Past, present and future
January, the month named for the two-faced Roman god of gates and transitions, has lately been for me a time for reflection on past, present and future. At New Year’s, we customarily look back on the past and plan for the future. Of course, the preceding year has been for most of us one of the most extraordinary and trying in memory, and many have been happy to see it pass.
As January 20th approaches, another cycle comes to an end: Trump’s four year reign of terror will be over (if not sooner), and Biden will offer the nation renewed hope for change and leadership. But even that certainty has been tempered by the chaos and violence Trump and his supporters have unleashed in recent days, and with which they further threaten the nation in the immediate future.
In the midst of all this change, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about past, present and future. Perhaps, as T. S. Eliot put it in the opening cycle of “Four Quartets,” his famous meditation on the nature of time, “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is irredeemable.”
Future-Past
I recently finished reading David Farrier’s excellent book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. Like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us and Robert MacFarlane’s Underland, the book offers us an exploration of planetary geographies and ecologies, both human-made and natural, seen through the zoomed-out lens of deep time. Farrier proffers on the reader an imaginative and rigorously researched discussion on a variety of subjects viewed from a very distant future. He presents us with a thoughtful consideration of the future artifacts of our civilization and how the geologic era now known as the Anthropocene will endure through deep time.
Among the offerings Farrier presents us with are thoughts on the eventual geologic destiny of humanity’s vast network of transportation systems and the cities they link; the semiotic and ethical quandary of how to safely store nuclear waste in a future in which, if humans exist at all, they will have likely evolved culturally and linguistically beyond comprehending present forms of communication; and the ubiquitous, almost indestructible, and incredibly destructive nature of our plastic wastes.
The author is well-traveled in researching and writing his book, from geographic, scientific and somewhat surprisingly—artistic and literary—points of view. Starting out from his native Edinburgh he moves to the marshy sprawl of Shanghai, then to the beaches of a dying and plastic-choked Baltic, and on to an ice-core laboratory in Australia, among others places in between.
But Farrier, a professor of English at Edinburgh University, also provides his readers with literary and cultural analogies that illuminate or add dimension to the topics under discussion. In his trip to Shanghai, he touches on J.G. Ballard’s early internment in a camp outside the city, now swallowed up by urban growth. He makes reference to Italo Calvino’s fabulistic cities and Borges’ famous Library of Babel, and recounts Virginia Woolf’s uncanny experience of a solar eclipse.
Perhaps most importantly, the author succeeds in bringing home to the reader the impact humanity on a global scale has had (and is having still) on a finite planet in the seemingly infinite context of deep time. Writers have been hard pressed to describe with appropriate urgency the unfolding ecological and environmental disasters of our age with the now-shopworn words of warning and abstract numbers of scientific papers. And these approaches have so far had little effect on a public numbed by a steady stream of bad news on the environment, and who are possibly incapable of really understanding concepts like exponential growth and feedback loops.
Artists working in other media, like photographers Chris Jordan and Edward Burtynsky may be better equipped to represent the sheer enormity and staggering scale of human impacts on the natural world. But Farrier understands this and frequently enlists the immediacy of the visual image (as well as the power of literary metaphor) to make his case. In one example, he describes a collage set in the Mojave Desert by the artist David Hockney:
“The elements are simple and non-descript: asphalt, road signs, trees, mountains, sky. But the whole is dizzyingly precise. Every single image is taken in close-up and often head-on…. Wherever it travels, the eye is arrested by detail; each crack in the painted road marking and flash of sunlight caught in the wrinkles of the crushed Pepsi can is intimately and immediately present.”
Ultimately, Footprints leaves one with a feeling that is again difficult to describe in words. For me, it’s a mixture of many emotions: A feeling of wonder that borders on vertigo; a sense of profound unease and remorse; grief for the communities and beings already lost; and the faintest hope that a big-picture awareness of civilization’s impacts might in some way lead to redemption for humanity and reconciliation with the more-than-human world.
But maybe the best expression of this sense defies human language entirely. Farrier, in a discussion of the environmentally destructive capacity of digital technologies, ironically notes the wild popularity of a recording made by Antarctic researchers of ice ‘singing.’ Their recording is from data gathered by geological sensors in and on the ice and sped up 1200 times. Like whale song, it is strange and haunting.
