw it sitting there in all its brown baggish glory.  I'm beginning to think I'm a hopeless case.  Not much else to consider.  Two more days to go. 

FYI.  You few readers who care for my mental state, perhaps you could give me some good, easy, retard proof lunch ideas.  Thanks.

On Mount Offal

Garbage Update.

Not much going on here. The pile grows. I can imagine a years worth completely engulfing my back yard pretty easily. The feeling of impotence is strong. I can see it being an extensive job to take care of all this waste.  The whole situation grows more depressing as time goes on.  I imagined it would change my perspective on garbage and it has.  But that perspective is laced with a stupporing amount of hopeless apathy and boredom.  What the hell can we really do?  Everything is wrapped, canned, boxed, impaled, bagged, clamped, tied, and ribboned and now we're coming into Easter when it will also be egged, basketed, and nested.  For goodness sakes, I opened a bag of bread yesterday to make a sandwich and the loaf was wrapped in plastic: wrapped and bagged.  Why?  That's a rhetorical question and a boring one.  It doesn't really matter. 

One note: It used to be fine to toss a nearly empty cup of coffee in the can with little thought to the consequences. Its not so cool when you have week old coffee covering every bag you now have to sort through and stack.  Something to think about. 

24 days in and one week out.

23 bags

8 boxes

250 sq ft of carpet

1 pile of construction crap

1 hot water heater.

The Real Story Of Farming

On Failure

Brown bag lunch, day number 1.

Lunch on menu: Fresh deli pastrami cut thick on wheat with mayo and a Dijon mustard, onion, and provolone. Side: sliced pineapple out of the can and a small gala apple. Desert: Girl scout cookies – Tagalongs. Hot damn!

Location at lunch time: home in the fridge where I put it after preparing it last night. &*(%^!!!!! (A professor once told me that the exclamation point is pariah to a serious writer but I think this is an appropriate moment for its ubiquitous use.) &$%#!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Though the fact that I’m lucky to get to work with my pants on right at 6 in the morning is noted I woke up this morning with an excited expectation for good food and the appropriate moral approbation to go with it. Now I’m just another douche at the office. Failure brings a tear to my eye and a rumble to my stomach.

On Place

But the sense of the past also gives a deep richness and resonance to nearly everything I see here.  It is partly the sense that what I now see, other men that I have known once saw, and partly that this knowledge provides an imaginative access to what I do not know.  I think of the country as a kind of palimpsest scrawled over with the comings and goings of people, the erasure of time already in process even as the marks of passage are put down.  There are the ritual marks of neighborhood - roads, paths between houses.  There are the domestic paths from house to barns and outbuildings and gardens, farm roads threading the pasture gates.  There are the wanderings of hunters and searchers after lost stock, and the speculative or meditative or inquisitive "walking around" of farmers on wet days and Sundays.  There is the spiraling geometry of the rounds of implements in fields, and the passing and returning scratches of plows across croplands.  Often these have filled an interval, an opening, between the retreat of the forest from the virgin ground and the forest's return to ground that has been worn out and given up.  In the woods here one often finds cairns of stones picked up out of furrows, gullies left by bad farming, forgotten roads, stone chimneys of houses long rotted away or burned.

Wendell Berry - A Native Hill

My own palimpsest of place is not so interesting.  Or it may seem that way.  Its easy to think of Wendell's words as aesthetic novelties that have no bearing on reality: on my reality.  But when you really start to do some speculative wandering with these ideas in mind you'll surprise yourself.  There are different levels of place in my world and this idea will be a continuing experience for me.  These are my places as I see them.

There is home: the house where I live with my boys and my wife in the city.  This is a new place.  Or new by Wendellian standards.  We've been here eight years.  That's old by Capitalistic standards I suppose considering how many different neighbors we've had in those eight years.  It may be my naked wanderings in the evening or the large pile of garbage in our backyard but I'm more inclined to think it's a mobile dissatisfaction that pushes people onward to new places and different neighbors. 

There are the ranches.  These are the places my parents grew up and my grandparents lived and where my parents live now.  I've a longer history there as does the family.  Both my parents came from the foothills of the Beartooth Mountains.  This is the land I think of when I think place.  It is the hills under the feet and the mountains on the horizon.  It is the wet cooley bottom and the dry rocky rise.  It is a land immediately apparent and a land slipping away. 

Most the places of my childhood are gone.  Asphalt and cinderblock cover the fields, the gravel pits and the ponds that spotted the edge of town where we lived.   

There are the three rivers: the Bighorn, the Yellowstone and the Stillwater.  There are few places I've studied more intimately than these waters.  They change.  They change on the season, on the weather, and on the inexorable wearing away of the land and yet they are always the same.  There is nothing untoward about them.  They move with highways and bridges but are separate from our machinations.  They spew from the bottom of damns but move with their own music despite the incompetency of their "managers."

And there are the mountains with their wilderness.  I've spent many years wandering them from the earliest time I could walk upright.  My feelings for them are varied and intense.  It is a vast measuring and a wild place.  I've struck out on all their trails and in some places where a trail doesn't exist.  I've caught their fish and tracked their game.  It is not a palimpsest.  It is a place I seek to be void of human touch and to find my way home from. 

The 3rd Sabbath of March

Honey

by Connie Wanek

Luxury itself, thick as a Persian carpet,

honey fills the jar

with the concentrated sweetness

of countless thefts,

the blossoms bereft, the hive destitute.

