Am I into anarchism?

I think so. Thank Urusula Le Guin and her novel The Dispossessed. Here are passages that capture the two planets of comparison:

Odo wrote: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart."

[...] There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a readiness to drop all care as soon as what could be done had been done. The old tag of “solidarity” had come alive again. There is exhilaration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, than all that tries the bond. (247)

vs.

Everyone was very polite and talked a great deal, but not about anything interesting; and they smiled so much they looked anxious. But their clothes were gorgeous, indeed they seemed to put all the lightheartedness their manner lacked into their clothes, and their food, and all the different things they drank, and the lavish furnishings and ornaments of the rooms in the palaces where the receptions were held. (83)

The motherbaby

 

This sculpture at the Art Gallery of Ontario made me think of the idea of the motherbaby, which I had come across in one book explicitly, but in many places implicitly.

The Geography of Memory

Poets are the best at prose. In this case the poet is Jeanne Murray Walker, who wrote a memoir about her mother's years with Alzheimer's and her own memories of a Midwestern, fundamentalist Christian upbringing. I really enjoyed this book, so much that I stayed up way too late multiple nights in a row.

309
She talks about metaphor. Her mother's ("Mother's") speech can be compared to the poetry of surrealists like Pablo Neruda, who "stuff their poems so full of metaphor that it's next to impossible to find a literal meaning." Accept the metaphor. Work with the metaphor.

263
On deciding which items will go with Mother to the care facility: "...I'm horrified by the responsibility of making these choices."

331
When she breaks free from Mother as a teen to travel to Peru: "The steep, husky, endless, snowy mountains gave me vertigo. I felt thrilled by the smallness of my own body and by the way the road ahead dwindled to a gray thread."

343
Watching Mother in a hospital bed after a hip is broken: "Watching is like hearing an alarm wailing, like an arrow slowly going through my heart."

319
A recounted prayer: "Life is short and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love, make haste to be kind, live without fear. Your Creator has made you holy, has always protected you, and loves you as a mother. Go in peace and follow the good road and may the blessing of God: Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, be with you now and always."

Wiki Friday: books, science, trends

Author of The Salt Path

I was trying to remember it, after enjoying the book so much. Raynor Winn – a memorable name. Her partner goes by Moth. Winn relays the story of walking the coast of England, after the couple have lost all their money and learned that Moth has a degenerative terminal disease. 

How happy I was that the book had been written. I don’t often see travel memoirs from people who are not just trying to save money, but who are truly poor. How is homelessness perceived when people are on a touristic trail, versus in a city? What role does age play?

I was curious if Winn had written another book. Indeed she has — The Wild Silence. From summaries I see it is about life after trauma and rewilding a property. 

More recently, and on that note, I read Wilding by Isabella Tree, which captures the challenges of attempting to return land to a previous state. It makes me think of neo-paganism and the challenges of reconstruction. Looking forward to reading this second book by Winn.

Why is the sky blue

Frequency
Vibration
Oscillation
Scattered light
Blue scatters the most
A reminder that rainbow colours together are white
Why clouds are white
Droplets
Sunsets 
Our chance to see the other colours coming from the sun

Earthworms

I have been walking around and amazing people with the factoid that earthworms were introduced to North America. 

Is this actually true? No. 

Apparently some earthworms are native here. Others have been introduced, and indeed some are considered invasive, especially in forests where they consume fallen leaves which would normally decompose. Species who live all over the world are called peregrine or cosmopolitan earthworms, which is a bit funny.

Honey bees

Honey bees defending their hive by swarming two hornets; the heat they generate can kill

Okay, this factoid really is accurate:

No honey bees lived in North America during human times until introduced by Europeans. 

I learned that of the 20,000 bee species alive today, only 8 are honey bees. 

