Community and language

Walking composition

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” —Iris Murdoch

What happens to a word when people start talking about it as having lost all meaning? When it gets to the point where people call it hackneyed or cliched or empty. What happens to the word itself, the spirit of it? This shape and structure that humans have birthed into being and defined and argued over and then used until it’s limp and flattened.

I was thinking that about community the other day. I read something that talked about the importance of community—which I of course talk about all the time—and I thought, wow, that word seems to have lost all its power (not its meaning, yet, just its ability to make little sparks of possibility in the imagination) and wondered what exactly happens to a word when it loses its imaginative capacity, and, more importantly, how can we restore its internal fire?

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I love words. One of my never-realized ambitions was a short-lived one to become an etymologist. When I first started freelance copy editing I was living in Boston, and almost took someone up on their offer to help me find a job at the American Heritage Dictionary, an opportunity I regret not pursuing almost as much as I regret not having become a paleontologist or mathematician. Almost. I could see getting lost in those words, meandering around in the tales and histories inherent in the letters and pronunciations and meaning-mutations that follow language around. A word, when you start to explore it, can be as versatile and thrilling as the images at Lascaux when, I’ve heard, you watch them come alive under the flicker of an oil lamp.

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Community was on my mind last weekend, when I dragged my family to the opening of a low-barrier homeless shelter in the next town over, and immediately afterward to a small gathering at someone’s house. The two groups of people on completely opposite ends of what we view as a political spectrum, with so much more in common than is usually acknowledged. (I have opinions on which group does more acknowledging, but it feels like flattening discourse to articulate them. Except it’s hard not to be swayed by the first gathering’s frequent expressions of absolutism, where someone running for city council got into his truck afterward with the bumper sticker “Fake News Fake Science” in the rear-view window.)

The whole point of this newsletter, when I started it, was to be a companion to a book I was going to write about private property and the commons—and to be a place to explore those ideas when it was clear the book wasn’t going to happen in the conventional way. I knew at the time, because I’d spent over a year writing a 60-page book proposal on the subject, that the core of this question is how we live together.

A little over a year later and more posts the I thought I’d end up doing, and I feel like I have fewer answers than I did before. I live in a small town, in an area that for Montana feels heavily populated but for urban areas would feel extremely not-so-much.

There are so many intersections and relationships among people of different political and social persuasions here that you literally cannot make assumptions about anyone’s values or voting tendencies. (That’s probably true everywhere, even if we don’t normally see it. ) When I first moved back seven years ago it was with that knowledge, and knowing that the grit of living among variety-minded community could keep a place alive and resilient and questioning. And yet now things feel as entrenched and unmoving as they do in any other bubble, except we’re not in a bubble and we see people at school drop-off and in the coffee shop or library whom we have trouble trusting.

And still, we have no choice but to share space with people whose values clash with ours.

I don’t know what to do about it except keep building relationship, even when trust is scant. To find new ways to invigorate that beautiful word, that heartbeat of human life: community, comunete, communis. Us.

Bonus photo: Dilled beans in progress, or “what you can do with Mason jars when you’re not busting them in the freezer.” (On that subject, though, both my older sister and an old friend got in touch after my Mason-freezing update to inform me that they’ve never had a jar break in the freezer. My friend said the key is to never use shoulder jars, only straight-sided ones, and the link she sent me only recommends up to a pint size for freezing, all of which explains why my experiments destroyed the half-gallon jars.)

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Some stuff to read or listen to (apologies for the length—I’ve been doing a lot of local volunteer work and actual job work, which leaves time to read and listen but not a lot of time to swim in thought-rivers):

• The Leakey Foundation’s podcast Origin Stories, unfortunately, doesn’t update on its website when it has a new episode out, or else I’d link to the most recent one about research into how wolves became dogs. If you’re interested (it’s good!), you can look up the episode in your podcasts, but in the meantime, the Foundation has a number of interesting past episodes on their website, including debates on the “obstetrical dilemma” and another on what fossil teeth can tell us about Neanderthal children.

• Rubin Naiman in Aeon writing on sleep and dreaming and what we’re losing—even what we don’t know we’re losing—when we sacrifice dreaming for wakefulness: “Wake centrism is a subtle, consensual, sticky and addictive over-reliance on ordinary ways of perceiving that interfere with our direct personal experience of dreaming. To paraphrase the 16th-century British clergyman Robert Bolton, it is not merely an idea the mind possesses, but an idea that possesses the mind.Wake centrism is a flat-world consciousness.”

• An actual land acknowledgment prose poem by CMarie Fuhrman (thanks to my mother for sending me this one): “Let us take a moment and acknowledge that this land was not stolen from the people whose language, culture, and religion was born of it; let us acknowledge that the people were stolen from this land. The people who celebrate this land with song, dance, ceremony; people who do not commodify and commercialize trees and water or call it resource. Here we pause to acknowledge that the land itself is rarely acknowledged.”

• Bison rancher and writer Dan O’Brien talking conservation, land ethics, pessimism, and writing about people like Valentine McGillicuddy on the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast and Blast. I’ve never read one of O’Brien’s books but really enjoyed listening to him and might have to pick up one or two.

• MIT Technology Review’s podcast In Machines We Trust has started a new oral history project interviewing people who were at at the forefront of AI development. The first is with Joseph Atick, who helped create one of the first facial recognition systems, and the dangers he came to see in the technology: “The issue of consent continues to be one of the most difficult and challenging matters when it deals with technology, just giving somebody notice does not mean that it’s enough. To me consent has to be informed. They have to understand the consequences of what it means.”

• A fun story from the Flathead Beacon about Rod McIver, a local apple farmer who experiments with endless varieties and preserves fruit heirlooms (sent by a friend whose father used to be a smokejumper with McIver). Our raspberry bushes came from McIver; he’s kind of a local fruit farming legend.

• Cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth writing in Nautilus on the reality of embodied consciousness—a tricky piece I had some trouble grasping, but for you Murderbot fans Seth’s description of how emotions are simply moving targets that tell our brain how to protect us made me think a lot of Murderbot’s organic parts and how and why it experiences emotions: “Experiences of fear, jealousy, joy, and pride are very different, but they are more similar to each other than any one of them is to a visual experience, or to an auditory experience. Why is this? The nature of a perceptual experience depends not only on the target of the corresponding prediction, but also on the type of prediction being made.” (I do kind of prefer Murderbot’s phrasing “I had to have an emotion for a minute.”)

• Also in Nautilus, a really interesting piece by Lukas Rieppel about how Gilded Age tycoons created the dinosaur in popular imagination through their extensive funding of paleontological research and natural history museums: “Dinosaurs lent themselves to the building of spectacular displays that attracted throngs of visitors to the museum, which was crucial to cement the argument that industrial capitalism could produce genuine public goods in addition to profits. Imposing dinosaur displays helped philanthropists such as Carnegie make the claim that because industrial capitalism concentrated wealth in the hands of the few, it unlocked the power for truly awesome achievements.” (This reminded me of a few conversations I’ve had recently about the difference between philanthropy, and actually advocating for and working toward structural change that would mitigate a lot of social problems to begin with.)

• Kind of depressing but very interesting essay in Hakai Magazine by Laura Trethewey about research into microplastic pollution from car tires—tires work because they create friction, but that same friction leads to particle shedding and an estimated minimum of 28% of the oceans’ microplastic pollution: “A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study in 2016 did confirm the connection with research on hatchery salmon. When exposed to storm water collected from busy urban streets, coho die. And in December 2020, the University of Washington Tacoma researchers finally nailed the chemical so lethal to coho, a ‘globally ubiquitous tire antioxidant’ called 6PPD-quinone.”

• The Subverse podcast had clean energy analyst and author of Windfall Ketan Joshi to talk about what a truly just renewable energy future would look like, and the kinds of mistakes we might be making if we pursue renewables without thinking about land and energy justice: “What I think people have a lot of difficulty dealing with is recognizing that those same problems might be replicated again in the future with different modes of extraction. Energy extraction techniques—planting machines into the ground—requires land.”

• Two essays from Sapiens—one on research (investigating melting points of pottery and various metals, and microscopic diamanoid particles) into an asteroid explosion that might have caused the destruction behind the biblical story of Sodom; and a second on how excavations at the Israeli site of ‘Ubeidiya are opening up more debate about how and why Homo erectus migrated out of Africa 1.5 million years ago: “These ideas radically reimagine the capacities of ancient hominins. ‘Homo erectus was not a passive creature in its environment,’ Belmaker concludes. ‘It didn’t just go with the flow—“Oh, more grassland, I’ll move here”—but was an active factor in its own destiny.’”

• Jean Kim in The American Scholar on what Squid Game says about the crises and traumas that Korea has experienced throughout the 20th century, and how its art reflects the realities of Korean inequality and uncertainty: “Although South Korea’s economic success has led to some waves of incoming immigration . . . the nation largely remains one provincially monocultural family crowded within half a peninsula and living mainly in high-rise buildings. With the advent of a stunning megarich class and, in equal measure, an exploited and indebted working class, all living on top of one another, both human ambition and embittered resentment cannot help but build.”