Stability & Turmoil

Human creativity varies in form and intention. It builds and destroys. Like much of our nature, creativity is morally neutral--a fact of existence, not a good or bad force but an unyielding, ever-present part of the landscape. Intellectual and artistic flourishing requires innovative thought, which is nurtured, influenced, and expressed in an extant environment. What sort of environment best serves our progress, our achievement?

On one end there is stability. In a peaceful, prosperous condition, society grows like layers on a solid foundation. I think of Pax Romana as exemplifying this side of the spectrum. For two centuries around the birth of Christ, from Octavian to Marcus Aurelius, Rome held the Mediterranean basin under its imperial rule. Its provincial system encouraged development in the peripheries, leading to the legendary road network, aqueducts, temples and arenas that constitute the empire's legacy today. It was an era of great literature and art, a time for people to write history and poetry. In hindsight, Rome's prime. 

Similar developments occurred across Asia under Mongol rule, during which the Silk Roads thrived. Post-war America has acted similarly, its hegemony ushering unprecedented technological advancement, material improvement, and widespread connection. Conflict and war surely existed during these times, but it was at the peripheries of these empires and at a limited scale. Huge numbers of people lived in guaranteed peace. 

But the cyclical, impermanent tendencies of life means these stable times are squashed between years of turmoil. And our prolific creativity is there during these chaotic years, too. 

The Warring States Period (475 BCE-221 BCE) is one of my favorite times in history. For one, it leaves me in awe regarding the scope of Chinese civilization; this was a relatively short stretch of political fragmentation in China bookended by thousands of years of dynasty, yet it lasted longer than the US has been an independent country. China is so old, its history so vast. This period in particular gives me a refreshing perspective on how short European/Western dominance has reigned. 

Though Warring States is notable for its tumult, it was simultaneously a time of landmark philosophical thought, agricultural innovation, and improvements in metalworking. Sun Tzu and Confucius lived and wrote, Daoism and Legalism entered the fray, social mobility was available like never before. Out of the chaos emerged the Qin dynasty, one of the shortest but most influential dyansties in Chinese history. Qin Shihuangdi created the centralized, bureaucratic state that runs China to this day. 

I don't know whether instability is the most fruitful environment for creative flourishing. I picked two circumstances that seem nearly opposite to me--I'm not sure what the data would show if one tried to correlate human achievement to social/political terrain, or if data could capture this abstract idea I'm circling around. I grew up in a very stable place; my home, school, friends, and interests were consistent and calm throughout my childhood. I think this has been integral to my disposition and development.

Everyone deserves to live in peace and prosperity. Unfortunately this isn't the reality, nor will it ever be. The hallmark of our species, though, is our remarkable adaptability, and people find a way to thrive under the harshest conditions. As Ibn Khaldun noted centuries ago, history is a cycle of order and chaos, and every Pax Imperatoria was built upon the novel ideas and inventions made during the preceding instability. There is always hope in the bottomless expanse of human ingenuity. 

Entries from the Bear Flag Republic

4/14/22

The grass in the yard is long and unkempt. Aesthetically, it may be inferior, but in terms of biomass--the grass itself is more, and its abundance supports more insects and beetles and spiders, more food for the birds, more life to go around. 

From the patio table I see swarms of gnats in the sunshine. I also see slightly larger creatures darting about within the swarms, feasting on the smaller diptera. Even these are no larger than a fraction of a fingernail. The natural ballet. I have no clue what these predators are exactly, but I see them gather and hunt until few gnats are left in those fluttering clouds. They then move to the next feeding ground. 

If given the opportunity, the predators will devour all the gnats until none are left. This I can see in real time. They don't have conservation techniques, long-term plans, food management practices. Supply and demand balance in the backyard ecosystem; if the gnat population declines, say from overpopulation of predators, so will the predator population. A self-regulating loop governs, enforces the balance. The scale tips too far one way and the consequences are morbid; bacteria will usher their own demise by colonizing every millimeter of an auger petri dish until nothing is left. 

The human parallel is evident here. What supposedly makes us more able to avoid the death-whiplash of imbalance is our consciousness. We can understand what we're doing and the consequences of those actions. 

