I thought for a minute that writing this blog would be good for me. As I think more about it, it seems to be neither good or bad. Nobody reads it, so there is always that. I don't think it is any more helpful than shouting in a vast wilderness.

Vox clemantis in deserto.

Anyway, I feel semi-devastated this evening. But I'm an armor-plated motherfucker.

A question that I have been asking myself lately is: How much land does one need to live self-sustainably? How will one go about living if many modern conveniences and conveyances were to disappear or seriously diminish in the near-future?



I am not a 'peak-oil' alarmist or a collapse-of-society survivalist. I am simply concerned with the further existence of my current quality of life and that my quality of life adds to the slow destruction of the planet and its resources. If I can live simply and self-sustainably, it might help in prolonging the availability of resources to those who need them. That those in need might have adequate electricity, food, or medicine if we in the fat west weren't hogging it all. So, there is my impetus for making inquiries into a simpler lifestyle.

So I ask myself: How much land does a man need? I am thinking only incidentally of Tolstoy's great short story of the same phrasing. I say incidentally because in the end, Tolstoy was referring to the amount of cubic space required to bury someone. I am referring to life. But I suppose death is that great hovering inevitability that we constantly struggle against. Like gravity. But really, how much land? And how much work? And how much struggle? And with how many people? And and and.

I am inclined to believe that anything more than five acres would be superfluous. Were I one who wanted to not only sustain myself, but to also make a living from the land, more than five acres would probably be justified. But orchards, berry patches, herb garden, garden plots, and animal areas couldn't possibly take more than five acres. I am not thinking about fuel, though, either. I am not thinking about gathering enough wood for heat. Heat is an important element to consider up here in the Northeast, and it cannot be take lightly when considering self-subsitent living. But ignoring that for the moment, five acres is enough land (unless you live on a commune or in a communal situation - which is something I just thought about - then more is warranted).

I refer myself to Scott Nearing's classic "The Good Life" for small amounts of inspiration. Also Richard Proenneke's "One Man's Wilderness." Yes. More thinking. But it is always so much easier to think about something than to just go and do it. Always and without fail.

Over the past month, I have been slowly meandering through the first collection of Guy Davenport's essays, "The Geography of the Imagination." It requires of me a slow meander. The ideas and the concepts, the allusions and learned references demand more from me than I am used to. I am just a simply country fellow with no formal university education, so trying to keep up with one of the most classically learned people of the twentieth-century is quite an endeavor.

Anyway, I just read an essay on the American poet Charles Olson and in it, toward the end, Davenport quotes from Rimbaud's 'Une Saison en Enfer':

Si j'ai du gout, ce n'est gueres
Que pour la terre et les pierres.
Je dejeune toujours d'air
De roc, de charbons, de fer.

...or thereabouts:

If I have any taste,
It is for earth and stone.
I take for my meals
Rock, coal, and iron.

I first read Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' when I was in Eleventh grade. I read it, initially, to impress a girl who was parsecs ahead of me intellectually, emotionally, and in every other way. But I spied her reading Rimbaud and I wanted to have something in common with her. She would eventually leave the school to go to an alternative, gifted public school of the arts in the city where she would slowly, disastrously merge with the suburban-fueled city bohemianism and drug culture. I would see her years later at a hold-in-the-wall bar in Rochester and talk to her for hours about how she had fared in those several years. She still made references in French, but those words came from a mouth puckered and weary of a life lived at the level of pavement.

That was almost ten years ago.
I wonder where she is now, with her tastes for rock and coal and iron. I could only ever have offered her corn, Chard, and raspberries. No competition.

Say the correct things; be witty, thoughtful, and vaguely philosophical. Don't hammer anyone over the head with facts or subjects too profound for casual conversation. But don't condescend by avoiding subjects that might appear too profound for casual conversation. Avoid those conversations that may appear to be too casual. Allude to the weather only when it suits your mindset.

Speak enough to distract attention away from other troubling aspects. Allow your mind to be the main attraction. Allow everything within your mind and all those aspects of you that emanate from your mind to take positions in the front.

Never allow your subterranean thoughts to surface. Maintain them as nature maintains an untapped artesian well. Never allow your intentions to be recognized or guessed. Leave no trace.

Though you are a mountain, carry yourself like a knoll, or, even better, a common hollow or ravine. Again, leave no trace. Mountains cast long shadows, impose themselves against the sky, and seem persistent. The Earth's tectonic plates had to smash into one another to create the mountains whereas the slow, quiet retreat of glaciers left the knoll. The slow and silently steady course of long un-named creeks created ravines.

Be unique by emphasizing your commonality. Let your descriptive power create ubiquity.

Don't be too sad when you fail and continue to move on alone.

A message I will not relay: My flattery was actually sincere the other night. I think as highly and as well of you as I implied. Really, I think the world of you and often imagine myself in your presence.

A message more in-tune with how I communicate: We indeed are, as Sagan liked to say, the stuff of stars; your magnitude, however, is greater than mine and I could never hope to complement you as a binary.

The following words were lifted from my half-assed blog on Myspace. Few people ever read it, and now even fewer will.

dulce et decorum

The vast tangible intellectual wealth of this country should be stored in Upstate New York, far away from the areas so prone to natural (and popular) destruction.

Indeed - what more appropriate manner (dulce et decorum) for American museums, libraries, archives, and natural history collections to be treated than to fade away into neglected rust as has all of Upstate New York?

~~

harvest season, ii

Best to sow on distant property,
Best to raise it far from home
In other people's fields or, better yet,
To act as usufructuary in the confused ownership geographies
Of ravines and well-wooded creek-cut glens.

