There was also another trip to Bloomington, probably with hopes of catching up with Nikki, a quest that fell flat.
I am surprised by how often I wound up staying with the Ostroms, East Lampkins Ridge road. Vincent, an esteemed professor, had been something of a mentor. The welcome is astonishing now. What happened to their Navajo rug collection since the two died? One piece is in the IU anthropology museum, but it is hardly the best I remember.
Two pages of notes from Wendell Berry’s Long-Legged House.
VO rose at 4 am, to write. The hour of mahabharta in yogic practice for me.
Later we discussed self-publishing book options: 4,000 copies for $3,600 before getting into distribution and so on.
Saturday night desolation of IU, Bloomington. Quicksand of Nicki, wherever.
Barbara crying, “Don’t hurt me, I’ve been hurt so much,” over and over again into the night.
The dormitories like tombs in the night.
There were no decent bookstores in town. My novel wasn’t in any of them. Even if it had been published.
“Learning Land” seems increasingly apt as a poery cluster. (Here I was, about to encamp in the former Great Black Swamp.)
More VO and responses:
Constitutions as paths through which we come to terms with the landscapes of human conflicts. Do we take easy routes or create new ones? Short cuts?
In Noam Chomsky’s view of language, surface “structures” versus deep “structures”: ellipses and elliptical speech (which he says most speaking is) intend to trigger a deep meaning and response. Snyder’s poetry: if you know, you know; if not, you cannot be told, till you have.
The search for comprehension, for order, for direction in human existence. Myth, as in the stars, to steer to known shores or beyond and back.
Ostrom: You need to rationalize the status quo before you can reform it. Meaning make it understandable before you can reshape or recast it.
The Tao: Nothing is the same, yet nothing changes.
VO brought up the problem of imperative displacement: imperative idealism, in which an ideal, “We ought to do away with poverty,” is adopted and made into an imperative manifesto, “We must do away with poverty,” regardless of its feasibility or practicability. The leads political actors into the realms of unreality and societies into futile motion.
The basis of fascism: “We must!”
Of communism: “We must!”
If inquisition and witch-hunting: “We must!”
Prohibition and drug busts: “We must!”
Does all idealism transfigured into political imperative turn into negative action?
Destruction?
Likely an image copied from northern Canada Indigenous artists.
(My journal also has notes from paleolithic rock paintings, southern France, from books I read from their shelves.)
World politics as continuation of ancient tribal conflict. “Modern history” typically glosses over those differences. Mongol hoards, a politics of plundering … nomadic movement in contrast to farm labor, the wedding of man and land … Celtic tribes, Teutonic tribes, Vikings, the British strands …
Parasites and preachers …
Pagan half-men running, screaming over the crests of the hillsides …
VO: If Ecuador, Peru etc. also allow Indigenous minorities to be taught in native languages, will that lead to a renaissance of Indigenous culture? Guatemala, residue of Maya/Mexico, true art overlay …
In Peru, 500 years after Roman Catholic-based persecution began, sun festivals were never successfully wiped out: ancient man is still heard …
Slave societies degrade labor …
In my hogan of happiness.
Ostroms’ fondness for Cape Dorset contemporary Native art, too.
VO: The problem with bureaucracies isn’t that they don’t respond to changing societies … they respond just enough to preempt other solutions … and their organizations distort information sufficiently to prevent more fitting responses.
[Any monopolistic organization: Detroit, for example.] [I’m not now certain whether I meant the municipality or the domestic automotive industry.]
He who frames the Qs frames the data response and rigs the game.
See fed regs on “community control.”
Without discipline nothing is possible.
“I like to compose much more than the music itself” – Stravinsky, on the Muse.
Carlos Castenada, paraphrased: Suppose a Navajo anthropologist were to look at modern America. He’d ask questions like “How many members of your kinship circle have been bewitched?” and we would seem incredibly odd to them. This is how we seem to them.
Multiverses: being able to see many separate realities, not just one. Try to see without interpreting!
~*~
From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 