Though my debts are heavy

honey would pay them all.

Honey heals, honey mends.

A spoon takes more than it can hold

without reproach. A knife plunges deep,

but does no injury.

Honey moves with intense deliberation.

Between one drop and the next

forty lean years pass in a distant desert.

What one generation labored for

another receives,

and yet another gives thanks.

The Brown Bag Busteth the Balls

I wonder if I could brown bag my lunch for five days in a row?  I wonder if I could brown bag (Gulp) a decent lunch for five days in a row?  Not very glamorous I know but Sara Dickerman wrote an article, Can It, in Slate on the new "fad" of canning food.  (I know what the hell huh.  I hate it when stuff I think is cool is actually cool.)  It raises this question for me. 

But don't be fooled: Along with independence there is plenty of self-congratulation. These culinary trophies are emblematic of a project-based food relationship that we urban food junkies are prone to indulge these days: athletic all-weekend bouts of cheesemaking, or bacon curing, or jam and pickle making are so much more bloggable and boastworthy than making a decent brown-bag lunch five days in a row...

Ouch.  That cuts deep.  I honestly may have met my match with this challenge.  I don't think I can go BB all the way.  I can pile garbage and butcher meat and run around in a loin clothe through the wild woods with a sinew-backed longbow but pack my own lunch to work every day?  It's a bit terrifying.  We'll see come Monday. 

Inspiring Film Makers or Smarmy Bastards?

Couple of dudes in Brooklyn who made the film King Corn are now Farming out of a pickup truck.  Great idea and pretty inspiring to the person who wants to grow their own food.  I mean you can grow it anywhere right? My only contention?  Those smarmy bastards.  I can't even grow food out of the ground much less a Dodge Truck and their just driving around town showing off their love apples for everyone to see.  Their Lycopersicon esculentum swaying with the creaking of the leaf springs.  The red pulpy partner of BL and T.  If they had lettuce in the back and a pig in the passenger seat they'd probably start riots.  I would hate them with envy forever.  Way to go truck farm dudes.

Vegetarians From the Other Point of View

On a lighter note. 

On Roads

In his essay A Native Hill, Wendell makes an interesting statement.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one.  A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place.  It is a sort of ritual of familiarity.  As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape.  It is not destructive.  It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.  A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape.  Its reason is not simply the necessity of movement, but haste.  Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort.  It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.  The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.

The reason I quote this is not only because I think it's true but because as I drive up to my parent's place at the foot of the Beartooths I'm confronted with the very act in progress.  Highway 78 runs from Columbus, Montana up the Stillwater valley to Absarokee, along the Beartooth front through Roscoe and ends at the sky resort town of Redlodge.  This highway is a gorgeous drive.  The stretch from Columbus to Absarokee is currently in its second stage of widening and flattening.  I've driven it many many times in my life.  It gave me the first white-knuckle, butt-pucker of my varied career behind the wheel.  (And that was a nice sunny day in the middle of July.)  The old highway was a swerving, narrow, mad-corner death trap.  The new highway is wide, straight, flat and fast. 

Now, I'm not sure there is a real distinction between old road and new road.  They both served the same purpose except the new one serves it better.  This may surprise some of you but I am a bit of a sentimentalist.  Or it may not surprise you at all since I am trying to find Wendell Berry and we all know that that is as good as being an idealistic, commy pig dog much less a "sentamentalist".  But when the old highway, on which I knew every curve and rise, went under the blade a few years ago I was deeply saddened and on occasion would burst out in angry lament.  But I soon realized that the new highway is much better and I've since gotten over my despondency.  I like the new one and am even looking forward to the finished stretch up to my parents corner.  My sentamentalist tendencies were bulldozed under with the old asphalt. 

With that said, I'm still saddened.  I realized this weekend the mechanized act of widening the road makes my psyche twitch.  They are literally tearing down hills and filling in valleys, ripping out stands of trees, fences, and ditches and reworking the surface of the planet.  It will bring a tear to your eye if you love that valley like I do.  This and I don't think the wide highway will do the locals in the valley any real good.  It will probably increase visitors and by extension absentee landowners and land developers.  That's shit. 

But it doesn't really matter what I think.  In two years I won't remember the old way and there won't be any sign of its existence.  The new highway is better than the old one.  You can see the deer coming, you can see cars coming, you can stay on the road when the weather's crap and we can get up to see my family faster.  But, I thought of Wendell's words as I drove by shattered trees, flattened hills and trampled land.  He's right in a very real, tangible sense and wrong in thinking it will be any other way.   The road will be there now for a millenia till the earth moves back.  But that's progress for you, they say. 

Garbage Update

Overdue I know.  I've been distracted by the looming hill of disease in my back yard so piss off.  Actually I'm pleasantly surprised by the slow growth we've experienced in the second quarter.  Had a minor snafu with a washer hose and an inch of water in the basement which translates into a large pile of carpet on the small hill of trash in my yard.  Not quite a normal month of garbage but oh well.  The carpet was slated for demolition anyway.  We're just ahead of schedule.  So far the count is as follows.

16 days in.  15 days out.

16 bags

4 boxes

1 pile of construction debris

1 hot water heater

250 square feet of pink, musty carpet in rolls and chunks

If you count the large hill of "stored" crap that is balanced precariously on anything more than an inch off the ground in our basement as trash, which is what I'm inclined to think of it as, then the accounting may double on April 1st.  I'm not a cheat.  It's just some trash deserves a roof over its head. 