Best to keep all themes and topics as far away as possible.

~~

harvest season

As late Summer fades softly into Autumn, the helicopters are already
Flying low over the treetops and through the ravines and glens;
One has to wonder how pork belly futures are doing.

~~

...throw aways

Sir Edmund Hilary once commisioned an artist to create a honeycomb out of gold in the manner of the ancient Greek inventor/aviator Daedalus. The artist fashioned it and Hilary placed it in the garden, whereupon the bees instantly recognized the golden honeycomb as their own and immediately began filling it in with honey.

The Russian poet/translator Vladimir Pyast went 'stark raving mad' on stage in front of a rather large crowd while reading his recent translation of Edgar Allen Poe's 'Ullalume'.

The night sky this weekend was spectacular. The Milky Way was a long trail of high-atmospheric chimney smoke; the Pleiades Cluster was brilliant and clearly discernable.

~~

Fog sticks loosely to the tree-line;
The cool air settles along the smooth mounds between the deep plow furrows.

Another day of radio silence;
Lines of purple clouds on the horizon at dawn.

~~

again.

There are some who are astronomers most of the time. Or all of the time. One can use telescopes mounted upon imperceptibly slow gyros that adjust for the rotation of the Earth so that the unbearably distant objects of our interests do not fly out of our unbearably narrow field-of-view. Of course, many of us cannot afford such extravagances and must stick to the crudities of table-top telescopes designed for terrestrial use; telescopes weaker than Gallileo's own crudity. Others still must rely on the naked-eye and can only guess at those heavenly bodies that fill the pages of National Geographic or Sky & Telescope. Globular Clusters, Nebulae, Novas, Galaxies and Magellenic Clouds. With Celestial Charts in hand, they can only see what the ancient Greeks saw and make conjecture, divorced from the vivid realities the Greeks were able to utilize.

In a similar vein, imagine a comet hurtling across the Solar System on its predictable course toward pre-planned observation. Imagine a meteor or an asteroid in orbit between Mars and Jupiter - let us say Ceres - that wobbles on its irregular path and gives pause to Kepler's laws. Something along the line gets the shank and the aforementioned comet veers off its path and avoids the anxiously awaiting glances of those who had been expecting it. Even those heavenly bodies that promise a moment of joy away from the telescope swerve and elude us. The denizens return to their refractors and reflectors, their Dobsonians and their Cassegrains. And in the coming light of Dawn, those who never had such elaborate implements never knew what they missed.

~~

Of course, there is more to say about the various creeks that jump their streambeds and flow down muddy, stick-barbed floodways. There is more to say about the lamentations over dry streambeds and dying mosses in the shade clinging to still-moist formations of slate. But after heavy rains, creeks sometimes fail to appreciate the value of their paths, avoid the grand meander, and recklessly spill across thickets. Like fools.

Wedding ceremonies are on common ground with Civil War Re-enactments. Outdated and overblown. In this day and age, though, it is as if the Confederacy is in the ascendancy; with something like two-thirds of all marriages sinking like the Merrimack, the losers have the majority of the soldiers. What does that mean? Nothing, but fewer and fewer get to wear the brilliant blues of the Army of the Potomac. Or even the bright greens and reds of the Volunteer New York Zouave regiments.

It used to be that slow and quiet moments at work were what I enjoyed the most during the day. Times when the orders slowed to a halt like trains winding their way down a gradient. Or when the space of time between the inbound trucks was perfectly long; a spread in time that seemed to allow for the reading of entire essays and the release of thoughts in the aftermath to wander along the paths opened up by the essay one had just read. Of course, these 'free' moments are no longer so refreshing.



The slow and quiet moments are almost oppressive now. I cannot concentrate on reading. I cannot let my thoughts wander too far for fear that they may be lost if (and definitely when) something intrudes itself into my attention and forces me to move on from where I had been moored. Each moment is surrounded on its edges by anxiety and impatience. Something is always lurking on the horizon. No spectres, no enemies. Just happenstance. The mundane. Certain realizations.

I still have a hard time understanding the thirst for wealth that drives many people. It bewildered me when I was fifteen years-old and it bewilders me, still, more than fifteen years later. I do not understand the almost selfless devotion to corporations that many middle-managers feel. I do not understand what keeps those sales-reps and various salaried administrative-types glued to their lap-top computers for sixteen hours every day. Is wealth so important that you would compromise your very being to have it?

I was a bottom-feeder at one of the largest companies in the world. I was one of the millions of legs that moved the milipedal body of a massive transportation company. The world was promised to you and everyone was made to feel that they were important and respected. Except, in today's economy (and I do not mean that of the falling markets and financial crises) there are no promises and there is no respect. The first sign of profit distress, no matter how miniscule and how localized, will trigger an amputational reaction. Done. Expelled like snot in a flu-ridden nose.

So I watch these upper-level administrators and these upper-level managers and directors and I have to wonder what makes them believe they are different. Though, actually, I should start to wonder why it is that I am still in places where I see all of this. I should ask myself why I am still hauling boxes out of trailers and filing shippng manifests and not building cabins or stone cottages in the woods.

This afternoon, in the sky:

Clouds like hundred-year-old portraits of long-forgotten, unrecognizable
Family patriarchs.
Clouds like mountains received in dreams,
As if Lonely Mountains were miniaturized by David Caspar Friedrich.

At night the theories always work,
Before Morning's arrival it seems that
All is elegant.
Then Dawn,
When shadows lighten and Light
Obscures the equations.

~~~

Through fields like weather-shredded
Tarps stretched across a
Decaying roof
Below which red ants, Potato bugs, snails
And the most grizzled bleached weeds have
Settled.