Anarchive

A dog called Marx

In a letter to an old schoolmate (1 January 1938), Eileen wrote that they had called their little dog ‘Marx’ ‘to remind us that we had never read Marx, and now we have read a little and take so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him’.

Simon Leys, ‘The Intimate Orwell’ (Review of George Orwells’s Letters and Diaries, ed. Davison) in The Hall of Uselesness.

Anarchism without adjectives

‘Let me imagine myself for a moment living in a free society. I should certainly have different occupations, manual and mental, requiring strength or skill. It would be very monotonous if the three or four groups with whom I would work (for I hope there will be no Syndicates then!) would be organized on exactly the same lines; I rather think that different degrees or forms of Communism will prevail in them. But might I not become tired of this, and wish for a spell of relative isolation, of Individualism? So I might turn to one of the many possible forms of “equal exchange” Individualism. Perhaps people will do one thing when they are young and another thing when they grow older. Those who are but indifferent workers may continue with their groups; those who are efficient will lose patience at always working with beginners and will go ahead by themselves, unless a very altruist disposition makes it a pleasure to them to act as teachers or advisers to younger people. I also think that at the beginning I should adopt Communism with friends and Individualism with strangers, and shape my future life according to experience. Thus, a free and easy change from one variety of Communism to another, thence to any variety of Individualism, and so on, would be the most obvious and elementary thing in a really free society; and if any group of people tried to check this, to make one system predominant, they would be as bitterly fought as revolutionists fight the present system.’

Max Nettlau, ‘Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? Both’ (1914).
Anarchism without adjectives (Wikipedia).

Back line

The silence of the back line.

There are all kinds of surf points along the coast – lazy lefts, rights, reefs, A-frames – but eventually I settled for mushy shorebreak off a shanty town at the edge of Galle, overlooked by a clifftop hotel on one end and a giant Buddha on the other, where a green jungly peninsula closes the bay. The water is blue-brown or pewter-coloured after all the rain. Occasionally it matches the quicksilver greys of the sky exactly and your eyes can’t pick apart the swells from the horizon – an eerie, beautiful effect, particularly as the light fades.

I get there on a bicycle or a tuk-tuk, and the men who run the surf shack (and, I suspect, sell MDMA to the Russians) usher me to the change room, pick out a rash vest and put an 8.6 longboard into my arms, something that is virtually impossible to miss a wave with. I try to get paddling immediately, since otherwise your feet brush strange things: the soft, feathery touch down there is most likely a plastic packet rather than a delicate seaweed. Sometimes there’s a sandal floating around, or an animal bone. The smoke of litter and leaf fires rises from the shore when you look back at the city. On the balcony of the hotel, flashes go off in the dusk but it’s not for you: more wedding shots in progress.

The swells are medium-small, slow, sometimes with long gaps between them. We bob out there in silence, full-grown adults, surfing in this shanty beach break, this scruffy urban shore.

‘So this is how it is?’ says Anna on the day she comes to bob around with me, ‘Kind of friendless?’

Entirely friendless: good training for advanced adulthood. The mysterious hooting of the locals continues, and today it seems more menacing. I am here and you should think about being over there, amid the kooks with the foam boards and coaches and whistles at the small end of the bay.

The light faded and first I thought it was the used-up thunderclouds blocking the sun, but in fact the day really was ending, the water becoming like liquid mercury and everything losing its 3D depth of field. The call from the mosque at Deweta slid across the bay, between the hotel and the Buddha, and I caught a last wave in and said goodbye to this odd pocket of water and time.

Bible Communists

Utopian communities tend to come in waves, historians agree, generally in the wake of some massive social and economic dislocation. In the 19th century – following the American, French, Haitian and industrial revolutions – an astonishing number of utopian communities were founded in the United States. Among them were the Shakers, Fourierists, Associationists, Owenites, Mennonites, Rappites, Icarians, Anarchist Equity Villages, Perfectionists, the Brook Farm phalanx of the Transcendentalists. ‘We are a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle in 1840: ‘Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket’.

