balancing

 

There were many things I wanted to do this week, outings, odd jobs around the house and garden, a spectacular walk down a deep ravine on the other side of the river but by Tuesday evening, after I finally got my fully repaired bicycle back (it was like greeting a long lost friend) it became apparent that reality doesn’t need me to help operate it. It gets along just fine without my input and as the almost forgotten but most familiar first waves of vertigo began to wash over me, I had to realise that life right now is not going to be my problem to be solved. And so to bed and much sleep and drowsy days struggling with balance.

 

The positive aspect, much appreciated, is that being retired, I don't have to crawl to a doctor to get a sick certificate which then has to be sent to the employer in order to get paid while recovering. 

 

By the end of day two, I was back sitting upright and reading wonderous stuff.

 

Like this:

    I was wondering about the pyramids in Egypt. Why are there three pyramids?  . . . And I didn’t know very much about it, but . . .  I made this thought experiment: I would bet that they were not built like one pyramid, and then 500 years later, another pyramid. I bet it was just one crazy period when they made these three pyramids, because it’s not possible to build one pyramid. If you’re going to build one pyramid and have 40,000 people build a pyramid for forty years, you don’t stop doing that. You don’t just say, “Thank you, you can go home now,” because if you are building a pyramid with 40,000 people, for forty years, that’s what your economy is about. It’s about building pyramids.

    You have, suddenly, generations, because people lived a shorter life then. So suddenly you have two or three generations that don’t remember anything other than working on this pyramid, and the whole supply chain of your country is about making the ropes, cutting the stones—the whole hierarchy of the society is about where you are in building the pyramid, from the chief architect, to the lowest slave, to the people supplying this structure. If you stop building a pyramid, you have chaos. If you just say, “Go home now.” You don’t tell people just to go home and do something, because they have been used to having an assigned job for forty years. They’ll ask, “What do I do now?” Naturally, they start building another pyramid, because that’s the only way to keep the society and the structure whole, and after eighty years, nobody even has the idea that there should not be another pyramid. It’s just a question of how much bigger the pyramid should be, so it’s not until they have built the third pyramid that some people start scratching their heads, like OK, so we’re going to build a fourth? A fifth? Can this go on like this?

    And they hear rumors from Greece where not everyone is a slave, just every other person is a slave. And they have these amphitheaters, and they watch tragedies, so they get this news about alternative ways of life. Then I looked into the archaeology research, and it was actually true. The pyramids, the Great Giza Pyramids, were built in a crazy span of 120 years, and I think that now, with the climate strikes, that we finally have a generation that is seriously questioning.

    They don’t want to build pyramids anymore, and they don’t see the sense of it, and they don’t understand, why am I toiling my whole life, dragging myself to some job, just to have this metal case around me that we call cars? Why are we putting all these resources into these roads, and highways, and these ramps, and all this? They’re questioning everything, the foundations of what we are doing and why we’re doing it, because they see the damage of it, so I think that this generation that is now climate striking will bring the change on a much faster level than we’ve seen before, that is, change in how we eat and how we dress. Their dreams will be different from the dreams that we had, because their dreams are against a real threat.

 Andri Snær Magnason

hopefulness is a warrior emotion

Over breakfast this morning on the patio, we reminded each other that has been 45 years since we started our life together, during an unseasonally warm, almost hot August way out in the west of Ireland, Connemara. It is what it is.

While the days continue to be hot and muggy, the mornings are pleasantly cool now, with the sun rising later allowing for morning shadow beside the pear trees on the patio. Strange as it is, the wasps and bees are keeping their distance. We invited neighbours and their friends to help themselves to the Victoria plums at their own risk (re insects and ladder) and people have picked buckets of them. There's still loads left, higher up. Tomorrow, I will look at a second hand automatic preserver someone down the road is selling. This should solve the pear situation.

It's been a hard week, my bicycle has been in for service/repair for two weeks now. I am bereft. 

My food intake has been dismal. We are discussing long distance travel now in light of this and agreed that I need to seek medical opinion first. I can see myself in some airport transit lounge hugging my bloated abdomen - not.

So this here offers some balm.

solastalgia

 

Just after 10 am in the morning. All the shades are down, the house is cool and dark-ish, while outside it's getting hotter and hotter. I thought myself very clever and went for an hour's walk along the river in the early sunlit morning before breakfast and returned home with sweat dripping from my nose. It's the kind of heat when I would tie my hair up if it was long enough.

I am now sharing the room with one fly and an almost silently whirring stand-up fan. 

A week ago, while standing on a ladder picking ripe mirabelle plums, I was stung by at least one bee and maybe a couple of wasp simultaneously and all that within seconds. I get a lot of mileage out of that fact. I also had to go to the GP for the appropriate medical attention because my heart when out of rhythm for a good while and the left hand, where most of the action took place, was a swollen red balloon. We counted six stings in fingers and thumb, all of which are still in there and itching but I can use my hand again. So, yesterday, I picked a couple more mirabelle plums and humbly sacrificed the remaining lot to our insect rulers.

