The human farm

My maternal grandfather had a farm. I would spend my summer vacations on his farm and had first hand-sightings of squirrels and a few skinny cows. 

Not much animal was raised on my grandfather's farm, but a lot of fruits were. Prime among the fruits were an orchard filled with juicy mangoes.

I feel like going back in that time and space and keeping a record of the farm's ecology. But unfortunately the farm life was laughed at as unsophisticated back in my childhood days in India.

In today's America, especially urbane America, it's hip to be associated with the farm life, so I regret having missed a chance to be part of the farm life, while I was physically living on a farm.

I have to make do with reading about farm life that others have experienced, and in this Verlyn Klinkenborg is my favorite.

Klinkenborg writes occasionally in the NYT about the animals he raises and allows to roam free on his farm in upstate New York.

I remember what he wrote about his chicken once:

On fair days, I've been letting the chicken have the run of the farm. I come out of the house, and the birds are waiting at the chicken-yard fence like pelihoners in some Russian novel, but with boundless optimism instead of resignation and despair [...] Chicken live in a monocular world, looking at things, one eye at a time [...] What is likeable is the purposefulness of their behavior [...] A hen raking backward through winter's dult is a professional at work. Scratch, scratch, look around for predators and what have we here? A foraging chicken feeds itself by finding surprises everywhere. The world seems perfectly adjusted to their expectations, which is to say that they take the world just as it is.

Oh the joys of having writers write about the particularities of animals, like the chickens' monocular vision, the pigeons' peripheral one and somebody like Annie Dillard comes along to observe the weasel's ahistorical tendencies of living life by the instinct.

Isn't it fun to see farm life mediated by the human eyes?

Civilization and its (ruinous) repetitions

When Sigmund Freud wrote of the psychic discontentments (in Civilization and Its Discontents) we experience when we consent to live our lives according to the rules and boundaries of civilization, he spoke of civilization as something confining, an enemy, as it were, of our natural beings, our tribal instincts.

Freud meant to suggest, I believe, is that civilization is something we settle for though internally we writhe in discontent wishing that we could live a life of our instincts.

As film critic Anthony Lane writes in his excellent review of the movie, The Kings of Summer, civilization may also be something we unconsciously reproduce and repeat as a fundamental structure of living, when we are in the midst of nature.

So used are we to the fact of living inside civilization that civilization has become our instincts.

This is a cause for concern, as is revealed ever so subtly in the film.

The story of The Kings of Summer revolves around a few teenagers who decide to flee their families and go back to nature. They begin to build a makeshift house with drift materials. No sooner than they sit down to observe the daily rituals of life, civilization starts to creep back in:

As they sit at their makeshift dinner, complete with candlelight and alcohol, we realize to our horror (as they do not) that these rebellious souls are already turning into their (conformist) parents. [Joe] even brings along a Monopoly set and one of his father's cigars. Run all you like, the movie suggests; you will never escape.

There is a serious Western artistic tradition of exploring the nagging permanency of civilization and Lane does well to mention Daniel Defoe's 16th century novel, Robinson Crusoe, in this context.

Defoe's hero is shipwrecked on an island of "savages," but instead of adopting to the ways of the savage, he can't help reconstructing the tidy existence of a gentleman farmer despite being alone on a desert isle. But of course, Crusoe wants to leave the stamp of civilization on the isle, in keeping with the spirit of rising imperialism and industrialism of the Western world.  

What about those who seek to escape civilization in the modern world? I think, we are all innately imperialistic, as we go around visiting nature, only to stamp our civilizational imprints on it.  

Humans can emulate nature

Breaking away from the usual mode of anthropomorphic thinking the following asks humans to be less like humans, and more like nature:

Spring is the torrential season. On a bright, blue-skied day in April or May, it can feel as if you’re standing in a river of biological change, whether you’re in Central Park or out in the country. Everything seems to be regenerating — every species of plant, animal and insect — all of them cued to the new light and the new warmth. It’s as though we’re living in three kinds of time at once: geological time, which is too slow for us to grasp, human time, which is just right, and tulip time, which comes and goes in the blink of an eye.
In all this change, we are the unchanging species. We don’t become vernal with new growth. We don’t blossom, nor do we contribute to the clouds of pollen that drift through the air. We don’t shed or nest or den. We are not the green men (and green women) of myth, vegetative humans who live by the cycle of the seasons. We go about our business and our pleasure. Perhaps, about now, the palette of our clothing shifts toward the pale and pastel. To all the beings that are rioting around us, we must seem like a remarkably stodgy species.
New Yorkers like to think of ourselves as 24/7. In fact, as a species we are even busier — and certainly never dormant. But there is also a constancy to us.
In the dark of winter and the light of summer, we remain more or less as we always are, a constancy so characteristic of our species that we don’t even notice it. It is useful. It is productive. But just once it would be nice to be budding out, breaking into leaf, bursting into blossom as the warmth of May approaches.

(Via The New York Times)