Thumbing through Ben Hewitt’s book Home Grown, which is always on the shelf in the playroom at the library:

Penny and I have not made the choices we have—around education, money, ambition, and so on—because we think we are going to heal the world. We are not that foolish, nor that virtuous. But while these choices may not immediately influence the trajectory of global affairs, they are ultimately a reflection of the world we wish to inhabit, and in that sense, they become the world we wish to inhabit. … It is a world in which it is commonly understood that all the seemingly overwhelming forces of humankind, many of which cause hardship and despair, depend on us to feel dependent on them. They depend on us not realizing that with every choice we make, with every action we take, we are shaping the world. Our world.

This is basically the constant background hum(ing question) behind everything in Chris Smaje’s book. How do we find out what else is possible?

Given that Smaje’s whole program is built on the presumed failure/never-should-have-been-ness of endless growth and out-of-sight waste and violence, it’s not surprising that David Graeber occupies some reference space in the book.

There’s a famous line from Graeber: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Here’s the quote as I have it in his book Utopia of Rules:

If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. …

From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong.

That comes from a chapter titled “Dead Zones of the Imagination.” If I have this right, it’s a rewritten essay of his 2006 paper by the same name, which did not include the above quote.

Here’s something from the close of that chapter:

If one resists the reality effect created by pervasive structural violence — the way that bureaucratic regulations seem to disappear into the very mass and solidity of the large heavy objects around us, the buildings, vehicles, large concrete structures, making a world regulated by such principles seem natural and inevitable, and anything else a dreamy fantasy—it is possible to give power to the imagination. But it also requires an enormous amount of work.

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do. Bureaucracies can democratize this sort of power, at least to an extent, but they can’t get rid of it. It becomes forms of institutionalized laziness. Revolutionary change may involve the exhilaration of throwing off imaginative shackles, of suddenly realizing that impossible things are not impossible at all, but it also means most people will have to get over some of this deeply habituated laziness and start engaging in interpretive (imaginative) labor for a very long time to make those realities stick.

[…]

There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility of interpretive depth that they repel every attempt to give them value or meaning. These are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel the imagination. But I also believe we have a responsibility to confront them, because if we don’t, we risk becoming complicit in the very violence that creates them.

This is a very rough post and I want to revisit this, partly because I’m taking it a little out of context. Among the directions and emphases I want to take, this one stands out: Power makes you lazy. Likewise, efficiency makes you lazy; speed and control make you lazy; etc. More to the point, offloading and short-circuiting our imaginations makes us lazy. And, even more to the point — the point behind the point — we don’t actually get to choose when we are offloading. Imagination thrives on randomness, friction, and surprise. A controlled imagination is something of an oxymoron.

The circling attempts to define what I mean quite naturally invoke the Tao. But that’s also certainly because of something I read yesterday from David Walbert, who wrote about taboos vs Tao in our approach to technology. It’s a very thoughtful piece. But I don’t think he gets the Tao right. Specifically, I wonder if he smuggles in a rational approach to technology and calls it Tao. At the moment, I haven’t decided if that’s my misunderstanding or his.

To be continued…

A lot of random little things I read these days are prompted by my son grabbing a book off the bookshelf, handing it to me and saying “Dada read that one.” Thus I find myself reading Sven Birkerts this evening. What an absolute treasure of a mind to have sitting on your shelf just waiting to be revisited. When it comes to all the tech critique stuff, in terms of personal discovery timelines, Birkerts is my O.G. I’m pretty sure he even preceded whatever the first word I read from Wendell Berry was. (Keeping in mind that I only started reading books at all, and barely, and very slowly, about 15 years ago.) And he deserves a more prominent place in this anti-machine business.

The devil no longer moves about on cloven hooves, reeking of brimstone. He is an affable, efficient fellow. He claims to want to help us all along to a brighter, easier future, and his sales pitch is very smooth. I was, as the old song goes, almost persuaded. I saw what it could be like, our toil and misery replaced by a vivid, pleasant dream. Fingers tap keys, oceans of fact and sensation get downloaded, are dissolved through the nervous system. Bottomless wells of data are accessed and manipulated, everything flowing at circuit speed. Gone the rock in the field, the broken hoe, the grueling distances. “History,” said Stephen Dedalus, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” This may be the awakening, but it feels curiously like the fantasies that circulate through our sleep. From deep in the heart I hear the voice that says, “Refuse it.”

