Tag: Paul Kingsnorth

“Our Elders Are Books”

I recently read Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth – a memoir of sorts about his removal to a small homestead in Ireland to practice self-sufficiency and environmental integrity, and perhaps to escape the culture that he has become increasingly disaffected with.  Part of that culture, he realizes, is the written word, the words he reads and the words he writes.  Words are the “savage gods” referred to in the title.  “I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.”  Much of the book is a discussion of writing and words; we forget that they are only symbols; misplaced emphasis on words pulls us away from a direct connection with the world. 

All this was very interesting, but it was his quote from Gary Snyder that really got my attention:  “In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”  What does this mean?  Does it mean that our books are our shamans, priests, wise men?  It surely discounts personal experience, oral history, and common sense.  And, if it’s true, it surely discounts the elders.  I had trouble finding the exact citation from Snyder when I went to look for the source, but I did find this in Snyder’s essay “Tawny Grammar”: “In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!”  Think about that.

Before a general level of literacy, experience had real and appreciated value.  Elders had knowledge about the best time to plant the crops, best way to make a mattress, best chance to find a wife.  They were the repository of the history of a family, a district, a craft, a people.  Even when their bodies started to fail, they could provide expertise and counsel that was valued. In early (non-literate) cultures, the memory of the elders was a critical asset, a form of social capital. And it was largely the written word that changed this. 

What did an increase in literacy mean for the elderly?  It might have meant that other, often younger, members of the household – the children and grandchildren – could read the new broadsides and chapbooks that their elders could not decipher.  One could imagine that, rather than tales told around the hearth by the oldest member of the group (the member with the longest memory and the most to “tell”), the literate were now reading to the illiterate. For these reasons, communal value increased for someone who could read to the group or could manage the new insistence on written legal documents – usually the junior members of the group.  One might think about how we rely on the young to fix our computers or set up our smart TVs.

Is it good or bad that the books are our elders?  Not so good for the elders and maybe not always so good for the readers.  In many ways, books are an easy out for all of us.  We think we have the answers in our hand.  In the Bible, the beleaguered and bewildered Job says that he wishes that “mine adversary had written a book” – meaning that he would then be able to understand, anticipate, and solve his problems if he only had a book to tell him what he needed to know.  We all think the right book can solve our problems.

I am particularly guilty in this regard; the answer is always going to be in the next book.  I inherited this from my father, who was adamant that everything that one needed to know could be found in a book.   Sometimes though, the nuances are more subtle than words.  He once built a stone fireplace with plans from a book – and he was completely confounded when it didn’t draw well and smoked up the room.  An old chimney sweep was able to tell him where he went wrong – but a little too late.

There are many differences between advice from books and advice from elders.  There is the nuance and the dialectic of human interaction.  There is the sharing of emotion from one who is struggling and one who has put the struggles of youth and doing behind them.  Human beings can provide counsel for the heart that supplements the advice for the work of the hands or the brain.  And the testimony of the old people – especially when they speak of their youth – reminds people of all ages that, with good fortune, we will all be old some day and we might look to our elders for models.  Blake put it this way in “The Ecchoing Green”:

Old John, with white hair 

Does laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green.’

Besides their advice and their memories, old folks like Old John provide models for aging to all who come in contact with them.

And now we are taking another step away from any such real interaction between generations with the advent of AI.  There was a story on the front page of the Sunday NYTimes last week about an elderly woman who gets an AI companion.  She shares her life, her stories, with the glowing machine.  This may be comforting to her – and I hope it is – but it makes me sad.  The machine can respond to her, help her organize her day, notify the proper people if she is ill, but it is a machine, an algorithm, a pricey way for families and communities to absolve some of their guilt for not being there.

Lent began this week.  With my husband recovering and a steady roster of doctors and therapists necessitating a complete change in all of our routines, we are experiencing our own kind of Lent, our own kind of renunciation.  We will learn in the process, and we might even turn to books for help and counsel.  But the kind of change in heart that such upheavals require are not fully relieved by the written word; the reassurance of those that went before is in facial expressions and kind listening.  AI may be able to listen, but it cannot wince or squeeze our hands in the appropriate places.  Neither can books.  Both books and AI minimize the value of individual experience, knowledge and judgment.  We have seen the results of this in recent years.   Not only are we losing the repository held by our elders, but we are losing confidence in our own experience and judgment and placing it in the hands of publishers, AI developers, content providers, media moguls, and spin doctors.  I love books and I don’t hate technology – but neither of those things is going to get us out of our current political dilemma or help me realign my world. 