Individually, we know. The problem is collective, though, and that's where my question is: 

Do we really have a collective consciousness? Does such a thing exist? Should we expect this from humanity, or is it an unfair, unnatural, idealistic burden contradictory to our instincts in this closed-system planet we live on? 

4/16/22

Traffic in LA is a hallmark of the landscape. It is everywhere, it is inescapable and completely enmeshed with the enormous city. But it's also a beautiful place dotted with lively and wonderful neighborhoods. A mosaic of Southern California knitted together by traffic. 

4/21/22

Saying goodbye is difficult. What I guess it means is that it was worth meeting, though. It feels tragic to part because the urge is to stay together--to keep those moments coming, to feel more of something that's been good. Is it worthwhile to develop a tolerance for this tragedy? To often say farwell? Only if one has faith that there will be more, many more, of those beautiful, magical offerings from the cosmos. A belief, a bravery, an optimism. Nothing can really stay; therein lies the miracle.  

I-10 W

I have no desire to enter the Pacific Ocean. I thought I did, before I arrived on its shores. Now, as I watch the frothing waves splatter against mussel-covered boulders lining the Ponto Beach jetty, cold wind and cold water spraying the sun-drenched California coastline, my desire has disappeared. The power of the sea is beautiful and intimidating in the way many great things are. 

The features of the American West are like this--grand, to put a word on it. My sister and I began to notice it as soon as we left San Antonio for our westward drive. The plateaus and white cliffs of the Texas Hill Country provide huge vistas just outside town. They invite travelers westward through a dry, rolling landscape into the fathomless desert southwest. 

In the Sonoran desert of Arizona, we walked under arboreal saguaro cacti dozens of feet tall and hundreds of years old. Evolved to thrive in an environment characterized not by lack of rainfall but lack of distributed rainfall, a place where the annual water supply pours from the sky only during summer monsoons, the saguaro skeletons are remarkably wood-like and their habitat remarkably lush for a desert. 

The chalky rocks turn into sand after crossing the Colorado River in Yuma, AZ. Wavy dunes are cut by canals ferrying water to thirsty cities and a black wall separating dust from more dust. Both projects look futile in comparison to their surroundings. The wind swirls sand constantly, littering it across the asphalt, the lonely buildings, slowly and inevitably covering everything. 

The desert ends amidst the piled granite rubble, towering mounds of enormous boulders looking like pebbles from afar, that comprise the eastern slopes of the Laguna Mountains. This side is fully in the rain shadow; not a drop of water is present in the area. Summit the cloudy peaks and the effect is clear. The land is scrubby chaparral as it races down to the Pacific, increasingly filled with people and palm trees until the continent ends and only water remains. 

The American West is newer in our national history and its features are raw: sparse populations dot an expanse of desert, coastline, true mountains, high plains, and evergreen forests, all unimaginably vast in their own right. This must have something to do with its grandiosity. The nature is big, and the people live under its glory. Humanity seems small here. 

Lost Rivers

When the bedrock of an area is comprised of limestone, interesting things happen. The Earth yields caves dripping with stalactites, pooling aquifers, sinkholes, bubbling springs, artistic features like pepino hills and natural arches. Water picks up CO2 on its descent from the clouds, making it acidic, which causes it to erode the calcium carbonate in limestone/dolomite into a pockmarked, Swiss cheese subsurface. These are called karst landscapes. 

The term was coined in reference to northeast Italy/Slovenia, a rocky region geologically similar to many locations around the world. The cenotes of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, the stone trees of Shilin, China, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and the Edwards Aquifer in South Texas, where my freshwater comes from, are all karst formations. The National Park Service says 20% of the US is a karst landscape and 40% of our groundwater for drinking is in karst aquifers. 

One of the phenomenon that happens in these areas is "lost rivers." Also known as "sinking creeks," "ghost rivers," and "disappeared streams," this is where a flowing current goes underground. The water descends into a swallet (as opposed to a sinkhole, which is any depression, a swallet is where water enters an underground system) before reemerging to the surface further downstream. 

These submerged rivers and labyrinthine caves are described by John Jeremiah Sullivan in Pulphead, an essay collection on the South from 2011. He mentioned how in the Cumberland Plateau, people had witnessed ancient tributaries cease in an instant, the limestone river bed suddenly collapsing upstream and sending the rush below. Any rational mind would see it as an act of God. I couldn't find any evidence of this actually happening so immediately besides his essay; I did find a story about a stream in Arlington, VA disappearing into a sewer pipe after a storm, though. 