I'm an Idiot Too!

From Front Porch Republic, my favorite author therein. Jason Peters on Majoring in Idiocy.  This is a great post on college education.  Read it all and behold the witty satire of the idiot.

An “idiot,” from the Greek idios (“private,” “own,” “peculiar”), is someone who is peculiar because he is closed in on himself or separated or cut off. In short, he is a specialist. If he knows anything, he knows one thing.

It was in anticipation of this idiot that Newman said, “Knowledge, in proportion as it tends more and more to be particular, ceases to be Knowledge.” Likewise, Emerson (to compare small men to great) said that “the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet”; “I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details,” he said, “so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts. . . .” And Pope, in his indefatigable effort to remind us that we were made to walk upright and to contemplate the heavens, asked, 

Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly.

Higher education lives in contempt of such writers and such notions. It prefers its specialists. It is itself an utterly idiosyncratic specialist specializing in specialists—in idiots. It advises students to borrow lots of money and recommends that they major in idiocy...

The idiot may have extensive knowledge of a given thing, but to the extent that he has no sense of where to place that knowledge in the larger context of what is known and knowable, and to the extent that he doesn’t know that the context for the known and the knowable is the unknown and the unknowable—to that extent his knowledge ceases to be knowledge and becomes a collection of mere facts, which, as Cervantes said, are the enemy of truth.

Again, I would not be misunderstood. In a manner of speaking we are all idiots, and anyone impertinent enough to get a Ph.D. flirts with idiocy every day of his life by virtue of the requisite and necessary specialization that attends the enterprise. That there are benefits to such specialization is, I think, unquestionable. It took a specialist to operate on my knee. It takes a specialist to make a fine cabinet or a good bookcase. But specialization is a limited, not an absolute, good, and it should never mistake itself for true intelligence. You may be an eminent Harvard biologist who knows a great deal about ants; you may be a brilliant if wheel-chair-bound British physicist who knows a great deal about string theory. But no amount of ants or strings or knowledge of how many ants can dance on the head of a string qualifies you to say that God is a delusion or human love a brain state. The world, said Thoreau, and rightly he said it (playing a variation on Hamlet’s theme), is bigger than our ideas of it.

We idiots, so closed in on ourselves, will more often than not fail to notice that ignorance is our default condition, that ignorance will always be our element, that knowledge is but a small blue patch in the cloud of unknowing, a tiny clearing in the vast forest of ignorance.

Being an idiot of the first order myself, I recommend as a precautionary measure “driving knowledge out of its categories,” as Wes Jackson and Bill Vitek say in The Virtues of Ignorance. I recommend as a second precautionary measure thinking of knowledge as a tool and of ignorance as a perspective. Such, at any rate, is the advice of one contributor to this fine book. By such measures and by the careful and humble discipline of broad learning we might arrive at the great Socratic conclusion...

But a great scam is being perpetuated against a lot of suspecting victims as well. They are being told to borrow a lot of money for the privilege of majoring in idiocy. They are actually paying people to make them into idiots. The consequences are playing out before us. Everywhere you turn, an idiot is in charge. Not a stupid person, mind you, but an idiot. Look, for example, at the President’s economic advisors. Look, for example, at the deans and presidents of our colleges and universities. Look, indeed, at the professors of these august institutions. You will find scientists who have never read the Bible–and who could not tell you what kind of book it is; you will find Biblical scholars who have never read Darwin–and who also couldn’t tell you what kind of book the Bible is. (The Origin they take on faith.)

The 2nd Sabbath of March

Beauty or Flight

by Denver Butson

The man who jumped from the highway bridge one afternoon

who drove his car along in rush hour traffic

then carefully pulled it over, fussed with something briefly on the dash,

so casually that another driver passing

thought he was looking for a map, or a cassette tape,

that had slid during the last turn before the bridge — that's all —

and then stepped out of the car, standing, stretching,

and closing the door routinely, a man in need of a break

on a long drive, a man untroubled by his next appointment,

a man who felt himself growing tired and thought

he needed some air, looked up the highway once

and then down at the almost frozen rows of traffic

under the haze that lingered above the bridge

and then broke simply and suddenly into a run, a dead run,

one motorist called it, crossing in front of his car

and not even stopping at the railing between the bridge

and the empty space beside the bridge, entering that space

and opening his mouth in what one driver called a scream,

though she heard no sound above the drone of traffic, and

other drivers saw as a gasp for breath, not unlike a child takes

when diving into a backyard pool, and he executed then

a nearly perfect, if a little rushed, swan dive out across the space

next to the bridge and into the water ninety-five feet below.

One fisherman in a boat a little upstream

saw the man who jumped from the highway bridge,

the moment he left the bridge and entered his dive, and the fisherman

swore he saw not a man but a large bird, a falcon or an eagle,

shot mid-flight by an angry driver, a large bird

who was trying to regain some sense of beauty, some sense of flight,

in its final dying seconds.

Listen to Your Wives Boys

I may receive a fair amount of flak at home for this post and not live it down till I'm fertilizer in the garden but I've never been afraid of providing my backside as a target before so why start now.  As Wendell said, we must be a people willing to undertake profound self analysis.  I found a random post on Wendell at a blog on organic farming and intentional community wherein a reader wrote about his breaking bread with the old poet.  I know.  What a lucky bastard eh.

