Andrew Taggart’s reflections on the founding story of Stone Soup attribute the success of the original beggar to personal charisma. Using the arts of magic, the beggar is able to mesmerise the villagers and charm them into parting with small individual gifts of food which, when added together to the communal soup pot, transform scarcity into abundance.

A trouble with charisma is that the magic always depends on that special individual. In this civilization that educates, and legislates, ordinary people away from the just exercise of their own capabilities and initiative, and into infantilised dependence on a complicated roster of experts, superiors, self-appointed gurus and superstars to live and dream on their behalf, charisma is not an unqualified blessing. Allowing it to stand justified as a means in itself is a recipe for disillusion, if not despotism. Charisma may hold the earnest intention of inspiring others to act, but unless the magic charge can complete its circuit through the self-chosen actions of those others, charisma is little more than a kind of vampirism, twisted into a feedback loop in which all it does is keep more mesmerised punters rolling up to nourish the bottomless soup pot of the charismatic’s ego.

A trouble with this sceptical account of charisma, though, is that it’s straining too hard to hide a necessary light. Charisma is as unevenly distributed through the population as any other gift or talent; calling for a radical redistribution of charisma is not unlike the tragic misperception of Wilhelm Reich, in casting himself as a mighty eagle who does not understand why only chickens and not more eagles hatch beneath him. Moreover, the sparks fired by the charisma of particular individuals are vital in the world: to take up the thread of Andrew’s post again, because they envision, inspire and model new ways of being and doing things.

Yet the inspiration has to take root in others. The villagers need to believe, and prove to themselves, that they can repeat the magic once the beggar has tucked the soup stone back in his pocket and headed off down the road.

In order to find out whether they can, I wrote – without pretending to any great gifts as a storyteller, mind – the following variation; the moral of which, if there is one, I’m sure you can deduce.

****

 Some years after the beggar visited and made stone soup, the land in which the village lay was invaded.

The long, already hazardous journey to the nearest town, to trade in the marketplace and share news, was no longer safe. The villagers lived in fear and apprehension, making do with dwindling supplies of salt and oil, eking out the vegetables and crops they could grow themselves, and the pigs and chickens they could slaughter. Strangers never came through the village any more, but some of the villagers remembered the beggar, and would slip a couple of potatoes or cabbage leaves to a neighbour who had less than themselves, with a smile and the words ‘Here’s an extra stone or two for the pot.’

Then came a day that no-one could forget and no-one wanted to remember. The village was invaded.

Hard-faced soldiers in black uniforms with guns, and swords. They poured petrol over the young crops in the fields and set them alight, put poison down the well, killed every last chicken, herded all the pigs into a truck, and burned all the villagers – men, women, children –out of their houses in order to slaughter them.

In the confusion and terror, seven villagers separately managed to escape. A young man, a middle-aged couple, a old mother and her adult son, a father and his eight-year old daughter.  They had time only to grab blankets and shawls before escaping as fast as they could into the deep forest that lay beyond the village, and once the night began to fall they were soon hungry and cold.

**

As he clawed and scrambled his way through the dark forest, the young man fell and cut his leg open on a sharp rock. He tore a piece from his shirt to bind it, but the blood quickly soaked through. He realised, cold with the understanding, that either he would bleed to death or starve to death or die of an infection; or the soldiers would come into the forest, find him and kill him.

So he made a choice. He bound up his wounded leg as tightly as he could with more strips torn from his shirt, and slowly, painfully, made his way back to the village.

As he limped up the road in the light of dawn, he was stopped by an armed guard. The guard could have shot him like a dog, but didn’t.

‘Look, I have nothing, no weapon, and you see I am injured. You can kill me if you must. But let me join your army and go with you. You see I am strong: I used to slaughter the pigs. Once a beggar came to this village and made soup from a magic stone. All of us gave a little something to make the soup even better; it fed the whole village and was the best soup I’ve ever tasted. I know that miracles are possible.  My home and village are gone, but I just want to live, and you are the rulers now.’

The guard eyed him from out of his hard face, and saw the strong arms and upper body of the young man beneath the remains of his shirt. He decided to save him. Not out of pity, but because he wanted the power of having the strong young man next to him as a comrade, forever indebted to him for this random and magnanimous sparing of his life.

The guard shouted up the road to a group of soldiers, ‘Here’s a survivor come crawling back for mercy. But I am letting him in. He wants to join us, and he is strong, but has a wounded leg. Give him food, and a uniform, and bring the medic to him.’

**

The middle aged couple spent two days moving north through the forest, surviving on plants and roots that they knew were safe to eat. Then they left the forest and came to a village.

They knocked on the first door that they came to. A woman about their own age swung the door open, saw their condition and hastily beckoned them inside. She could guess what had happened and so spared them the asking; whether for her own sake or theirs or both it’s impossible to say.

‘Set two extra places for these good people,’ she called to a girl who was poking the fire under a big, bubbling iron cauldron. ‘ Whatever we have cooking, it always goes further when unexpected guests arrive. Come over here by the fire and make yourselves comfortable.’

The couple marvelled at the woman’s unselfconscious generosity, so different from the attitude of their own village when the stone soup beggar had come knocking from door to door, only to be turned away from every one.

‘I wonder,’ began the man, ‘did you ever have a beggar come to this village, whom every household turned away and refused to feed, and who then sat in the square and cooked soup with a magic stone in a rusty old pot. He persuaded everyone to bring a little something to add to the soup, a potato, a carrot, an onion, a ham bone; and the whole village ate some, and I have to say that it was the best soup I’ve ever tasted. After that, we always tried to share what we had, however little, and we have always had less and less, ever since …. ‘

He fell silent, and looked away into the fire.

The woman whose home it was understood his silence, but still looked puzzled. ‘Well, I couldn’t say if that particular beggar has passed through here. Every so often  a beggar finds his way to this village, but it’s our custom, always has been, to treat every stranger as a guest, to share whatever we have, because that way it always goes further. So even if that beggar came to our village, he would have been given a meal and a place to sleep, if not here then with one of our neighbours. No one would have left him to make his own soup in the square, out of a magic stone, in a rusty old pot.’

**

The old mother and her adult son took three days traveling east to find their way out of the forest. The woman was frail, but she too knew which plants were safe to eat, and at night her son built for them shelters of fallen leaves and branches, to spare her the worst of the cold.

They came to a village and knocked on the first door that they came to. A man answered it, opening the door just a crack. Behind him they could see a roaring fire, and a woman next to it, cradling a baby.

The man looked at them through the crack in the door, guessed what had happened, and spared them the asking. He had met survivors of the invasion before, and it was always the same, terrible story.

‘Just a moment,’ he said, pushing the door to for a few minutes and then re-emerging with a ladle and a couple of blankets in his hand. ‘Take these to warm yourselves’, he said, handing them the blankets, ‘and follow me’.

The man led the woman and her son into the village square, and from behind the water trough pulled out a rusty old cooking pot. He began banging the pot with the ladle, and shouting out ‘Stone soup! Stone soup! We have strangers come to the village, cold and hungry, and we must make stone soup to feed us all!’