Past-Present
How to describe life during ‘The Great Pause’ of the COVID-19 pandemic? For many, the days of the past ten or so months have more or less run together, as the tedium of lock-downs and restrictions on social life, quashed travel or professional plans, and a life spent largely at home unpunctuated by novelty continue on into 2021. It has certainly been a year of worry, anxiety and distress for all of us in many ways.
For Tasha and me, who ordinarily spend a great deal of time together on our rural homestead, things haven’t changed so much over the course of the year from pre-pandemic days. Both of us were working remotely well before the pandemic struck, so no major adjustments there. We have never been able travel much anyway, due to our farm animals requiring frequent attention and Tasha’s elderly father living with us. But we do miss seeing our friends at our long-running Friday happy hour at the vineyard down the road, and also celebrating the holidays with both friends and family, though we are both lucky enough to have some family living nearby.
In March of this year, when it was becoming clear to us that massive disruptions were on the way, we stocked up on food and supplies we couldn’t provide for ourselves and made plans to hunker down indefinitely. But over the course of the slower and more seasonal rhythms of time which we’ve become accustomed to since moving here in 2014, the need for upkeep, maintenance and development on the farmstead slowly crept in. So I decided 2020 was a good time to put my writing on hold, for the most part, and focus on completing some long-running (and long overdue) infrastructure projects here.
At the top of the list has been the completion of our tiny house, which had been underway since its initial incarnation as a bouldering wall in 2016. In previous years I’d been unable to get out and go rock climbing as much as I liked, and lacking a nearby climbing gym, I decided to build my own. I finished the bouldering wall, a 16-by-8 foot structure with three vertical-to-overhanging walls that first summer. At the time, we had also been discussing building a separate guest house. After Tasha pointed out that the bouldering wall was ideally sited as a structure on which to add a tiny house I began work on it the next summer.
Working on and off through the summer of 2017 and with help from my brothers getting a roof in place, the basic structure was finished by the end of the year. The next year, the framed-in, 120-some-square-foot structure languished, though we were already getting some use out of it for storage. In 2019 I installed a 400 watt photovoltaic system we had bought for other purposes and managed to get the whole of the outside painted. My brother Jason came down that spring and helped wire the circuits for lighting and A/C power. Closer to the end, but still a long way from finishing, I vowed to complete the project in 2020, and what better time than a pandemic to stay close to home? Though not 100% complete, I’m happy to say that I’m close.
Over the spring and summer of this year, I insulated the wall and ceiling spaces and closed those in with plywood. I framed out the platform for the sleeping loft over the steepest bouldering wall and the bench and storage space next to it. I also built a bookshelf occupying most of the 16-foot north wall to hold our almost 1000 books, which Tasha and I scanned into a database before moving to the tiny house. Eventually, we’d like to offer them for loan through a library scheme we’ve been thinking about. More on that later.
With that done, I disassembled planks from about 30 reclaimed shipping pallets and soaked them in borax, ultimately to use as a rustic interior finish for the walls and ceiling. I built another shelf with a fold-down Murphy table with seating for up to five people, but mostly as a comfortable table to sit and work at, in what we hope will eventually become a writer’s retreat in addition to a guest house.
The table became a project within a project. Deciding it should be a centerpiece for the dwelling, I planned to use off-cuts from the reclaimed shipping pallets to create an inlay pattern of alternating dark and light strips, spiraling out from the center.
Cutting, gluing and nailing the strips in place to the pine substrate was a time-consuming task, but one that I became more and more involved in as as the project progressed. I wasn’t sure how things would work out in the end, but I’d planned to cover the bas-relief surface texture of the glued wood strips with a layer of clear epoxy. I’d never worked with epoxy before, but I’d seen it used on bar tops and tables to great effect.
When the wood strips were finally all in place, I mixed the two-part epoxy and hurried to spread it evenly over the table, hoping it would be enough to reach the slightly higher outside rim of the table. I had about 20 minutes to work with it before it started to set. After that, I used a butane torch and hair dryer to work the bubbles from the surface. The first layer didn’t quite cover as much as I’d hoped, and despite my best efforts, there were still plenty of bubbles.
