jabel

From a year ago today: “The men who live in my memory”

Fried green tomatoes!

We’ve reached that part of southern Indiana’s summer where literally every day’s forecast is humid with a chance of thunderstorms.

🚨 New Wendell Berry essay collection alert 🚨

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: Seamus Heaney understood the landscape in which as a child in small-farm Derry he grew up as ‘sacramental, a system of signs that called automatically upon systems of thinking and feeling.’ Kevin Williams has remarked how the Catholicism of Heaney’s upbringing was part of an environment that was paradoxically not ‘specifically Christian’. Heaney wrote that ‘Much of the flora of the place had a religious force, especially if we think of the root of the word…

This wonderful story was alluded to in an Emerald episode on death: “The Story of Jumping Mouse” (pdf)

I’ve never seen evidence of good men in national politics. The best are only good in relation to the swine roaming DC hallways. Truly good men are only ever known personally and are invisible to every form of worldly power.

I decided late in the week to go to Tell City because the Pour Haus pub there had been on my mind lately. Not that it’s particularly noteworthy—it’s just how this particular day-trip itch popped up for me. So with a few episodes of The Emerald loaded up, I headed south. After brief visits at family graves, I stopped first at Saint Joseph’s Holy Family near Bristow. It’s a wonderful folk shrine that I’ll definitely be visiting again when I can walk it more slowly. Religious devotion is blended…

Rachel is playing in an old time music jam in Paoli tonight. Having no musical talent, I’m one of four or five spectators. Two upright basses, two mandolins, a banjo, a fiddle, a dulcimer, several guitars, and fifteen voices. If you aren’t jealous, you should be.

Finished reading Tools For Engagement: Reclaiming Craft in an Age of Technology by Joshua Klein and Mike Updegraff. This book is full of Joshua and Mike’s characteristic blend of woodworking history, craft philosophy, technological criticism, and practical skills. I appreciate the way they have never let theory drift far from practice. Embodied intellect.

A memory of the old timey internet: in the early 2000s I used to listen to a Christian rock internet radio station. No idea what it was called. It was broadcast live, with actual DJs. It was the station that first introduced me to Evanescence through their breakout song “Bring Me to Life.” Also discovered several other bands through that station: The Benjamin Gate, Jeremy Camp, Kutless, 12 Stones. Evanescence was particularly big for Rachel and me. We loved that combination of ethereal vocals…

Jaroslav Pelikan, as quoted in Tools for Engagement: Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

Study finds that Coloradans will be traveling less this summer. Coloradans traveling elsewhere is proof that humans just can’t be happy.

Women get a lot of crap about being basic in the fall, with the pumpkin spice lattes and sweaters and such. But, listen, I have a long beard and use beard oil and love brewpubs with craft beer and dabble in woodworking. It doesn’t get much more basic than that. 😂

Beautiful coneflowers

Klein and Updegraff, Tools for Engagement: It’s necessary, absolutely necessary, for us to first recognize that it’s good to be human—inefficiencies, blunders, and all. We are not machines, nor should we desire to be. This means taking a strong stand against what author Wendell Berry describes as “our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries,…

Picked up a load of wood from the Amish farm today. Ol’ Green struggled a bit under load on the hills between here and Buddha Bypass Road but we made it. The farm was, as I suspected, open despite the holiday. What to the Amish is your Fourth of July? 😉

Looky at Rachel’s tall, lovely sunflowers

Finished reading Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur. Highly recommended, if you couldn’t tell by all my quotations from it. The great gift of strange books like this is a fresh pair of eyes. There’s always something invigorating in a Jungian perspective, even when I don’t end up fully adopting it.

Despite what I said the other day about not wanting to analyze what I love, I’m listening to a podcast where David Benjamin Blower and Lydia Catterall discuss his new album. He’s just confirmed my suspicion that “The Boot is on the Other Foot Now” is about the Gazan genocide: We are all here Be upstanding for the hellscape yonder there Roman stakes sprawl across Judean hills again Scroll through the dust. Meander round the famine Vespasian, who wears your crown now? Done something with your…

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: To make room for the daimons is to set a distance between us and them. This enables us to reflect, and reflect on, them; or, perhaps more accurately, allows them to reflect themselves through us. Reflection is “an act of becoming conscious.” If we become conscious of the daimons, and remain mindful of them, we avoid becoming possessed by them. For we are always vulnerable to neurotic fixations and compulsions when unconscious daimons drive us to act out,…

Remember the reported UFO sightings at Malmstrom Air Force Base and other sites associated with nuclear missiles? One way of understanding that phenomenon is as some kind of manifestation of our collective fear. How long until we start getting UFO sightings at data centers?

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: Too much of our recent history has been soul-slaughter, imagining the past as merely primitive and, muscle-bound with technology, bulldozing the sacred places, hunting the daimonic animals with high-velocity rifles, dispatching the jets to shoot down the UFOs, violating the moon-goddess with phallic rockets, and so on. Having severed all connection with the gods and daimons, we reckon we are getting away with it. But we aren’t. The victory over the daimons is…

I’ve revised my “Memory is an Otherworld” post and added audio narration. I may start doing this now and then. Nothing improves a piece of writing like a rural accent with authentically dropped g’s. 😂

Meet Fred and Ethel (named by my adorable wife). You should get one of these feeders that sticks to your window. It’s wonderful to be able to see birds within two feet of my chair. The marking you see on the window are flowers drawn by Rachel to make sure the birds don’t bonk their noggins.

Ridiculous dog raised to a new level of ridiculousness.

The popular idea of memory is a machine model. Memory is a hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability. This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is an Otherworld. It is a place we visit which exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not. The rules of the waking world do not apply there. There we meet the dead and…

Awesome: Ten year old boy from Santa Claus, Indiana, catches a huge catfish with his bare hands. Are you more surprised by a ten year old noodler with the active support of his mom or that we have a town named Santa Claus?

A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them.

I love this video on shillelagh making by Eoin Reardon. Also, from another of his videos, I learned the wonderfully symmetrical rule about renewing the finish on a handle (and maybe a walking stick?): re-oil once a day for a week; once a week for a month; once a month for a year; then twice yearly.