By ones and twos and threes and whole families, the entire village assembled in the square. Each person carried something, tucked in their hand or pocket,  wrapped in a handkerchief or a corner of their shawl, but kept their offerings hidden. The wife of the man at whose house they’d knocked brought firewood in a basket, and began to build a fire, the baby tied at her back.

Despite how cold and hungry and tired they were, the old mother and her son were incredulous. They had turned the stone soup beggar from their door, just like everybody else in their village; and although they had offered a little salt to add to the stone soup, just to play along, had eaten their share of it and knew in the secret places of their hearts that it was the best soup they’d ever tasted; still the beggar was a charlatan, not to be trusted. Even when afterwards some of their neighbours became soft and stupid enough to share more than what they had, the old woman and her son had kept to themselves, because goodness knew it was hard enough with this invasion and the dreadful rumours and supplies running short, without having to take from others and give to others and somehow it never felt right, this indebtedness, because in the secret places of their hearts they felt that whatever they could give was not enough to justify taking something in return.

‘No!’, said the son ‘not this! That crazy old beggar with his stone soup trick has been here too, and you’ve all fallen for it! We’d rather go hungry, or move on somewhere else. You can’t make this last, because the invasion is coming, and stone soup can’t feed all of you, because there’s not enough food in this village to keep giving, and the soldiers will … ‘

He fell silent, exhausted, and looked away at the half-built fire.

The wife with the firewood and the baby at her back could see, sometimes, into the secret heart of things. She put down her basket of firewood and came up to the old mother, untying the cloth that held her baby.

‘Look’, she said, ‘I have to build this fire. We all have to eat, and do what we can for each other now. After the beggar came, we all agreed that the stone soup he made was the best soup we’d ever tasted, and now whenever strangers come through this village – although, goodness knows, it hardly ever happens now – we like to do just as the beggar did, if only because stone soup tastes so good. And it will be so much easier for me if you can rock the baby while I work. All the others will be helping make the soup and clear up afterwards, but my job is building the fire, and it is hard bending and stacking wood and getting the kindling to catch with the little one tied to my back, and the smoke too close and making him cough. Please take him for me.’

By this time she was holding the sleepy infant in her outstretched hands, and the old mother couldn’t help but feel a little softer, and that she didn’t know what would become of them if she refused. Besides, she knew in the secret places of her heart that the wife was right about how good the stone soup was. So she took the baby and began to rock him.

Then a tall man, holding out an axe in his hand, came over to the son. ‘I can see you are tired from your journey,’ he said, ‘but you are still strong, and we really could use some help cutting more wood to make a really big fire. It is going to be a cold night, and we’ll need to stay warm out here while we all make and eat stone soup together.’

The son felt embarrassed about his outburst, and not sure what to say. He could see that there were enough strong men in the village already to chop a mountain of wood that would burn to warm the whole village all night and into the next day, without him helping.  But he could also see that the village expected him to give something in return for his share of stone soup, and that suited his desire to earn receiving with giving. Besides, he didn’t know what else he could do for his mother, who was already cooing to the sleeping baby in her arms; and he knew in the secret places of his heart that he too had never tasted anything so good as that crazy beggar’s stone soup.

So, the wife built the fire and the old mother rocked the baby; the son helped chop firewood, and the villagers sat and waited. When the fire was ready, the man with the ladle filled the old rusty pot with water and set it over the fire to boil. A boy of about ten stood up, went over to the trough, and pulled from behind it a smooth grey stone, which he dropped carefully into the pot.

The man began to stir, and the whole village, one by one, unwrapped their offerings and added them to the pot; and soon everyone was eating stone soup together, quite the best stone soup that they had ever tasted.

**

The father and his eight-year-old-daughter took a day and a night to get out of the forest by travelling west. Tired and very hungry, they came to a village and knocked at the first house on the road.

A young woman opened the door a tiny crack, no further, barely looking at them. ‘No, nothing to spare here, go away’, and before the father and his daughter could digest her words, the door was slammed shut again and bolted.

They tried the next house. A man with a thick beard opened the door a tiny crack, no further. ‘Get away from here,’ he hissed ‘For all we know, you are spies from the invaders, come to see what food we have that they can then come and steal, before murdering the lot of us.’

The father and his daughter tried the third house, the fourth house. Everywhere the same story: they were turned away, with either fear or outright hostility.

They ended up in the market square, hunched against the water trough.

‘We’ll rest here for a little while, and then get out of this village,’ said the father. ‘No-one wants us here, and they might hurt us, or worse, if they find us hanging around.’

The girl stared dully at the dirt in front of her feet, and then her eyes wandered to the right as if they knew where they were going. Her gaze caught upon a white gleam, so she scrambled over to where it lay and saw a smallish white stone with tiny chips of mica that, when she picked it up, fitted neatly in the palm of her hand.

‘Look Papa’, she said. ‘A pretty stone. Remember that beggar who came to our village once when I was tiny and made soup from a stone when no-one would give him anything to eat. And how it must have been a magic stone, because everyone, even the people with the hardest hearts, gave a little something to make the soup taste better; and afterwards everybody said that, even though it was stone soup and the ingredients were just the same as we eat every day, it was quite the best soup anybody in the village had ever eaten. Well, maybe this is a magic stone too, and maybe we could make stone soup for this whole village, just like that beggar did.’

The father felt terrible, because he knew that the beggar had played a trick – although it was a very clever, well-executed trick. And the stone soup had tasted remarkably good. And he did not have the heart to get angry and pour scorn on his daughter’s childish imaginings, because she had already seen things that no child should never have to see. But he was a plain-spoken man, a poor liar; this was a hard and perhaps dangerous place, not like when the beggar came to their village.

Yet he did not know what else they could do. It was still early in the morning, and nobody was about. The father guessed,  from his own recent experiences, that the villagers would not go out of their houses unless the absolutely had to, in this climate of fear and apprehension.

So, keeping low and moving slowly, he beckoned his daughter to come with him, out of the square and down a quiet track to the edge of the village, where, just as in their own village, there was a junk pile. Sticking out of the junk was the spout of an old rusty kettle with no lid. ‘That’ll do’, though the man, and pulled it out. Next to the junk pile grew a few straggly trees with fallen branches, and by twisting and snapping, he was able to pull together enough wood for the makings of a meagre fire.

The man and the girl returned to the square; the man build the fire and lit it with flint he always kept in his pocket. The girl took the game as seriously as any eight-year old would, carefully rinsing the old kettle in the trough and filling it with fresh water from the tap at the end.

Her father held out his hand for the stone, which his daughter had tucked safely in her pocket. He placed the stone in the kettle, and set the kettle over the fire. He found a loose twig in the dirt, and used it to stir the pot with.  After a while, he handed the twig to his daughter as she squatted beside him, and so between them they took turns stirring as the water began to steam.

A woman came from her house to get water and stopped short when she saw the pair. ‘What are you still doing here?’ she asked sharply.

‘We’re making soup’, said the girl eagerly as she stirred the water in the kettle. ‘A very special and delicious kind of soup. Stone soup.’

