Dark Mountain 3 & the Paradox of Civilization

The new Dark Mountain, Issue 3, is loaded with interesting ideas, writers, and art & I'm excited to have 3 poems in it. The art of holding conflicting ideas in the mind: unfortunately civilization is headed for a crack-up of epic proportions, but on the other hand, poems in print!

In Chicago last week I walked around the Armitage-Fullerton-Lincoln Park triangle taking pictures and admiring the beautiful houses and growing garden culture. The sedums and sages in the formal garden by the conservatory have honey bees all over them -- who's keeping bees? I want to talk to them!

The "blue angels" military air show raged overhead, burning jet fuel, making a huge noise, causing dogs to howl and babies to burst into tears. How can you not love this civilization of fountains, conservatories, gardens, diverse people taking picnics to the park? How not be horrified by our wastefulness -- wasting jet fuel, enticing young people to the military, and creating sonic booms -- as entertainment?

Bookman's Alley

Bookman's Alley in Evanston was the greatest bookstore around Chicago... on trips to the midwest I always made a trip up there to browse the vast stacks and inhale the special aroma of literature, local history, printing press, wool blanket, and bison skull that permeated the place. The owner had announced that he was selling off his inventory and closing up shop in the spring, and it seemed the time to visit had passed. When I was in Evanston on Monday for lunch we stopped by Bookman's Alley and found it locked up, but the young woman working in the frame shop opposite told us that he had been open over the weekend. It seems like it's still possible to visit, though I don't know how much of the inventory is left. Well worth a trip, last chance to see, carpe diem!

My best find there was an old copy of H.L. Mencken's The American Language. A treasure.

Excitement in the Bee Yard - Requeening

We are requeening our hives using Steve R's no-kill method. On the right, the Big Purple hive and the new purple nucleus hive. The nuc. hive contains the new Russian queen from Olympic Apiaries, along with ready-to-hatch brood and a lot of young workers from the Purple hive, and honey. Later in the summer we'll combine the two hives, with the nuc. hive and young queen on top.

On the left, the combined Blue swarm hive and the Pink hive from which it originally came.We are recombining the two so that the young queen in Pink can be the queen of the whole colony. Right now there's a double-screen board between the two colonies, but in 2 weeks we'll remove it and spray with syrup and Honey-B-Healthy to make them all smell the same (yummy) and stimulate feeding, grooming, and good vibes.

This method allows you to requeen without killing the old queen, or even finding her. Putting the new queen on top and making sure she has lots of workers and a strong colony on her side seems to be the trick.

preparing for collapsatopia...

At my house we talk about What To Do in preparation for the big crash, the Collapse of the Economy As We Know It. Which we assume is not too distant; maybe next week like JH Kunstler is forever promising, or maybe next year, or maybe somehow not for ten or fifteen years.

Our bees got through the winter pretty well and had a big population build up in March and April. When we took off the bottom board it was easy to see the mites that had dropped during winter, and I started noticing a lot of dead bees under the hive and bees unable to fly because their wings were mis-shaped or missing.  Decided that we should treat for mites, and still not wanting to use chemical treatments I decided to go for the powdered-sugar treatment. A few bees inevitably get crushed when we start moving boxes around, but the bees seemed okay with the sugar treatment -- their first reaction looked like "hey, what are you doing?" and the second one seems like "oh, it's sugar...sugar is goood!"  It took them just a few minutes to calm down after we put the hives back together -- they all were inside grooming each other and knocking off mites and putting away some of the good stuff. Though I'm not happy about the cornstarch in the sugar -- undoubtedly GMO corn as even I am not insane enough to use organic powdered sugar to dump by the cupful on my bees.

This patch of  moss is growing in a giant chain which is turning to rust at Maury Island Marine Park.

A Tale for Middle-Aged Women

One is tempted to call Lolly Willowes a fairy tale, but that implies romance, which it has none. Ursula K. LeGuin mentions Sylvia Townsend Warner in her essays, and quotes her at the beginning of the lovely story"The Poacher." It took a while, but I have fallen into Lolly Willowes -- a perfect book to discover in one's fiftieth winter. Here's a favorite passage:

All day the wind has risen, and late in the evening it called out to her. She went up to the top of Cubbey Ridge, past the ruined windmill that clattered with its torn sails. When she had come to the top of the Ridge she stopped, with difficulty holding herself upright. She felt the wind swoop down close to the earth. The moon was out hunting overhead, her pack of black and white hounds ranged over invisible quarry. The wind routed through the woods. Laura from the hill-top heard the different voices. The spent gusts left the beech-hangers throbbing like sea caverns through which the wave had passed; the fir plantation seemed to chant some never-ending rune.

(135-36 in the Cassandra Editions edition of 1979).

Apparently this part of Buckinghamshire in the Chilterns is now quite suburban -- the wildness that Laura encounters in the novel has perhaps been dispersed. Was there ever a village truly called Great Mop?

Realism or Nostalgia?

My students -- most of them born around 1990 -- view the continual proliferation of electronic devices, access to information, instant communication, and incessant downpour of ideas, images, memes, and phrases from all these devices as normal. They expect it to continue. They expect that the information will continue to rain down, heavier and heavier. The mass media, and especially the internet media, continually promise faster and more complete access to information.

I see the current info-spasm of our civilization as a self-limiting condition, an aberration from the human norm. It seems as sustainable as a metastasis, and about as desirable. I anticipate a collapse of energy, of access to information, of complexity. The Transition, the passage Down the mountain.  I don't think that the survivors will be carrying cell phones in 50 years.

So, which of these views is realistic?  which is nostalgic? 

Jane Smiley Rocks

Jane Smiley is one of those writers I just can't get enough of -- her style conveys generosity, humor, intelligence, and a faith in the reader's ability to be all of that as well. Rereading Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel, which once again makes me want to read all the great novelists I haven't yet (I've read hardly any Dickens; a huge oversight or a deferred pleasure) and also to return to my five unfinished novels and make something of them.  I want to know how she moved from writing Thirteen Ways to her next published novel, 10 Days in the Hills. 

Dark Mountain Issue 2

Yes, I'm a Dark Mountaineer.  Someone said in the Guardian that he wasn't "climbing the dark mountain..." Which misses the point of the Jeffers poem: we've already climbed the mountain of civilization, and now we begin to stumble downwards, in the dark. Today's economic news shows the point.

Dark Mountain aims at a re-thinking of the paradigms; not collapse, not apocalypse, not the end times. Rather, how does an unsustainable global civilization come unglued, and how might human beings respond to that unraveling --  creatively, psychologically, practically, spiritually?

A highlight of the new issue is Vinay Gupta's "Death and the Human Condition."
"Over-consumption and aggression to the planet and other people cannot go on indefinitely, and we with either transform or crash, but the age of the mall-dinosaurs is over and living in the truth strips out the lies. It does so without any bold statement, with no advert in the papers proclaiming that the end is night, but with the gentle and gradualist refusal to acknowledge other people's social fictions around consumption. It is the least we can do....

...We live in a culture which as made birth relatively safe, sex less mysterious, and death largely invisible, yet still from all three timeless points, the numinous shines.
   So, too, there is a strange numinosity around the death of capitalism, the survival challenges we pose the ecosystem, and the green shoots of a new culture which ache to climb the wreckage, and instead find themselves shadowed by dead-while-standing oaks."  (Dark Mountain, Issue 2, 78).

More at www.dark-mountain.net