Michigan Land Trustees Newsletter, July, 1992

UNEASY TRUCE

Sanity let us say, is like people packed in an automobile which is traveling downhill without lights on a dark night at terrific speed and driven by a four-year old child. The signposts along the way are all marked "progress". -- Lord Punsany

 
I am, I am, little Nero, sitting in front of the computer, obsessively and compulsively stuffing "chips" and salsa down my gullet while the New World Order burns. 35,000 people are starving to death today (everyday) while I check out Jack Nickolas' golf game on the display terminal. The caffeine in my Coca Cola props me up as I wash down Guilt 0' Plenty and work on a good case of prostate cancer, heart attack or stroke... think I'll try a five iron on this next shot...

I have traveled extensively in Kalamazoo and the stress and the horror of life in the last part of the 20th century here among the vision incarnate of left-brained technosycophantic carbide engineers sometimes gives me the idea I ought to put a shotgun to my head. Abandon all hope ye who enter here...

The unnamed force that drives us ever onward remains the unnamed.. .meanwhile the misty monoxide descends on the valley of our phantasmagoria as we build our foundation and our legacy on top of fossil fuels that we purchase with our bloodstained credit cards. Running in a somnambulistic state, away from ourselves, we call the momentum of the unnamed normal and dismiss all else as crazy...

 My neighbors though, as they do their running, wear an outer shell of "functionability" that I covet. With comparative ease, they go about their business, having settled for the "deal" long before me. They were issued a "rules book" I think, and remain a mystery to me...if we all end up in hell, I suspect they will understand the new "setup" better, and even have an occasional smile for the devil...

 No plan! No insight! No direction! No vision! No future! Social Darwinisms' finest hour. The torture, pain, misery, starvation, famine, murder, war, poverty, ignorance, racism, incest....ETC...ETC...ETC...goes on and on while the masters of misology rise like scum to the top, attempting in the name of "public service" to keep the end they are on "propped up".  Nice guys can't finish, sociopaths win...

 The few wise and truthful among us (in wealthy countries) have fallen below the level of court jesters, they are simply tolerated and ignored. In poor countries, they are dispatched quickly, without much of a fuss. Even Socrates would be trying to get hired over at the county. A glass of hemlock, served up by a government these days, doesn't go very far. Can't get much milage out o'a stunt like that...the unnamed is the "mother" all black holes, its gravitational pull impervious to any puny actions on the part of writers or philosophers...

Like an anaconda on amphetamines, undirected by any illumanati we can be sure of, the unnamed momentum, which has us so placated, mesmerized and hypnotized, winds through the nerve center of the wreckage we call the industrial revolution. The fission between man and nature is complete and total...

Still, mad dog artists, poets, and dreamers try to penetrate the armor of the "church of technocracy".  In their attempts they try and discover ideas which might set off a revolution in the human spirit, but they seem doomed to failure. ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! They go down like bugs zooming into a bug light.., fried and fallen criminal saints...

And I, sitting inside the electric eye of the hurricane, the engine block of the beast (accessible only to me by accident of birth) pick up my pencil from purgatory and compose this word ammunition, galvanized with soulsckness, and proceed to take aim. But where does one aim shrapnel of lucidity??? It is no damn good. It is just another "message in a bottle," cast out into the sea of the unnamed. And if I go on like this, I expect the real-politic-men, the business dweebs with ties tied tight, under worsening economic conditions, might mistake me for a wise man and drag my silly ass out into the street and have it out...

The call goes out... PRODUCE! CONSUME! COMPETE!. It is overwhelmingly dreary.. .be a part of it all! Grab a shovel and dig our grave en masse as we follow our worse instincts to the brink.., the ultimate sacrifice seems to be to go on living into a road warrior world with no safety zones.. .WORK! SACRIFICE! WIDGETS! GADGETS! GIDGETS! The march of the...Consumasaurs...

And I, an eco-slob with no answers for anyone, am aware that I am an integral part of the dynamic quo. A faulty part, no doubt, by the looks of things. All my time and energy is spent jockeying for position...overwhelmed and frightened by all the emptyness...

The flotsom and jetsom is crashing against the inside of my skull now... thinking is bad... I will get into my car and head to Sams' whorehouse. There among the pallets of products, the shelves of stuff, in the garage of goods, I will find peace. Like a good Roman citizen, I have tried to reduce, reuse, and recycle, hoping to atone for some of my corrupt environmental ways. But it all seems so hopeless, and I have grown comfortable. Death to the rainforests! Death to the ozone layer! Death to the dolphins! I will go create JOBS, and buy something new that I don't really need, and run away from my feelings...

 We have become addicted to and dependant on a nonsstainable society. The shithouse is almost full. More and more, it looks like mankind will only be a short lived experiment on a tiny planet on the edge of a small galaxy. Why? Why are we so alone, and stupid?

"How much more abuse from man can she stand?" -- Marvin Gaye

Letter to the Editor:

Maynard Kaufman has written a great resume of our present economic/political melee in the March, 1992 MLT Newletter. Whether his two-legged, partial economic solution is applicable to our present realities is questionable. At the same time Mike Phillips ends the letter with the question, "Does anybody out there write poetry anymore?" The article and the question are "synergistic".  Around 1800 the great cultural historian Giambattista Vico wrote a classical and revelatory paragraph in his book called The New Science. It goes like this: 

"But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human minds. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since man had made it, men should come to know." 

In short, man has always made his own cultures by means of his own mind. What Maynard reveals clearly is that we, our politicians, our economists, have not the foggiest of notions of how or why we have made and continue to operate a most ignorant political/economic system. This is true of all history as all cultures have failed-- the latest being communism. Vico then goes on to explain how it took him twenty years to understand how a culture gets started. He found the answer in the poetry of Homer, in particular the odyssey of the Greek king and crafty warrior Odysseus, which, again in short, dictated the direction of Greek culture and led eventually to the concept of democracy. Who are the initiators of new cultures? For Vico, it is the poet, which in Greek means creator.  "Sublime poets" he calls them, such as Homer.

Odysseus is the prototype of western man. He was the ultimate explorer of man and beast, land and culture. He was followed by Alexander the Great, Christopher Columbus, and now the engineers of our well named "Explorer", Which probes the cosmic heavens. Where did Odysseus end his explorations? By going home after decades of adventure to his patient and lovely wife, Penelope. Which leads us to the insightful poetry of T.S. Eliot: 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

What place? Home. What home? The planet Earth. The derivation of Maynard's poetic expression is homesteading. But there is more. Vico saw history as cycles, three cycles that all cultures traverse. The Age of the Gods, The Age of Heroes, and finally, ending in complete failure, The Age of Men... after which the cycle begins again. We are now living in that last age, The age of Men, where complete rational thought brings us to what can be best described as the "statism of bureaucracy" Exactly what Maynard describes as our present economic and political condition. Why can't we rationally figure out our culture and set it straight? Otto Rank, the psychological guru, explains. There is a clash "between the two worlds in which man attempts to live simultaneously, the natural world and the man made (Ersatz) world."  Hence, we live irrationally in a man made world that we think is rational but which is not. Hence, we live in a world of mental defectiveness where we do not know what in the hell is going on. And who can discern it better than our poetic T.S. Eliot:

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
Al1 our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. 

A new age is birthing. It needs a new name, a new poetic mythology. Maynard's new economics--or economics in general--needs a new name. He has asked for help here. So in the interests of having some fun, and helping poor Mike with his request for poetry, I am suggesting that we have two poetic contests with prizes (in case the profit motive is still alive).