The woman leaned over, suspicious, and saw that there was nothing in the kettle but water and a small white stone. She decided that the pair were just crazy, filled her bucket, and was turning to go back to her house when her bearded neighbour came out – the man who’d thought that the girl and her father might be spies. The woman gestured over at the father and daughter with a look that said exactly what she thought of them. The bearded man was tempted to get angry, kick over their stupid kettle and drive them out of the village – but he had an imaginative eight-year-old daughter of his own.

Then another woman came for water; the village was starting to get as busy as it ever did in those fearful days. Before long, a small crowd had gathered around the man and his daughter, and to every enquiry as to what they were still doing there, the girl would stir the pot with an extra bit of vigour and concentration and reply, ‘We’re making the most delicious stone soup, for the whole village to share.’

Although every household had shut their doors in the faces of the father and his daughter, none of them made a move to drive them away. The children were fascinated by the game. Some of the adults, like the first woman come for water, though they were mad, maybe driven mad by what had happened to them, certainly too mad to make reliable spies for the invaders, and perhaps dangerous if provoked. Others, like the bearded man, hadn’t the heart to spoil the earnest game of an eight-year-old child who had probably seen things that no child should have to see. The most suspicious villagers started to believe that it would actually be best to humour the pair, so they could not report back to the invaders. And there were a few who didn’t care whether they let the two alone or kicked them out, whether they were spies or survivors, because they knew what was going to happen to them all, tomorrow or next week or in a month. They could feel their fate whistling in their bones.

All of them, as time went on and more steam rose from the rusty kettle, and the girl and her father took turns stirring, were gradually forgetting the constant atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in which they now lived.

‘Mmm,’ said the girl, ‘this really will be the most delicious stone soup we’ve ever made. But you know what Papa, wouldn’t it be just extra good with a potato in it. Just one potato.’ And she turned to the assembled villagers and asked ‘Can anyone spare a potato, just one potato, not even a big one, to make this stone soup taste extra good?’

The eight-year-old daughter of the bearded man turned to her father and said ‘We have potatoes, don’t we Papa?’ So the man returned to his house and came back a few minutes later, holding out a potato, which he offered to the stirring girl with his best play-along grin.

The daughter at the pot looked hard at her father. He was nervous, and ashamed, but he could also see that the game was making his daughter happy, and just maybe … ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this stone soup is looking really tasty indeed. But what would make it just .. so much better is .. a carrot. Can anyone give a carrot to make this stone soup really, especially delicious?’

One of the women who though that the man was crazy and possibly dangerous hastened to her house and came back with a wrinkled carrot, if only to humour his delusion.

And so it went on, with the addition of an onion,  a turnip, some cabbage, a ham bone, a handful of garden herbs, and a sprinkle of salt. The father and his daughter took turns to suggest ingredients, but by the time it came to the herbs someone just offered them, and then people began bringing more ingredients unasked. The whole village was absorbed, having forgotten the thing that they still had every reason to fear.

When the father announced that the stone soup was ready, everyone went back to their houses to fetch bowls and spoons; and even a little bread was found too.

Enough stone soup came out of that rusty kettle to give every person in the village a bowlful. All agreed afterwards that that stone soup was, truly, quite the best soup they had ever tasted.

Bonds are ties. Ties are compulsive. They are the fabric of domination, whether between us or within us. We live in societies that are bound by forms of domination. These form the social contract.

We struggle with the shape and size, the fit of this container. Some resist by pulling back, exercising authoritarian instincts to make life “simpler” by making the binders tighter and more direct. Others resist by asking for leniency. They seek to reform the bonds, looking for ways for them to pinch less, for them to make us feel more generous, magnanimous, more liberal. Neither side of this duality recognizes any possibility outside of bonds. All of them agree, without ever articulating why, that life could not exist outside of a state of domination. Each is eager to replace their flavor of dominance over their rivals, but neither sees any reason to look beyond the struggle they’ve bound themselves to.

Life is seen as a negotiation. There are roles and parties play their parts, and the whole is a game with winners and losers. There are no visible doubts concerning these foundations anywhere to be seen in any public forum. Arguments about inclusion and prejudice and hegemony thrown at one’s opponents from either side; and all across the “middle” of the fiction that this one short line scratched across the infinite realms of human possibility is all that is, all that matters; maintain an increasingly desperate insistence that beyond the tiny circle of their struggles can only exist chaos and the void. There is no room, no air beyond their panicked inhalations for anything else. Argue with them and their rage is their only answer.

This rage is the cutting edge of the all-consuming destruction that is both cause and result of a misunderstanding, a human failing that has led us on a self-amplifying course about to culminate in universal destruction through a variety of means and fed equally by the attitudes and beliefs that underlie the entire program. It matters naught which team we might prefer. This program has been fed by the consumption of abundance to create the fiction of wealth by placing its “winners” in a position of relatively lesser poverty that they then call wealth. The entire system, based on the primacy of desire and appetite, is only concerned with maintaining a slope, a relative position of perceived “superiority” for its proponents over those who’ve been taken as their victims.

In the endless bottomless craving for completion, complete power, complete consumption, complete domination over everything within range; there is no room for any deviation from the intoxication and addiction to this single human propensity now swollen to encompass the entire range of human possibility and touted either victoriously or in apologia as the sum total of “human nature!”

What is there to counter this Juggernaut? Even this question is mired in the overall framework that has caused this view of domination to become so all-encompassing.

What is a question that points us in another direction?

What is?

Asking what is, instead of demanding what one wants, is an alien concept today. Our alienation from such a clear and obvious necessity to place our efforts towards engaging with what is, is the final binder holding us within our trap.

When we talk of letting go, instead of this being a cry of defeat, a giving in to the nihilism hounding our exhaustion at our captivity, it is a release from the bonds that hold us within domination’s grasp.

The simple yet profound action of removing our attention from the struggle at the heart of domination’s hold over us does nothing, yet it changes everything. This is the catalytic moment we find in the story of Stone Soup writ large.

It is a choice to attend to connection, and through this choice we arrive at community, with all that this can give. It takes us from the binding traps of negotiation; with ourselves, with each other, with the world, with our conceptions of God; and releases us to the realm of trust, of sincerity, of the entire realm of the Gift. It opens us to the greatest gift, to the recognition of what our life is in each moment, its immensity, its sufficiency, its joy.

We replace an insatiable hunger to maintain a slope of advantage for the narrow slice of everything we deign to call ours, with a focus on sincerity and the ways of compassion that carries us into the only kind of growth that is eternal. The growth of community ever expanding, fed by compassion and understanding, to encompass all that is. This movement is life. It is not a trait of some subset of things as we see the world from within the view of domination. It is the currency of all. It is the dance, the motion that brings what is to be.

This must be experienced to be perceived. As fewer and fewer of us have had contact with craft, we’ve lost sight of this process. Lacking this experience we tend to resist the initial intractability of real tools and we welcome the simulated interaction with technologies. Hackers and “appropriate technologists” are caught in this trap.

