Random Notes from a Crank

Sometimes when I'm at meetings, I can sense it coming. I get this visual image of a wave in the ocean starting to break, and I think "Rationalizations a-coming!" We're awash in them. 

One of the magazines I subscribe to, the magazine formerly known as Ode but now renamed The Intelligent Optimist, had a nice little editorial about the periodical's name change. The Editor-in-Chief, Jurriaan Kamp, relates what I find to be a productive and energizing frame of vision because I can tend toward pessimism and morose moods: "I argue that optimism -- intelligent, not mindless, optimism -- is the only realistic strategy for life. It is not going to prevent bad things from happening. On most days, more will go right than wrong; still, nobody can escape problems and setbacks. But the intelligent optimist accepts reality without immediately coming to a negative conclusion."

I keep thinking that my fantasy baseball team, The Schlitzophrenics, is going to collapse in the end (there's tonight and tomorrow left in the fantasy baseball regular season). I'm trying to be optimistic, but I'm a Cubs fan. We're used to heartbreak, pain, and suffering. 

Last Words

Tonight I was reading an article in Ode Magazine in which the author was using Buddhist principles to talk about how to cope with wild and mundane happenings in one's life. In other words, the author was looking at life through a Buddhist lens.

For the most part, the article wasn't anything I haven't read before and nowhere near as interesting as Brian Haycock's Dharma Road, but the author does provide presumably the final words of Buddha Shakyamuni's last sermon before he died. Those last words are the following:

"Transient are all conditioned things.

Strive on with diligence."

A bit later in the article, the writer cites a knowledgeable friend of her who says a better translation of the final sentence is this: 

"Move with confidence into the future."

Regardless of how one translates the last line, my crude paraphrase of the Buddha's words are this: 

Good and bad stuff happens.

Deal with it. 

I like the Buddha's words better though. 

We All Emit Light

I was reading an article in Ode Magazine the other day titled "No Such Things as a Thing" by Lynn McTaggart. In the article, there's a section of it that really got me thinking, got me tripping on a concept.

You see, we all emit light--biophoton emissions to be exact.

The force is with us.

I'm going to quote the article at length since the author does a better job of explaining the concept than I could:

• McTaggart relates, "In 1970, while investigating a cure for cancer, German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp stumbled on the fact that all living things, from single-cell plants to human beings, emit a tiny current of photons, or light, which he labeled 'biophoton emissions.' Popp immediately understood that a living organism makes use of this faint light as a means of communicating within itself and also with the outside world" (38).
• Since then, Popp and over forty scientists have researched this phenomenon, and "They maintain that this faint radiation, rather that DNA or biochemistry, is the true conductor of all cellular processes in the body. They have discovered that biophoton emissions reside within DNA, setting off frequencies within the molecules of individual cells" (38).
• After years of experiments, "Popp recognized that he had uncovered the primary communication channel within a living organism, which uses light as a means of instantaneous, or 'non-local,' global signaling. Popp also discovered that these light emissions act as a communications system among living things. In experiments with a number of organisms, including human beings, he discovered that individual living things absorb the light emitted from each other and send back wave interference patterns, as though they are having conversations. Once the light waves of one organism are absorbed by another organism, the first organism's light begins trading information in synchrony. Living things also appeared to communicate information with their surroundings--bacteria with their nutritional medium, the inside of an egg with its shell. These 'conversations' also occur among different species, although the loudest and best dialogues are reserved for members of the same species" (38-9).

The connection that many folks will make after reading that infrormation is the how biophoton emissions sound similar to "the force" within the Star Wars movies even though Lucas took that concept from Maori mythology/religion--the idea that there is a life force that interconnects all beings/Nature, a more interesting Oversoul from my perspective that predates Emerson anyway.

I don't know how respected this view of living systems is though. I'm no scientist. But it's certainly interesting.

If biophoton emissions are indeed true, if that's how this all works, the Maoris were on to it before the folks in lab coats got to work.

Farming and Agency

In the June issue of Ode Magazine, there's an article by Diane Daniel titled "Farmers as Change Agents." In the piece she details a different population of folks who have become interested in farming, and it's a type of agriculture that goes against the agribusiness-induced, monoculture farming of soybeans, corn, etc. If you've read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, you probably have a good inkling of what Daniel writes about.

Since Ode is an international publication based out of the Netherlands, some of the examples are from Europe, but the sustainable agriculture program at the University of Kentucky is featured briefly in the article. Of course, there are other alternative agriculture programs developing at other universities across the nation since some professors of agriculture see the current food system as ecologically and economically bankrupt.

It's nice to read an article that has a positive take on farming since I remember my uncle Raymond, a farmer who raised cattle and grew soybeans and corn in northeastern Missouri, telling me emphatically that "If you want a good job, being a farmer ain't it."

What my uncle was talking about then is what George Pyle discusses in his fine book Raise Less Corn, More Hell.

The article I've linked exemplifies the magazine's mantra of being "for intelligent optimists," but Pyle's book is required reading for intelligent pessimists.

Grouchy Old Men

I have reasons why I'm usually reading three of four different books at the same time, but right now I'm reading the work of two grouchy old men along with my devotional slog through the whole obtuse but intellectually compelling A Grammar of Motives by Kenneth Burke.