The Texas karst landscape provides not only ample drinking water but also habitat for huge numbers of bats. As a result, Texas is home to 32 different species, the largest urban bat colony in the world (1.5 million under the Congress Ave bridge in downtown Austin), and the Bracken Cave colony, a nature preserve outside San Antonio with 15-20 million Mexican free-tailed bats. It's the largest gathering of mammals on the planet! Take that, Tokyo. 

The bats emerge at dusk above the permeable rocks into the fading sky. When they fly together from their roost, they form a chirping, immense black cloud, streamlined for a feast of mosquitos and insects. I often swim at that time in the spring and summer; I float on my back and watch them fluttering overhead, their jerky silhouettes in hot pursuit of pests and biters. I always wish the bats endless success in their evening hunt. 

American Oil

"There is no doubt about our absolute and complete dependence upon oil. We have passed from the stone age, to bronze, to iron, to the industrial age, and now to an age of oil. Without oil, American civilization as we know it could not exist"--Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior 1933-1946

I found this quotation in The Prize, a Pulitzer-winning monumental history of the oil industry first published in 1991. I don't think what Ickes said is an understatement. There is no modernity without oil--the two are more inseparable than we are with the internet, in my view. For oil, the reigning king of all commodities underlying the lives of us billions on the planet, is the foundation upon which digital technology rests. The hardware is not built without petroleum products, the software not developed without the churning wheels of an economy. 

That black substance permeates everything. It would be futile to try to list its products and their integral roles in daily life. I like how Ickes frames it as a tool, a technology akin to metalworking that defines human activity. Our collective knowledge of manipulating such substances is like a dense, irreplaceable nucleus. 

Shifting away from oil, as we are presently trying to do, is to usher in a new era of history. The renewables revolution is the largest undertaking humanity has ever tried: a concerted, global effort to revamp an engine of incomprehensible scale on the fly. This is hydrocarbon world. To call the task ahead enormous is laughably understated. 

One of my biggest takeaways from this book is how American dominance stemmed from our oil reserves. After the Civil War, this country industrialized like the Europeans & Japanese did, with coal fueling steam engines in locomotives and factories. But once the world's first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, American industrialization went to a new level. This denser, more-transportable fuel unlocked internal combustion, a superior mechanism with greater power and efficiency than any before. 

I find it no coincidence that the British and Germans had coal under their lands, and they industrialized first. The Americans and Russians found oil under theirs, and they ruled the 20th century. 

With this heavenly gift, the US catapulted to the top of the global power structure in short order. I was amazed to see how early the imperial powers of Europe came to rely on America as the enforcer of their colonial order. The sheer magnitude of this nation, supercharged by flammable liquid, was unparalleled well before WWI rolled around. Even by the turn of the century American industry, American oil, ruled. 

The story of oil in the popular imagination is a Middle Eastern one. In reality it's an essential American one, from the beginning to now, from when we were a dominant producer to a dominant consumer to a dominant producer once more. Oil and America define each other. The story of our country is a story of how oil changed us. 

Material Things

Most of us have too much stuff. The excess is detrimental to the health of our minds and our planet. Though consumption hasn't receded, there is a mainstream rhetoric highlighting the negatives of our vast accumulations; the minimalist self-care movement (really another form of the same consumer culture that got us to this point in my opinion, but not the point here). It's laudable to have less. But the demonization of things isn't the right mentality--the things themselves aren't inherently bad. Our relationships to the world around us is where the problem lies. 

I look around my apartment at my possessions while writing this. The z-shaped console my dad and I built from a plank of wood. The desk I work on. The nightstand I've had since childhood, its drawers and surface sanded and re-painted to fit my evolving style. My cozy sofa and tall stools and firm mattress. In the process of moving, I sometimes view these things as burdens weighing me down. I imagine I didn't have them; a world where I could move freely about without logistical obstacles. 

But these fleeting thoughts ignore the practical, daily, essential functions these pieces of furniture provide me. These objects reflect my individuality and history, ingenious creations with comfort and utility of the highest order. 

