[photoset]

Tuesday June 16

Grades in. Half a dozen or more thank-you emails from students. Calculating the profit on the Sierra Club benefit: $10K. The agonizing move of Claire from 24A to 16B complete.  Hidden Hills Mobile Home on the market.

I complete the touch-up painting, mulch tomatoes and cukes, break down the bikes and pack for the trip. After spending the day together, Claire and Ian and Dennis and Lucas come for pizza to Albert Drive.  Jan to City Council at 6:30.  Ian and I watch Aristocats. I wake up at 3:00 A.M. and complete the article on Green Building and Joe’s spec house that he asked me to write for the Sun Valley promotional magazine. [click images to enlarge]

The holy crusade for sustainability converted into marketing strategy and composition class writing prompts.

Wednesday June 17

7:30 A.M. departure.  Ian in his sleeping bag, watching Spider Man in the back seat.  We listen to Garrison Keillor reading his new novel Liberty borrowed from the SLO Library.  Buy cherries, peaches and apricots from a farmgirl at a fruitstand on Hiway 5. This is our fourth June trip with Ian to Ketchum.  He is carsick twice, but avoids messing the car. This time, no dallying at Donner Lake or Yosemite.  Sleep at the Elko motel after a late Chinese dinner.

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This one-hour movie is about, among other things, the life and work of Ernst Haeckel and his mission to integrate science, art and spirituality.   It’s subtitled “A Nineteenth Century Vision,” and it weaves threads of cultural and intellectual history with mythography, art history, and literary criticism into a pattern of emergent form based on the growth of radiolaria.  The film chronicles an alchemical quest that incorporates quotes from Goethe’s poems, letters, and Faust, with a provocative reading of Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner,” and an account of the vessel, Challenger‘s voyage of scientific research.  This is accompanied by music, sound design and animation graphics of extraordinary precision and quality.

There’s little discussion of the film on the web.  The New York Times review is dismissive and wierdly tendentious.  I’ve ordered my own copy of the DVD to keep exploring.

click on picture for full-size image

more pictures from 2008 and 2000

quotes from a correspondance:

July 15 2002

I’m in the process of preparing to sell my rather nice
first-edition collection, regretfully but to the immense relief of my
heirs, I think.  It sits today in the dining room here, in 100 cardboard
boxes, each numbered, so I can’t even see the books, but it wouldn’t
surprise me if we’re in a bit of a bubble in firsts, which the popping
of the stock-market bubble could in turn pop.  I plan to sell to offset
my considerable marketing losses and hope it will assure I can stay on
here indefinitely without counting on an inheritance–a good idea, since
my mother may indeed be immortal, unlikely as that seems.  As may I.
But neither’s a very good bet.

December 24 2002

We’re a mess, but life is, and fortunately not just a mess.

March 8 2003

The war does seem all but inevitable.  Bush may have been right about its
necessity, but his lead-up has been a travesty.  It would arguably be
necessary (if you accept any rationale for war) if the war was to serve the
purposes of the U.N., which likely needs teeth to work well, but Bush from
the start has seemed to be intent on undermining the U.N., now seems likely
to go to war when the U.N. attempts to forbid him.  The NYT columnists have
been excellent from the start, Krugman best and Friedman, except that he
obviously would applaud an attempt at a just war to establish a moderate
Iraqi democracy (as though that was doable and as though a democracy has any
way of forcing its electorate to be moderate), very good.   But whether X
might wage a wise war, Bush seems very unlikely to, seems to be bent on
isolating the U.S. and assuring us a semi-permanent terroristic opposition.
He can win the war but the peace we’ve reason to think he’ll butcher.

…Mom uses my experience a lot, my early radical dependence on others in
effect pioneer work for her and you of my generation.  There are just more
and more things she can’t do, and she’s very good, or seems to be, at
focusing on what she can.  Also, at 91, she can’t help but wonder now and
then, as she did one day all day this week, whether a temporary aberration
won’t prove permanent, a wonder I’ve known myself now and again.

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An Address to Focus the Nation II Cal Poly
February 5 2009

The words of Bob Dylan’s 1964 anthem, “The Times They Are A Changin'” have never rung truer than during the last few years of apocalyptic uncertainty, threat, and promise. It’s been a period of sudden collapse–from the Twin Towers and the Global financial system to species diversity and climate stability–and of miraculous growth”from the Internet and biological research to community organizations and acceptance of diversity.

Change, when you’re in the middle of it, is mysterious, lacking adequate name or narrative. The package isn’t labeled, the story is still unfolding. In the sixties, before the words “hippy,” and “counterculture” were coined, we referred to our transformations of consciousness simply as “the Movement.” The positive change going on today remains unnamed. In his latest book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken calls it “the largest social movement in all of human history.” He claims “noone saw it coming.”

