I just read Isabel Allende's Largo pétalo de mar, a novel of the epic genre, in which a Catalonian family is cast adrift in the wake of their Republican stand against Franco, to wind eventually up in post-Pinochet Chile. In between is a lot of striving, living, and suffering.
Allende has a Hemingwayesque gift for trapping powerful unspoken emotion between terse, concrete lines. I'm not a big Hemingway guy myself, but Allende's command of the technique is effective here.
Case in point: at one juncture, one character tells another, "El mundo no tiene remedio." ("There is no cure for the world.") Being a more incisive take on that dilemma we anglophones dismiss as the "way of the world".
It's particularly à propos in this context, but as a Zenner, I feel the need to add, "Yes, but you can cure yourself."
The Spanish aphorism is exact: it's best to give up the "one candle in the dark" model, by which, given enough candles, you hope eventually to light the world. There lies madness.
But washing your hands of the cruelty here isn't skilful, either.
Instead, concentrate on fixing yourself; it's a prerequisite to changing the world, anyway. Worst case scenario: at least you'll have fixed something.
And that's what fixes the world.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(Because the North Coast has only been densely populated for the past two centuries, we have nothing like the glorious mudlarking they get in the UK. [On the other hand, we also don't need a licence to do it.] Generally, unless you stumble on something pre-contact, you're looking at a 20th century Euro-American artefact. Maybe 19th; very rarely 18th. The above probably falls in the first two categories. I still wonder how it comes to be there, and where in the bay it was lying before the tide fetched it up.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
Well, I finally did it. I dumped the IntenseDebate comments widget.
It was a hard decision, for several reasons. Worst of which was losing full nine years of reader comments.
As I always say, my intrepid half-dozen readers make up in quality what they lack in quantity. As a result, there was almost a decade of thoughtful, supportive, and informative participation locked up in that abandonware, that couldn't be transferred to any other host. Dumping IDC meant losing all of that.
But keeping it meant many couldn't comment in the first place; in some environments there wasn't even a "Comments" link available. And finding a back door was fiddly and time consuming, when it was possible at all. The glitch dogged me as often as readers, who had been gently complaining about it for some time.
The lesson here is, never use a third-party feature for content. Off-site upgrades are inevitably deserted by their inventors, leaving their users recourse-free. So only use host-native resources for core services.
There were a few other issues. Worst was that I'd lost the ability to delete spam or abuse. Fortunately neither have been a problem on Rusty Ring, but this is still the Internet. It was just a matter of time.
Not that IDC was short of attractions, of course. Most notably it allowed readers to edit their comments. No matter how vigilantly you copyedit, the instant you post that paragraph all manner of typos and missteps bob to the surface. Therefore you need the power to fix it afterward. But sadly, Blogger's crude comment interface, with its attendant lack of up-thumb (they can keep the down-) and ugly typeface, robs readers even of the ability to delete a comment, let alone change it.
In other words, it's worse than Twitter.
And "worse than Twitter" is grounds to dump anything.
But I'll tell you what that rock-knocking Internet v.2 Blogger comment utility does allow you to do: it lets you comment at all, which IDC, for all its elegance and convenience, was no longer doing. And since it's built in to Blogger, it's unlikely to simply go numb one day, unless the entire platform does.
The good news is that I immediately heard from readers who had been chafing at the inability to continue our conversations – and a few new ones who had never been able to start one in the first place. In less than a week I've racked up more comments than I've had at any week in the recent past.
So welcome back, friends! If it hadn't been for that lost material I'd've done this a long time ago. My deepest apologies to those whose contributions got poofed into the ether at a stroke of my keyboard. (Make that several; hoovering out all of the IDC code and troubleshooting the result took the better part of an evening.) I look forward to seeing you once again in Rusty Ring's new/old bindle-technology comments.
(And for those wondering, yes, I'm still planning to move this blog to an entirely new host. It's just that I've got too much going on at the moment, what with my mom's in-home hospice and a few other things, to take it on yet.)
(Photo of a reader comment scratched in Robert Burns's Commonplace Book 1783 – 1785 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
1. All chairs are green
2. No chairs are green
– Steve Martin
(Photo courtesy of Greg Rosenke and Unsplash.com.)
(Panellus serotinus; identification informal, but I believe these are them. Don't eat any based solely on this photograph.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
This is Lobaria, either oregana or pulmonaria. (Probably the latter.) Common lichen of the North Coast, it completely sheaths some trees – especially apples, for some reason – like a ragged union suit.
I've been a big lichen fan since primary school, when my teacher took us on a walk in the forest beside our school and pointed out several. He explained that lichens are actually two organisms, living in collaboration: a fungal base with an algal or bacterial rider. Together they secure the wherewithal of life for each.
He also said that lichens possess the amazing ability to die in drought and spring to back to life when it rains. I'd seen this happen – the shrivelled grey fuzz on summer trees and rocks, suddenly ballooning three times larger, supple, and fluorescent green in autumn – but hadn't truly remarked it till then.
I promptly collected seven or eight types, dried them to crispy death on a plate in my bedroom, then sprinkled them with water.
Boom: miracle.
Now I can't not see it; neither their sudden absence in August, nor their full-spectrum blitzkrieg in October. In fact, it's among my favourite moments of the year.
Though acid rain endangers European Lobarias, they remain rife here. Some sources say our local species are useful in tea, but while sitting my 100 Days on the Mountain I tried it and ended up with a gen mai that smelled and tasted powerfully of rotten fish. From this I conclude that, like most edible lichens, they're best reserved for survival food.
And you'd have to really want to survive.
But what else would you expect from a class of organisms that includes fairy barf?
Yes. It's really called that.
UPDATE 8 JANUARY 2021: A friend and reader advises me that lichens have been found to comprise two, and as many as three, different fungi, not just one as previously thought. More information here.
(This is Dacrymyces chrysospermus, also known as orange jelly or witch's butter. In spite of its otherworldly gelatinous texture and neon colour, it's remarkably good eating, and omnipresent on the North Coast at this time of year.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
