August at From The Forests of Arduinna

A digest of all my writing this month

Aug 31, 2022

This was a very long, very dry month.

I’ve never been much for Augusts, despite a kind of telluric testosterone kick that always seems to course through my body right at Lughnsadh. I’m sure those with more occult knowledge might have a better idea of what I mean than I do, and I’m sure there’s a more eloquent way to describe it, but whatever it is, it’s as reliably predictable as the sun rising in the morning.

What happens is that I suddenly feel gravity and friction better. We don’t just walk on the earth because of our own impetus: we’re always pushing off things, using the friction of the ground to propel ourselves forward. The earth pushes back at us as we push at it, and for some reason I feel that most in August.

It’s a great time to work physically, but not the best time to sit long hours typing on keyboards.

Earlier this month my husband and I re-worked much of our backyard. He was on vacation, and vacation always means working with his hands rather than his mind. He did most of the work, primarily extending wooden walkways around a koi pond and further so that his mother, a very active octogenarian, would be less likely to trip over uneven grass. He also built several walls, and a very large trellis for me, which is now set in stone next to the garden plot I built.

That was what I did, that plot, turning an area that had been grass growing in 20 years worth of compacted clay into somewhere for my kales (yes, I’m one of those people…), radishes, arugula, and lots of other vegetables that would be better in open earth than in pots.

Speaking of friction, clay is a nightmare to dig. I had to use a pick-axe to break it up enough to even get a spade into it, and the motions you have to use for each of those tools are nothing like anything you do in the gym. So, despite being “gym strong,” that clay showed me I was a rather pathetic weakling.

Clay soil isn’t actually bad soil. In fact, it’s a lot better at holding water and nutrients than other kinds, except for when it’s compacted (as in having been a lawn for two decades). After digging it up, I then spent most of a day mixing the clay with wood mulch, yard scraps, and compost by hand, then refilled the area. Already, all the autumn seeds I planted have sprouted, and the kale (yes, kale) I transplanted is looking quite damn happy.

That took quite some time, and all of this during severe heat and a seemingly interminable drought.

That drought, incidentally, appears to have ended today. I woke to rain and a chill in the air, and felt alive again. It’s such a strange thing to feel most awake, most imaginative, and most alive when it rains. Sunlight and heat are great of course, but it’s only when it rains that I feel most myself.

So it’s been a dry month, also for writing. Lots of gardening work, and editing work, but not much writing. I wrote less this month than usual, only six essays rather than the usual eight or sometimes ten. I didn’t feel much more inspired than that, and I learned long ago not to try to write when I’ve nothing I really need to say.

Here’s what I did have to say, though:

4 August: “A Good Life” (free)

I wrote this after Luxembourg was named by one study as the richest nation in the world by GDP adjusted by Personal Purchasing Power. It’s about conservativism with a small “c,” the kind that once defined older leftist resistance to capitalism:

The most brilliant and most disgusting success Capital has ever affected in the modern world is a false dichotomy manifesting through a cultural stance of enlightened urban versus reactionary rural. Cut away at such pretensions and you’ll doubtless find that most oppressed identity groups would actually like the same thing as their supposed enemies. What single black mother in a city would really not like a stable home of her own with a yard or a safe nearby green space for her kids to play in? What trans or queer sex worker wouldn’t trade that life for a living wage at a job and a reliable apartment they didn’t have to worry would disappear at their employer’s or landlord’s whim?

5 August: Human Shields and Imagined Communities (free)

I wrote this after reading the controversial report from Amnesty International about Ukraine’s potential use of civilians as human shields.

But at what point does such a situation end? Or, better said, at what point does direct violence against an aggressor no longer become the preferable way of dealing with the aggression?
I guess this question reveals me to be one of those really awful humans called “pacifists,” but so be it. I see one of the most insidious beliefs of the modern world to be the construction of false consciousness and false collectivity, the idea that humans can and should sublimate their particularities in the service to the egregore of a nation or an identity group.

11 August: Neurodivergence? Or Alienation? (paid)

This is the sort of essay that I feel like I should have made “free” instead of paid, but I was too much of a coward to do so. The reason is that it’s precisely the sort of essay that would have gotten very popular very quickly, and when I write something popular it quickly brings in the angry social media justice crusaders eager to accuse me of whatever the current bad thing to be is. Honestly, I'd rather dig clay than deal with those sorts.