1. Grand Ultimate name or myth for the new age
                                                                                      $200.00 Prize

2. Grand ultimate name for Maynard's new economics (if applicable)

$100.00 Prize

 Remember, these should be cultural names and not theological names-- unless someone should have a divine revelation. To reiterate Vico's insight, we don't know what God created but we should know something about what we create, "in our minds", that goes by the name of culture... or economics. So far we have not. Other clues: Christian mythology was mostly poetic. Communism and capitalism are rational forms of mythology called ideologies. They are dead or dying. "Spaceship Earth" does not quite make it as a poetic name. Gaia or Mother Earth falls short; the Earth is not, an organism.  And Maynard's original names by de Romana, "post-crisis equilibrium" vernacular informal economy" certainly are not appropriate nor poetic names forthe new economy. Maynard and I both studied under the same cantankerous divines at the University of Chicago some thirty years ago. We have all known for thirty years (Nietche for a hundred years) that the world needs a new poetic mythology. We have both worked hard at naming the new name without success. But we will not quit until our discoveries are over. In the good old American game of baseball, some strike out, some make a hit. The object is to get the hitters HOME. So there may be some poetic savant out there who will come up with a divinely inspired mythological message and hit us home. One might even become a renowned "histerical" celebrity if their poetry captures the popular imagination. It's your chance to become a "creator".  This is serious fun. HELP!

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

So: 

Write something whimpish
Or even impish
So long as it rhymes
With the times
Even something in yuppish

Joseph C. Filonowicz
Palm City, Florida
March, 1992

(Editor)ote: Poets and mystics are welcome to send their visions of the next mythos to the Michigan Land Trustees. Perhaps Joe, Maynard, and any other interested souls can sit down together and ponder any submissions some time this fall? Mean while, we'll push the contest in the next couple of newsletters and by any other means in hopes of a good response.)

Notices 

The MLT will hold a Permaculture Design Wcrkshop (planning for tree crops and useful perennials) on Saturday, August 1, 1992. The program will be at the tree farm of Dave Clairemont at 67659 29th Street, Lawton, Michigan, and run from 9 a.rn. until 2 p.m.

Featured will be renowned local nut tree grower Elwood Holton, and MLT Farm Co-manager Jon Towne. Whether you own a place in the country, or a city lot, there will be valuable information on design and layout for plants and trees and how they might best work for you. The fee for the workshop is $10.00, and that includes lunch. For registration or more information call Lisa Phillips at ******* or Dave Clairemont at ******

Palisades Watch is a coalition formed in response to the proposed siting of a high-level spent fuel nuclear waste storage facility at the Palisades nuclear plant in Van Buren County--150 yards from Lake Michigan.

According to the coalition, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is allowing Consumers Power Company to have concrete casks built to store spent fuel so that the plant can continue to operate. Since there is no repository for nuclear fuel waste in the nation as had been anticipated at the onset of nuclear power plants, the waste site may become permanent storage within one of the most fragile ecosystems of the world--the fresh water system of the Great Lakes. Moreover, Consumers Power, with the help of the NRC, may be trying to do this without allowing any meaningful public input. The coalition is committed to show that the people of this region will not accept a permanent nuclear storage facility, and that electric rate payers of this state will not indefinitely pay for the storage of this waste.

The call for poetry was answered. Swan Sherman Huntoon, as of late residing in Durham, NC, submitted a poem from his close friend and colleague Reuben Van Streuban--I think that's what his name is. For a while I thought that I lost the paper it was written on. (My desk occupies a corner tf the kid's playroom so I routinely sweep the typewriter for crayons and small cars, which explains how something sitting on my desk might end up at the bottom of a box of Lincoln logs.) Fortunately Lisa filed it away before me or the boys misplaced it.

Voices

The voices, the voices, the voices never cease
They tell me when there will be war and when to pray for peace. 
"We're kicking ass and taking names" , they say
"We're reaching for the top."
The voices, the voices, the voices never stop
They tell me when the market's up and when the dollar drops. 
"The economy is weak", they say
"We've got to spend, spend, spend."
The voices, the voices, the voices never end
They tell what's going on now and what's around the bend. 
"The polls show we're number one," they say
"We're really flying high!"
The voices, the voices, oh, the voices never die
The voices and the flickering lights, fill up all my days and nights
With their never ending chatter on what does and doesn't matter
And you know they never lie.
No, the voices never lie.
They never lie.

                                                                                                    --Scruffy Van Goethe

The next MLT meeting will be on October 11, 1992, at the Land Trust farm in Bangor, Michigan. Details will be included in the next newsletter. Thank you Conrad Kaufman for the lettering. Send more poetry.