I once had the good fortune of having soup with Wendell Berry. At the time, I was a divinity school student, and a couple of friends and I had been talking a lot about intentional communities – what they were, how they worked, whether we might start one somewhere (anywhere, really – our first mistake). Perhaps foolishly, and probably seeking some sort of affirmation, my friend Steve decided to bring this up with Mr. Berry. His first response was that whatever far-flung ideas we had, an intentional community would have to be an agricultural one; it would have to be a land-based community. Maybe it was not surprising to us that he would say such a thing, but in retrospect I imagine he was pretty surprised. Here were some smart-seeming Yale students with almost no sense at all.

Long after the subject had been changed and we were all walking out the door saying our goodbyes, he made his second point: “Listen to your wives, boys – listen to your wives.”

Now, Wendell's views on intentional community aside, though they are interesting, I was struck quite profoundly by that last little bit of advice, those last parting words.  I admit, on a random blog with a random letter, that I have no idea if this happened, but I'm not one to shirk a good tale.  I believe in dragons for goodness sake.  Why not.  Drives Sara crazy but the boys love it and if I can't prove it right then I can't prove it wrong.  Besides, this seems exactly like something Wendell would say.  So I'll take it for what I think it is - the truth.  Listen to your wives, boys - listen to your wives.

What the hell is that supposed to mean?  Here's my take and this is my place and my family.  Yours will be yours.  Sara is profoundly practical.  I have been known to be a bit flighty.  Sara is optimistic.  I'm pessimistic.  Sara is nurturing.  I'm relatively destructive.  Sara is stubborn.  I'm more stubborn.  Sara is hospitable.  I hide down aisles in the grocery store to avoid people I know.  Sara is beautiful.  I'm not very good looking.  She's the win to my wang.  Or is that the yin to my yang?  The point is, she is the central personhood of my place, she is the voice of my limits, and my primary economic partner.  If you believe in place, limits, liberty, and community then you sure as hell better listen to your wife.  That's a lesson I could learn a bit more about.

Read the whole post here if you so desire. The power is in your fingertip. Revel in it. I'm not responsible, however, for any dancing nuns you may see herein.

On Indians and Iron

From Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America.

"The New World,” Bernard DeVoto wrote in The Course of Empire, “was a constantly expanding market… Its value in gold was enormous but it had still greater value in that it expanded and integrated the industrial systems of Europe.

And he continues: “The first belt-knife given by a European to an Indian was a portent as great as the cloud that mushroomed over Hiroshima…. Instantly the man of 6000 B.C. was bound fast to a way of life that had developed seven and a half millennia beyond his own. He began to live better and he began to die.”

The principle European trade goods were tools, cloth, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and alcohol. The sudden availability of these things produced a revolution that “affected every aspect of Indian life. The struggle for existence… became easier. Immemorial handicrafts grew obsolescent, then obsolete. Methods of hunting were transformed. So were methods – and the purposes – of war. As war became deadlier in purpose and armament a surplus of women developed, so that marriage customs changed and polygamy became common. The increased usefulness of women in the preparation of pelts worked to the same end… Standards of wealth, prestige, and honor changed. The Indians acquired commercial values and developed business cults. They became more mobile….

“In the sum it was cataclysmic. A culture was forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to. All corruptions of culture produce breakdowns of morale, of communal integrity, and of personality and this force was as strong as any other in the white man’s subjugation of the red man.”

I have quoted these sentences from DeVoto because, the obvious differences aside, he is so clearly describing a revolution that did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesmen of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat. The Indian became a redskin, not by loss in battle, but by accepting a dependence on traders that made necessities of industrial goods. This is not merely history. It is a parable.

I know it’s ridiculous that I haven’t finished processing this essay yet but this piece of writing was very revealing to me in its historical implications. I picked up DeVoto’s book The Course of Empire and found it fascinating. The political tableau that unfolded among the great lakes tribes and the French was unknown to me prior and the wars and trading and political gambles aspired to a level we’d recognize immediately today. The French became like demigods to the Indians and changed the fabric of their lives. Wendell spends a large part of this essay exploring the cultural implications of a nation that follows this path of exploitation and expanding markets and the history that traces that thinking. Pretty good stuff

What does it mean? In some ways it makes me feel hopeless. There is such a vast swing of history pushing us in certain directions it seems futile to reach for something different. But it also gives us a perception to deal with. You can't ignore technology. DeVoto makes a determined case for the technology of the age in the 17th century and its reasons for dominance. The hard truth of the times was iron ruled. Once again DeVoto,

The Fox chief who told Perrot, 'You gave birth to us for you brought us the first iron,' was telling the truth... To the last fragment of a broken axehead, the last half of a cracked awl, the last inch of strap iron, a better life depended on the trade.

An iron axe beat a stone axe. An iron arrowhead gained mastery over a flint arrowhead. This was an indisputable truth and if you denied that you got it in the back of the head.

Yet we have advantages. For starters, I don't think the tribe with the HighDefinition viewing capability has any paramount advantage over those that don't. And the guy with the ipod (That's me) is no more advantaged than the guy with the boombox on his shoulder. You laugh but I just saw a guy walking down the street like that last week. Boombox rockin by his ear. Swaggerin down the sidewalk. Soaking up the admiration. Though your mating capabilities may be deminished your ability to live is not.

We can pick and choose. We can decide whats to our advantage and whats not. With thought and consideration I think we'll find many technologies disadvantaging us and some profoundly useful. And the best lesson we can learn is if we can do it for ourselves then we should gain that advantage when its available. This is the lesson of the 17th century Indian. They became dependent on Europeans for their subsistence and thus were ruled by them. Will it be repeated again and again and again? Are we repeating it now? If you can't provide for yourself or your neighbor what you need to live then your not free. Am I wrong?

Wendell on Faust

From Wendell's, The Necessity of Agriculture

In Goethe’s Faust, the devil Mephistopheles is fulfilling some of the learned doctor’s wishes by means of witchcraft, which the doctor is finding unpleasant. The witches cook up a brew that promises to make him young, but Faust is nauseated by it. He asks (this is Randall Jarrell’s translation):

Has neither Nature nor some noble mind

Discovered some remedy, some balsam?

Mephistopheles, who is a truth-telling devil, replies:

There is a natural way to make you young. . . .

Go out in a field

And start right in to work: dig, hoe,

Keep your thoughts and yourself in that field,

Eat the food you raise . . .

Be willing to manure the field you harvest.

And that’s the best way—take it from me!—

To go on being young at eighty.

Faust, a true intellectual, unsurprisingly objects:

Oh, but to live spade in hand—

I’m not used to it, I couldn’t stand it.

So narrow a life would not suit me.

And Mephistopheles replies:

Well then, we still must have the witch.

Lately I’ve been returning to that passage again and again, and every time I read it I laugh. I laugh because it is a piece of superb wit, and because it is true. Faust’s idea that farm life is necessarily “narrow” remains perfectly up to date. And it is still true that to escape that alleged narrowness requires the agency of a supernatural or extrahuman power—though now, for Goethe’s witchcraft, we would properly substitute industrial agriculture.

(By the way does anyone really know how to pronounce Goethe's name without swallowing their tongue or is that just me?)

Requiem of a Diaper

Garbage Count

8 days in. 23 days out.

10 bags 

4 boxes 

1 pile of old trim and paneling 

1 hot water heater.

There are a couple of issues to note.

First, this is a pretty disturbing project. It changes your perspective to know that the plastic shampoo bottle you just tossed in the garbage will now sit in your back yard saturated in macaroni noodles and coffee grounds till spring comes. I say that because last night I just threw out my empty 28 oz Alpine Xtreme mountain stream scented body wash bottle with convenient pump attached. I had to pry my fingers from its sides to drop it in the can after considering cutting the top off and sucking out the dregs with a straw for one more refreshing lather before it polluted my back yard. Luckily I had a bar of Ivory in standby to replace it, a simple and sturdy breed of soap with which came a small and easily folded box to throw away though even that made me shake my head. What a troglodyte Wendell has made of me.

But shampoo bottles are small potatoes. The real terrorist of garbage bags everywhere and threat to the life and liberty of the free world is the poopy diaper. There’s nothing else that sets my skin to crawling than dropping one of those nuclear bombs into the bag. Because I’ve enjoyed my status as simple consumer yodel till this stupid project came along I had no idea what a disposable diaper was even made of nor should any other self respecting citizen of this country. Now, after a quick google search (Queue hallelujah chorus), I have been exposed to the myriad of highly functional and state of the art features the modern diaper embodies and my kid craps in. It’s really pretty amazing and extremely disgusting. To see the whole process, if you’re the curious minded sort, click here and be amazed.

In short it’s a hydrophilic, synthetic polymer with a cute little dog inked on the front. Sweet. I’ll just call them Bag o Poo, the industrial absorbent family fun time filled to bursting with gelatinous diarrhea, rolled up into a ball and set in your backyard… for a month. There’s a process of grief here. I’ve found myself denying the poop, angered by the poop, bargaining with the poop, depressed by the poop and finally accepting the inevitable and throwing the poop out.

Through this whole development I’ve been tempted to fudge (no pun intended) and I’m already imagining alternatives to the garbage problem which I've sorely wanted to implement but we’re setting a baseline of refuse here damn it. Be strong man!

Note two. I may be wrong, paranoid or just overly suspicious but the world, as in Mother Earth, Gaia, the Global Hood, is out to get me. Normally I would be over the top excited about the first day of March bringing sixty degree days for a week and counting. Except I have bags of now rotting garbage that were supposed to stay nicely refrigerated. This is still winter or so says the calendar. I believe I could feel the temperature rise discernibly the moment I placed the first bag on the ground.

Note three. There’s a perception out there that piles of garbage in your yard is redneck.

Note four. Sara hosted a bridal shower Saturday. I believe I know why they call it throwing a party now. Three new garbage bags of paper, boxes, ribbons, and bows and the ravaged remains of two cakes, three quiche, and twenty fruit skewers. Baseline, baseline, baseline. Being a loyal husband I moved all the prior trash into my shop during the party in case some innocent women were to glimpse our landfill. All except the hot water heater. That thing is heavy and though it doesn’t really count as March trash because it was already there in February and will still be there when April rolls around I’m sure, I include for aesthetic reasons.  How cool am I. I may just incorporate it into the landscaping. I can see it now – rainwater tank and diaper garden. A true piece of Avant Wendellian art. The wheels are turning my friends. You will see some changes around the Trees house. I swear by the stink of my backyard.

