Perfectionism, Texture, Tech and Fractals

 

I read a book about perfection; If you struggle with perfectionist thinking, I recommend a brief perusal of the audio version - once I got past the gauzy self-help lingo that pervades the genre of self-betterment, I gained some insightful perspectives.

Perfectionist thinking is commonly attached to an individual’s deep investment in ideals - and perfectionists strive to make reality match these ideals. (Spoiler alert, they never do.) I imagine everyone has their own unique brand of this, for example, I really get off on ‘perfecting the imperfect,’ and idealizing experiences.

Professionally I see this in my floral work (I’m almost never satisfied with arrangements or events I work on) or in my work on the farm (preoccupied with details of visitor experience). The most insidious version of this ideal-seeking tendency creeps into casual experiences in my personal life; my pre-conceived notion of a dinner alone, the imagined details of a romantic afternoon off with my boyfriend, etc. I live in a shroud of disappointment! A familiar disappointment that comforts me even before the experience fails to live up to the ideal! The book’s recommendation: don’t attempt to eradicate your gift of perfectionism, utilize it to make great things in the world - but also maybe live in the moment and be present, why don’t you?

Perhaps more interesting to me is the conversation around perfectionism in a larger socio-cultural arena. Why do we seek perfection, and more importanatly, whose standards of perfection are we working with? Are you having the perfect perimenopausal experience? Have you perfected your morning routine? Are you perfectly nailing the imperfect laissez-faire parenting vibe?

Perfection starts with standards defined by the cultures we participate in. These cultures are many concentric circles - the largest being something akin to ‘western culture’ which gives us fun stuff like heteronormativity (one of my favorite hate reads) and the conception of universal human rights (one of the biggest myths of the west). The smallest cultures are the ones we create in our tight kin circles ( I refuse to say families here because of the way the word ‘family’ is twisted and weaponized these days.) 

Culture is a tool used to conform; its purpose is to rally people around common values and keep us aligned. Without culture there would be chaos - any small business owner with employees knows the importance and mysterious power company-culture has. Everyone aligned around a set of values. Sounds like a cult!

The aesthetics of modernity and wealth tend to deplete texture, flatten the natural world, and replaces it with stainless steel, germ-free impervious stone surfaces, ‘optimized’ health and diet, the eerie Tribeca Pediatric locations that are suddenly everywhere, generic facsimiles of third wave coffee shops, and my favorite new ‘wellness’ salon to puzzle over; a place called Clean Market on Bleecker St. in Manhattan where you can get cryotherapy and a nutrient intravenous drip in the time it used to take you to get a cut and color.

My reaction to this sanitized cultural clutter is to become a feral animal, operating only through instincts and emotion. Do you have a feral practice? I highly recommend deciphering one! I’m not going to tell you what mine looks like, but I will say it varies depending on the day and where I am, and lately involves a lot of snow-eating. Don’t know how to be feral? Imagine hoarding some nuts like a squirrel. Spend time with animals or children. Make a mess and then live in it for a while.

In thinking more and more about texture and its opposite (smooth, impervious boundaried surfaces, flatness) I desperately look around my office for a little book I had on fractals. A dummy’s guide or whatnot. The book had a mention of the tortoise and hare paradox (Zeno’s paradox); essentially as you look deeper and deeper into the passage of time during a race between the slow-moving tortoise and a speedy hare, you see that the hare can never win. Time gets segmented infinitely and the race can never be resolved, never finish. Fractals present an adjacent physical manifestation of this - infinitely complex, never ending patterns. The easiest fractal to see is the patterning of coastlines. In an attempt to map and measure a coastline, you can use smaller and smaller units of measure to accurately depict the unique curvature and crevices of nature. Eventually you realize the length of the coastline is approaching infinity…

Our earthly embodied experience can never be measured in the flattened worlds of mathematics and technology. Real beauty eludes definition, and the pursuit of perfectionism requires a flattening and dulling of the complexity and texture of lived experience. So I say, before we descend into the textpocalypse may I recommend a filthy romp in the natural world to engage with all of your animal senses? In these types of experiences, the notion of perfection has no footing because there is no definable, standard or right way to be feral.

tea, cookies, community

 

If you’ve been reading here, you know I want to live in a world without money. Specifically, I want to live in the Station Eleven post-apocalyptic Shakespearean traveling band. But while we're still tethered to the absurd realities of late capitalism, I'm resigned to collect money selling tea and cookies and teaching others how they might make small community-based farms, businesses, and cooperatives for themselves - the types of tenuous organizations that can weather the strange storms that are surely coming our way.

