The Marks Left on Tools

My girlfriend recently gave me a very nice handmade knife from the 1970's. Made by a small shop in Whitefish Montana, long out of business, the knife is in excellent condition. The near mirror polish on the blade hardly marred by scratches, and the edge was untouched by a stone or use since its final rouged-buffing at the makers bench. For something approaching forty years old, the knife remained essentially new. The design of the knife is simple, a modified drop-point hunting knife, with pinned wood-laminate handle scales. It carries in a hand-stitched leather sheath, of a quality of workmanship not always common to even custom knives. Well made through and through, it is a tool; An object of combined elements of purpose. And yet, it has gone the decades since its making unused.
I am bothered by this newness of things meant to be used. There is no poetry in disuse of fine tools. It is the death of intent and meaning, an act against life to always rest a thing meant to be worked with.

On my workbench there live a few tools of my grandfathers and great-grandfathers, from the L.S. Starrett company. They are not new, in any sense. Most have passed a century. All have been used in the numerous tasks of a machinist, for lifetimes now. As machinists tools, they are exceedingly precise, and still have sharp edges, fine points and little slop or wiggle in their moving parts. These tools were made in a time before computers, when math was done by hand and mind, and the most precise work was that of men who manipulated machines themselves. The precision of these tools was artistry of purpose. Tools finely made, so they might be used in making other things that would be used. They have lasted not because they were put away and never taken down, but rather because they were acted upon and with as intended. A tool used is, of necessity and responsibility, a tool cared for.
The use of tools imbues them with an even greater richness, from the users knowing of them, the oils of his work and himself in their fine knurling, the experience of what he can do with them. The care of tools is a natural result of this. We care more deeply for that which we know, and value through experience, because we wish to preserve that which preserves us. Good tools, like good lovers, make our desires possible, our wills able to be wrought, their touch fuels our engines, and we care for them, or we die alone and empty. It is a lesson we learn, those of us who know it, just in time.

I sharpened the knife she gave me. The buffed factory edge, though shiny and new and perfect to see, was not keen when I took it up to use. Stoning the edge to a shaving sharpness left it uniformly and finely scratched where it had been as mirrored as the blade, and to a collector (those ill preservers) less valuable. Sharpening and using the knife is an act of being alive. Touch and pressure and wear are real and whole, and nothing good exists absent of them. Nothing good is unmarked by the passing of time.
Our tools, the objects in our lives we call valuable and their condition through time, are markers of ourselves in the world. If our tools are given over to rust and devastation, all we leave for the world is brokenness and useless oxidization. Ruined tools are things that perhaps should never have been. Tools that are unmarked, boxed, shelved and protected in perfect newness, never truly were. Only things used, worn, marked by process and care carry any valuable weight. The marks we leave on tools, are the marks we leave on the world.

Kinetics

This family pulled away from my father, as water from shores before the wave. It was the small things, that went mostly unnoticed. My files gone from his office computer, the lack of words from my mother over dinner. We felt the drawing up, our selves pulling back to a disrupted center, and the waiting tension to return. To return in full, washing over the shores where he had been, and further, to wash away the structures there.
Like many acts of natural fury, this too began slow. The start was rumblings of dysfunction rising to a final draw, when my mother asked him to leave. Things come apart. Either slowly, or quickly. The part of the family that was my father was being unmade slowly at that point. My own feelings were mixed. Even knowing where I stood, there was an awfulness in what I then still believed was the lifetime of a man coming to failure. Amid this, it was curiosity that led to cataclysm. In drawing back, in the steady rumbling of process, I stumbled upon something that did not fit. It felt, beneath the touch of my concern for his devastation, somehow wrong. You look closer at things rough to the touch, and the truth is what you find, not what you are told.
He had built islands of artifice. Shores with the names of all things goodly familial; Love; Compassion; Hope. He poured the sands of his lies on them, and trusted that we would come no further than these inviting beaches. It was all there, in his own words to this other woman. Full accountings of the things had had built, and the lies with which he had built them. The give and take of lapping waves finally ceased, the drawing away completed in a moment. Everything compressed upon its center, and rushed outward again. For every action, a reaction. Such acts are kinetic, moving with fury, unwilling and unable to do anything but take ground. Everything before you is overrun, swept under and you drive on.