Slow Food 

McDonalds resistance
Bra (the town)
Carlo Petrini, now 72, contributing culinary articles to communist newspapers
Turin/Torino
Terra Madre Salone del Gusto
Should I learn Italian?
Critiques of elitism
Alice Waters
Turkey

Wade Davis's One River

Wade Davis writes about his own ethnobotanical explorations, but he also outlines the life and work of Richard Evans Schultes, whose trajectory took a turn with a course offered by a Professor Ames: Biology 16, Plants and Human Affairs.

There were six students in the class, and in the introductory lecture Ames outlined the course requirements. In addition to the basic readings, examinations, and written assignments, there would be a practical laboratory during which the students would experiment with various plants products. They would make paper and ink, mix essential oils to create perfumes, extract sugar to produce molasses, turn fatty oils into soap, dye clothing with leaves and roots, sample rare and exotic spices, and practice the art of herbal medicine. And naturally, Ames continued, they would brew beer and distill alcohol, just as his students had done every year throughout Prohibition.

I wish I had taken this course in university.

I'm enjoying One River. Davis talks about a group of Indigenous people in Colombia who see knowledge as the goal of life. It stopped me in my reading. It reminded me of how much I love knowledge, love learning. During this COVID-19 pandemic, I feel ambivalent, though. What should I focus on learning? Even as I become a teacher, it's unclear. What will I teach? Where? What will education look like in the coming months or years?

For now, I will continue to enjoy the books I enjoy.

Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy

This 2015 book comes from Ece Temelkuran, an author and journalist who has already written serious books about controversial issues in Turkey, and who was fired from a newspaper for being critical of President Erdogan and the AKP.

I read it because I want to know more about what is happening in Turkey, and I know that immersive learning experiences (books, documentaries, travel) serve me better than headlines and articles. Temelkuran divides the book into "yesterday" "today" and "tomorrow", in other words, spans a huge amount about the past, present, and prospective future of Turkey. Here are just a few pieces I pulled. Bold and brackets are my own.

On censorhip and language available for the political imagination

After the military coup of 1980, hundred of Turkish words were prohibited. Banned from state TV, these words were gradually dropped from use in social life as well. They include [and this is only a section of the list]: 

active 

answer 

compromise 

coordination 

critical 

describe 

determine 

experience 

experimental 

free 

imagine 

life 

masterpiece 

memory 

movement 

opportunity 

peace 

recall 

relation 

religious 

revolution 

spiritual 

story 

structural 

vacation 

verse 

whole 

Some of these words were replaced with their Ottoman, Arabic or Persian counterparts that had been used prior to the Republic. These words, however, either had no equivalent in the imaginations of Turkish-speaking people or were hazy at best. That was the start of the Turkish speakers’ pitfalls in communicating with one another. Then there were some words that were banned completely, one of which had a profound effect on Turkey’s history: 

Resistance! 

[...] 

Those who forget words surely also forget their meanings and the actions they imply. 

The Gezi protests of 2013 and "security"versus "trust"

For two weeks, the surge of adrenaline was enormous. For those “misfits” who were looking for a country to emigrate to before the protests, Turkey became the only place to be with the uprising. And as for those who were already there, they frequently told each other that they felt guilty even for sleeping for a few hours, as if they were missing out on the action. The Turkish diaspora, with a million voices, cried on social media: “Wish we were there!” Although there were deaths, people lost their eyes and hundreds were injured, thousands of people were still enthusiastic to join the “resistance”. For many, the reason was somehow the pure happiness of solidarity and the thrill of seeing oneself being strong before the cruelty of those in power. 

In the countries where such movements took place, what people emphasized and wanted to be emphasized was this: we are all vastly different from one another, but we all trust each other in wanting freedom, equality and justice. We may have ethnic and religious differences, but we trust one another’s conscience, sense of justice and humanity. During these movements, photographs showing coexisting dissimilarities were the most celebrated and exalted images… no one would think of someone as being crazy for “trusting people”. Because, for weeks, everyone trusted that others were the same as them, or, even if they were different, that they were good people. They chose to believe and trust. They defeated not only their fear of the authorities but that of one another’s differences. We cut down the briars and took a breath of fresh air. That feeling of refreshment was the reason why, despite all the pepper gas sprayed by the police, everyone felt as though they had just taken a deep, expansive breath. Nothing reeks worse than fear. To top it all, we learned that security and trust are inversely correlated. The feeling of trust grew in sprit of the fact that the police attacks obliterated the feeling of security.