But Hawken is one of the visionaries who have seen what’s coming and have provided it with various names and stories. His earlier books, The Ecology of Commerce, and Natural Capitalism, envisioned the present as one of “Restorative Economy” and “A Second Industrial Revolution.” E. J. Dionne calls it “The Revival of Civil Society,” Thomas Berry, “The Great Work,” David Korten, “The Great Turning.” I’m calling it the Sustainability movement.

One way to make sense of this movement is to place it in historical context.  As I look back at my own story, I remember childhood in the nineteen forties and fifties governed by postwar, coldwar, economic expansion, consumerism, suburbanization, homogenizing TV, and patriarchy. The sixties and seventies rejected all that in favor of peace, community living, spirituality and ecology. The eighties and nineties reacted again, privileging individualism, greed, branding and technology over nature. The new millennium took those tendencies to an extreme and then reversed direction toward where we are now.

Such a pattern of oscillations was characterized by Friedrich Hegel as thesis-antithesis-synthesis. He believed history was driven by the progress of the collective spirit of humanity expressed in science, art, and philosophy. Changes in ideas were then manifested as material progress in technology, economics and politics. Karl Marx famously turned the pattern on its head, claiming that economic arrangements, particularly the flow of financial capital, provided the base that determined the rest, which he called superstructure.

This dialectical pattern can apply today. The movement we call Sustainability seems to synthesize the sometimes unrealistic idealism of the sixties and seventies with the shrewd yet often short-sighted materialism that followed. Sustainability is grounded in science and deals with resources, technology and business, but it’s also grounded in consciousness and deals with morality, aesthetics, and religion. Its trinity of values”Environment, Equity, Economy”can be emblematized not as base and superstructure, but rather as a triangular recycling moebius.

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Back in December Claire got a job in a phone center marketing upgrades to web orders.  To support her efforts at achieving independence and paying rent, we have taken on babysitting for Lucas while she works.  He takes a two to three hour midday nap and otherwise is easy to look after and fun to be with.

We’ve been going to the Singalong at Boo Boo records, a fifteen year institution I happened to hear about last month from a lady in the City Hall Parking Structure elevator. It’s not publicized.

The woman who leads it is named Heidi.  She wears funny glasses and shoes and passes the hat afterward. I dont think BooBoo’s charges for the space.   An underground club scene Wednesdays  10:15 to 10:45 A.M.

I woke up this morning with a cough, stomachache, headache and sore back.  No appointments today except babysitting, and I wanted to see the inauguration.   Jan needed the day to prepare for the long city council meeting tonight.  I decided to stay in bed watching on our snowy, cable-less TV as long as possible.  Claire got here with Lucas during the oath of office.  The baby was happy to sit next to me with his two Thomas train cars, though he kept looking at me anxiously when I cried, before, during and after the speech.

Obama carries the public pain of these last eight years along with the historical pain of African-Americans on light and supple shoulders.  The evocations of Martin Luther King and Lincoln mix with those of Michael Jordan. His language is exquisite. His sternness and smiles overpower me like my father’s when I was two.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

I believe every word of this. But I only feel that satisfaction sometimes, because I know how hard it is to give my all, and I cant always do it.

Last night I finished work on a speech for the Focus the Nation Teach-In on February 5. To juxtapose it with the President’s utterance today is  hybris.  But at various moments while I watched and wept this morning, pieces of it came into my mind and made me both ashamed and proud.

After an hour and a half of igloo building in the deep snow of the front yard, Ethan and I slouched on the sofa with the current issue of Sun Valley Homes magazine I’d purchased for five dollars in Atkinson’s. On the slickest, brightest paper I’d ever seen, it displayed six pages of beautiful photographs of the house around us and reported the story of its design and construction by Joe and Amy. The inside back cover was a full-page picture of Ethan on the skateboard ramp they’d made in the back yard.

We compared the descriptions and pictures to our cozy surroundings, and Ethan recalled the day the reporter and photographer spent with them. Then we leafed through ads for lavish condos and articles about custom-made lamps and hand-carved front doors.  Ethan was struck by the picture of a wooden bas-relief depicting the Garden of Eden with a naked Adam and Eve holding hands surrounded by a menagerie of tame animals. Though he’d spent three years in the Wood River Presbyterian Church pre-school, he apparently had never heard the opening of Genesis, so we put the magazine down, cuddled deeper into the sofa, and I started with “in the beginning.”