What followed was time, probably days but immeasurable in the cloud. For that time, we allowed it that things were neither good or bad, but rather the efficient neutrality necessary to do as needed. The worst of processes are sometimes the easiest. You pragmatize for calm, and focus on physical labors. There is a logic and order to packing, even large amounts and big items. Like high ground, he clambered atop these acts, keeping above the water and moving. A life, even one deceitful, can be stripped down into so many orderly boxes, taped and marked. Old furniture can be pulled apart, this top piece separating from that piece, the contents rifled for a sense of belonging with whats to be left set haphazard to available horizontals. Into the removed drawers can be packed things to be taken. In such a taking apart, many voids will be found, and this is how all empty spaces are filled, with things from elsewhere. Strangers and aliens in spaces of former comfort, teaspoons in sock drawers and socks in pants pockets and pants shoved into garbage bags. The garbage, and dust, of thirty-six years all left on the floors. Strewn behind him, the waste and old receipts of the thing now undone. Or was it the thing long undone? Like days, some knowing was clouded.
And some knowing will never be. Amidst it all there was always a clarity. Some things are known to the point of gravity, a fact beyond all concept of denial. The knowledge, there in every discovered word of my fathers, was inescapable as the risen sea. That too made it easier. If in war it is easier to do the work when you hate your enemy, so too is it easier to do anything at odds with another. Who-gets-what arguments are are easier for the absolute wrongdoing of a single party, for there is always that card to play. The sins are real, untruths and infidelities whole, and they put end to the forever circular arguments. I wonder how families do this when there is less clear-cut reason; How mine would have done it if reasons of amorphous dysfunction had remained the paramount.

And then, after the mad rush of it all, calm. Water and wind, and a great and wholly natural silence follow disaster and action of all sorts. Not for long, there is always the cleaning up, the putting to rights, the changing of lightbulbs and calendars to turn. Some of this work will be difficult, and some is already proving to be, but everything has indeed been washed clean. The rot that escaped the wave, that lingered on or was accelerated is being found, mostly by smell, and cut away. Birds twitter, and other creatures great and small circle and joy in the coming spring. All acts are for now in accordance to plan and planting cycles, a pace lacking any greater kinetic push than life itself.

Poem Published at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k)

I'm very pleased to note that one of my poems has now been published at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k): "Holiday Poem"

I've been reading Poor Mojo's for a few years now, and am delighted to now be a small part of that wonderful publication. I'm also quite pleased by the timing of this publication, being just prior to Christmas. The poem is drawn from an experience on Christmas thirteen years ago, was written around Christmas last year, and now has been published just prior to Christmas. Great, great, timing all around.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Faceless Consumption (Being a Tale of Idiots, and Meat)

The other day I tripped over a piece of foolishness online, and haven't been able to shake it. This being the internet, finding foolishness shouldn't come as any surprise, but it did. I was reading in one of the few low-idiocy havens I've found online; A forum which the core membership of is primary military, law enforcement and emergency rescue personnel. So I was relaxed and receptive when I stumbled into the following gem of subintelligent thought, sort of like wandering into a trap. It was not meant for me, like all truly devastating traps it was entirely impersonal and aimed at whomever chanced upon it. A Bouncing Betty of stupidity.
The discussion at hand was on the film “The Cove”, which depicts in horrifying detail the mass slaughter of Dolphins in a particular cove in Japan. The general consensus was that killing something smarter than many people (or any politician) was “not cool”, and killing much of anything in that fashion was equally unacceptable. All of this brought on a small discussion of hunting, and that is where the idiot struck. He said, “The day I have to kill for food is the day i[sic] eat fucking nuts and berries. With all the meat in someones local food superstore, why kill any animals? I am in no way putting anyone down for hunting,it just isn't for me or something I want to do. Terrorists,yep. Animals,No[sic]."