Hackers, following the instincts that led people to craft in the past, go “under the hood” with computers, but they can’t escape the fundamental problem that computers create simulacra, they don’t deal in the actual. They appear to present more or less stimulating realities, but these are merely models. These models are built upon programed input. This input is necessarily limited, clearly finite. It is another layer of conditioning we apply over the rest of our psychological and social conditioning. Since it is based on that conditioning, the translation of thought into binary code, it amplifies our conditioning by the nature of its stimulating appearance as if it were present. It makes conditioning more compelling. We loose sight of the possibility present in actual tools to resist and to exert pressure on us to challenge our conditioning.

When someone attempts to literally use a hammer on everything, because it is the only tool they have, the result is immediately apparent. Its absurdity is transparent. When we take the armorarium of computer technology and use it on everything, we don’t even notice any problem with it. The artifacts, though based on a self-limited subset of only that which we think we know, generates such compelling models. In our fear of uncertainty we are happy not to question their validity and we are caught-up in a solipsistic loop gazing in wonder at the reflections of our input noninflected by any outside checks.

The entire framework titled “Appropriate Technologies” is based on the notion that human action is limited to technologies and that we can treat this grab-bag, the result of spending money to generate codified preconceptions, as the high point and end-all of our human ability to interact with the world.

The greatest promise within a re-engagement with craft lies in weaning us away from this codified narcissism. Schools & Museums are focal points from which this change can grow. For this to happen we need to take their potential seriously and drop all the rationalizations that have enshrouded us and paralyzed these institutions as they are now formulated. Instead of seeing schools as training grounds for future technologists, they need to be recast as places where an engagement with art and craft can take all who participate; students, teachers, community past our present impasse. We can stop looking at museums as part of some “entertainment industry” and engage with them as repositories of collected wisdom, held within artifacts, tools, and within the life experiences of those who have dedicated their lives to studying and maintaining these artifacts and tools.

Schools and museums currently suffer from our trivialization of their promise. This trivialization is a symptom of the deeper trivialization we’ve come to accept concerning our lives and life itself. Our infatuation with technology and the fundamental misunderstanding of craft around us has been a driver of that trivialization. Unless we can cross what remains of a bridge back into an appreciation of the difference between technology and craft, we will lose the chance to find meaningful ways to interact with our world at a time when this is so desperately needed.

As the fire grows tall and the fumes rise high, the villagers, with curiosity piqued, wander out from their homes and ask him what he is about. “I’m making soup,” he says. “Stone soup,” he clarifies. The first villager replies that he has “never heard of it.” In Antonio’s version, we read on:

“It’s a magic stone. It makes a wonderful soup! If you’re willing to wait a little bit, you can have some with me!”

He gave the pot another stir. They sat down together by the fire. She couldn’t take her eyes off the pot. She sniffed the air, trying to detect the aroma of the soup in the smoky, damp, cold air.

“This is a wonderful soup. But,” he hesitated. With conviction he added, “You know! It would be so much better if we had a potato…” His voice trailed off wistfully.

The woman blurted out, “I have a potato!”

And so it comes about that the villagers show up, inquire in turn, and, mesmerized, add to the pot what they have – an onion, some cabbage, some carrots, a ham bone – with the result that the stone soup manages to provide for all.

*

For a while, the skeptic has been standing very impatiently off stage. Let’s give him some lines. No doubt, he would have entered the scene at the point when the first villager arrived and scrunched up her nose. Unmoved and unconvinced, the skeptic would have thrown up his hands and said, “Oh, come now! What is the beggar offering in the end, and what reason do we have for believing him? As far as I can see, he has no goods to sell and no skills to alienate. For observe that he has not laid down any warm clothes, nor has he brought any good food. Lest we forget, he is a beggar: hence not a cobbler, a mender, or a farmer; and not a carpenter, a builder, or a shepherd. He is not even a cook, for his soup is neither edible nor nourishing. Indeed, it is nothing save a stone and some water. Stone soup it is not. In short, with nothing in hand and without skilled hands, he comes empty-handed. It is not clear to me that he isn’t just out to swindle, and I don’t see how one could quiet my suspicions.”

The skeptic poses a reasonable challenge. Give us a reason, he says, show us something, give us some grounds for our beliefs. Unless we can give him some reasons, we cannot be justified in believing that the beggar is anything but a swindler or a charlatan.

Can the beggar be vindicated? The case is more doubtful still. Recall that no villager has ever heard of stone soup so that the beggar can’t even appeal to evidence of the prior existence of stone soup as an anchor point in reality. Stone soup is only a conceit, an idea both vague and indistinct, a vision whose motivating force may come only from Schwarmerei (in German, the word refers both to illusion and to excessive enthusiasm). Following the beggar may lead us into disaster.

*

I have heard and felt the skeptic’s doubts. During the past week, I have read the story many times since Antonio first asked me to write something about it. I have spent some time puzzling over a vindication. Let me open my hands and in just, careful generosity offer a reply to the skeptic.

The beggar’s charm, I would argue, is manifested in charisma, and his art is the art of magic. He offers up the thought that more can come from less, that the staid way is not the only way, and that things can change in virtue of how we change our collective way of life. For consider: as he makes the soup, the beggar is transforming himself from a beggar into a visionary of a different, more just economic order. And what he is offering, it seems to me, is a thoroughgoing transvaluation of the concepts of scarcity and abundance.

In the beginning, the villagers assume that scarcity holds sway. Times are tough, hostility is the way of the world, and distrust abounds. They assume that there is no other way to get on during hard times but to hoard, to turn away the guest, and to turn aside from their fellows. For them, nothing apart from scarcity is remotely conceivable. So that the visionary, once a beggar, must turn things around. In this, he does no more than invite each who comes forth to conceive of an economic order in which the little bit that he has can be “alchemized” such that the whole can become more than the sum of its parts; in which each can contribute something, a little, a little bit, whatever it is he can give; in which contributing to the common good can entail partaking of the final bounty; in which the lack of social trust can be overcome in a blessed time of amends making; in which – and this may be the most important riposte to the skeptic – the vulnerability of each person can be honored but limited (it is a potato, yes, but only a potato; in giving this potato, I might bleed and lose, true, but even if I lose, I won’t lose my skin; I am not asked – no, not once – to give more than I can spare).

What the beggar-cum-visionary is offering, then, is the conceit that our fragile mutual dependency can be the basis for an economy of abundance. And that, I think, is quite a radiant vision of life brought to order.

We talk of technologies when we believe that the means justify the ends. Craft reminds us constantly that the means are the ends.

One of Krishnamurti‘s most powerful insights is that the means are the ends. So much for unintended consequences! There is no mystery there. What blind-sides us is our recurring expectation that we can establish and maintain a distance between means and ends. We read the collapse of that wished for distance as unintended consequences.

All of our discussions concerning technology are mired within this expectation. We have stripped away the context of our actions, willfully we choose to believe that techniques are merely means and that they are as a movable feast available to us to choose whatever is expedient to toss at whatever end we have in mind. This results in unintended consequences. We join battle with these, as if they were some capricious result, or some outside foe messing with our plans, and we double-down. Then triple-down. Then shift the battle to cover a wider front. All the while unintended consequences pile on and proliferate and expand to reach tipping points and carry us into new regimes of increased destabilization – or, perhaps even worse – new stable regimes that are increasingly hostile to life.

This path is easy to fall upon. There are always moments when the means-to-an-end-crowd, their copies of The Prince in their back pockets ready to defend their realpolitik as the ultimate in pragmatism, win a victory or remove a foe. But these are Pyrrhic victories, and a new foe is always ready to step in.

When I speak of Craft I’m not talking about a nostalgic desire for any particular craft tradition or any modern fad that looked at Craft as a quaint respite from the necessity to get things done. What I’m finding is that in any actual Craft tradition there is buried an attitude towards making and doing that leads us away from the urge to settle for a means to an end.

Our modern resistance to Craft, “It’s so slow! It’s so hard! It’s so inefficient!” are all based on our desire not to look too closely at the dangers of distinguishing means from ends. In every case these resistances provided by Craft are there to pull us back from that precipice, the precipice we are up against and looking down from with increasing horror.

Faced with the enormity of our predicament, what do we do? We use this fear to prod our sense of urgency so we can remain fully committed to chasing after ends by whatever means.

Ever wonder why futility catches up with us? No matter, we can throw more will at it! Stir up more fear and anger! These will keep us on task!

They will. They will keep us focused. They will keep us focused directly on the process that got us here, and by doing so we are insuring that nothing will be done that might actually change our course.

What does it take to recognize that the means are the ends?

It all comes down to whether we are honest with ourselves about our level of engagement with what is. What is is not what we would like it to be. It’s not what we fear it to be either. It is very difficult to maintain an engagement with since our conditioning, the operating system of habits and memories, and thoughts and emotions, we are saddled with as a result of the way we develop within families and societies, keep getting between us and what is.

I’m beginning to think this is why Crafts developed. In times when it was not so easy to insulate ourselves from the consequences of our actions – and that was most times in the life-span of humanity – without cheap and easy fuels to throw at our difficulties – we had to develop Crafts as a way to keep our focus on the consequences of our actions. There had to be a mediator between desire and action. A way had to be developed that would give precedence to a mature response to both desires and needs, so that our actions would remain within some sort of bounds.

Often these bounds have been couched as questions of morality. We’ve worn the efficacy off these arguments. What is moral has come down – whether we choose to believe them or deny them – to be a battleground over authority. We accept them or reject them, not for their validity, or in ways that make them useful, but simply as a means to fight for an end regarding our stance on authority.

Because of this it seems worthwhile to look beyond moral arguments for any action. These are compromised motivators and they don’t give us any traction where it matters most.

Behind every moral argument is a core of utility. This term has also been degraded. Utility has been subsumed into the means-to-an-end point-of-view. Utility has joined efficiency and pragmatic as excuses for chasing after ends by whatever means.

Behind all of these arguments lurks validity, a truth so masked as to often lead us astray into falsehood. The truth behind the moral or utilitarian arguments for recognizing that we confuse the relationship between means and ends at our peril is that whatever means we choose, these will be the ends we arrive at.

There is no weight in our intentions or our expectations for a particular result that will bring us to whatever end we’ve held up as our excuse. We will be working on our means. We will bring these means to be. They will fill our present and shape our future. Whatever ends we posed to justify ourselves simply do not exist. They are projections, wishes, illusions we generate in a naive or calculated attempt to hide our falseness. They become rallying points around which we expect to create a conspiracy of lies so that we can maintain our falseness. This is a definition of corruption.

It becomes easy to spot the corruption within those who most obviously benefit directly from these lies. This is one benefit we have within this moment of clarity provided us by our global predicament. The hard part is recognizing that we all have paid our dues to this club and we all conspire to maintain the lies when we choose to maintain the falsehood that simply replacing one set of corrupt actors with one flavor of corrupt actions with another will solve anything.

These are the fruits of the clarity available to us, given to us by the perspectives we have available to us today. Perspectives from so many periods in the past, from all over the world. The knowledge we have of the pervasiveness and depth of our predicament. The enormity we face is more clear now than it has ever been. We cannot hide behind any narrow view or provincial partisanship.

There have been people, human people physically interchangeable with us, on this earth for between one and two hundred thousand years. Out of that great span we have a record, loosely bound within a set of stories we call history, that stretches at most five thousand years. Before that time there were long periods of stability. There were enormous cataclysmic upheavals of climate and geology. Humans persevered throughout.

During this last blink of an eye we have become enamored of looking for means to achieve ends. This has led us as though on a path of reductio ad absurdum to the edge of global destruction by a host of available means. Each of our means has grown out of our following a convoluted path as we’ve chased after one series of unintended consequences after another. We stand on this edge and continue to put most of our efforts into playing the same game.

Remnants of Craft remain. Remnants that have much in common with the stone tools and baskets of that long prehistory keep whispering in our ear,

“The means are the ends.”

Will we stop long enough to listen?

Rima Staines has created this rune.

She writes in part,

For some time I have wanted to make an image with which to start a quiet revolution on the backs of service station toilet doors, on the billboards behind carparks, over the screens of insidious train-journey advertising. In deep hatred for the feeling I get when I am forced to enter motorway service station cafes, shopping malls or toilets, I wanted to rail against all that is bland and homogeneous and commercial and life-suckingly chrome-and-concrete and spreading un-refuted like a disease across our land. I imagined planting little seeds of hope and solidarity in the form of a beautiful and rousing image which I would stick between the scrawlings of desperation and ugliness in the perfumed, disinfected cubicles made for us to shit in whilst we are not at home. The backs of public toilet doors are a fascinating melting pot of honest expression, dissent and advertising; it feels like there’s a communication between strangers played out there in this, the most private of rooms, and this is the way I wanted to communicate: liminally.

I’ve not followed the Runic Arts but I am struck by the direct simplicity of these marks that straddle pictograms and writing. They call to my Celt-Iberian roots.

This mark, which appears to have come to her in a dream – the way all creativity strikes as it crosses from somewhere else into consciousness by a path of its own devising – refers to roots, to growing things. It begins with the tripod stability that signifies rootedness itself, and goes on to rise into a forked asymmetry that calls for some continuation beyond what is, what is known, maybe even what is knowable.

Rima has offered this, and an image it may have grown out of, for anyone to use. In the above excerpt from her post, she shows us some of her motivation, how she sees these as possible signals of revolt, a sign that such revolt could be a form of growing, not simply a negative form of resistance. And, that such a revolt was best communicated softly, as she puts it liminally.

What a wonderful word. It speaks to limning, lining off, delineating, drawing a gesture or a mark that begins here, and goes somewhere….

It also refers to the edges of things, boundaries, the places and spaces that are known more for what they separate than for what they are in themselves.

The forces she resists are none-other than the Spectacle. The act, the reminder, and the sign post of leaving such a mark in such places is a way of countering the Spectacle and so is close to what we are about here.

I’ve been thinking of labyrinths lately. This mark is not a sign of labyrinth. Though it could be a map of safe passage through one. Its directions are clear. Go up from where you stand firm, and don’t be afraid to branch….