Minimizing possessions, decluttering, is a great goal. But this trendy view, popular among wealthy young people in wealthy countries, that the things are blocking true happiness, that its better to flutter about tied to nowhere and no thing, ultimate freedom attainable by rejecting material constraints, glorification and worship of the internal self--I don't think that's right either. 

I see this movement as an extension of Descartes' pervasive, misguided idea of dualism. Separating mind and body created a false distinction between human and nature, the outside and inside, me and not me. Advancements in biology and ecology and physics and chemistry and psychology clearly show this separation is nonexistent. Everything is connected. Diet impacts brain function, polluting the air and water is suicide, on and on. How we treat the world (including those material things we own) is effectively how we're treating ourselves. 

Dualism is how the balance was broken. Defining the self as an independent entity from the surrounding world leads to destruction on moral, environmental, and spiritual levels. 

These objects of mine--they ground me in the physical reality. They're mementos of where I've been and what I've done. I take care of them. I treat them with the respect I treat myself with. I use and enjoy them, and that's a good thing. I strive to have a healthy, loving relationship with my world. Viewing the physical world as inferior to the metaphysical isn't solving any of humanity's problems. 

If anything, these days we should be more rooted in the tangible reality. We have to see our surroundings as extensions of ourselves. Condemning everything beyond our fingertips as a distraction will accelerate disaster. We must rediscover the meaning of health. 

The Vietnam War

It's well established that America, the benevolent superpower, lost its innocence in the Vietnam War. This was the second time this happened. The first was the Civil War, but that was for the post-revolutionary nation. This was for the industrialized nation. A different beast. 

 

As someone who didn't live through our decades of involvement there, I had not understood what exactly that meant. I viewed Vietnam as one of the Cold War interventions this country undertook, one of the many bad, short-sighted plans with horrific ramifications for non-Americans. The biggest and most notorious one for sure, but in line with the coups and military dictatorships and civil wars and atrocities perpetrated by the US government. I watched Ken Burns' documentary series on the war. Now I think I get it. 

 

This was a war that made Americans question who they really were. The abhorrent brutality and utter disregard for idealized "American" values was public. Citizens were confronted with a reality where they weren't a heroic force saving the day but just another powerful empire ignoring liberty, human rights, justice, freedom, the supposed foundations of their political experiment, in the pursuit of control. 

I knew the war was vicious. But seeing how graphic the televised reports from the field were, film of the horrors of war, which despite the populous' fantasies American soldiers were just as capable of indulging in as any other group of armed young men in human history, I better understand how traumatic this was and is to the national psyche. Scenes of our people torching villages, piled bodies of murdered civilians, napalm-scorched children, were broadcasted onto the airwaves. Direct witness to the primeval violence that emerges in men during war.

Anybody seeing that devastation done in their name would feel the stitches of their society tearing apart. Especially in a self-righteous country like the US. 

The general ineptitude is another jarring aspect of the tragedy. Borne out of arrogance, the perverse military and political leadership through at least 3 administrations (Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy) raised damning questions. How could we logically reach such insanity? How could we fight a war like this, where Vietnamese body count is the metric of success? Does the government truly have our best interests in mind? How can we rectify war crimes undertaken by our democratically elected leaders? 

Without even adding in the other psyche-shattering events of the time (civil rights and Watergate), Vietnam was a monumental heartbreak that we have yet to recover from. 

I think a huge swath of the population concluded they could never trust the government again. In their view, backed by evidence, Washington lies and operates under the rules of power, not the high morals Americans hoped, believed, their country had. Lack of faith in our institutions came from a betrayal.

The war was a tinderbox that blew up our unity as a country. I'm not sure if the cynicism that now separates and individualizes us can ever be breached. The cherished ideas we strived to live by have become cheap, hollow of meaning, naive and ignorant dreams. After what we did to Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos), we as a body of people could no longer uphold any exceptional claims to dignity.

And if I were Vietnamese, I would say "damn straight!" That they bore the incomprehensible blunt of our internal roils, our ego, is profoundly unsettling. It's horrifying. A quarter of South Vietnam doused in herbicide. The rape and slaughter of innocents. 3+ million killed. Countless refugees, impoverished, shell-shocked, their lives and sanctity irreparable. Watching this series made me feel many emotions, but I think the dominant one is disappointment. 