I was flabbergasted by this idiots perspective, quite honestly. Not that I don't believe people think this way. I know that such twits exist, but I remain amazed and disgusted by it. In this case the source also probably has a lot to do with why it continues to bother me. Such a statement coming from someone with a military background, a group of people who commonly refer to themselves as “meat eaters” and take a great pride in the hunting of many things, is particularly surprising. More than that, I find this perspective fairly insulting in a broader fashion. No matter your background, or your particular thoughts on hunting, divorcing yourself so thoroughly from the origins of your food is beyond dishonest.
It is an incredibly spoiled and elitist position; One made possible only by a certain class of living, allowing such a luxury as routine access to a supermarket and little or no exposure to agriculture. Only from there is it possible to have no involvement with the animal, except to get hunks of its meat from the store, all while expecting others to do the killing (and even the thinking about the killing). This total removal of the self from the process of killing what is eaten is to deny that what we eat was ever alive. As an act it reduces life, a heartbeat and a spirit, to nothing more than a commodity. Whole beings become nothing more than their inanimate pieces. People who act this way say the animals death bothers them, as their reason for this denial of it's life, but there is no honor or respect in their actions, no respect for life.
This act also reduces the actor to something less as well; Something which is also denied heartbeat and spirit by the very spirit possessing it. If none of our food has a face, we ourselves become faceless. Such denial of the life of food is, in essence, making a choice to be sub-human. To make that choice, to seek that ignorance, is to say "I am not a human being. I am not a predator. I am some creature that eats the hard work of others, consumes the lives of other animals, without doing any of the mental or physical work or giving recognition to the costs necessary for me to survive." That's akin to being some sort of vaguely sentient mushroom or something, that just soaks in nutrients without awareness of where they come from.
It is incredibly disrespectful to divorce yourself from the process of killing and still want to consume its results. It is disrespectful to those who do that work, and it's disrespectful to the life you're now treating as merely commodified pieces. Such disrespect is also disrespect of the self, and remains so even if the divorce from food carries over to only eating non-animal foods. It is disrespectful to the self, as a human being, a predator; A creature of strong legs, and cunning mind, evolved to hunt and kill.
Some might say they wish to overcome being a predator, but do they have any idea what we would be if were were not predators? Our hunting and meat eating habits are at the root of many of the fundamental attributes of human beings; We are what we are because of eating animals. Theory suggests that the impact of meat consumption on brain development was fundamental to achieving the brains we have today. Who you think you are (to jump from brain to mind for a moment) owes to the mental gymnastics you are capable of thanks to descending from predators. And that's not to say anything about what being predators has done for the body.
Jackson Landers, “The Locavore Hunter”, provides us with this:

“As Christopher McDougall points out in his book, ‘Born to Run,’ we became modern humans in large part because we became predators. We have a lot of anatomical features that don’t make sense any other way. We are unique among living primates in that we have an Achilles tendon. An Achilles tendon is only really good for long-distance running. You don’t need one to walk or to sprint (as other apes demonstrate). Ditto our unusually large gluteus maximus muscles. We are finely tuned to be long-distance runners. And what good is running long distances? We can’t sprint fast enough to escape predators. But over marathon distances we can outrun even a racehorse. As a few indigenous tribes are still demonstrating, our bodies are very good at running down four legged prey until it collapses from exhaustion.
The physiological adaptations that allow us to do this are profoundly complex. Our tendons are especially springy compared to other primates. Our hearts and lungs are capable of amazing efficiency. We can sweat and regulate our bodies temperatures to avoid overheating. That kind of evolution doesn’t happen for nothing.
The title of McDougall’s book, ‘Born to Run,’ tells half of the story. The other half is that we were born to kill.” In Defense of Predation, The Locavore Hunter