This seemed to be a good thing to celebrate here at Stone Soup. Her gesture of giving what she has created is certainly an example of the generosity that underlies our story.

I’m reminded of the Hobo’s marks used in an earlier period of hard times to help those who come later tell friend from foe, a welcoming haven from a trap.

I’ve recently taken another ride on the merry-go-round that is the process of getting published these days.

Here’s a direct quote from a friendly publisher who took the time to answer my request for a reading,

“…it’s almost impossible to sell any debut fiction at all these days, wherever it comes from, unless it’s a bestseller…”

In a way it’s refreshing to hear. And not the first time.

Coupled with a variety of other catch-22s and old fashioned double-binds it’s publishing way of welcoming us into the era of collapse! These conditions aren’t going to improve “after the down-turn.” This is a sign of the new normal, at least until the next floor drops out.

I’ve been putting a lot of thought, for years now, into what it is that I really want that has not been available outside of traditional publishing. It has consistently come down to two related issues. First my conviction that a manuscript is not a book – I’m talking about fiction and creative writing in general here, non-fiction is a totally different animal, as I’ve been told for a decade by everyone I’ve asked within publishing.

A manuscript is not a book until it’s been edited. I don’t mean copy-editing, or proof-reading, although those are necessary. I’m talking about having a committed reader and lover of literature who is experienced and talented and can communicate a point of view and enter into a dialogue with the writer in a process that culminates in a finished book. This may mean a series of major revisions, cuts, and transpositions, or it may be the lightest of line-edits and a thank you very much! But it doesn’t happen in an editor-for-hire situation and rarely today does it happen at all, even if one is lucky enough to find an amenable publisher.

I can’t stress how important this is. How central it is to the creation of a work of fiction. Somewhere between the subjectivity of a writer and manuscript, and the public presentation of a completed book, there needs to be this other person, another subjectivity removed from the writer, yet held to the work by a certain affinity, and even love for it. Much of what we revere as literature written at least in the last few hundred years has had the benefit of this relationship as part of its creation. If there’s anything I’m nostalgic for about the great days of the small independent houses in Europe and the United States, say, between 1900 and 1950, it’s this.

The other point I’ve been holding out for is the way a publisher’s involvement signals the approval of a known “gatekeeper.” This isn’t to validate the work in my own mind, that’s not really here nor there. It seems to be the best, if not the only way to get above the noise. There are more works published, either printed or as e-books, today than ever. There are so many thousands of items published every day that it is nearly impossible to show above the surface of this deluge without the benefit of whatever remaining clout publishers still have to get the word out and notice paid.

Of course, the above quote does admit that this is not seen to be enough anymore, even by those who are still dedicated or crazy enough to attempt to run an independent house. Everyone expects a writer to be his or her own publicist and to spearhead a marketing campaign for their own work. It’s curious the way this last gasp of “market wisdom” is so firmly held in this field of creating and disseminating an art form when it’s been so fully discredited everywhere else! It’s almost funny.

Then there’s another double-bind. Publishers reject outright anything that’s been put up for view on the web. Copyright is a fraught issue. The blurring of traditional quid-pro-quo, payment for work, hit music and print publishing hard, as it continues to spread to many other sectors. There are no clear procedures to address this and there needs to be room to experiment with ways to trade access for attention. This publisher’s fiat makes it that much more difficult for a writer to jump start interest in their work before they get a contract.

As I see it, in the absence of a clear path to publication one of the few avenues open to me is to put my writing on-line so it can find some audience, have some influence, and perhaps gain some traction. But then by doing so, I run headlong into their prohibition and automatically exclude my work from consideration. The net result is as if print publishers admitted I have absolutely no chance of getting picked up without being able to prove that I have a following and that my work is influential. But if I put my work out so that it can have a chance to meet these prerequisites, I have forfeited any chance they will accept me.

Ah! The joys of the double-bind! Good thing I’ve had so much experience with them, now that they’re surfacing everywhere we look!

This condensed version of my agonizing analysis of the situation is a preamble to finding some other ways forward. These problems are not unique to me. This is where so many writers find ourselves today.

As with any intractable problem or predicament there are all manner of snake-oil remedies and sweet-tasting pablum “on the market.” Buzz-words abound! Today’s versions of the true-blue advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate, “Plastics!”

As with all generalities, these are much less helpful than we’d like to believe. They still need to be translated into a set of specifics, and these need to be tested against our real requirements, not just taken on face value.

To begin, let’s review what publishing has traditionally offered writers and see what still applies.

A relationship with an editor may be the only thing that cannot be worked around or done without. Obviously there needs to be another way of finding such a person and entering into a relationship with them that will meet each parties needs.

The question of gatekeepers and rising above the noise, is much more complex. It seems to require all parties to recognize and admit that there are no sacrosanct defensible positions. The double-bind of demanding a viable presence from writers without allowing them to use the web to generate it is a refusal by publishers to see anyone else’s needs but their own. The demands to meet a “bottom line,” whether as was recently the case by making fat profits on a bet on a best-seller, or even today’s narrowed circumstances where even meeting costs is more of a wish than an expectation by small houses, we all need to work on the realization that without maintaining the cultural connections between writers and readers, there will be no publishing, and literary culture will fall in lock-step with this particular society’s fiscal assumptions and collapse with the rest of it.

Writers write because they have to. People read because they feel a need to. Creating a path between the two that honors the values behind this human connection is a way of life that some people have taken since the birth of writing, even before the printing press, certainly before the e-book! As the old ways fall apart around us, we need to carve out a way to fulfill these roles without putting all the pressure to take up the changes on some other party.

We are all in the same quandary, How do we make a living in a post-capitalist world?

The assumptions behind profit and capital growth are killing us. We see the results of this play out around us in every sphere of life. When it comes to the specifics of how we each make a living, we are caught in a trap. We have “expenses.” These are firmly within the dying paradigm and are backed, at least for the less fortunate among us – the vast majority – by the power of law and the state to keep us within this form of servitude. We are each of us making some efforts to find other pathways to connect with each other and share value and find meaning in the way we would want to allocate value. We have a hodge-podge of tools at our disposal, and a variety of skills and talents to bring to bear.

The result, at least so far, has been a form of fibrillation. Our old rhythms are failing and the new ones have not been able to develop strength, so we vacillate and vibrate between them unsure and unknowing how to proceed. A first step would appear to be to recognize this and accept it as our current situation. Continuing to look over our shoulders at what used to work and hedging our bets is one mechanism that keeps us from going forward. We need new ways to find each other and to initiate new relationships. We then need to develop these relationships, building resilience and robustness into new forms that just might last as the collapse of the old ways deepens and continues to exert pressure on us all.

Our desires, as with our needs, will have to be modest; but that doesn’t mean that we should abandon what led us to follow our callings in the first place.

Reading this, you might be thinking of all the tools we do have available to do this. There’s Kickstarter, and Indie Gogo, collaborative projects like The Future We Deserve…. These are useful tools, as far as they go. But unless we put some effort into laying out a framework for their use, a set of new assumptions that are more than marketing ploys or wishful thinking, we will continue to flail about, each finding some partial success or teasing near-miss.