[...] 

In a way, it was like returning the feeling of security that had been sold to us and exchanging it for the feeling of trust. And everyone was gracious enough to say, “Keep the change!”

[…] 

we know that the system is well versed in creating a need and then selling it to us. It succeeds in selling us a false feeling of security to compensate for the insecurity it fosters in us, as though it wasn’t the very thing making us rivals and thus turning against one another. We, the world, are tired of this schizophrenic situation. We want to trust. We want to trade in the security farce for the feeling of trust.

On what western Turks learned about Kurds

We were a people made diseased. For as people who were children in the 1980s and 1990s, every evening when we sat down to dinner, we would see news broadcasts from south-eastern Turkey showing the bodies of the Kurdish militants caught in the mountains. In newscaster speak, we would be informed that “terrorists apprehended in their caves were captured dead” and we would go on eating. These people never had faces and there was no other news concerning the region. 

[...] 

I remember that one night after such a news broadcast, my father, who had taught at a primary school in the Kurdish region when he was young, told the following story from the 1960s at the dinner table: 

“When I first went there, I saw that the kids didn’t speak Turkish. We weren’t told. No one told us that the people there were Kurds, that they spoke Kurdish. I wrote to the capital and asked for book recommendations for teaching Turkish to the kids. In turn they called me to the capital. ‘You were deceived, there are no people called Kurds, Kurdish does not exist,’ they said to me.” 

On Kurds and the decade ahead 

The young people sitting across from me [students of Mersin University, an institution favoured by Kurds from south-eastern and eastern Anatolia] were born in the late 1990s. Children growing up during the bloodiest times of civil war, mostly of provincial families forced to relocate to the cities in the mass migration brought on by war. They grew up in the shadows of bombs, fires, poverty, the harassment flights of warplanes and automatic weapons. They set out on life five steps behind in the godforsaken villages of godforsaken provinces. Nearly every one can identify the model of a warplane by its sound. 

It’s almost a miracle that they are here as students rather than up in the mountains as guerillas. Perhaps that’s why they study, read and exist with guerilla-like discipline. They are growing up as the children of a suppressed – and, more importantly, organized – people. Whereas their peers in the West have different opportunities for experience, they take life as seriously as only an organized individual car, as a matter of life and death.  

[...] 

The Kurdish people are an organized society. 

[...] 

In the 1980s’ Turkey, in the midst of the breakdown of all political organizations, the political organization of the Kurds was born…The Kurds brought up an educated generation in addition to the one they gave up to the war. It’s a generation in step with the world, which has had to explain its issues to the world, with the discipline of an organization that is open to the world without forgetting where it came from. 

[...]

I’m talking about a political movement that also has legitimacy and renown in terms of international dynamics. It’s possible now to follow YPG militants fighting against ISIS, especially the Kurdish militant women, in the international press. Even the Turkish TV channels broadcast their news with the organization’s name rather than saying “terrorists” as they used to in the past. An ironic twist of fate: the “Kurdish terrorists” against whom we defended our borders now defend the borders of Turkey against ISIS. 

[...] 

In light of all this, my prediction is that the next decade in Turkey and its surroundings will be the decade of the Kurds. It will be so not only politically but also culturally.

[...] 

Don’t forget that this is the political power of an armed organization that has fought against the second largest army of NATO for thirty years.

Let Our Fame Be Great

"Isn't it terrible about Chechnya?

