Things Fall Apart

   

 

So, just look at these pictures for a moment.  They're from an ordinary, behind the house gritty place, where one broken gutter spits out its deluge, pretty often this summer. Much of the water I harvest in two large buckets, for dogs and critters and tomatoes, not that the plants need much extra this year.  But look at the bits of that red clay pot.  Bits, certainly, scattered.  How did that happen? I didn't, in a fit of rage against the redness or the clayness or the potness of the red clay pot, shatter it and cast its broken shards behind the house. Take that Ceramic!  No.  I vaguely recall a broken pot, maybe broken in two, tossed back there, but then... I don't know its ongoing material history.  We'll circle back to this.

Two other forms of decay in my yard.  Well, two I'll admit to today.  Here in this next picture, if you can see my Paint red outlines, are two flecks of a plastic bag, an ordinary grocery store bag, one of those that claim to be bio-degradable. Why is it here? It isn't just that the dogs shred everything they find, and I do let them delight in making one cereal box into 27 bits of trash to pick up, but bags left in the world outside come apart.  I once asked a chemist friend what became of such flecks of plastic, what the smaller pieces devolved into, what chemicals finally spread themselves invisibly into the soil, but he didn't know.   

Last year I got to the Boonville RiverFest, held in the Isle of Capri parking lot, after many of us participated in a Missouri River Relief clean up.  At that event, besides much music and many booths, a friend of mine dressed up as The Plastic Bag Monster, to give a good visual of our individual impact, in terms of just this one commodity:    
     

 

It was a blistering hot day, so The Monster didn't exist long, and Jan didn't get heat stroke.  

The plastic bags themselves?  Well, harder for me to figure out. The State seems to be fighting about this just now--the Legislature proposing a bill to prevent localities from banning plastic bags on their own, the Governor vetoing said bill, bitter arguments in the Tribune...  And so it goes...  I'm not much for plastic, but on a contrary note, sometimes I wonder if it's better to just make and trash mountains, absolute Everests and McKinnleys, and an Olympus Mons or two, of plastic and Styrofoam and 2-liter bottles and old toothbrushes, and all the other useless stuff we make from petroleum.  It's a huge waste to turn petroleum, this amazing resource, into frivolous, disposable trash, when dwindling reserves of hydrocarbon will be needed for legitimate industrial chemistry in 500 years, when folks may likely have to start from far less efficient bases.  However, "fixing" all this petroleum, on the scale of Wall-E waste, instead of burning it, at least keeps more CO2 out of the atmosphere.  I think.  

But then, I don't know all the details of the manufacturing process, don't know what gases are released, how much CO2 is added to our apocalypse in transporting all that stuff, and certainly still don't know what happens when this all slowing decays.  We aren't on the 500-year plan.  Alas.

One last pair of yard pictures.  


                                     

Here, two plastic buckets, once I'd guess holding pickles or brownie mix for a restaurant, and rainwater/dogwater for me, now, uh, past their prime.  After enough years in the weather, they are brittle and breaking apart.  That blue plastic pool, until recently the goldfish abode, is at the early stage of that--brittle and cracked at the base.  And if I can't epoxy and duct tape it for one last round of use, it will join the two previous pools that brittled and brittled, and finally took their own joy in becoming thousands of sharp blue and purple triangles, dog-crunched and scattered, and still turning up in the yard, years later.
       
Ok, so this talk of broken pots and brittle buckets isn't world-quaking in itself, though it leaves me with a lot of questions.  That's the thing--it's both hard--and necessary--to keep the curiosity of a six-year-old, all the way, all the way to the end, even if we do all live to be 125, which is my current plan.  And it's more than just getting questions answered. No doubt I could find an archaeologist just down the road who would stare at me like I'm stupid, and if in a charitable mood, assign a grad student to explain weathering and frost-freezing cycles and the way artifacts like clay pots come apart and move "on their own."  And somewhere, there's a highly technical study of the chemistry of plastics, which I could perhaps find on the web, though I'd still need "translation" help, despite long ago, briefly majoring in chemical engineering.  
   

http://mms.businesswire.com/media/20130530005473/en/370903/5/Singapore_Chemical_Plant_Expansion_photo.jpg 

Always questions, yes.  But that questioning has to be met with a way to find answers, and it's the way, not the answers, that we should talk about. Yes, for help with my naive questions about plants and birds, I happen to know Matt, and even though he's moved from the blissful heart of the world, Missouri, to the Grendel-haunts of Minneapolis, I can still email my questions. Yes, I have a legion of fairly friendly ivory towers at Mizzou, just across the road from where I'm typing this (at the Berg).  Yes, I could ask for a show of hands of Ph.Ds at Lakota, my coffee haven, and wouldn't strike out on any day or hour at all.  I could access a whole other kind of knowledge at the D & D Pub, where even last night, Buzz was singing a version of "Country Folks Will Survive," and I know SCA folks who keep alive a downright and deliberate medieval skill set, down to authentic details of stitching 14th century slippers or making authentic chain mail. (They're the ones you'd want to know if there were ever a dramatic collapse.)  And I can read in many libraries, about anything, and I can surf like the Silver Surfer himself through the infinite reaches of the web.  Yes, yes, yes.