It comes down to our expectations for institutional forms in general. We are coming off a long habit of expecting to plug into institutions created and operated by others who are doing so on the basis of harvesting a capital advantage from the process. We have the underlying assumption that all such interactions should and are necessarily negotiations between competing parties each bent on gaining whatever advantage they can from the system. We reward those who succeed at harvesting these advantages and sequestering socially perceived value for their own uses, whatever those may be. The failures of the rest, most of us, to meet these conditions and “win,” is taken as not just the “way things are,” but as a sign of virtue, or divine Providence.

This does not work. It is corrupt and leads unerringly to the abuses we suffer from and which threaten to destroy everything.

Those of us who find our callings as artists, as writers, as anyone who sees value in all that is missing from this reductivist equation need to be clear. With ourselves, and with each other.

Making a living cannot continue to be segregated from having a life. We can no longer afford it!

This connects with the examples we have of past Bohemias. In these places, at those times, people came together and chose to share hardships so as to be able to live a certain life that was not generally valued by the culture at large. This truth has also been corrupted. Over the course of the Twentieth Century the idea of Bohemia was co-opted and taken advantage both from within and without. The Star System and things like the CIA backing Abstract Expressionism for nationalistic geopolitical ends came together and destroyed the old Bohemia. It’s important that we realize how this happened so we don’t just assume the initial impulse was faulty. Bohemia was killed, it didn’t die of natural causes. It was colonized along with every remaining scrap of the world outside of the reductivist system.

Unless we see these connections, and take seriously how deep the rot goes, and how difficult and all-pervasive the causes are, we will remain trapped, oscillating between an inchoate yearning for something vital while disbelieving how much force is arrayed against us.

Our predicaments are intertwined. The crises of security, of want, of the destruction and unraveling of the fabric of life; are all interwoven together and cannot be addressed independently with any possibility of finding traction. As artists, as writers, we are the ones who can point this out, and imagine new pathways, all in the spirit of the beggar in Stone Soup.

I’d like very much to see this place as a forum for dialogue on the implications, both broad and narrow of these conditions. I think that putting them under this umbrella could be useful as a way to signal, to ourselves, to each other, and ultimately to a wider view; that we see what’s at stake and are going forth together and with our eyes open.

I recognize that the splintering and Balkanization of views the web facilitates as it makes it so easy for some of us to find a minimal reach for our work at least is yet another bind. There is a continual fracturing of consensus and a doubling-down of finding differences between those who might otherwise be willing to act as allies. This may be frustrating, but as a reminder that any grouping of artists into a herd is a mistake, it does help keep us honest! The key is in finding ways to work together while maintaining our unique viewpoints. In finding paths to reciprocity and dialogue instead of negotiation and aggregation.

This is a rambling preamble and not a laying out of steps, or even an exhaustion of the factors involved. I look forward to finding ways to proceed with this project in the new year.

Life is being devoured by growth, misplaced growth, growth that refuses to admit to cycles and insists on a manic linearity that can only lead to collapse and immense destruction. This kind of growth exists in nature, it is cancer, malignancy. It is no stretch of poetic fancy to recognize the way our culture is functioning as a form of planetary cancer.

Yet, growth is what makes life possible. Growth is deep within our innate yearnings as organisms. This is the kind of growth that recognizes cycles and fits into the ebb and flow of life. It is growth that sees value in all aspects of existence and does not attempt to bend the world to fit ill-considered whim.

Nurture. Growing within a pattern of cycles, is deeply connected with Food. Through Food, and then expanding out into other endeavors, this form of growing is an important aspect of Craft as well. We see this acting directly when we look at subsistence agriculture and hunting and foraging. Our food is not only found or grown through a series of practices that coalesce as the Crafts surrounding finding and growing food. Food is then made from its ingredients within another series of Crafts surrounding the preservation and preparation of food. When we put these all together we are talking about traditions and rituals and ways of acting that culminate in characterizing how we live.

So much of these Crafts have been, and are continuing to be, lost. Beyond the loss of information is an increasing difficulty for us to even imagine the habits of mind and action required to maintain them. What was once taken for granted, as an ongoing legacy transmitted down the generations, is now a series of isolated artifacts most often collected for reasons that have little to do with their actual value. While we suffer from these losses, we are also recipients of the gift of awareness of the value intrinsic in these Crafts, and the ways of life they create through their practice. What has been discounted and abandoned in a rush after fantasies of power and control is now poignantly precious in our eyes once again.

What this requires of us is that we combine efforts to resurrect these practices and enfold them into our lives with a process of re-examining the meaning of these practices so as to free them from secondary considerations of connoisseurship and fashion. These attitudes may have contributed to salvaging remnants of our traditional crafts, but they now hold these practices at an artificial remove from our actual lives that is increasingly dangerous and maladaptive.

We find that we can increasingly no longer afford to establish and maintain enclaves and preserves that attempt to hold onto aspects of craft as though – and even literally – in a museum. This is both lamentable and also something to be used to our advantage. As our abilities to act whimsically contract, we are given the opportunities to act with serious intent instead. We can work to incorporate as many aspects of craft tradition into our actual every-day lives. This works to reverse the trends, as so well put here by Christian Ford,

“Especially if we’re defining ‘power’ as heat engine and ‘strength’ as muscle.  What really strikes me is the corollary, the inverse relationship between power and craft, which I would idiomatically render as ‘the bigger the engine the dumber the man.’  I really do think that there’s a 100% concordance between the availability of ludicrous amounts of power and the ignorance with which we approach our world.”

If we are to reverse this course, for the internally logical reasons that reducing our ignorance is a positive value, as well as out of necessity – as we lose the ability to call on unlimited power – then we need to both adopt and adapt traditional crafts into our lives, and also embrace them as a way of life instead of as an avocation or socially modulated special-interest.

Two major thrusts have driven the increase and spread of poverty. First is the destruction of abundance. The second is the erosion of practical knowledge and its connection with traditions of wisdom that put strength and craft above power and technology. While we are at the mercy of the destruction of abundance that has been carried out, and whose inertia will carry us even deeper into an era of loss, we do have control over how we deal with the second cause of poverty. As the collapse of failed systems proceeds, each of us will have to contend with a growing personal, direct relationship with a narrowing of possibilities. Poverty will no longer be an abstract concept for anyone.

Again, there is a benefit to be gained in this! Our motivations to restore craft and to counter poverty will be personal, not abstract. The direct effort and the direct engagement this calls for is a great opportunity. We are not destined irrevocably into an abject poverty as we see it now in its worst cases. We have the opportunity to exchange the extremes of ease and want for a growing appreciation of enough. As the villagers discover in Stone Soup lack is not sufficient to guarantee poverty. It takes lack and isolation and ignorance to impoverish us. In this way we are all poor today. We risk becoming much poorer unless we take these lessons to heart.