Going into this book, I was about as informed as Bridget Jones in the 2001 film, when she's preparing to meet Salman Rushdie and wants to sound smart, so practices asking, "Isn't it terrible about Chechnya?" Chechens came up for me again recently in the fantastic and frightening show Okkupert (Occupied), when the Russians want to extradite and kill a Chechen man for terrorism.

But who does know that much about the Caucasus, that in-between region east of the Black Sea?

Oliver Bullough, for one. He grew up in Wales, chased a passion for Russian into the field of journalism, and pursued his curiousity to write this massive mix of history and personal stories, published in 2010 as Let Our Fame Be Great. Maps, long quotations, statistics, and some notes of travelogue make it into this book. He continues writing for The Guardian, most recently a profile of Putin, and is working on a book called Moneyworld.

The title

Apparently the original people of the Caucasus region were asked by their god if they wanted a life of plenty but in relative obscurity, or a life of absolute struggle in which they would be tested and damaged, but famous for their courage – held up as emblems of heroic humanity. "Let our fame be great," was their defiant answer. Their god failed on his end of the bargain, though, because how many people know the history, and the decimation by the Russians/Soviets, of the Circassians, the Ingush, the Balkars, the Chechens?

Circassians

By one estimate, around the time of the 1864 exodus, 400,000 Circassians were killed, 497,000 deported (a third or more likely died in transit or upon arrival, mostly in what is now Turkey), and only 80,000 allowed to remain.

Americans and Brits visiting Circassian villages were scandalized to learn about the widespread slave trade, of sorts, in which poor villagers would sell their daughters to Ottoman harems and their sons to the Ottoman military, in exchange for goods and weapons that they could use to defend the homeland. The foreigners wanted to be enraged, but couldn't help but notice that the children were largely comfortable with the arrangement and understood the necessity.

Did you know that Circassians make up the Jordanian royal bodyguard?

Hearty, unreliable, and good

A traveler to the Caucasus, Florence Grove, who may well have been the first to climb Europe’s highest mountain – Mount Elbrus – wrote of the Katachai-Balkars:

Strong, healthy men as most of them are, well capable of doing a long day’s work without the slightest distress, it is wonderful how they loiter on a journey, and what frequent and protracted halts they may. Most irritating, too, is their procrastination. It will be seen then that, though the Caucasians are not always to be relied on, and at times try the traveller’s patience largely, the good much predominates in their character, and I think that those who have sojourned among them cannot fail to carry away a most pleasant pastoral remembrance of this simple pastoral race...

The importance of a literary movement

Before the events of the 1990s and 2000s, including the hostage taking and killing in the school in Beslan, a literary and cultural development bubbled up in the city of Grozny.

The shows that Zakayev’s theatre in Grozny put on in the 1980s had titles like Freedom or Death or There is Only One God, and these were to become slogans of the nationalist movement that was to explode at the end of the decade. The generation that the literary movement was to create would stand on the barricades with them.

What constitutes, I wonder, the current literary movement that will create the generation that will stand on the barricades–real or metaphorical–to come? Not for a nationalist movement, but for a movement for a world that we and our descendants can survive or even thrive in? Who is jumping in? Naomi Klein? Micah White? Zadie Smith? 

Although the number of people involved in these groups was small – just a handful really, compared to the mass of the nation – their influence would be disproportionately large.

Genghis Khan: The Man Who Conquered the World

Instead of buying this newish biography from a little bookstore in Kanab, Utah, I waited to borrow it from the Vancouver Public Library. I skimmed a lot of it, looking for the juicy bits to share. Here are a few:

Food for journeys

The mounted archers on campaigns mainly ate meat jerky, kept under the saddle where it could be massaged and tenderized, and dried cheese, which could be rehydrated in a water flask.

Different sense of time

Genghis Khan made a famous Taoist travel for four years to visit him, because he was interested in immortality.

Origin story

Genghis Khan killed his own brother for grabbing and eating a fish without sharing, which was in keeping with Mongol steppe acceptable recourse.