These mushroom-people who want to divorce themselves from being predators are not just rejecting meat, they are rejecting essential humanity as well. Refusing to be a predator is a decision to step outside of humanity and be something else. Adherents of such a lifestyle seem to think they have risen above by doing so. They often act as if they've gained some pious state from which to condemn and dictate to others. Such people are so convinced of their superiority as to verge on suggesting tyrannies against real human beings acting in tune with nature (likening meat eaters to pedophiles and cannibals, as people who need to be "corrected"):

“The line of thinking goes like this: Evolution is natural, and what is natural is good; and because humans evolved the capacity to eat and digest meat, the practice of eating meat must also be natural and subsequently good. This is the naturalistic fallacy and it leads to all sorts of problems. Given this line of thinking we should also condone other human traits that came about through evolution, namely rape, murder, pedophilia and cannibalism. Obviously we’re not about to do this any time soon. We know very well that many people cannot be left to their own hard-wired devices; this is why we have self-corrective memes (i.e. ethics, laws, etc.) and why we need to have police and penal systems.
More to the point, however, is the acknowledgment that overriding our evolutionary baggage is part of the human mission. Having Darwinian processes guide our moral compass is sheer lunacy. Where is the morality in ‘survival of the fittest?’ Evolution may have helped us describe how we got here, but it most certainly won’t help us move forward as a compassionate species.” Meat Eaters are Bad People, Sentient Development

The cost of moving forward as a “compassionate species”, to those standards at least, will be not moving forward as a species at all. The nature these types claim to love and want to protect from “bad people”, is actually the very thing they are denying when they go on like this. They seem to see themselves to as smarter than, superior to, the way of the world for millions of years, and in their arrogance think they can override it. In reality, these petty would-be-god's have simply decided to be something less capable and interesting than a human being. Something needs to come along and eat them, if it can palate the taste.

In a certain way, these (anti-)people who either divorce themselves from their food, or refuse to be predators, should make me happy; If a cataclysm were to seriously challenge the survival of the human species, even if these mushrooms survived the initial event, they would be among the first to die or be eaten in the aftermath. That thought might bring a smile to my face, but for the fact that such cataclysm isn't around the corner. Even as things continue on the path they are on, true cataclysm is unlikely. So, we're forced to harbor these mental defectives; Those of us who participate in agriculture are forced to feed them, and the rest are forced to share with them.

(Photo: Original from Beverly & Pack's Flickr stream)

Penitent Distance

She wasn't able to find the last shell casing, lying silent and glimmerless in the shadows of the tall grass. A panic set in that they would catch her now. She swallowed it, with the bile and let joy rise in its place. In this joy she ran.

The motel smelled of cigarettes and water leaks. Thin curtains barely hid her from the light, and she slept restlessly beside the pistol. Her joy came and went, another part of ragged dreams making for fitful sleep. In the moments she slept her long fingers arose, with wills of their own, and caressed the pistol. In waking, she held it close and smelled the steel and gunoil. As the night wore on to day, she knew what had to be done. Tears welled in her eyes, and she fought for hope of another option, but with the dawn breaking came certainty.

It was worse than the killing. The pieces of her friend, stripped to bare components in a bread sack, turned her stomach. She felt an awful emptiness as its familiar weight was reduced to parts jostling and dangling in the cheap plastic. The riverbank stretched before her, and through her grief she saw that the water flowed. Bird songs fought against her, but their joy was winning out.
She dropped pieces of him as she went. Small ones first, into the mud and flowing brown water. She took her time, and felt like she walked some great penitent distance between each lonely, and hopeful, splash and plop. As the sun drew low in the sky, setting the river ablaze in reflection, she emptied the bag and dropped it. This was the last of him, the barrel. Her fingers ached from the loneliness of each piece she'd dropped before, and ached more to feel his cold metal so long a friend. She kissed this last of him, and found it cold and rank with oil against her lips. With a cry she flung his finality into the deep water, and stood watching the ripples become overwhelmed in the flow.