I have written about books and AI in relation to old folks before. You could try my earlier blogs, Here Be Dragons or Charlotte Bronte, Luddites, and AI on artificial intelligence. On reading, you could look at Teach Your Children Well or Some (Unspoken) Thoughts About Reading Aloud. For a short story about what one generation has to offer another, you might look a “Any Help She Can Get.”

Death Cleaning of the Soul

We have had a major medical challenge.  My husband had a bad fall, which turned out to have been precipitated by a heart attack.  We came home after surgery and a few days in the hospital, only to have to rush back a week later.  Things are better now (which is why I can post this blog), but they are not the same.  I am buffeted between my feelings of gratitude that the love of my life has survived, and my mourning for the way our life used to be.

In the midst of all this and during long hours in the hospital, I finally read the two books on my list by Margareta Magnusson, one about Swedish death cleaning and one about old age.  Both are worth reading, and both insist on the need to peel things away as we get older – tangible things (belongings) and intangible things (beliefs and rituals).  They were good books to turn to as I strove for a way to deal with the hard realities in front of me.  Downsizing of the household is almost impossible, as we all know.  In my case, further physical downsizing is for some later time. Downsizing the soul is harder yet, but necessary in the present moment.  Parting with roles, rituals, and habits is harder than parting with Grandma’s china.  I like to think, however, that it could also be more rewarding in the long run.

We are not used to thinking of losing things as good.  I recently read a book by James Clear about how to use our habits for big gains, how to accrete knowledge and success into our lives a little at a time.  Like most self-help books, it focuses on increases and ignores the possibility that loss could be a good thing. For the latter proposition, one has to look at wisdom literature of all kinds, where renunciation is often seen as a positive thing, a necessary step toward contentment, happiness, and peace.

For example, Joko Beck said that Zen was a process of “wearing away,” or erosion rather than accretion.  We have to let go what we think we know, habits of mind we have acquired. The Tao reminds us:  “Learning consists in adding to one’s stock day by day.  The practice of Tao consists in subtracting.”  Christianity has a similar message.  Jesus told the rich man that “if you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.”  At other points in the Gospel, he tells his followers to give up their adult ways and become like children.

The poets have much to teach us in this regard too.  Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” purports to teach us how easy it is to lose things – homes, keys, people:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

But Bishop ends up admitting that loss can also be catastrophic:

 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

Philip Larkin, in “The Winter Palace” says that he is done with learning:

Most people know more as they get older:

I give all that the cold shoulder.

Larkin’s tongue is firmly in his cheek, but he bounces off a truth about the value of discarding what we have, what we know, and what we think we know:

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage

To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

 

Both poems are worth reading frequently – one to remind us that loss is inevitable but not easy, and the other to affirm that loss is not all bad.

In reading Magnusson, it also occurred to me that our whole culture could use a Swedish death cleaning, that the Earth might have a chance if we stripped down and lived within limits.  In a recent article (“The Cross and the Machine”) about technology and religion, the wonderful Paul Kingsnorth puts it well:

Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits – limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries – is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative.  There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one that we’re living in.

We’re human beings with limits in a culture that recognizes no limits.  No wonder it is so hard.

So these are just some musings about loss from a new caregiver and a rapidly aging person, who is coming up against the limits of her situation.  I know that limits can be good, less is often more, and worrying is almost useless, but I sometimes still succumb to despair.  I have to read poetry, write in my journal, contemplate Spinoza, talk to others, and take heart.  And I do these things, but – as Elizabeth Bishop says in the end – it is not always easy.  Slowly my husband is improving, and we are getting used to our new limits.

I have written elsewhere about paring life down.  You might look at my blog, “A Diminished Thing?” from several years ago, and my short story “Nothing New.”  Needless to say, any advice is welcome.