After the fourth day, I interrupted the narrative to let him know that I regarded this as a story not the literal truth, though many people thought it actually happened just this way.  He countered that the world had to have been made by somebody. I said maybe so, but there are some folks who think it was made by a big raven, or a turtle or an old woman, and others who think it just is, with no creator, since what created the creator?  He said maybe God just created Himself, and I said, maybe, though that’s hard for me to imagine.

As we got to the sixth day and the animal kingdom, which brought us back to the carved wooden door, I mentioned that the animals were all made in pairs, male and female, and I asked if he knew why.  He said yes, a man and woman get married and then they have children.  And I said yes, and that’s also the way animals have babies and make more animals. So in the beginning, according to the story, God created the animals and then they all created more animals and so did people.

New Year’s morning the rising sun kindled pea vines that grasped the bent bamboo stakes over the vegetable bed.

At 8:45, my teaching partner Jim and student activist friend Eric arrived to join Jan and me for a ride to the Guadalupe Dunes, site of the 25th annual New Years Day hike originated by Bill Denneen and this year organized in his honor by Kara B., San Luis Obispo’s first lady of Land Conservancy.

More than 40 people showed up including 85 year old Bill, son and grandchildren.  The further south we went, the more pristine and dramatic the landscape, low dunes giving way to taller ones sloping steeply down to the ocean, gradually revealing longer stretches of coast and Coast Mountains, the small human settlements in appropriate proportion to the immense land, sea and sky.

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For the last six years Jan and I have flown to Idaho on December 25 in order to celebrate the holiday with both the San Luis Obispo branch of the family on Christmas Eve and with the Ketchum children and grandchildren on Christmas Day.  This year, back in September, we decided not to make the trip until after the first week in January, to allow ourselves some down-time at home and save money on air fare.  This meant that both of us would be absent when our colleagues were getting back to work.  I had to schedule the first meeting of the Sustainability Faculty Colloquium at Cal Poly the Friday before the first meeting of classes, and Jan has to miss a community workshop on budget priorities”though no City Council meetings.

I felt a duty to use the time as intended–for contact with friends and family”but neglected to plan for that. Nevertheless it so happened. Claire started a full-time job at the beginning of December and I became the primary daycare provider for twenty month old Lucas.

We went on hikes along up Stenner road to gather rocks for the border of a new vegetable bed and pine cones for the fireplace. We went to see the calves at the Dairy and the aqueduct excavations and the sheep at Cheda Ranch. We took a birding expedition with Johanna at Oso Flaco lake.  His long midday naps and the morning hours before his arrival gave me time for work. Even up and around in the house he made few demands.

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When the house of cards started to fall in September, I tripled the size of my vegetable patch and ordered the movie “Wall Street” from Netflix. It had made an impression that stayed in my porous memory since I saw it twenty years ago, and I had a hunch it would shed some light on the present from a long perspective. Netflix said it wasnt available–the first time that’s happened–and I couldnt find it in any local video store. Yesterday morning it finally arrived. Jan said she’d mentioned that to the City Manager at the afternoon holiday party, and he told her he’d also been looking for the film and been puzzled by its unavailability. Another sign of the times.

Rather than write holiday cards as planned, we watched it in bed and drank whiskey. I wasnt disappointed. “Greed is good,” proclaims Gordon Gecko, the ruthless stock trader who gets his comeuppance at the end. That growling grasping creed has epitomized the mainstream values of American culture in the era starting with Reagan’s election in 1980, just after we returned from Canada, and now catastrophically concluding. The film’s economic analysis and social criticism are as simplistic as Naomi Klein’s in The Shock Doctrine, but it nevertheless captures the emotions I feel whenever see the ads for golf resorts and fancy hotels in airline magazines, the New York Times “Styles” section, the pounds of throwaway newsprint on my driveway every morning.

Repeatedly we are told that the crisis around us is caused by depressed demand for stuff, that Christmas has been spoiled by not enough buying, and that public wealth has to be funneled into the economy to promote consumption of junk. I think this idea originates in the Gecko view of the world. The film sets it against the position of Carl Fox, the father of “Bud,” the young protagonist who worships Gecko. A capable machinist and union steward, Carl despises the whole culture of Wall Street finance–the “Rulers of the Universe”–who neither produce nor create but use their talent to parasitise those who generate society’s real wealth. When I heard recently that CitiCorps is putting 55,000 people out of work, I experienced compassion for these  folks–most of them I’m sure no more greedy than average–but I also felt that this downsizing will benefit everyone in the long run.

It was startling to discover at the beginning of the film that it was made by Oliver Stone and even more startling to read the dedication at the end to his father, whom he identified as a stockbroker.  That adds to the richness of the parallel father-son relationships in the film–Bud and Carl, Bud and Gordon–reminding me of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and his two fathers Henry Bolingbroke and Falstaff.  And it motivates me to see Stone’s latest production, W.