Pouring a second coat before the first one cured a couple days later, I used enough epoxy to evenly cover the entire surface. When the final coat was set and I’d done my best to heat out the bubbles, I still wasn’t satisfied. I began the process of wet sanding to work out the few ripples and bubbles that set before I could smooth them. Starting with 220 grit sandpaper and a spray bottle, I worked over the surface with progressively finer grit, stopping at 3000 grit when the epoxy began to look like wet glass and no imperfections were visible on the surface.
Building the shelves to attach the table to was a bit of a challenge, since the walls of the tiny house are not exactly plumb or square. In putting together the legs for the table out of 1-inch tube stock, I’d found too that my welding skills had deteriorated since I’d last used them almost four years ago. But when I finally attached the table to the hinges and put it in place, I was satisfied—I was satisfied with what I had created, and not just bought, put together from a kit, or built according to someone else’s plans.
In the first couple years after our arrival here, I spent almost all of my spare time on building or infrastructure projects: Siting, leveling and assembling a greenhouse, planting and trellising a vineyard, fencing in a vegetable garden and goat pasture, for example. The projects I enjoyed most though were those more than strictly utilitarian in purpose, but which also demanded some craft, where the final outcome was never a certainty and the materials embodied some element of place. In this category, there is the 12-foot-long outdoor dining table, built from remnants of structural lumber from a local sawmill, as well as our outdoor pizza oven, constructed mostly from materials produced or salvaged from our property.
But returning to the Murphy table—the project drew me in, in a way that the process of writing sometimes does, when it’s going well. Immersed in the act of creation, the hours melt away, and with any luck, the end product is a thing of beauty and sense. The physical process of creation is similar, but perhaps with more at stake. There is no Ctrl Y to return an object to it’s previous form. Some mistakes can be fixed; with others there’s no going back.
The concentration and attention to detail when I find myself truly immersed in the making of things is wonderful. It’s what I imagine some people achieve through meditation. Every moment is in the moment. The mind—engaged in what I like to think of as a kind of reciprocity, a dialogue with the object of creation—is wholly committed to the present without regard for the future. In that state, there is only an ever-present now.
Present-Future
Starting about a week ago, I began an online course through Sterling College in Vermont titled, “Surviving the Future: Conversations for our Time.” The course, hosted by Shaun Chamberlin, is based on the teachings of the late David Fleming, a British economist, historian and writer.
Having heard much about Fleming’s ideas but not having read any of his works—Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy and Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It—I figured a course on the highlights of Fleming’s teachings would be a good introduction. Chamberlin, who spent years working with Fleming before the latter’s unexpected death in 2010, was responsible for posthumously editing and publishing both books, and recently created this course to share Fleming’s teachings.
One aspect that also drew me to the course was the roster of guest presenters slated to speak on various topics each week. Nate Hagens and David Abram are two whose work I’m already quite familiar with. Other names include several who have been involved with the Dark Mountain Project, a group of writers, artists and thinkers that I’ve contributed writing to over the last six years.
While I don’t ordinarily interact much with online communities or social media, I have missed conversation and social interaction with those outside of my family and immediate group of friends over the last year. With that said, another hope for the course was that it would provide a community of diverse and interesting fellow students to share ideas and thoughts with. So far, that has been the case and I’ve indeed had some thoughtful and stimulating exchanges.
In the past I’ve tried out online courses offered by EdX and others, but never really stuck with any for more than a few weeks. It wasn’t that the content and presentations weren’t good, it’s just that the format wasn’t really that engaging. This course is different. Most participants share a real passion for the ideas that are central to Fleming’s work, such as local economies and human-scaled communities, and how to adapt to the period of upheaval and transition that Fleming has characterized as ‘the climacteric.’ I’ve also enjoyed some of the live discussions in smaller groups facilitated over a Zoom call.
So, a week into “Surviving the Future” and the future is seeming brighter to me, recent national and global events notwithstanding. I’m not sure what the rest of the course will hold, but the material, presenters and participants so far have really impressed me. If we can spread and adopt some of Fleming’s best ideas throughout our communities and networks, then the future may indeed be brighter than many of us currently dare hope.