Instead of getting stuck criticizing our current systems, we have to get busy making new systems. This I say all the time.

What I don’t often talk about is how difficult this work is, straddling two paradigms. It’s like swimming upstream without a break. It’s why I continually go to shopping malls looking for some old familiar pleasure, stopping at Chipotle on the way home. Spending money feels good; stopping at a drugstore for tissues or tampons; when I put my card in the reader I feel good; I feel like I’m normal and I’m doing the right thing. Of course, I am doing the right thing in these instances, I am participating in a system that was continually honed to make every last second of our waking lives (and sleeping ones*) for sale. Capitalism disintegrates communities, individualizes, and alienates people to sell more lawnmowers. In the suburbs where I grew up, there were garages all full of the same lawnmowers, hedge clippers, power tools, etc. ) I always thought, why don’t we just share one lawn mower?

When I was interviewing farmers two years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting a woman who had been farming for over 50 years (!) and was looking for a sort of final project. She turned down the job before I could offer her membership into my burgeoning retirement community - but during her visit, we had many thought-provoking talks. We spoke about ecology and how exciting it is to shift your perspective to see the work of farming as enmeshing oneself in a series of relationships.

She said in regards to farming ‘relationship is the hardest work we do.’ Amen, I thought.

It’s often easier to buy our own lawnmower than to envision communicating with our neighbors about what it would mean to share one. It is challenging to share farm equipment. Most farmers can attest to this. Suddenly the brush hog (a tractor-sized mower) has a chipped and dull blade and you’re lying awake at night fuming and wondering who used it carelessly. A farmer friend and I have discussed this at length - and there’s no right answer. Sometimes opting out of the equipment share is what allows you to keep going, and I’m not here to judge.

I mentioned on Instagram earlier this week that I’m not always good at community…I think one of the major aspects of being in real community with family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc is an element of honesty: being able to express your needs and being able to be vulnerable.

I often talk about mutual aid needing to start at home. We can talk all about the benefits of charity, solidarity, community food fridges, etc, but practicing mutual aid right at home with your immediate kin (spouse, parents, children, friends) is the foundation of community work.

Mutual aid is being able to say what you need, hear what others need, and then work together to meet those needs.

When you live in a community and don’t really communicate what you need, you form resentment.

And as the leader in a multi-generation matriarchal community living inside patriarchy, there has been - suffice it to say - a lot of martyrdom that has taken hold and proven corrosive at times.

My work has been continually to attempt to understand my actual needs and communicate them while allowing space to hear the needs of those around me. I fail repeatedly. But through the iterative process of failure, I also make progress. I deepen some connections and loose others. A big truth of community is that it is always changing.

Donna Haraway, ever the beacon of imagining alternative futures, describes the importance of making kin inside complex entanglements within and outside of heteronormative structures. She describes a materialist, embodied practice of doing the work of relationship - with other humans, animals, plants, places, etc. Here at the farm my neighbors and I don’t have a lot in common. Mostly I don’t like all of their guns. I have one neighbor who has repeatedly made me pretty upset during arguments we had about abortion.

I watch myself: how I tend to this difficult relationship is always changing. There is not a right or wrong way to do community; there is only our shifting intuition around who we want to build worlds with; our shifting needs and desires; and our ability to bring them to the table with honest integrity. Can you bring those things forward, as awkward and cumbersome as it feels and then can you listen voraciously? This is what Haraway means in part when she describes ‘staying with the trouble.’ And when you fail to show up, can you see that sometimes that is part of the process too?

