connections – Pearl ●f Civilization

Interdependence, ex-vegetarians, crossing the streams.

March 7, 2011 sarah

Been thinking so much about being vulnerable with people and asking for help, while sorting through surprising and painful life changes. Noticed this old quote kicking around as a draft and liked it all over again today. It’s about food, but I’m thinking about feelings when I read the bit about not trying to get out of debt, not trying to be self-contained.

In his book Long Life, Honey In The Heart Martin Pretchel writes of the Mayan people and their concept of kas-limaal, which translates roughly as “mutual indebtedness, mutual insparkedness.” “The knowledge that every animal, plant, person, wind, and season is indebted to the fruit of everything else is adult knowledge. To get out of debt means you don’t want to be part of life, and you don’t want to grow into an adult,” one of the elders explains to Pretchel.

… This is a concept we need, especially those of us who are impassioned by injustice. I know I needed it. In the narrative of my life, the first bite of meat after my twenty year hiatus marks the end of my youth, the moment when I assumed the responsibilities of adulthood. It was the moment I stopped fighting the basic algebra of embodiment: for someone to live, someone else has to die. In that acceptance, with all its suffering and sorrow, is the ability to choose to live a different way, a better way.

— From The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, page 5.

Ex-vegetarian inspiration strikes again.

De-colonizing and Fair Isle knitting.

September 28, 2010 sarah

Keep Abortion Legal sweater by Lisa Anne Auerbach (2006).

These are old notes from 21 February 2009. I said I had lots of ideas and then didn’t say what any of them were… I think they were mostly about working with explicit symbols and words using Fair Isle techniques, like the LAA sweater in the photo (which uses Norwegian patterns, I think, not Fair Isle).

I just read several knitting books and several anti-colonial books at the same time, and I have all these new ideas about my own knitting. As happens when you read different topics at the same time, I found where they overlap and connect. An example.

From Michael Pearson’s Traditional Knitting: Aran, Fair Isle and fisher ganseys, 1984.

Pages 121-2.

[The Shetland Islands] lie to the north east of Britain and are in fact closer to Norway than mainland Scotland. … The inhabitants owe their heritage to the Norsemen who settled there in the 8th and 9th centuries, living under the patronage of Norway for over 500 years before the influx of Scottish mainlanders in the 13th century. Norse influence then began to fade and ended with the sale of the islands in 1496 by Norway to the Scottish Crown.

From this date right through to the present day the history of the inhabitants has been one of ruthless exploitation— by the Stuart family till 1615 and then by the splitting up of the islands into estates run by rich immigrant Churchmen and landowners…

The two knitting traditions that had the most resonance for me were Cowichan sweaters and Fair Isle knitting, both affected by Scottish colonialism. The more I read about Scottish history, the more it seems like Scotland has been a volcano of settlers for hundreds of years. They can’t stay home. Why? I continue to read. I want to know more about how I ended up here, descended from at least five different Scottish settler families on Coast Salish territories.

But. Ideas I got from this round of reading.

Folk knitting history is patchy and there are many versions of events and stories.
Reading books by American and British people mostly involves serious denial about colonization of any kind. It’s almost a relief to read books about North American genocide, because at least the destruction is presented as destruction. I read one book about Fair Isle knitting that presented Norway’s sale of Fair Isle to Scotland as simply a “reflection of the fact that the island was by then more Scottish than Norse.” OK, author, but how did that happen?
Knitting has labour politics as well as the more discussed gender roles. I hadn’t thought much before about the history of underpaid cottage industries where poor people knit clothes for rich people, for peanuts per hour. It is still basically impossible to make a living wage selling hand knitting. Like gardening, it’s one of those subsistence activities that middle class people dabble in for leisure. Not sure what to do with that right now.
Again, being a folk art, patterns and ideas spread whenever one crafter meets another (or even a craft). It sounds like Cowichan spinners and weavers were keen to pick up knitting from European settlers and missionaries, just as crafters. But also, English style knitting (yarn in the receiving hand) was taught in residential schools as a “civilizing” domestic skill, sometimes to produce items the school sold for profit. I want to find out how Turkish style knitting (with the yarn around the back of the neck) ended up in the Andes, when by the time of colonization I think Iberians were knitting in continental style (yarn in the loading hand). So far I haven’t found a resource that has both crafty knowledge and awareness of colonialism.

Plant dyes, having a smell, odourlessness in general.

July 20, 2009 sarah1 Comment

Lump indigo (blue)
Old recipe from Outer Hebrides

Boil wool with onion skins till clear yellow, then let wool dry. Have an old pail filled with urine at least two weeks old, or until skin forms on top… Put lump indigo in a muslin bag, heat the “bree” by placing a hot stone in it. Squeeze in the blue bag. Wet the wool and place in the liquid. Cover the vessel and place where it will keep warm… For navy blue, 11 to 21 days are required. Fix with boiled sorrel roots as rinsing water.

— Dye Plants and Dyeing, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, 1964.