Vision, illiteracy, and making it up as you go along

Genghis Khan was the greatest conqueror the world has ever known. He and his sons vanquished peoples from the Adriatic to the Pacific. The Mongols eventually reached Austria, Finland, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Vietnam, Burma, Japan and Indonesia. 

[...]

All this was achieved by a man who seemed to come from nowhere; the only similar feat, though in a very different sphere, was that of Jesus of Nazareth. Genghis had no tradition to build on, for although there had been powerful steppe kingdoms and nations before him, he was unaware of them. Alexander the Great had a powerful military machine constructed by his father Philip of Macedonia; Julius Caesar had three hundred years of Roman military superiority to build on; Napoleon could rely both on the ancient French tradition of Condé and Turenne as well as the élan of the French Revoluation and the mass mobilization it unleashed.

In a real sense Genghis had to invent his own tradition and solve a plethora of political and social problems as he went along.  Besides his military and administrative genius and his uncanny ability to read men, Genghis was truly original in that he saw how it was possible for nomads, employing the quantum leap in military technology afforded by his mounted archers, to dominate civilised societies and extract tribute from them. All this he did while being illiterate and having no access through books to the wisdom of the ages.

Hunting

Every winter, a massive hunt or "battue" would be organized, taking up to three months for an ultimate animal massacre.

The battue was a central event in the Mongol calendar and it had a threefold significance, as military training, an important source of food and as a great social event that inculcated the idea of the organic solidarity of the nation.

All soldiers (i.e. every man, except those who wanted to be unpaid labourers for the empire) would start on a line up to 80 miles long. Eventually the ends would form a semicircle and then a circle. Each section of the circle was commanded by a commander of a minqan (unit of 1,000 men).

-->

Finally, the animals were contained within a narrow circumference, within which was a panicky melee of roaring lions, bleating stags, lowing wild oxen and the ululation and cacophony of scores of different breeds.

Genghis Khan and anyone looking to appear brave and capable would enter the melee, on horse or on foot, and begin the killing. They would let enough animals escape to keep up populations.

Trees

Before invading China, Genghis wanted to subdue the “Forest Peoples” in the northwest.

-->

Much of this vast area was an immense forest of birch, poplar, cedar, larch and fir, with an interpenetrating undergrowth of rhododendron, mosses and lichens.

Sounds nice.

Descendants

Geneticists have recently established that about 0.8 per cent of the population of Asia has an identical Y-chromosome, indicating the likelihood of a common ancestor, possibly some time around 1000 AD. This would imply that about 0.5 per cent of the world’s population has this common ancestor and that he has 16-17 million descendants.

Mortality

As he was dying:

-->

To his sons he reiterated the arrangements about the succession and the division of the empire, remarking sadly: 

‘Life is short. I could not conquer all the world. You will have to do it.’

The Infinity of Lists

Behold this beautiful compilation of real and unreal:

the magnet, Agrigentine salt, asbestos, the Egyptian fig, the fruits of Pentapolis, the stone that follows the cycle of the moon, the meat of Naples that cannot rot, the baths of Pozzuoli, the upside-down bean, the gates of hell, the Holy Face of Edessa, the combat of beetles, hot sands, the windows at which ladies appear, water that never boils, silk, dolphins, mermaids, the fox, the equinocephali, bearded women, the phoenix, men with eight feet, nocturnal larvae, the crow’s egg in the stork’s next, and birds born of trees…

water that never boils... mermaids... and birds born of trees

These are mirabilia – miracles, marvels – that Umberto Eco draws from Gervase of Tilbury's Otia imperiala.

Eco gives us marvels listed by Aristotle, too, and a list of things liked and not liked by Roland Barthes, and animals in made-up categories by Luis Jorge Borges, and body parts compared to amber and despair by André Breton.

My love an otter in the tiger's jaws...

Whose back is a bird's vertical flight