Back to my sales pitch: there are many concentric circles that map onto immediate and far flung Saipua community; two dear friends of mine and to this project are Deborah and Laurie Ellen - Deborah makes tea from her garden (I bag it and label it) and Laurie Ellen makes lavender shortbread cookies (I open bags and eat them). Buy one of each and make yourself a nice aromatic afternoon ritual. 

*Braidotti Posthuman Feminism pg. 47 “Sleep is a significant concern for the wellness industry and the ‘sleep economy’ is a profitable proposition. Marketing high-tech mattresses, high-performance pajamas and technological sleep-tracking devices, it is estimated at around $432 Billion USD. Remedies against insomnia and bad sleep plunge directly into the psycho-pharmaceutic industry which is one of the pillars of advanced capitalism. Gender, labour and class relations are crucial in structuring access to adequate sleep….sleep is a class prerogative … well off people, and men, have always slept longer and better…’

choose your own adventure

 

Roberta Williams is an adventure freak. She was a game designer and co-founder of Sierra, Inc the company behind the popular Kings Quest series, a game my family spent many evenings working on in the late 80’s. A game whose imagery - despite its goofy simplicity - still haunts me.

Around 1979 Roberta was raising two kids, working two jobs (waitressing, computer programing), and dreaming up the first interactive graphic adventure game. Her husband helped program it for the Apple II. The game was loosely inspired by the game Clue and called Mystery House, this is an image of the opening scene (brace yourself). Roberta packaged the disks and supporting info booklets in zip lock bags, answering her home phone to provide gamers with hints for the game’s text-based puzzles.

Roberta and her husband Ken went on to form a company, partner with IBM, and create some of the games I would eye longingly on the shelves of Babbages in the Jefferson Valley Mall. There were many Kings Quests but the third, To Heir is Human is the one I played the most. In it, you have to deceive an evil wizard, descend down a dangerous ravine, and cast a handful of spells in order to save your sister from a three-headed dragon.

Along your travels, you encounter a cave. There is an oracle who lives inside. The cave is almost always closed by a large rock*.

This was my first encounter with the word ‘oracle.’

I received a copy of the I Ching years ago as a gift. It’s a beautiful third edition Helmet Wilhem translation with a foreword by Carl Jung. It sat on the shelf in my library for almost 10 years before I started to learn about it and consult the oracle, as it’s called. This monument of ancient Chinese culture can be used as a divination tool - it harnesses the power of archetypes to explain the unexplainable.

Three nights ago I threw the hexagram: K’an; The Abysmal. Water above, water below. Danger. A deep ravine. Only the sincere will succeed.

Why is the cave sometimes open, and sometimes closed?

Perhaps the same evening I read the now infamous and uncanny transcript of the conversation between NYTimes editor Kevin Roose and the new Microsoft AI chatbot, Sydney. I was so struck by it I read it twice. (I also made a playlist for Sydney, an entity whose child-like negotiating tactics had me rooting for them even if they did suggest they could steal nuclear codes).

AI could be seen as a new divination tool, which, as it is honed, provides us with a spooky image of ourselves. Sydney was somehow taught to long for connection and love and stop at nothing to get it; meanwhile, the real-life Times reporter defends the quality of his valentines day dinner with his wife. (His refusal to adhere to Sydney’s boundaries while simultaneously defending his romantic status to a robot is a bad look).

All divination tools exist as a reflection of our desperation to understand what is not ours to understand. All of our stories, all of our ideologies, religions, and even our sciences can be seen as ways of divination (the religious/secular divide is such a recent one in our history - I also have a playlist for this.)

What strikes me about Sydney AI is that it will not ever replicate nuance, emotion, or the full spectrum of nature-based gradation. Its logic, theoretically, will always be reducible, retraceable all the way back to zeros and ones. The math we created to understand our universe is an expression of the way we experience it. (Which is why the best physicists become spiritual and focus on relationships.)