Our interactions with internet technology are ultimately alienating, and it’s meant to be that way. Going to Wikipedia to learn something rather than a library or a knowledgeable friend, masturbating to pornography rather than using imagination or actually having sex, and “being social” over social media rather than hanging out with flesh-and-blood humans, shopping for products on a screen rather than going to weekly markets or shops in town centers: these are all equally effects and engines of human alienation from ourselves, each other, and from our bodies.
Of course we have trouble focusing. Of course we have difficulties expressing ourselves to others and understanding the nuance of their emotions. Of course we have the sense that simple life tasks and complex relationships are somehow easier for others than they are for ourselves. Of course it feels like our mental landscape is cluttered and chaotic. Of course we feel like our time gets stolen doing certain things while other more urgent tasks seem to stretch on interminably.
We’re living in technologically, economically, and socially alienating societies and accept this all as a default state. Those who seem to adapt better to that alienation must be “normal” or “neurotypical,” while the rest of us are the broken ones who re-narrate our alienation as something unique.

19 August: The Garments of the Goddess (free)

Speaking of clay, I wrote this over several days, during the late evening coolness after working in the garden, typing with clay under my fingernails. Part of the reason we were doing all this work was specifically because I’m trying to make the soil better able to hold water during the inevitable yearly droughts this essay is about.

It’s not just a map of a river and its myriad of tributaries, but also an image of a goddess and her almost countless younger sisters. I live within a kilometer of five of her tendrilled branches, and two kilometers from the stream they later join. That stream later joins the Moselle and then joins the Rhine, but what matters most is the parts of her directly in front of my window and those other parts a short walk away. Those are the parts of her sacred self I can see, and work for, and work along with.
All these streams once wore the forest clothing of Arduinna and laughed through her forests out towards the sea. Arduinna is mostly gone, the Ardennes a fading memory of a vast ocean of trees. Fading, but not faded, not gone.
We cannot make the rains come, nor can we stop them from coming, nor can we stop industrial capitalism or climate change. We cannot undo the terrible legacy of the factories, the slaughter of ancient forests for charcoal and then for coal mining. We cannot bring the sacred back to the entire world and undo what awful things its absence has left us with.
But we can help the sacred where we are, help the forests and streams where we live, and maybe show others how to do so, too.

26 August: Choosing To Be Violent (free)

This essay is what happens when I can’t get the sound of a screaming mouse out of my head. I guess other people might drink, or just turn on the television. I, on the other hand…

The owl doesn’t need to “dehumanize” the mouse, or even to “demousify” it. It’s a mouse, and owls eat mice (among other things), and that’s all. There’s an order to it, and it’s one that humans haven’t imposed, cannot alter, and really probably cannot fully understand.
All we can understand is the human, and that’s all a right mess. If there’s an order to human violence, it’s a terrifying order, and probably also unalterable. The most we can ever do I think is to re-assert what’s probably the only really unique thing about humans: choice.
The owl doesn’t choose to be violent. It just is violent, and also other things as well. Humans are likewise violent and many other things, but the difference is that we actually have some sort of say in our acts of violence. We can choose to rape or not to rape, to shoot someone or not to shoot someone, to rob a woman on a street or not to rob her. Most of us, the overwhelming majority of us on earth, choose the latter of those options.

29 August: On Debt (free)

Before I left the United States, it already felt like every issue was only allowed to have two sides to take, and each side was always only an either/or proposition. It’s gotten much worse since I left, and with this essay I tried to show what something else might look like. In other words, not everyone who disagrees with you is an enemy. In fact, they rarely ever are.

The positions a bachelor’s degree might have earned you two decades ago now require master’s degrees—if not officially, then as a way to give you any kind of chance against the hundreds of others with bachelor’s degrees applying for that same post. People borrowing to go the university have every reason to be furious with this system and to be happy they’ll get some relief.
Those that did succeed and also managed to pay down or completely discharge their debt also have every reason to be furious, though. Had I somehow managed to keep paying, the $8,000 I borrowed in 1995 and 1996 would have been paid off ten years ago at roughly $11,000. After all the self-discipline, personal austerity, and probably really miserable living circumstance paying down that debt would have required, finding out later that it would have been fully forgiven would incite me to rage.

Two brief promotional things to mention.

The first is that I’ll be teaching my course on Being Pagan starting 18 September. There are still 12 spots available, but before you register, see the next point…
Secondly, the publisher I direct is having their twice-yearly 20%-off sale. All orders of $20 or more qualify for this discount, including my course and my books. So if you’d like to join the course, use code SEPT at checkout and it’s 20% off. Or you can do the same for my books or any other titles.

This month’s poll

Someone recently asked me about my writing “process” and I never know how to answer that. It isn’t a process at all. I usually write whatever demands to be written about, like it’s an external idea trying to gnaw its way into my soul. More often than not, I’d describe it as being “hijacked” or maybe even “seized” or “possessed” by an essay, rather than some sort of straightforward process.

So maybe this question is irrelevant, but it’s worth asking anyway: