Ice Coffee

Listened to a movie review of the “The Descendants”. The reviewer intoned in a pleasant, narrowly modulated voice. It sounded like a depressing if not interesting movie. Finished up the baked potato, lunch, and the swallow of vodka left from last night's two and nibbled at the edge of the apple crisp on the table that was last nights desert, eating more than I might have if I had just cut a piece. Vodka and apple crisp, worked well. Walked pass the bathroom and closed the medicine cabinet door, then seeing my image in the mirror, wondered why there was a reason to su...(rvive the next two hundred years): trashing the planet the way we are. Sat down at the desk upstairs sipped on this morning’s cold coffee and wrote this. (The coffee would have gone well with the apple crisp.)

Ice coffee some years ago was promoted by a coffee company, do not remember which. That might have been as long ago as the age of ‘better living through chemistry’ when instant coffee was also heavily advertised. The image was the young, happening crowd: sex and money I suppose. At the time ice coffee was a fizzle. A fad who’s success was but contrived and lost its way quickly, might have been a European thing. Mom tried it for a while. It took McDonalds to make ice coffee chic. Chic and McDonalds, I suppose chic is relative to whatever crowd you might find yourself in: McDonalds' Chic. The walk up window of the fifties McDonalds: no dinning room, Coke, nickel hamburgers and fries might have been happening but at the time it was not chic: so now to call ‘McDonalds’ (as it might very well be) chic, seems an uneasy phrase. Maybe chic has changed.

Has ice coffee found an enduring place in the culture? It certainly has survived longer than that first spasm I remember.

Except for Saturdays

The week is done except that there is Saturday. Saturdays lay in wait to ambush at harvest, some times Sundays too. This is a research field, not a farm field with crop for market. It is nearly six and there are only two of us left in the field. Here are the omens of food and energy for an increasingly hungry world.

Don't Put This In Your Mai Tai

The Gods Are Watching

Whoa man, some party.

When the Water Rises Party

When sea levels rise 300 feet, Cairo, Illinois will be ocean front property, 12 feet above sea level.

This place, earth, will be a very different world in two hundred years.

The people who come after us will walk into this room. They will see the mess by the dim light that shows through the windows because the power is no longer on in this abandon building. They will see the empty beer bottles, the dirty plates, and broken furniture and they will say among themselves, “Whoa man, some party. Wish I'd been there.”

Mister Leibowitz

I read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr. years ago. It made pretty good sense given the times. We were still living in a polarized world, Axis and the Allies, East and West, the Soviet camp and the USA camp. I heard it first as a radio play and then read it. I still quote, paraphrase, from it occasionally. (Before I start this I really should reread this but I will not.) The central circumstance was nuclear war but the story starts well after the war. The nuclear war was central to the story but the sort of disruption to human culture was secondary. It occurred to me while listening to the news recently that the kind catastrophe of this story could easily be replaced by rising sea levels. Some years ago I made the comment that our demise, human kind, might not be the big event. but a gradual decline and disappearance, maybe (turning into) a race of beings their ancestors would not recognize, the sort of thing that seems to be the way of this world but difficult to contemplate. I believe he referenced T.S. Eliot and made a remark about with a whimper not a bang. A poem I should, I suppose, read.

The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

  I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

  II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

  III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

  IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

  V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                     For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                     Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                     For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

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

Now I have and seems not on topic.

But none the less I could borrow the phrase. No I will not.

In any case the rising seas could be substituted for the nuclear war to good effect: rising seas, war and famine as the world deals with contracting ability of the earth to support human culture.

Let us suppose the seas fully rise by 2200 and that world population has shrunk to a billion after having risen to ten billion by 2100. The world population would shrink by ninety million a year for the years from 2100 to 2200, a 2.3 percent steady decline.

The end of human culture seemed so distant at one time. I am trying to find a way or at least a way of thinking about it that has pleasant outcomes. Will it be a chaotic descent into extinction or can humanity find a way to survive, survival is not everything but not surviving is liking trying to think of the thing nothing, the perfect thought, nothing, still leaves the thinker thiinking of thing nothing, or can a grand life be found that is less great. It will after all be a great watery planet with new beach front property.

Dome - 25 May 11 - 1

Dome - 25 May 11

From the valley floor, Half Dome seems gloomy. Earlier today the sky was an intense, bright, sunny blue. My internet voyeurism takes me to Yosemite daily. Here on the prairie it has for most of the day been dark, overcast, and some times with  heavy, windy rain. While the view from Turtleback is more exuberant, the hazy view down the valley toward Half Dome and El Capitan still tells the story of the dreary afternoon in the valley. The additional altitude at Sentinel Dome gives the view of the cloudy sky an urgency that is masked with haze from lower altitudes.