Not good enough.

Sometimes, Wikipedia seems like as ideal metaphor for how knowledge exists--unfinished, to a degree unstable, yet with accessible form, subject to revision, never univocal, and with a high degree of collective accuracy.  (On a side note, Wikipedia seems much like the shimmering kernel that could become the Library in David Brin's Uplift series--there, the Library offers universal knowledge, spanning two billion years, the vital link in a galactic civilization usually at war, in which the branch Libraries are both "valid" and subtly altered or limited by the politics of any given fleeting millennium...).

But more immediately, I'm trying to figure out how we know, how we can know in a more enduring, more wholesome way.  Not simply a reliance on experts--though yes, I love reading the science that's dumbed down enough for me to follow along.  And not just listening to the old man on the farm who knows all the local lore, if such old guys really exist now in great numbers (but do look at the Missouri Folk Arts Program, which finds masters of folk techniques, and nurtures apprentices...). 

                             

http://mofolkarts.missouri.edu/exhibits/artists/murray.shtml

Let us swerve into different discourse.  I asked Soren this unfair and out-of-context question, at our weekly theory chat, toward the bottom of the pitcher of IPA:  How do you think of knowledge--what is it--and how is it distributed in the world?  He went quickly to Foucault's "power-knowledge," especially how it works in relation to centers of authority, institutional, disciplinary. Those folks at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy say it this way:   

On Foucault's account, the relation of power and knowledge is far closer than in the familiar Baconian engineering model, for which “knowledge is power” means that knowledge is an instrument of power, although the two exist quite independently. Foucault's point is rather that, at least for the study of human beings, the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we control and in controlling we know. 

Scary stuff.

Soren talked more about knowing, as both relational, and as friction, that is, a disruption of relations, and as opening for change, for shifts in power.  And that is probably how knowledge is usually framed, especially with an academic flourish.

I'm wanting to push toward something different. Not knowledge as dependent on an expert who casts out pearls of wisdom.  Not knowledge spread as from a leaky bucket that empties out on us below (recall Paulo Friere's banking metaphor). Rather knowledge as both face to face, local, and invisibly distant (all our technologies, our stretched associations).  As a community of knowing, full of gaps and asymmetries, certainly, but a community where no one is excused for ignorance, nor rewarded for one-note specialization, no matter how profound.  We aren't headed for the old Romantic dream of an organic community--for we must be aware of how our threads of being are strained and linked far beyond any tight group. But we also can't leave it with knowledge-as-power, as privilege, never knowledge as personal or professional possession.  

Knowing as a state of being, one that expands, that grows, that alters.  With demands on the individual... Here's a fun quote from our own home-grown Missouri author, Robert Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.         Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988)  [see: Quotes ]

And demands on what we do with what we know, in ways that lead us to an ethics, to a different type of being, where the changed and more fluid boundaries of knowing become more porous identities. I suppose I'm working toward a form of knowing as a way of adapting and surviving in the Anthropocene--as a challenge to create something quite new, whether "mere anarchy loosed upon the world," or some "rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born"?  I'm thinking we need to be that rough beast.

* * * 

Sigh.  Seems like I'm a long way from being able to write a straight-forward essay anymore, and my friends know I can't tell a story without a huge, exhausting 'walk-about', any simple anecdote involving one character or another, a couple allusions to poetry, some strange I ate out of country, and a possum and probably a green meteor I saw out in the field...

                       

http://thestate.typepad.com/bradwarthensblog/images/possum.jpg 

Once we stop trying to jettison all the real thinking (the associations, whether poetic or practical, and what we once called digressions, but now term hypertext), even small, easy blog posts about a broken clay pot begin to sprawl and unfold and refuse to be small or easy.  It turns into such a messy process, and perhaps that's what the genuine essay was 'sposed to be, way back when (and maybe now).  The essay as closer to the way the world enacts itself--not Enlightenment, not modern, but linked, unfolding, unstable, frustrating, alinear, dangerous, glorious.  Turbulence in a stream, flickers in a bonfire, currents in a community of knowledge. 

later, bob