Link Musings

I've been debating starting to do regular link posts... I might. If I do, they may be in the form of thought-streams from my day, or a few days (if some sort of topical, or at least related, lumpet emerges from my reading/thinking/writing for more than a day). This may also be another random post, never to be repeated, in a blog full of them.

Digital Ecology? - This musing from Jacquet is pretty interesting, and reaches beyond the immediate field in which her musings occur. I keep returning to “This is a different type of ecology, one facilitated by the digital universe”, and wondering if there isn't more there. The idea that the digital universe has its own ecology whispers beneath the surface. Not that that is a new idea...just a compelling one.

50 Posts About Cyborgs - This is interesting for the topic/material, but also for the format. I'm increasingly interested in the variety allowed by “blog form” publishing. I like the idea that a stand-alone, non-continuous, digital object can be created as a blog – Particularly in the simple interface delivered by Tumblr. Although I'm not sure I need more inspiration to start new blog projects, as I'm sitting at... half a dozen blogs now, including this one. Most of them I have no idea what to do with... other than I wanted to write about, or create something about, a topic that didn't fit in well on a blog I'd already established. That said, I have some writing/thought projects that would make interesting non-updating blog-form works.
On the Cyborg topic:

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented. We have used our minds to manufacture our selves and thus we humans today are the first cyborgs. We have invented ourselves. And we are not done yet. Kevin Kelly

I like a lot of this (the whole piece), although some of it is just distressing. Distressing in that it gives me visions of fat, iDevicePadObject plugged in, and tuned out, humans; Evolved with our technology, gone slow, dumpy and soft. Slow, soft, dumpy things are food to my mind. Obligate button pushers are a terrifying concept. They are not spear throwers, or rifle shooters; Those dangerous creatures of beautiful and lethal form. I refuse to be a button pusher. I'll go wild, and raise other wild things, if I must.

Newspaper Extinction Timeline- Interesting in the whole new publishing vs. old publishing way. I wonder how true this is for local papers in more remote places? The nearest towns to me are small, and isolated by miles and miles without urban sprawl; They are also not technologically contemporary communities, nor (most importantly) are there electronic media sources to supply them. What of the small town local paper in the Western US, and similar areas of geographic isolation, low population and low support from electronic media? Local media is different when you're in San Francisco, Ca. and San Francisco, NM.

I got notification of an acceptance the other day (on my birthday actually), and it should be getting published soon... If so, you'll get more soon. If not, perhaps more weeks of silence. This is my blogination-machine, and I'll use it as I see fit, after all.

Scorched Bastards

A nut hit the dirt ahead of my boot, its fleshy paleness rivulet with blood and blue veins. Stepping through the dust, I felt it slide and rupture under my heel accidentally. The injection gun in my hand creaked as, bending to the heaving flank, I stuck the needle in and squeezed. I stepped away again quick, as I felt the heat of the iron pass beside me. The denutted bull-calf bawled in pain as the hot iron struck his hip. He strained and twitched. The kid on the calf's neck twisted the foreleg higher, screwing himself down harder to the animal and the earth. Hot iron struck flesh once more, and then everyone pulled back. The calf jumped up, all snot, flying hair and dirt, kicked free of the rope and bolted to the corner of the corral. There, shoulders bumping against the others, the fright passed from his eyes. I spit, flicked a droplet of antibiotic from the needle tip and slid into observation.

The work was more than just putting the old two iron brand to flesh. The calves were roped out, and dragged nearer the cedar fire where the irons rested. Swift in movement, I stepped, gave the shot and withdrew. An ear got notched, and nuts got cut. Then the fiery-irons and scorching. All together the work became a flow. The dust, bawling and smoky smell of blood thickened in the senses, and the rhythm carried us. An easy joking rose among us in moments of panic, and fell to silence in the fluid moments of steady work. We darted with function and purpose, and laughed in disregard to the tastes in the air. We were all scorched bastards there, burnt in the sun and by the irons, but some laughed.