 

In reality, I have a hard time eating or rather, digesting fresh ripe fruit and this is sad, really sad, but needs must. The third expert opinion still outstanding, I have resigned to the shape of things and the limited diet options and decided to just get on with it.

 

We are in a debate about long distance travel and family visits and the CO2 emissions of twice 33 hrs flying across the planet and personal principles and the future of our grandchild and all other grandchildren in this world and responsibilities and excuses and what if not now and but the planes fly anyway and and. Currently, the man is getting deeper involved into scientist4future protests while I am trying to fool myself with a deal that involves looking at flight options and going completely vegan. Watch this space.

Solastalgia is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. It is best described as the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change. A distinction can be made between solastalgia linked to distress about what is in the process of negatively perceived change and eco-anxiety linked to what may happen in the future (associated with "pre-traumatic stress", in reference to post-traumatic stress).

found somewhere

 

 

 

 

fruit trees and ants and a penguin

 

abundant sloe (blackthorn) harvest this year, will soon become liqueur

Today, I got the shakes, which is what I call a day with no get-up-and-go, no energy, when every task has to be reduced to its minimum. These days come and go. I've picked a handful of blueberries and a bowl of mirabelle plums before it got too hot to rummage in the garden. R bravely trimmed the hedge. My mood is lousy, I am prone to angry arguments and have been sulking a bit. Cannot remember what caused it but at least I have a good excuse to withdraw and do nothing, not even thinking.

 

almost too many pears

 

and plums

and the vegetables

Here are some thoughts and stuff that came my way recently. I listened to a lecture by Nigerian philosopher/psychologist Bayo Akomolafe:

In a death spiral (otherwise called ant milling), ants seemingly become fixated in a lethal cycle of sorts. Entomologists believe that some kind of pheromonic accident occurs when the cartographical chemical loops on itself, compelling the ants to keep going round and round, probably intensifying their pacing in the hopes of arriving home.

But they rarely do. If you were an ant, it would be very difficult to shake yourself free from the trance of a death spiral. On the other hand, it would be dangerously easy – it seems – to believe that the next unrelenting step would bring you closer home. In most death spirals observed, the ants march in their crazed continuity, sometimes for days, come rain or sunshine, and then die out of exhaustion, the hopes for a safe arrival lingering over their little bodies like pheromonic ghosts unsure of where to go.

The ant’s death spiral is a multi-species phenomenon, involving human onlookers and their speculations about ant society. Who knows how it comes to be that ants seemingly march in a circle – sometimes as large as a football stadium or as small as could fit on an office table – and then die afterwards? It’s impossible to say for sure what is happening. And yet, we would be remiss if we didn’t heed the ancient warning to learn from ants.

What do death spirals tell us about the constancy of the modern quest for solutions to critical civilization-baring problems and the subsequent realizations that these applications often retain the logic of the problem, perhaps even fortifying the conditions that led to the issue in the first place? Perhaps we can begin to speak about ‘anthro-milling’, not just ant milling: the enlistment of expertise and human agency in territorial patterns of repetition. A trance that whispers we’ll be home – if only we persist in what we already know…

Because one theoretical way an ant can break out of its trance is if it became infected by a fungus, like ophiocordyceps unilateralis – the zombie-ant fungus. Once infected, an ant breaks away from holding patterns and strays, getting lost in the forest, far away from incarcerating concepts of arrival and the anxieties about identity. Somewhere mandible-deep in the underside of a leaf, the zombie-ant becomes an art-form for fungal sporulation – no longer ant nor fungus, but now a curious living-dying betweenness that produces new kinds of worlds.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for us – citizens gestating in modern demise – to think along with the monstrous, to think along with the edges, to map out new realities.

Bayo Akomolafe

And I listened to a conversation between Werner Herzog and the physicist Lawrence Krauss. I could listen to Werner Herzog's voice forever, his Bavarian-English accent is a thing of beauty. It's a long conversation and I listened to it in instalments while I knitted the grandchild's cardigan. There are of course many anecdotes, stories from his childhood and weird stuff that happened when directing his movies and documentaries and writing opera scripts and books and so on. Here's one story about his grandfather:

". . . my grandfather . . . (in) the last years of his life, he was demented or insane. And he did not recognise his wife anymore and he would sit at dinner table and address her as madam . . .  and one night he folded his napkin, put his cutlery cleanly on the table, stood up and bowed to her. And he said to her: Madam, if I were not married, I would ask for your hand."

In this conversation, there's no mention of the existential penguin from the documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007), which in my humble opinion is essential viewing. (Full video is available on youtube, click here.) So here's the penguin, he/she has been part of my imagination for years, Werner Herzog's accent, by the way, is nothing like my English accent despite the fact that I also come from Bavaria - but learned to speak English in Ireland.