Besides Professor Burke, the curmudgeons on my reading list are H.L. Mencken (The American Language) and Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw).

I've read lots of Mencken. He did very interesting and insightful work on a range of topics (Treatise on the Gods mixes erudition and humor quite well), and I've heard about how excellent The American Language is supposed to be. The man doesn't disappoint. I've always enjoyed the Sage of Baltimore's style--how he uses simple and complex sentence structures and selects a wonderful variety of word choices, the high and low--and his Juvenalian study of American English at that time is a lot of fun. Besides focusing on our use of the English language, the book is also an examination of American character. In particular, one statement stands out for me when Mencken talks about how Americans love to adopt new or in vogue words, how they are not linguistically conservative like the British: "A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new shibboleth, or metaphor, or piece of slang" (30-1).

Spot on.

Bourdain of No Reservations fame, on the other hand, writes like he tends to talk, which goes against the usually useful mantra of folks who teach writing. But Bourdain talks/writes in very interesting ways (except for the overuse of profanity), and his book, and I hadn't realized it came out this year, courts my fascination with food, my growing exasperation with the Food Network, and other food/cooking concerns. His "Heroes and Villians" essay, for example, has the directness of a punch in the gut, and I look forward to reading the "Alan Richman Is a Douchebag" chapter.

But rather than this post being some sophomoric book report, what I'm pondering is why I'm drawn to such grouchy old men. Even Burke in his massive tome has occasional snarky comments about Aristotle, Emerson, Kierkegaard, et al.

Sure, I'm getting older myself (creeping up on the big Four-O); however, I think I've always sort of been a seventy-five year old dude in a younger body ("What the hell are all these people texting about? Don't they have better things to do?").

I should be thankful, I know. I have the loving Mrs. Nasty as my wife, and my kids are my main joys even though there are some times when I understand the old saying, "Madness is hereditary. You get it from your kids." I've been called a lot of names in my life, but my favorites are "Dad" and "Daddy."

I'll chalk up my grouchiness and penchant for reading grouchy old men to my defensive pessimism, which is a phrase I was introduced to recently from an article in Ode Magazine, and I can't link the article from Ode's website for whatever reason (See why I'm defensively pessimistic, especially about technology?).

So I'm thankful but wary.

"The Last Taboo" & "The Joy of Dirt"

If you're interested, click HERE to the lead story in the latest issue of MotherJones.

While MJ is a decidedly lefty journal, I felt the article takes a self-critical and wide-ranging look at an issue most people really don't want to grapple with, overpopulation. But it's a concern that certainly connects to a myriad of issues in the world--climate change, loss of topsoil, consumption patterns of developing countries, and so on.

And if you're hankering for even more information and possible solutions about this topsoil issue, take a look at "The Joy of Dirt" by Larry Gallagher in Ode Magazine, a magazine that describes itself as a magazine for "intelligent optimists." Click HERE for that.

The End of Silence

One of the slicks (as Dubya likes to call magazines) I get every month is the international magazine, Ode. This month's edition is devoted entirely to "silence," or more precisely our world's disturbing lack of silence or quietness.

The article, "Quiet, Please?," is attached (click HERE), and it provides a number of findings and studies about how the lack of silence or even just the lack of quiet can very detrimental to our physical and mental health. The article, at times, gets to be a bit of information overload for me, but it simply confirms a number of thoughts I've had for years:

I hate noise pollution from mowers and leaf blowers. They not only cause horrible noise pollution, they're also incredibly dirty because they're unregulated. The amount of CO2 they emit is atrocious. As the Union of Concerned Scientists relate (LINK), "the average lawn mower emits as much smog-forming pollution in one hour as eight new cars traveling at 55 miles per hour." 

While I own a cell phone, I detest having them go off in one of my classes, and conversations on them do invade public space. Added to that annoyance are the dreaded blue tooth devices that facilitate people walking down the sidewalk as if they've escaped from an asylum and they're talking to their imaginary friends because we don't recognize the ear set (for lack of a better term) right away. The worst is when you're watching a baseball game, and some fool behind the plate or to the side of the plate is on his cell phone (and it's usually a male) while waving and talking to one of his nitwitish brethren on the other line with inane questions such as, "Hey, do you see me?"

The plethora of folks plugged into their iPods disturbs me too. They're all plugged in, shoving out other opportunities to hear the beauty of everyday life: the wind blowing, leaves rustling, birds chirping, kids laughing as they play, etc. The iPod, in this sense, simply exemplifies how our country has a hyper-individualistic culture. We plug iPods into our ears. We drive our pods (cars) to work every day. We park our pods in our pods (garages). And we live in planned pods (houses) that look a lot like the other pods and focus on our our pod (family) while not getting to know our neighbors or going outside much. 

More than anything, I think I and others need much more time to relax and do nothing for a change: time to "recharge our batteries."

The Italian psychologist Piero Ferrucci said it well when he stated, "Our culture is suffering form an overdose of action and a shortage of contemplation. I consider contemplation a basic need; you even see it in animals. Just think about dogs and cats. You often see them starting off into space. I think that their way of meditation, their way of recharging their batteries. We have that need too. But we deny this basic, physiological need--as if an entire society were to forget to go the bathroom. That's serious."