Books about natural dyeing have a lot of lore I hadn’t foreseen. So many smells! Boiling weird fungi, soaking fiber with onions (“It will take at least four washings to eliminate the odour”), fermenting urine. One book detailed an argument between the author and her editor about whether traditional Harris tweed, dyed with lichens, smelled “musty” or, less judgmentally, “earthy.” I had no idea that tweed used to have a smell. I am fascinated by this, and want to dye all my clothes with different plants to get to know the smells.

Why don’t I expect my clean clothes to have a smell? Not a laundry scent, but a part of their nature. I can remember talking about the smell of my clothes like a normal thing, all the time. Wool sweaters smell sheepy if I get wet in the rain. A couple of weeks ago I told someone (who?) that I liked the smell of raw silk, because I was knitting with a silk blend yarn. I can recall the scent of cotton in my mind’s nose: wet, dry, or hot. Why did I still think of clothes as odourless?

Heather wrote once (or maybe we spoke) about why people are so obsessed with genital odours. Do they smell right? Do they smell too strong? How to keep the smells in control? She suggested that this was partly because we have come to expect the entire rest of our bodies to have no odours at all. Healthy hair, feet, armpits, mouths, and skin in general all have smells, too, but between washing and deodorizing they’ve been redefined as ideally odourless. It’s total fantasy, bodies still smell, but we expect odourlessness. (Like my clothes!) Compared to that, genitals are almost getting smellier by contrast.

Thinking about the more familiar politics of body odours makes me even more interested in knowing what smells are required to make the colours in my clothes. These plant dyes seem like an opportunity to make experiential connections, to know things by observation. To have know what clothes smell like and why, instead of not knowing what shocking petrochemical smells are happening at distant textile factories. It feels grounding. Educating my mind’s nose. I have some pondering to do, regarding wood smoke and other smells that have been banished from modern, civilized, classy life.

I think I will start slow, though, with tea and lavender dyes. Fermenting a bucket of my own urine is going on the “someday I will peek behind this curtain” list along with attending a pig or goat slaughter. Someday.

Unyeasted bread, quests.

July 10, 2009 sarah1 Comment

Unyeasted breads have a deep, hearty, honest spirit with a certain substantial integrity. Dense and thick-crusted, they require a good bread knife for cutting and a certain endurance for chewing…

No matter how much I mentioned the dense, “bricklike” nature of some of these breads, still I received many letters from people wondering why the bread came out of the oven like a piece of building material. O.K., they are not to everyone’s taste, but some people really like this sort of thing: “How real,” they say, “How flavorful.”

— Edward Espe Brown in The Tassajara Bread Book, 25th Anniversary Edition

I’ve been finding a lot of inspiration in a particular kind of far-out food book. Not dietary inspiration; something like philosophical inspiration. Emotional inspiration? Attitude inspiration. The connecting thread seems to be authors who used to practice more extreme diets. Former vegans, former macrobiotics, former hippies. Some of these books have consistent ways of respecting radicalisms and moderations at the same time, finding another level of inclusion where you get the thorough, grounded ethics of radical thought without the isolating righteousness. I find myself re-reading bits of non-content like the introduction to a recipe, just for the tone or the attitude.

Does that Bread Book passage do any of that for anybody else? I know I’m reading the way I need to read.

This is helping me rename a personal communication quest that I’ve been naming and renaming for, I don’t know, fifteen years? My teenaged fixation was how to be honest and also nice (both in the sense of liked and in the sense of kind). Later it was how to have a critical analysis without alienating people who don’t. How to be compassionate without self-censorship. How to make space for differences without them being cast as disagreements or negativity. How to maintain boundaries without being judgmental. Consideration without passivity. Empathy without enabling. Belonging without conformity. How to make connections across differences. All of these draft mission statements have been discarded or modified, but I’m getting somewhere. I want to joke that it wouldn’t be hard to be both more honest and more kind than teenaged me, but that isn’t true. It has been hard!

Flipping through a chapter called Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat that kept me up late last night, I have totally failed to find a quotable section. I started just collecting words. “Much depends,” “life and death and life,” appreciation, reflection, mistakes, “not so easy,” “Plan B,” courage, “emotionally spent,” responsibility, “more directly involved,” experiments, clumsy, “I’m very curious,” “our memories diverge… isn’t memory funny?” Vocabulary for a big, thoughtful mess.

Who said that keeping up with fashion is the ultimate way to create anxiety? Connecting people in a big mess seems like the opposite to that. Seeking ways for many fashions to co-exist together is comforting and useful. So I guess that’s the communication quest for now. It must seem like this is too abstract to possibly be useful in my real life, but I bet I will refer to this in the next 24 hours, trying to explain a decision or action to someone. “It’s like the unyeasted bread! I know how to do this!”

Survivalism as if self-sufficiency is an illusion.

April 9, 2009 sarah1 Comment

How do I protect [my disaster supplies] from the unprepared and desperate have-nots if I don’t already have a fort-knox style bunker?

Obviously the first priority will be to avoid conflict in the first place, if possible. The cause of conflict in your question was a shortage of supplies, and the potential aggressors are disorganized. So the easiest way to avoid conflict in that case is to make sure that there are enough essential supplies to go around for your neighbours. . . . That’s why I think that community sufficiency is much more important than just self-sufficiency.