Years ago I went to Yosemite. I might have been twelve. It was a place of tall trees and high places. I do not remember Half Dome or El Capitan but I must have seen them. I do remember the fall of embers from the cliff at Sentinel Dome. A practice that  has since been abandon because it offends our sensibilities. We had made camp and had dinner. I assume dinner because I do not remember being hungry, and for a twelve year old hungry would have been memorable. We had driven up  the mountain from camp. I stood a the rail waiting for the fall of embers as we talked about flinging paper airplanes from the cliff into dark and wondering how far they might go and what it would be like if only we could see them.

My folks met in California. Mom had taught in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Georgia (Spelman College) and had gone to California from Duluth with her folks when they had retired, drove the Nash with a trailer, the trailer looked like a little Conestoga or gypsy wagon: hoops and canvas her dad had built. Her dad became a citrus and avocado rancher in his retirement after finishing a career in mining engineering for Oliver, a company that mined iron ore for United States Steel on the Mesabi Range. Dad, after his stint in World War II straight out of college, had gone to California to pursue a career in big oil. He had aspirations to management,  I found home study course work among his stuff after he had died on how to succeed in business. Her folks, both college graduates, she was a teacher and he was a mining engineer, were up and coming. His folks were not college graduates, but up and coming, she was a teacher and he was a business man.

All these people imbued with energy and skill, going hither and yon, succeeding.

Well the short of it  is my middle son has lit off to California and in an age of internet and I can watch him succeed, while I moulder, unaccomplished in the backwater eddy of the confluences of lives that have come here and then gone on. I can look at the horizon and imagine what lies there.

The problem with accomplished people is that at a distance the sheen of their lives can be seen and the defects get lost in the glare of spectacular reflections. Lives seen in retrospect seem fated, seen in prospect they seem mostly to be unlucky. It is the few that succeed. "I got here by hard work and practiced skill." when in fact most of life is delivered to us and we bumble through with blind luck.

Horse thieves, revolutionary Colonels, Quaker refugees, hard luck Arizona farmers and undiscovered family: some of this is fiction, but it is the fiction I remember the truth to be. I will refrain from research, a promise I will probably abandon, but at least I can thrash about unrestrained if the facts are too repressing.

‘at some moment as I sat there’

If we are gods, all things are absolute. If we are not, all things are relative.
I climbed down the ladder into this kiva, having walked down into the gorge with a guided Park tour in winter and waiting for the first rush of people that had climbed in to climb out. There were people who followed me in and left before I left. I saw them move and heard them talk. This kiva was probably restored. The roof and ladder were likely new but this was a place and the very walls were where people very much like myself lived millennia ago. These were their living places, maybe warm in the winter, close to saved food under the edge of the gorge rim sheltered from weather, and near to a seep at the head of the gorge. Above the gorge was flat land that was farmed where buildings had stood. They lived without a mechanized world of moonwalks, aeroplanes, cellphones, grocery stores, and central air and their view of the universe, their world, might seem bizarre were we required to live in it. Yet they lived, creatures of this place. They lived connected to this place.
There is found in these kivas a small depression, a small cylindrical hole in the floor a few inches around and several inches deep. The hole was assumed to be a foundation for a pole, maybe the place to anchor the ladder. One day a visitor, a native American: Hopi, was there with a Park tour and this hole was explained. He explained that it was not. That it was, so to speak a navel, a way that spirits travel to and from the earth.
At some moment as I sat there, quite suddenly, this placed seemed quite familiar, quite comfortable. I stayed a while and then climbed the ladder and walked back to the parking lot and drove the truck back to the central heating and the electric range.
When I was young, children of a friend of mother came to visit. They lived not too far away but in very different circumstances. We lived on two and a half acres with an oak woods next to farms in a rural neighborhood. They lived in an urban neighborhood on a lot that was forty foot wide in city stretched for hundreds of miles along Lake Michigan. Among the curiosities for them of rural life was the vegetable garden. Mom took them to the pea patch and there the conversation might have been like this. "These are peas.", she might have said pointing to a row of peas. "Those aren't peas. We see no peas.", they might have said. "Oh, they are.", she said. She picked a pea pod and handed it to them. "This is not a pea.", they said. “Where are the peas?", they asked. She picked another pea pod and split it and shucked it and handed the peas to them and said, "Here are the peas." They admitted that this seemed to be peas but none the less would not eat them. I suppose outdoor peas seemed unsanitary to them, for peas came in a can and milk in a bottle (another story all together).
We live in a world that seems to be wholly of our own making unaware of the foundation on which that world stands.