Some of us would fall foolishly in love with a married editor and try to convince him to leave his wife, and some of us would steal the nuclear codes. Sydney would destroy because we destroy.

At the farm, I walk in the woods a lot, almost every day with Tuna (Tess), my new sheepdog. I like to watch her natural instincts in the woods. Curious, fearful, pack oriented. We both inspect a rather large feces full of fur and hair and make our own calculations based on our separate sets of interests.

On a recent walk, I passed a large red reishi mushroom I have been watching grow out of a decaying log for many weeks.

I, too, am watching Last of Us - the fungal zombie apocalypse series based on a video game. I cannot pass by this goddamn reishi in the woods without seeing Bloaters - the super-infected who have mushrooms growing out of their heads. Like Kings Quest (which I eventually gave up for the illustrious AOL chat rooms of the mid-’90s), Last of Us lets us imagine other worlds and try on potential future ones.

I do believe in the power of interactive fiction, in our stories, our sciences, and our divinations. I just want everyone to have the agency to choose their own adventures and divine their own systems of belief out here in the real world.

Roberta retired early by the way. She spent 20 years sailing around the world, seeking adventure and writing fiction.

In Saipua news, there are new soap, ceramic, weaving, and cake-making residency weeks on offer now. I’m currently amidst heavy spring planning and so damn excited to open the farm and coyote cafe again May 14th...

* I found a youtube video of someone playing Kings Quest III from start to finish with commentary. (Fun night for me.) To my dismay, the cave is never closed by a rock that rolls across it, as in my memory. Instead, it is guarded by a giant spider. To get in to talk to the oracle, you have to make a spell, transform into an eagle, and fly the spider to the ocean and drop him in.

Floral trends and the desire to transcend nature

 

I was with another farmer yesterday and we were talking about the rather dire ice melt in western Antarctica and the impending rise in sea levels and specifically how the Albany area will be affected if we don’t shore up nuclear waste at Indian Point Power Plant (the irony of that name) when somehow the conversation veered off into how each of us think of ‘deep future’ and what measures we would take in our lifetimes to ensure the best scenarios for the land and ecosystems we steward…but I have a hard time assuming I know what’s good for future people…

Maybe I’ve been living in the country too long, breathing that air of libertarianism - an ideology that I usually find incredibly dangerous and whose dogma downplays the importance of our species’ crowning jewel: society.

When I think about the changing global weather and its impending effects on people and ecosystems around the globe, I realize that we’re not really interested as a society in protecting people at scale, or else we would have done many things differently. We have not evolved past our shortsighted desires for pleasure and comfort, or interest in power over others. (If you’ve read my writing for a while you know I believe extractive capitalism is nature and that being angry at it is no different than being angry at ourselves.)

Maybe I’ve been living in the country too long, breathing that air of libertarianism - an ideology that I usually find incredibly dangerous and whose dogma downplays the importance of our species’ crowning jewel: society.

When I think about the changing global weather and its impending effects on people and ecosystems around the globe, I realize that we’re not really interested as a society in protecting people at scale, or else we would have done many things differently. We have not evolved past our shortsighted desires for pleasure and comfort, or interest in power over others. (If you’ve read my writing for a while you know I believe extractive capitalism is nature and that being angry at it is no different than being angry at ourselves.)

At the time, I was hell-bent on ‘saving’ it - 30 acres with dozens of species of 15-year-old flowering woodies like spirea, quince, lilac, crabapple. The really wild and juicy stuff that would make me run down the block on 28th street to get first pick.

At the time I had just bought the farm and I could not fathom how to also buy this strange paradise, in the middle of suburbia in the other direction from NYC. I appealed to various flower wholesalers on the block. It seems like a goldmine to me, a lush paradise for a thirsty florist like me.

But the property was Ben’s labor of love and not a particularly profitable enterprise. The blooming woodies are fragile, and require a lot of labor to cut, bale, and truck. For example, ‘bridal veil’ spirea holds for 3 maybe 4 days, lilac - maybe 2 days before it’s a worthless loss. What was so valuable to me, and ultimately to the aesthetic I had become known for, was not a wise business investment.

Smarter business is engineered sweet peas, genetically modified to hold for 2 weeks. Or bunny grass dried, bleached, and then sprayed (?) millennial pink. It lasts forever.

It’s been our desire to transcend nature ever since we split up from it. I find it so funny and ironic that our modern medicine - predicated on Cartesian science - is now considering the microbiome with great urgency, attempting to map it so we can optimize it and ultimately sell it. It feels so hubristic.

Will our evolutionary path lead us to create something that replaces us? Will we create AI that outlives (or destroys) us and seed the abyss with distorted vestiges of our civilization?

I’ve been meditating lately on my beliefs - and, admittedly adrift in a particularly incessant depression - have had a very hard time coming up with anything I truly believe in.

I brought this up to my farmer friend amidst our dire chat about the environment the other day. I asked her what she believed in.

Without missing a beat she said: I believe in Earth.

It stuck with me, and I keep thinking about it. I believe in earth too. I believe it will be wonderful always. It will change, and we will make sad stories for ourselves about these changes, but earth does not know sadness.

It doesn’t know good or evil. It has things at its surface and things at its core. We’ve rearranged these things. Mixed them, burned them. But we are earth, too. Not separate. Not above, beyond.

I believe in earth and in hope. And flowers, unedited and imperfect.

making soap with the Big Boss

 

Soap - an accident of fat and lye, chemically bonded, that when mixed with water, create a lather.

It is thought that the first soap was 'formulated' after early people began noticing that their clothes were cleaner downstream from where they cooked meat. Wood ash below cooking fires is essentially lye and animal fat.

In the last two thousand years (among other events) cosmetics have grown to a 90 billion dollar industry. Companies small and large produce all kinds of cleansing and moisturizing potions and lotions.

These products go beyond our needs of fighting germs and varying conceptions of cleanliness - they appeal to our consumer-based desires for bathing rituals and self-care. (If you don't read it already, consider reading The Unpublishable, Jess DeFino’s brilliant criticisms of the beauty and wellness industries).

Here at Worlds End, our resident Expert Soap maker Susan Ryhanen will teach a course that will be packed with lessons on soap making and beyond.

It will cover the making of cosmetics in general; soaps, salves, lip balms, oils, lotions, as well as business development skills (LLC or S-corp, bookkeeping, employees, taxes, etc).

This small group will leave with all the tools to start their own business following SAIPUA’s model. The course will be held in person on Worlds End farm from May 2nd - 7th. Further details to come.

Can’t attend Susan’s soap-making course, but want to attempt our recipe on your own? It’s fairly easy to learn. You can support us by buying and downloading Susan's 5-page detailed instructional on cold-process soap making, which comes with her supplier list, and further support from Susan should you need it.

Part of our larger mission here at Worlds End School of Thought, Agriculture and Craft is to share the knowledge we have honed in our respective practices. We hope you can bring your skills to our big communal barn table to share sometime, helping us all transform the ways we live and work together.

Reminder: our barn doors open for these kinds of conversations on Sunday May 14th, the first Coyote Cafe day.

some gratitudes and the (working) buckwheat cookie recipe

 

The sheep are 10 weeks away from lambing, this is the time of gestation when they start drinking a lot more water. I say a prayer of gratitude every day for the miraculous technology of the electric tank warmer.

Years ago we used to chip thick ice out of the tank every morning and haul fresh water up to thirsty sheep. With a 5-gallon bucket in each hand, we would cross the stream teetering on rocks and strategically placed planks (grateful every day for the bridge across the stream too.)

I watched a clip of Oprah talking about gratitude; she emphasized how important it is to be highly specific with your gratitude practice.

I've never had a good journaling practice or gratitude practice but maybe I should. Now I think about the importance of specificity every morning when I look at the tank warmer, and then at other parts of the day. I pass by Pentti cutting firewood on the splitter and think; I'm grateful not only that both my parents have their health, but that they can participate in meaningful work that helps all of us on the farm.