What the World Eats

This seems like it would be a fascinating book.  Peter Menzel has spent years photographing what people around the globe eat in a typical week and how much they spend on food.  These photographs are surprisingly intriguing.  It reveals alot about how we eat, prepare, and manage our food.  Check out some of the pictures here.

What The World Eats

The First Sabbath of March

Ode: Intimations of Immortality (excerpt)

by William Wordsworth

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight

To me did seem

Apparell'd in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it has been of yore;--

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more!

The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose;

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare;

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

On Bigness

A recent Orion article, The Curse of Bigness by Christopher Ketchum, illuminates the nature of largesse in our culture in a great way.  I recommend reading the whole thing if you can sit still for more than a few minutes and concentrate your waning powers of literacy.  I know that's difficult for some of us but it may be well worth the effort.  I've taken the liberty of including the conclusion here if you're the type who just likes to read the end and find out who done it. 

IT WAS E. F. SCHUMACHER WHO, in the 1950s, as the chief economist at the British National Coal Board, came to the quite reasonable—at the time unthinkable—conclusion that energy supply, the coal that England so ravenously was burning up, could not satisfy an ideology of unlimited growth. It was, Schumacher concluded, a suicide pact with Planet Earth. What Schumacher offered instead in the book that made him famous, Small Is Beautiful, is the common-sensical idea that man is small, therefore should think small—that is, think along the lines of human scale.

When in 1955 Schumacher was invited by the government of Burma as an advisor on economic development, he understood at once that the rote econometrics of the West had little to offer the Burmese. Schumacher fell in love with the country, the people, the culture, and it was Buddhism that most impressed him, Buddhism in practice in the little villages, the Buddhism of the Middle Path. The experience was transformative, inspiring him to gestate the notion of a “Buddhist economics,” an “economics as if people mattered.” Instead of demanding that his hosts modernize, he urged the Burmese to hold fast to the middle path, employing energy-light, human-scale technology—what he called “democratic or people’s technology”—to develop the economy on the organic scale of the village. Instead of industrial irrigation super-projects, there would be drip-irrigation and foot-operated treadle pumps (which have worked in Burma to this day). Instead of breakneck urbanization and huge capital investments and centralized planning, the Burmese would do better to decentralize as much as possible, he said, to keep decision-making local for the local production of food and handicrafts to be locally consumed.

Mahatma Gandhi’s development plans for India were much along the same lines. “If we feel the need of machines,” said Gandhi, “we certainly will have them. Every machine that helps every individual has a place, but there should be no place for machines [that] turn the masses into mere machine minders.” What in the intervening years has been the alternative? In China, great leaps forward have poisoned the rivers and the lakes and the fields and the coastal beds, displacing huge populations, concentrating them in the filth of cities as machine minders, impoverishing every rank of traditional society while enriching a very few, for whom tradition is nothing more than an attachment to the nonmaterial.

Of course, among the economists for whom growth was the unquestioned ideology—growth for its own sake, the ideology of the cancer cell—Schumacher was considered a crazy old man, a godforsaken crank. And to that he was said to have replied that a crank is small, safe, cheap, comprehensible, nonviolent, and efficient, a perfect tool of intermediate technology.

Let us be cranks then, though the consensus conspires against us—against the very notion that the small-scale and low-tech may hold the means to a workable future. We can start by downsizing the monster corporations. The antitrust law is there, waiting, a fist in our pockets. Let’s have a third party in politics that might dare to confront bigness—hell, let’s have a second party, given that Republicans and Democrats are at odds only in the perfumes they wear. Let’s have ten or twenty parties. Let’s encourage local production with local labor within easy commuting distances; pay a living wage; restructure land-use patterns to provide easy access to work; grow most of our food close to where it will be consumed. Let’s dream small.

Of course, bigness may still be needed to provide certain goods and services, but the most realistic future for humankind lies in a determined return to the human scale. The transformation will no doubt be costly in the short term, that is, less profitable for Big Ag and Big Oil and Big Coal and all the other bigness complexes, but it will produce vast benefits to social health in the long run. And how shall we quantify that kind of quality? Not in the usual gibberish of national product—the original definition of gross meaning “repellently fat”—or exports and imports, or capital-output ratios, or capitalization, not with the metrics of the idiot savants in the finance industry, who produce nothing one can hold in the hand, nothing of real value in a human-scale economy. Instead of depending on slave labor abroad, we can have jobs at home for the things we need, not the things we are told to want. Instead of processed food, we can have fresh food. Instead of faraway hierarchies, we can have local networks. Instead of militarism, cooperation. Instead of repression, innovation. Instead of homogenous, homegrown.

It goes against every urging in our recent history and our covetous training, and therefore it may only happen when some external force comes into play. Most likely that force will be the limits of Planet Earth, and our fitness will be determined, as it was with the dinosaurs, by our ability to adapt to the new conditions. Or not. We might do well to remember that the laws of nature are bigger than Goldman Sachs or the Big Three or the United States of America. Until then, we will continue to think of our systems as too big to fail, during which time we may end up presiding with a blithe mind over their failure—which, ultimately, will mean our failure.

This idea of size is very intimate to the thinking of Wendell. His first critical essay of agriculture published in the Whole Earth Catalog in 1970 was titled Think Little, which by the way is a great read. Even after forty years it's still a pointed attack on our current systems. We need to address this economy of scale in some manner. As of yet, I don't know what that address will look like.

My question then is this: is there a way to change our economy of scale? Can we make an economic network of our own or are we stuck in the economy we have? Will I ever not be a machine minder? What are your thoughts?

On Garbage

The first bag of spring has appeared in my back yard. Its white luminescent skin emerges from the ground in a sickly shine with a yellow bow tied in the top like two dying flower petals. Its scent is of pizza crust and diapers. I expect it to breed soon and duplicate itself. It bulges with refuse, the corners and caps and baggies and boxes all jutting from its plastic shell in taught distress. I wonder how this will go.

Following McGrother and most of Wendell's other writing, I know and you know and on some level most of us know that we're wasters. We waste, squander, trash, fritter, discard, and generally prostitute ourselves to the cult of the disposable. This has so many cultural and generational roots that I’m pretty sure I’ve not sat down and thought it through as carefully as I should but oh well. I’ll shoot from the hip like I usually do.

The levels of waste vary. I waste time. I waste fuel. I waste light. I waste damn fine spring days. I waste nearly every product I buy. But this is mostly hearsay. I can’t really quantify my waste because I don’t deal with it. We’ve developed a system - one I am proudly in support of– called solid waste removal. Or in another idiom it’s called garbage day wherein a garbage man comes in the broad daylight of midmorning and smuggles my garbage from the garbage can and takes it to the garbage dump, a hill on the horizon, from which it never returns. This process involves no words, no money, no handshakes or eye winks. I don’t even have to say thanks and pat the garbage collector on the butt in a sportsman like display of affection. It’s almost magical in its simplicity, like skipping through a licorice forest shooting ferries with a shotgun. That would actually be way more fun but you get my point.  I have no concept of my garbage.

Now don’t misread me. Refuse has to be dealt with. It is, appropriately enough, a part of being human. But this completely sterile separation from our waste is disconcerting. I do nothing but dump it in a can and poof it disappears. This separation makes waste easy. In fact they’ve even gone so far as taking away the dump itself.

I remember growing up and my Dad would have a big load of garbage – construction debris or tree limbs or dead bodies or who knows what – and he would put the wood side walls on the old, yellow Datsun and load that thing till it sat on its axles, knitting rope about it like a spider weaving a web and we would head to the dump. Those were adventurous days at the dump. You’d pull up to the weigh shack and the guy would blow a cloud of smoke in your window from his cigarette and ask, City or county? I always worried that we’d answer the question wrong and he’d come after us with a lead pipe or send us into a no return zone where small pickups disappeared forever. Us city folk I think always felt proud saying City because it was an entitled answer. We were in the know and didn’t have to pay. Then the ex-carney would point up the hill where plastic bags tumbled like weeds in an old west movie and say, put it in A, with a guttural growl. Then we would drive up a hill of garbage, dodging nail spiked boards, massive ruts, and rabid seagulls and back between two small, insignificant orange cones with the letter A stapled to their side while a giant, junk smashing front loader with spiked wheels and man eating jaws crushed garbage mere inches from our frail bodies. Even now the thought of it causes a momentary bladder release. You were lucky to come off that hill alive, at least from the perspective of a ten year old.

Now the shack is air conditioned, the attendant (as he’s now called) shaven, the road paved and you just back up to a giant dumpster and take a dump. You don’t even see the hill or the fire breathing monster or risk bodily harm and flat tires or have anything to do with a landfill. What the hell! I can’t even dump my own garbage anymore. The refuse is refused of me. And so it goes.

We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves.

And big hills I might add. You may remember this quote from my post, The Unsettling of My Soul, or most likely you may not. However, I remembered it and that’s what really matters. It is only one of many times that Wendell names a waster. In my post on McGrother that was one of the man’s first traits. It’s a common thread throughout.

So because I’m impulsive and I have no concept of my own waste (Solid waste not sewer waste, I’m well acquainted with my sewer waste. Don’t ask.), I’ve decided to collect my own garbage for the month of March. It’s an experiment in quantity and kind. The first bag has been placed, pestilence and disease soon to follow. I’ll keep you posted.

On Writing

I haven't written about this yet because I started doing it without much thought and because its pretty ironic given the medium of my readership and I don't like irony unless I can make it into a bullet and shoot other people's dreams down.  But, I've decided to start writing my first thoughts and drafts on a legal pad with the graphite injected cylinder some people call a pencil.  I use pens too.  I especially like the V-Ball grip extra fine.  (Hopefully Pilot will appreciate the boost in sales I just gave them and send me a complimentary Lear Jet.)  But why you ask?

At first glance, writing may seem not nearly so much an art of the body as, say, dancing or gardening or carpentry. And yet language is the most intimately physical of all the artistic means. We have it palpably in our mouths; it is our langue, our tongue. Writing it, we shape it with our hands. Reading aloud what we have written—as we must do, if we are writing carefully—our language passes in at the eyes, out at the mouth, in at the ears; the words are immersed and steeped in the senses of the body before they make sense in the mind. They cannot make sense in the mind until they have made sense in the body. Does shaping one’s words with one’s own hand impart character and quality to them, as does speaking them with one’s own tongue to the satisfaction of one’s own ear? There is no way to prove that it does. On the other hand, there is no way to prove that it does not, and I believe that it does.