— Aric McBay on Strategies for shortages, from In The Wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization

I often feel self-conscious reading (and liking!) a certain type of anti-civilization literature. I’m trying to come up with a concise way to explain the appeal without just making a joke out of it (crazy survivalists!). Part of it is this struggle to take care of oneself in a cooperative way. The whole anti-civilization argument, at least from the people I’ve been checking out, comes from the premise that civilization makes cooperative self-care impossible, because the civilized are always destroying and overshooting their (our) landbase and depending on imperialism to survive. It’s that situation where one competitive person can ruin a whole group’s attempt to use cooperation and consensus.

So there are a whole lot of ideas in there about resisting a hierarchical, destructive culture without creating a new hierarchical culture in its place.

Douglas Rushkoff on individualism and disempowerment.

April 8, 2009 sarah

Another affirmation that cooperation can be more empowering than only looking out for number one, this time from economics and media theory. This is Douglas Rushkoff in his opening invocation at Personal Democracy Forum 2008 (transcript, video/audio). If you’re going to listen to a whole presentation, I prefer his similar 56th Annual Korzybski Lecture but I couldn’t find a transcript of that one.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle— independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

The Enlightenment— for all its greatness— was still oh, so personal in its conception. The reader alone in his study, contemplating how his vote matters. One man, one vote. We fight revolutions for our individual rights as we understood them. There were mass actions, but these were masses of individuals, fighting for their personal freedoms.

Ironically, with each leap towards individuality there was a corresponding increase in the power of central authorities. Remember, the Renaissance also brought us centralized currencies, chartered corporations, and nation states. As individuals become concerned with their personal plights, their former power as a collective moves to central authorities. Local currencies, investments, and civic institutions dissolve as self-interest increases. The authority associated with them moves to the center and away from all those voting people.

(Emphasis mine.)

I really notice the undefined “we” in that speech. He is expecting to be heard by people who take European history as their own history.

Interconnected quotations about interconnection.

April 7, 2009 sarah

‘Individualism’ is not to be mistaken for freedom to choose moral, political and cultural alternatives of one’s own making. Each person is expected to operate ‘individually’ but in more or less similar ways and similar directions. . . . ‘Individualism’ in the United States refers to privatization and the absence of communal forms of production, consumption and recreation.

— Michael Parenti quoted by Alfie Kohn in No Contest: The Case Against Competition

This is so similar to the quotation from yesterday, about how disabled people often define independence.

A disability activist perspective on independence, and on working less.

April 6, 2009 sarah1 Comment

“Professionals tend to define independence in terms of self-care activities such as washing, dressing, toileting, cooking and eating without assistance. Disabled people, however, define independence differently, seeing it as the ability to be in control of and make decisions about one’s life, rather than doing things alone or without help.”

— Michael Oliver quoted by Sunny Taylor in The Right Not To Work: Power and Disability

I looked up Sunaura Taylor after enjoying her discussion with Judith Butler in the movie Examined Life. They talked about walking as it related to disability and gender issues, and about the politics of helping each other and asking for help. At one point they stopped into a thrift store to get a sweater for Sunaura, which was suddenly revealed as a Queer Eye make-over scene such as I have occasionally wished for. Queer shopping with politics intact; it was quite beautiful! I had a little thrill, there in the cinema.

Part of the thrill was seeing the two of them act out an interdependent version of shopping, with Judith helping Sunaura try things on and the store clerk adjusting her usual check out techniques. It was very clear that all of the people benefited from working together, and it was also clear that to accomplish that they had to work outside of usual store policies and etiquette expectations.

I have been finding affirmations of interdependence in a lot of different sources lately, and they really cheer me up. I’m hunting for ways to resist competition and hierarchy without resorting to competitive tactics, and in the meantime it is very encouraging just to watch people cooperate within structures that are set up to facilitate competition. Life affirming.

Taking a different angle on accepting all of us instead of competing to find the winners, here is another quotation from that essay. This is especially for Erin and anyone else who is into working less.

The right not to work is the right not to have your value determined by your productivity as a worker, by your employability or salary… What I mean by the right not to work is perhaps as much a shift in ideology or consciousness as it is a material shift. It is about our relation not only to labor but the significance of performing that labor, and to the idea that only through the performance of wage labor does the human being actually accrue value themselves. It is about cultivating a skeptical attitude regarding the significance of work, which should not be taken at face value as a sign of equality and enfranchisement, but should be analyzed more critically. Even in situations where enforcement of the ADA and government subsidies to corporations lead to the employment of the disabled, who tends to benefit, employers or employees?

One more, because I really like this question:

The minority of the impaired population that does have gainful employment are paid less than their able-bodied counterparts and are fired more often (and these statistics are more egregious for disabled minorities). To ensure that employers are able to squeeze surplus value out of disabled workers, thousands are forced into dead-end and segregated jobs and legally paid below minimum wage (for example, in the case of “sheltered workshops” for those with developmental disabilities). The condescension towards the workers in such environments is severe. Why should working be considered so essential that disabled people are allowed to be taken advantage of, and, moreover, expected to be grateful for such an “opportunity”?