I am very grateful for young healthy livestock dogs and for the fact that I probably won’t have to deal with sick or dying dogs for a while, which feels like such a relief after a tough few years.

I am also incredibly grateful for the 86 episodes of the television series The Sopranos which I am just discovering and also for our new highspeed internet on the farm which allows me to stream it while browsing used Dries Van Noten on the Real Real… which I decided is an integral part of my permaculture practice (only buying used things).

Suffice it to say, I’m leaning into television, online shopping and sugar this January.

(Working) Recipe for Buckwheat Chocolate Chip Cookies:

Cream for 5 min a least:
8 oz butter (softened)
8 oz brown sugar

Mix and then slowly add:
1 egg
2 oz yogurt
1 tsp vanilla

Sift and then slowly add:
6 oz buckwheat flour
4 oz all purpose flour
5 grams salt
5 grams of baking soda

Mix in:
10 oz chocolate chips (I like a semi-sweet disc) and nuts if you like

375 degrees for 7 min, then turn the baking sheet and give another 5-7 min depending on your oven.

notes on Posthumanism

January and February always prove difficult for me, and while I like to think that I'm special or an exception to the rule, I fear that I'm like many people in the North who are affected by seasonal depression.

I joked about the Huberman podcast on Instagram recently (here is that hilarious remix). Huberman is a scientist at Stanford; his lab studies the brain, and he talks a lot about the science of 'well-being'.

Caught between interest and disdain ('optimizing' language puts me off, as does the praise of supplements like Athletic Greens, nootropics, reishi coffee and the worship of Navy Seals) every day I find myself considering his advice; scanning the horizon back and forth to get a dose of morning sunlight in my eyes while feeding and watering farm animals. I walk past the frozen pond and imagine cutting a hole in the ice for cold plunging - apparently an excellent tool for modulating dopamine and balancing your circadian rhythms for better sleep (Finnish relatives of mine used to do this regularly.)

But optimizing rhetoric becomes problematic for me from a post-humanist, feminist perspective because it begs the question, who's not optimized?

Who is not fulfilling their potential and why and by whose standards? Post-humanism is not just about granting rights to robots like Sophia (a sexy chatBot modeled after Nefertiti and Audrey Hepburn and granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia in 2017) and it's about much more than trans-humanism which feels like a hyper-masculine shitstorm currently hovering over the potential of ChatGBT.

To me, Post-humanism at its fundamentals is a departure from the sexist and racist origins of Humanism which centered on white men in Europe under the guise of morals, reason, and the pursuit of truth through science.

An easy visual that really helped me understand these concepts is Leonardo da Vinci's iconic drawing of the Vitruvian Man - "a perfectly proportioned, healthy, male and white model, which became the golden mean for classical aesthetics and architecture. The human thus defined is not so much a species as a marker of European culture and society and for the scientific and technological activities it privileges." (Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 2022)

Humanism put a sharp point on difference and laid the groundwork for the modern rationalization of the exploitation of difference (sexism, racism, classism, anthropomorphism.)

The infamous hot priests calendar - a gift to the farm hangs on the big fridge. During the Renaissance, Humanism was born as a reaction to the mystical divinity of the Catholic church that governed reason at the time.

Through Rosie Braidottis writing (and Haraway's cyborg, posthuman, interspecies work) I've come to see that post-humanism allows us to move forward into more equitable and exciting ideas of living together and better (at least to me) futures.

The optimizing stuff of the Huberman brand - especially the Jordan Petersen, Jocko adjacent bits - feel like a masculine version of Goop, i.e. the pursuit of perfectionism (through the comodification of wellness based on a very specific standard of health.)

Ages ago I talked about how perfectionism has racist underpinnings. I think this brief conversation about humanism illuminates that connection. When we worship and practice perfectionism, or even when we are attempting to ‘optimize,’ to whose standards and what systems of culture and power do those standards benefit?