If You Can't Fix What's Broken, You'll Go Insane

The title of this post is a line from Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2015 instalment of the Mad Max film series.

Much has been said about these Australian productions. Unlike virtually every other movie "franchise" (a fast-food industry term that often denotes similar entertainment), it contains no weak links: every release is genetically different, and all five succeed both as stand-alone works and episodes of the larger story.

Reasons for this are highly speculated among film geeks. Suffice it to say that creator-director George Miller came into cinema with no formal training (he's actually a doctor – odd how often that happens) and aside from not knowing any better than to just go out and make a movie, he's also a bit unhinged.

In the best possible way, I mean.

Anyway.

Fury Road is a tale for our times. Made on the very cusp of the current collapse, it takes place, like all Mad Max movies, in a thoroughly collapsed world that was fanciful when the series began. In this respect, it's hard not to read it as allegory – nay, prophecy – of all that's pounding down on us now.

I don't want to spoil this epic for those who've yet to see it, but to service my theme, I'll just say that unlike previous Max films, Fury Road has two protagonists: the titular figure, whom we know well (though played by a new actor), and Furiosa, a newcomer who is in many respects his female prosopopoeia. (English. Use it or lose it.)

The two share a common if involuntary struggle – the old, damaged, half-crazy man, and the younger, vital, ultimately righteous woman – and in the end, Max quietly issues her the above warning.

The Zen of which is undeniable.

As a young man, I was determined not to give in to the hypocrisy and self-centred self-destruction of unworthy authority. Not to serve it, certainly, but also not to enable it. This is why I get both Max (who's my age) and Furiosa.

I understand the ambition to cast down the wicked, even if no-one else has your back, and the danger of accepting that crusade at heart-level, on behalf of others; you can't stop fighting without defecting.

In Zen we have an uneasy relationship with activism. Classic teaching condemns it outright, as wasted effort at best, and multiplying delusion at worst. The fact that this means we've given de facto (and sometimes active) support to unspeakable evil over thousands of years renders that reading of our practice unsound in my eyes.

In the late 20th century, Thich Nhat Hanh came up with the notion of Engaged Zen, of which Kevin Christopher Kobutsu Malone became the head of the arrow in North America. That Kobutsu was ultimately crushed by his ministry in no way invalidates it; if anything, it's a mark of honour. But it does go to Max's point.

I never served like either man, but I've experienced that crushing. And I think all Zenners should consider this thing that I wish I'd learned much younger than I am now.

That the main reason inquity always prevails is because it isolates its opponents, leaving them outgunned and outnumbered.

And that's why you can't beat evil without accepting it.

If that makes no sense, you're in the right room.

WW: Century-old wiring

(This ancient outbuilding, one of a few derelict structures still surviving from what was a working dairy farm near my home when I was a child, has knob-and-tube wiring. As you can see, it was a two-element system consisting of cloth-covered wires strung on insulators. In living areas they were usually hidden inside walls, but in basements, attics, service buildings, and outdoor applications, they were hung along rafters, down siding, and under eaves, as here. [Note the old-school porcelain insulators – no longer wired – on the rafters.]

Though alarmingly primitive to modern eyes, knob and tube wasn't much more dangerous than recent methods. The main reason it disappeared was that it required twice as much labour as the single integrated cable introduced in the 50s, and was therefore twice as expensive to instal.

I believe that old farm dated to the 20s [the other 20s, I mean], when knob and tube was industry standard. But this shed was apparently still rocking it in the 70s, while in active commercial service.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Everything Is Time

"The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.

"We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.

[…]

"Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. […] The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

[…]

"A stone is a prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event.' It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

"The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. […] They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events."

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

What Dr. Rovelli, internationally noted theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, is saying here, is that a rock isn't an object; it's an event. Which is true of literally every "thing"; they're phenomena, not matter. They only exist for a specific time, their natures changing from moment to moment. So time is the only thing objectively present in that space.

We think objects are solid and exist because we can't grasp the temporary (the word means "subject to time") nature of matter and energy – which are the components of "stuff".

But stuff is an illusion. (More accurately, it's a hasty conclusion, leading to a practical fiction.)

So the good doctor has at long last caught science up with Zen, of which this notion of an "empty" universe, where things don't really exist, but are instead an ever-changing stream of dependent co-arising (scientists call it "attraction") that never attains stasis, is a fundamental teaching.

Which is why every "thing" in the universe – you and me and rocks and trees and amœbas and planets and galaxies and Labrador retrievers – aren't objects or things at all, or even matter, but events.

Literal products of time, having a beginning and end, because the agglomeration of attractions that make us all up never settles on a permanent relationship, and eventually dissipates entirely, its components running off to join other processes, in the manner of a wave or a cloud.

Thanks to Brad Warner, whose latest book, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space, and Being, alerted me to Dr. Rovelli's thoughts on this matter.

(Who, by the way, is also a professor emeritus of L'Université Aix-Marseille Luminy, where I spent a year in the late 80s. An observation à propos of nothing but my startled satisfaction.)


(Photo courtesy of Neil Owen and Wikimedia.com.)

WW: Scottish thistle

(Emblem and patron of my father's people, as any who know us will understand, this well-armed weed flowers in surpassing beauty on the North Coast this time of year. Hated invader notwithstanding, compromising pastureland, and misguidedly considered coarse and unseemly.

As are we.

Cirsium vulgare; though this being the avatar of Scotland, disputes abide over which exact species is truly the authentic Scottish thistle, amongst the many, well... er...

pretenders.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Battered but not beaten

(I made this fudo [look left; hanging from the bell] in 2009, for friends in Spokane County. When I took care of their farm for a few weeks 6 years later, I posted a photo of it here. It was still looking pretty smart then, all things considered.

On a visit last month I noted that 16 years' continuous duty in the desert hadn't done it any favours. But given the conditions, the old warrior still serves our patron well.)

Sea Star Wasting Disease Cracked

Over the past eight years I've posted regular reports on the welfare of local starfish as they endured (and some populations became extinct due to) a mysterious contagion that makes them rot alive. Now American television network CBS has announced that the cause of Sea Star Wasting Disease has been firmly established, and it's not a virus as suspected, but a bacteria.

As noted before, several species have developed a measure of immunity to this pathogen since it first appeared in 2013, but a few have been wiped out, at least in shallower, warmer water. One of my favourites, the sunflower star (Pynopodia helianthoides), once omnipresent on the North Coast, is now basically exterminated; according to the article, less than 10% of the original count still exist, all in cold, deep water. But efforts to breed them in captivity have been successful, so there's hope they might be reintroduced to their old habitat one day.

A little Googling verified that another old friend, the giant pink Pacific starfish (Pisaster brevispinus) also lives on in colder water.

As suspected, the underlying cause of this pandemic is climate disruption, which has allowed the bacteria to flow north along the eastern Pacific Coast, to warming waters where sea stars have no defence against it.

But we've got an important scientific advance in the identification of the pathogen. Together with significant rebounding on my local beaches and location of surviving populations of much-mourned MIAs, I'm taking delivery.


(Photo of pre-plague tidepool crammed with young Pycnopodia courtesy of the US National Park Service and Wikimedia.com)

WW: Novel architecture

(The Spokane Regional Health District is an arresting sight, inspired as it apparently was by the architecture of West and Central Africa. I can't remember seeing such a structure anywhere before. And I certainly wouldn't have expected to find one serving as a government building on the Gold Side of Washington – arid though it is. Hats off to an inspired county facilities committee.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.