All that being said, the poor teenagers sent to fight the war on this country's behalf are not the ones to point fingers at. Our institutions deserve the blame as they do for our similarly (though not as collectively traumatic to the US) disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. And as we Americans are the creators and upholders of our governance, the failures of our leadership ultimately reflects on us. We all share the blame. The Vietnam War is who we are. This is the uncomfortable truth.

The Noble Savage

The "Noble Savage" narrative is pervasive in human lore. I got to thinking about it after recognizing its presence in various places with different contexts; imperial conquests, ancient parables, academic fields. The premise is an unexpected depth of character in individuals of inferior, unremarkable background--the surprise being so because of ingrained prejudices of contemporary society, the righteous superiority of prideful condescendents, self-rationalization founded on shaky layers of twisted logic and close-mindedness. We may not use the same term nowadays, but the trope is thinly veiled across our stories too. First the person is framed as an "other," then their qualities are recognized. The initial assumption is a negative one.

I believe our enamoredness with tragedy plays some role in the popularity of this character. They're underdogs, hopelessly outmatched by a greater, more modern enemy. In their perceived less-fortunate circumstance and inevitable defeat lies gripping, enviable martyrdom, an innocence that is lost after the cocktails of power have been drunk. This sentiment is unavoidable when the powerful dominate the weaker, especially when the bullying is unjust and the bullied is undeserving. Guilt cowers not far from sight. 

This makes me think that, maybe, there is a universal shared instinct (apart from the mentally ill whose condition is horrifying because they lack it), a subconscious sense, that can respect admirable qualities in any person when shown those qualities. That there is a true goodness we know when we see. It transcends learned hatreds. It's more real than anything we create. 

The ultimate reason behind promoting diversity is this. It gives people the chance to see that there are no anomalous savages that happen to be the good ones. There's only people: people as varied as the world is infinite who should be viewed in the same, unflinching light, judged by their convictions and character before anything else. 

 

With empathy we should approach fellow man. 

Untitled (Russians man)

Life seems to slow around the holidays. We get a bit fatter and more content, and we check out to cruise into January. I feel that big time this year. It's ok. I'm riding the waves of the cosmic ocean instead of fighting them. 

I wrote something earlier about Leo Tolstoy, but I realized that wasn't what I wanted to write about. Not exactly. I wanted to write about a theme that stands out in his work; acceptance. 

Though I'm certain my understanding of him as an author is incomplete because I haven't (yet) read his monumental novels, I'm currently enjoying a collection of Tolstoy's novellas and short stories. They share the same characteristic realism that made him a legend, so I assume this idea of acceptance is present in War and Peace and Anna Karenina as well. The elegance and severity with which it is described has struck me. 

In what I've read, Tolstoy forces his characters to face the harsh realities of life, rationalize what they've experienced, then move on. Accept them. He walks the reader through the thoughts of these people, characters who elicit remarkable empathy due primarily to their relatability. They feel raw and nearly interchangeable with the reader. What they must grapple with are what we all meet in our journeys, eventually; love, death, betrayal, hope, pride.

 

I wonder why these parts of the human experience, quite literally the most common, inescapable, inevitable conditions in life, the fundamental emotions we share with all before and after us, can be so difficult to accept. I image this is because their true manifestations can clash with our notions of how they ought to be. When a fundamental belief is challenged by the facts, I guess, the foundation shakes. The first instinct is to reject reality--to assume what you believe, not what you see, is true. 

The ability to revise deep notions of the workings of the world, of how justice and the personal narrative play out, might be the dividing line between adulthood and childhood. It takes a mammoth excursion of willpower to overwrite an ingrained worldview. Maturity, it might be called.

Then, after experience teaches, the student must react with moderation, for the slope to pointless nihilism awaits. I think teenagers often slip this way before climbing back up to a plateau of reasonableness. It's part of the learning process. It's easy to extrapolate and discard all prior beliefs after witnessing and accepting a reality in contradiction to the world imagined before. Nothing is real and nothing matters because my expectations turned out more fantasy than truth. This view is unproductive but makes sense, to me, in the aftermath of a foundation-shaking realization. 

 

The process of acceptance, with its mental gymnastics and logical jumps, is Tolstoy's mastery. It seems very Russian of him to write about this; from what I know of that country, its culture has a distinct blend of romanticism and realism, a pedestal upholding a brutal history and lofty ideals side-by-side, exquisite ballerinas twirling in the sub-Arctic blizzards. Maybe it's a stereotype. But I get the feeling they place great value in their collective retention of beauty amidst acknowledgment of the harsh real world. The balance makes for a special people, and the balance is what Tolstoy's writing explores.

On Boredom

In a world of never-ending change, of infinite complexity and activity, the existence of boredom is a bit strange. Our time is limited and something is always happening; how could one get bored? The reality, though, is that we all experience tedious, unengaging, monotonous times. Underneath the dynamism of life is a repetitiveness that we quickly acclimate to, and in short order what was newly exciting becomes stale. 

I guess it’s a byproduct of the unbelievable computing power of the human brain. It recognizes patterns with such efficiency, it learns so fast, that near constant novelty is required for stimulation. And finding this novelty takes energy, creativity, and a level of discomfort that clashes with simultaneous desires for stability and safety and calm, a craving for the known. 

How one deals with inevitable boredom ends up being a defining trait. Tolerance of boredom is quantified as our “attention span,” basically an expression of how long one can maintain concentration on the task at hand. This dictates how we act and live: the sorts of jobs we take, the hobbies we enjoy, the depth of our relationships with the world around us, essentially what we like to do and how we fill our days. How we handle boredom, this weird underlying constant that inherently necessitates effort to avoid, is fundamental to our personality. 

A common refrain nowadays is that modern technology has destroyed attention spans, which has dumbed humanity down into a depressed, flaccid mess of confused individuals. At its core, the argument is that we’re more bored than ever, which makes us unfulfilled, despite and because of having easier access to nearly unlimited content. People can’t figure out how to feed their insatiable mind anymore. These sentiments have been taken to another level during COVID lockdowns. 

I’m not so sure about this. Without a doubt we’re more exposed to quick-trigger stimulants, flashing electronic lights and dopamine hits than our ancestors were. Maybe our attention spans are shortened. But I believe in the universality of boredom. I think it’s been present among humans since our first days on Earth, and that its presence has spurred our collective advancement. As long we’ve had these brains, we’ve strived to satisfy them with constant exploration and challenge. 

An ancient, extroverted shepherd whose livelihood demanded he keep watch over grazing ruminants all day, every day, watching the sun move across the sky in the quiet still meadows, must have felt boredom akin to what someone might feel today. A young, curious housewife obligated to stay home instead of in school must understand boredom regardless of what era she lived in. 

Maybe the scale of the phenomenon is larger than before, that more people are more often bored than during previous times. How to even begin measuring this is beyond me. But on an individual level, I think we ultimately face the same conundrums humans have always faced. We're more similar than different.  

I got to this topic while reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, a book essentially about boredom in contemporary life. He sets the story in just about the most bland, unremarkable place imaginable: an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois, a flat expanse of Kafkaesque bureaucracy and mind-numbing work. He humanizes the employees by showing how they deal with boredom—their inner thoughts, their interaction on breaks, their histories, their gossip, their hopes. In a way he valorizes these oddballs who do what most of us cannot, facing tedium head-on and conquering it. 

Wallace makes the reader grapple with boredom, too. He wrote a dense book with loads of detail on accounting and the IRS structure. Parts are difficult to get through. But this is the point. I think he wanted us to really feel what he was writing about, to grapple with it like his characters do and understand ourselves more fully as a result. It reminded me of ASAP Rocky’s album Testing in that both feel like a challenge from the creator to his audience to self-reflect. Both works grew on me over time as I recognized their interactive nature. 

I think it’s unsustainable to rely on external forces as a salve to boredom. The most infallible solution, I believe, is changing our own mindset about the whole thing. We can train our brains to focus, to find the specific originality of every moment we’re alive. We can’t really escape boredom, but I believe we can learn to embrace the oft-ignored details that make up life. Instead of settling into the familiar patterns our brains create, we can examine our lives in more minute and expansive ways. In these investigations we can find endless wonders.