That was published in 1994.

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

— Hayden Carruth

Excerpt from the (real) mailbox:

Please remove me from your mailing list. After reading about the use of AI for the “depolarization dōjō,” I no longer wish to support Braver Angels. 

Thank you,

Forgot I had written that late last November and sent it off in one of those courtesy reply envelopes. I received email confirmation today that annual auto payments were stopped. I feel a little bad, but — as true enough generally — my seriousness outways my timidity. 

And I have to say, I feel a little bit like my hero, Hannah Arendt.

Yeats:

I don’t always judge books by the cover; I do judge them by the epigraphs (mostly just by whether or not they are there at all). Today: enthusiastically enthused.

^ The title of my next (unwritten) book 🙂

Stanley Hauerwas in the introduction to his 1998 Sanctify Them in the Truth:

So the invitation for me to do theology ‘straight up,’ so to speak, should be something I particularly welcome. Yet I am by no means sure those who wish me to do theology in a more straightforward manner will be happy with what they find in this book. To be given the permission to do theology is, at least for me, a frightening task. I am not sure I know how to do theology ‘straight,’ which means I may well disappoint those who think that if pushed, I will know how to ‘pay up’ theologically. It is not that I am just unsure how to do theology, but that even if I knew how, I am not sure I would want to do it. At least I am not sure I want to do theology the way many who bear the title ‘theologian’ do. I certainly have learned and continue to learn from those who do theology in a more systematic fashion than my work takes, but I continue to worry that such theology in our time cannot avoid giving the impression that Christianity is a set of ideas that need to be made consistent with one another.

Of course it is true that ‘all loci of theology are interconnected as nodes of an intricate web,’ which rightly requires theologians — in a manner not unlike that of spiders — to explore, repair, as well as, perhaps, discover new connections. Theology is always a matter of finding the interconnections in a manner that helps our lives not to be distorted by overemphasis on one aspect of the faith.…

That theology works like a web helps us understand why the work of theology is never done. Webs, after all, are fragile. They must constantly be redone. Theology can become a fascinating game in which the various loci are reconfigured by making one locus determinative for all the others. This kind of theology has been turned into an art form in Germany, in which every theologian is expected to produce something called ‘doctrine.’ Theology so produced can be quite impressive. It can give one a sense of ‘completeness,’ but such ‘completeness’ can be quite deceptive. Too often, I fear, this mode of theology provides answers to questions no one is asking. […]

… I hope that one of the ordinary reasons I do not ever seem to get around to doing ‘real’ theology is that I am a very simple believer. That way of putting the matter is not quite right. The truth is that I simply believe, or at least I believe I should want to believe, what the church believes. Believing thus means I never get over being surprised by what wonderful things The church affirms that at best I only dimly ‘understand.’ Therefore, I do not assume that my task as a theologian is to make what the church believes somehow more truthful than the truth inherent in the fact that this is what the church believes. One of the reasons, moreover, why I resist those who urge me to ‘pull it all together’ is that attempts to do so impose false unity on the wonderful anarchy of life called church.

(See also H. Frei and some previous “anarchist squinting.”)

Kimmy Sophia Brown:

Part coincidence and part inspiration following Jeremy Abel’s lead, I am also impressed by the cover art of a book.

La Saint-Jean by Jules Breton

I found that on the cover of Kimmy Sophia Brown’s collection of poems The Time Signature of Night. The title poem is written for that painting.

I often skim but don’t always read the acknowledgment section of a book. But man, Brown might have the best one I’ve ever seen:

I thank every person, every dog, cat, horse, cow, sheep, goat, pig, squirrel, chipmunk, vole, mole, dragonfly, mouse, whale, dolphin, jellyfish, roly-poly, bird, tree, flower, weed, vegetable, mineral, and stink bug l ever met or saw, and everything and everyone else too. I love you all.

I thank the most gracious and loving unseen helpers, the nature spirits and fairies, and the beautiful, sweet, divine Creator who thought of everything first.