The act of writing language down is not so insistently tangible an act as the act of building a house or playing the violin. But to the extent that it is tangible, I love the tangibility of it. The computer apologists, it seems to me, have greatly underrated the value of the handwritten manuscript as an artifact. I don’t mean that a writer should be a fine calligrapher and write for exhibition, but rather that handwriting has a valuable influence on the work so written. I am certainly no calligrapher, but my handwritten pages have a homemade, handmade look to them that both pleases me in itself and suggests the possibility of ready correction. It looks hospitable to improvement. As the longhand is transformed into typescript and then into galley proofs and the printed page, it seems increasingly to resist improvement. More and more spunk is required to mar the clean, final-looking lines of type. I have the notion—again not provable—that the longer I keep a piece of work in longhand, the better it will be.

To me, also, there is a significant difference between ready correction and easy correction. Much is made of the ease of correction in computer work, owing to the insubstantiality of the light-image on the screen; one presses a button and the old version disappears, to be replaced by the new. But because of the substantiality of paper and the consequent difficulty involved, one does not handwrite or typewrite a new page every time a correction is made. A handwritten or typewritten page therefore is usually to some degree a palimpsest; it contains parts and relics of its own history—erasures, passages crossed out, interlineations—suggesting that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to. The light-text on the computer screen, by contrast, is an artifact typical of what can only be called the industrial present, a present absolute. A computer destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization. The well-crafted table or cabinet embodies the memory of (because it embodies respect for) the tree it was made of and the forest in which the tree stood. The work of certain potters embodies the memory that the clay was dug from the earth. Certain farms contain hospitably the remnants and reminders of the forest or prairie that preceded them. It is possible even for towns and cities to remember farms and forests or prairies. All good human work remembers its history. The best writing, even when printed, is full of intimations that it is the present version of earlier versions of itself, and that its maker inherited the work and the ways of earlier makers. It thus keeps, even in print, a suggestion of the quality of the handwritten page; it is a palimpsest.

Something of this undoubtedly carries over into industrial products. The plastic Clorox jug has a shape and a loop for the forefinger that recalls the stoneware jug that went before it. But something vital is missing. It embodies no memory of its source or sources in the earth or of any human hand involved in its shaping. Or look at a large factory or a power plant or an airport, and see if you can imagine—even if you know—what was there before. In such things materials of the world have entered a kind of orphanhood.

It would be uncharitable and foolish of me to suggest that nothing good will ever be written on a computer. Some of my best friends have computers. I have only said that a computer cannot help you to write better, and I stand by that. (In fact, I know a publisher who says that under the influence of computers—or of the immaculate copy that computers produce—many writers are now writing worse.) But I do say that in using computers writers are flirting with a radical separation of mind and body, the elimination of the work of the body from the work of the mind. The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has a sterile, untouched, factorymade look, like that of a plastic whistle or a new car. The body does not do work like that. The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.

But writing is of the body in yet another way. It is preeminently a walker’s art. It can be done on foot and at large. The beauty of its traditional equipment is simplicity. And cheapness. Going off to the woods, I take a pencil and some paper (any paper—a small notebook, an old envelope, a piece of a feed sack), and I am as well equipped for my work as the president of IBM. I am also free, for the time being at least, of everything that IBM is hooked to. My thoughts will not be coming to me from the power structure or the power grid, but from another direction and way entirely. My mind is free to go with my feet. 

-Wendell Berry's words from Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.

I believe him.

On McGrother

It is often the case that fiction is truer than philosophy. By truer I mean, truth that raises the hackles of your soul or causes you to feel the very walls of you heart collapsing and expanding as if it had climbed up into your mind. When I read Wendell’s words that define his view of exploiter and nurturer I think, yes, your right Wendell. I understand. Damn those bastard exploiters. When I read The Memory Of Old Jack and Sims McGrother rides up to the ridge where Jack stands, his weather worn mules mismatched and dirty, I see the man and I am he.

No, I’m not such an impeccable archetype but what I mean is if I can know a man and know his character, then in this knowledge I can know myself a little more. McGrother is far from a dynamic character but he serves his role well and he is not an impossibility. He is not a faceless corporation blowing the tops off mountains and grinding up farm animals. He is not abstract and unknowable. He’s a man and as such I can compare myself to him.

Big talker and waster – Check. (Well maybe a small to midland talker.) Love cash – check. (Spend forty hours a week working for it and another many hours spending it.) Missing three fingers – not yet but working on it. Kill an automobile, buy another one – check. Abuse self with McCrap, fiberglass insulation, sheetrock dust, and moonshine – check. Be an ass to my fellow man – check. (Just got that one fine tuned today at work.)

I don’t mean to say I’m McGrother's bastard son reincarnated. I don’t think I am. But he represents a certain mindset that needs to be defined and he defines it in his character quite well. He defines it well enough for me to recognize it in my own character. What I do with that is a different question. A lot of it is cultural and generational. I’ve not been presented with an alternative to wastefulness in my time nor do I have much of an alternative to cash. I’d say my “love” for it is more out of necessity and desire than out of love. If I could live without it I probably would. Some of it is just how I am. I’m an ass at times and I recognize that which I guess gives it a flavor of grace. That could be said for all these things I suppose. And so that may be what separates McGrother from me: grace and hope.

Over the next couple weeks I’d like to look at two other archetype characters in The Memory of Old Jack. One of them, Gladston Pettit, will really strike home and make you sick of yourself. The other, Will Wells, is a man of a different sort but I still see much of him to be admired and mourned. Till then.