We yearn to be involved in growth, to grow, to be growing, nurturing, belonging. We’ve been taken by a colossal bait & switch. We’ve mistaken the false promises of linear and blinkered growth for the real thing. We’ve suffered as a result. We’ve been a party to tremendous destruction and find ourselves complicit, even against our wills. By turning our attention and efforts to building a new edifice of craft we can change our course and meet our responsibilities.

On so many levels we feel trapped and hemmed in by choices that offer us no choice and condemn us, and everything we care about, to unceasing destruction. By turning our attention away from the enticements and the traumas surrounding these bad choices, we can do the only thing which is in our immediate control. By focusing our attention on matters of craft, of nurture and the growth of this other kind; we open ourselves to new possibilities and limit the hold, and the damage, we do to ourselves, and our world.

]]> http://counteringthespectacle.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/growing/feed/ 2 antoniodias Mauricio's Potato Plot http://counteringthespectacle.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/adjusting-expectations/ http://counteringthespectacle.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/adjusting-expectations/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:08:57 +0000 Antonio Dias http://counteringthespectacle.wordpress.com/?p=131 ]]>

Reading accounts of life in preindustrial contexts is often a lurching experience. We find so many instances where we are used to, “And we started her up and motored on through!” Where, instead days weeks, even months or years, are spent dealing with a discrete obstacle of distance, or adverse conditions such as wind, or current, or altitude; we expect to simply power-on to get what we want, when we want it. The same holds true regarding getting things done. Instead of a few clicks and the delightful expectation of an overnight delivery, we read of the grueling effort required to make the simplest thing.

There’s a consistency to our reactions. We automatically assume that our attitude is the normal one and that the situation described is one of a tremendous lack. Swimming in a sea of unexamined exceptionalism we expect to have our whims met by whatever expenditure is necessary to avoid our impatience, or even merely our boredom. We certainly never let it get to the point of effecting our actual needs!

At the risk of sounding a trite and off-putting note, does any of this make us happier? Is there any connection between this emotional state we consider normal and the state of our general mental health? There is now talk of adding Lithium salts to drinking water. Is this a sign of how much better off we are?

Anyone who’s followed my writing at Horizons of Significance should expect that I don’t see eye to eye with these assumptions. I’ve been working on plotting out a series of connections between aspects of existence such as power and strength, control and mastery, technology and craft, futility and joy. This site and its organization around the interconnections between Art, Craft, Food, and Life; and their connection to the role of the artist as a catalyst for developing community, joy, and a sense of satisfaction with enough; is an outgrowth of that work and a potential next step.

What if the problem lies in our expectations and not in our material situation? Of course, our expectations have led to a deteriorating physical condition paralleling our increasing dissatisfaction with the state of our lives. But, the correlation may not be what we assume it to be, that wanting more and not getting it is a problem of supply.

If we take reality as a starting place instead of our wishes, then it becomes quite clear that as the distance between what we have and what we wish for increases and becomes ever more insistently a matter of focusing desire on those wishes instead of what is possible, then we not only get increasingly unstable physical conditions, but we get increasingly unstable mental states. It’s no coincidence that our aggregate public persona is now that of a spoiled, uneducated, and insistently demanding infantilized adult.

There have been those who have had something to gain by this. It didn’t happen without help. We might find that the greatest public investment of the past century has been directed to creating this ideal consumer/subject. It takes a bit more digging to see that the cost of this investment has backfired even on those who sought to gain at our expense. They have now been swallowed by their own propaganda – Oh! That’s not been an acceptable term since it got a bit of a bad press with Göebbles and Stalin…. The dream of a new feudalism with shiny space-ships in place of grimy castles on cold dank hilltops doesn’t appear to be panning out. They’re now setting their sites lower, and closer to the old paradigm. Still, the excesses of our day cannot be held at bay by walls and highly armed security forces.

Let’s get back to the dynamic surrounding our expectations and the gap between our own experience and those of just about every human that preceded us and the majority of people alive today who have never achieved a semblance of what we’ve aspired to.

One more digression. The question of wealth. John Michael Greer in his latest post goes a long way towards describing the mechanism of arbitrage that has powered the Ponzi-scheme of industrial development. I would, and have gone, a bit further to say that all wealth concentration throughout the civilized portion of human life on earth has been the same thing. The concentration of benefits has been a way of stripping away a general abundance and robust resiliency so as to provide ease for a few. Instead of creating wealth, it has created poverty, as Ivan Illich so well laid this out forty odd years ago.

Stealing sufficiency from others, human and non-human others, created the illusion of wealth creation while in actuality generating widespread poverty and a general and always downward trending condition of impoverishment for all life on Earth. My personal experiences of eating at a pinnacle-of-wealth restaurant in New York in the eighties and eating at one of the last true peasant households in western Europe gave me a direct measure of how that has played out. These were among the best meals I ever had. The latter was by far the best of the two.

The restaurant is closed. The peasant, my mother’s cousin, has died. The possibilities for either level of quality have diminished with the passing years and the erosion of the Earth’s abundance and diminution of human possibility playing out all around us. Every meal we eat today has the added consequence, payback for Tokyo’s gaudy night-life, in a load of Fukushima spread nuclear hazard – as just one discreet example of the ongoing toll of all that desire.

The lie of wealth creation is becoming harder and harder to maintain. I doubt anyone holding considerable wealth today actually believes in the mechanisms that brought them what is an increasingly meaningless comparative advantage. There are so many signs now of a grim retrenchment of the kind that led the wealthy suburbanites of Conimbriga to tear down their own villas and retreat to a more defensible citadel, using their marble columns and statues to build a new wall intended to keep the future out.

Craft, and Food. These are the ways into a readjustment of our expectations. There is a tremendous disillusionment we must get through in this process. We tend to shy away from such a prospect! What I’ve been discovering over at Horizons of Significance over the last year and a half or so has been the connection between disillusionment and the prospects of Joy. There is a direct connection between the pain and suffering of our growing sense of futility and the frightening level of our current delusions as they appear in what passes for common-sense, or as the basis for any general consensus coming out of our exceptionalist expectations.

As we progress through a process of disillusionment we find a new access to the vitality of our beings and the wellsprings of joy in the satisfactions of existence. From this we begin to see the way our present delusions set us up, not only for physical disaster as we force ever greater consequences as we reach for ever more trivial results; but that they also keep us bound within a bottomless pit of unquenchable desire that strips us of any possibility of satisfaction.

Food is one of our most immediate necessities. Craft is the overall umbrella of how we confront need. We are disconnected from both. We have been led, and have eagerly followed, a chimerical promise of never-ending ease; and have paid for it by the erosion of food from a daily celebration of abundance into an inexorable decline into ersatz food-product. We’ve left behind, and almost obliterated, a world of highly developed and sophisticated craft that tied us to the earth and to an economy of actual necessity as we’ve been seduced by the false-promises of power and its handmaiden, technology. Food and food-product are not the same thing! Craft and technology are also not the same thing!

Let’s tease out the differences and carve out a space for as much good food and honest craft as we can muster. At the same time, lets allow ourselves to go through the painful, yet ultimately healthy, adjustment to our expectations. Let’s make room for patience and perseverance, for acceptance and the opening to Grace it affords us.