These social experiments reacted against the onset of early capitalism, unable to accept that ‘Cash Payment’ should become (as Carlyle warned) ‘the sole nexus of man with man’. Religious communities often turned to the Acts of the Apostles, a book of the New Testament which evokes an early Christian church that is based on social welfare and the holding in common of all goods: ‘And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need’. As Chris Jennings writes in Paradise Now, it is a creed that echoes Marx’s famous dictum: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Some 19th-century communities even saw themselves (in a phrase that seems impossibly oxymoronic today) as ‘Bible Communists’.

Broken up by life

Lurking behind this essay is another, unwritten one on the complicated relationship between Orwell and Gandhi, figures who are at once so similar and so different. Right at the end of his life, when was working on Nineteen Eighty-Four in a remote cottage on the Scottish island of Jura, Orwell reviewed Gandhi’s autobiography. ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ was the last essay he ever wrote. Thinking about the life of this living saint, who demanded ascetism and abstinence from his followers, who warned that friendship could lead you into wrongdoing (and who once pressured his sick wife and child to refuse the chicken broth recommended by doctors) Orwell writes:

This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which – I think – most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

Can Socialists Be Happy?

On Pondicherry promenade I passed the statue of Gandhi each day and thought of Orwell. My planned book on him as a closet utopian had unfortunately been written in the meantime: Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit. She quoted his essay ‘Can Socialists Be Happy?’, where he argued that ‘all “favourable” Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness’. She’d even winkled out the detail about a dog called Marx. :-(

Centrifugal bumblepuppy

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

Fear of freedom

The lingering prejudice can possibly be explained by the disturbance that is created in the minds of the insecure by any doctrine of logical extremity. The anarchists attack the principle of authority which is central to contemporary social forms, and in so doing they arouse a guilty kind of repugnance in ordinary people. They are rather like Ivan Karamazov crying out in the court-room, ‘Who does not desire his father’s death?’.

The very ambivalence of the average man’s attitude to authority makes him distrust those who speak openly the resentments he feels in secret, and thus it is in the psychological condition which Erich Fromm has named ‘the fear of freedom’ that we may find the reason why – against the evidence of history – so many people still identify anarchism with unmitigated destruction and nihilism and political terror.

What anarchism really is we shall now begin to consider…

George Woodcock, Anarchism.

The feeling that haunts literary criticism

After thousands of words you still haven’t really got to what it was you wanted to say about this strange and compelling work of art, one that seems to contain more thought and imagination in single paragraphs than other writers put into whole books.

Fragments of an anarchist anthropology

To David Graeber, it was a matter of plain fact that things did not have to be the way they were. Graeber was an anthropologist, which meant it was his job to study other ways of living. “I’m interested in anthropology because I’m interested in human possibilities,” he once explained. Graeber was also an anarchist, “and in a way,” he went on, “there’s always been an affinity between anthropology and anarchism, simply because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible. There’s been plenty of them.” A better world was not assured, but it was possible — and anyway, as Graeber put it in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, “since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify and reproduce the mess we have today?”

David Graeber’s Possible Worlds. 9 November 2021, New York magazine.

Google reviews

Raw and insufficient food served unapologetically while charged more per head than most AirBnBs in the area. Rude and unfriendly kitchen and grounds staff. Don’t expect to be able to flush your toilet or shower every day. Have someone else’s dharma imposed on you by having no coffee and washing your own dishes. Complaints fall on deaf ears.

Grading

This was another reason to visit, since Brandfontein became the only pocket of space and time where I could bring myself to mark the piles of student work at the end of semester. At home I found myself vacuuming inside the cutlery drawer to avoid it, or falling down the deepest internet sinkholes of my life. But sitting under a Brandfontein willow with no signal and only the peacocks and piglets for company, I would have no option but to finally tackle the stack of creative writing portfolios

I had issued a blanket ban on writing about drugs, sex and going to festivals; but there was always someone who wanted to show you what a liberated time they were having, bragging about it essentially. Someone described unbuttoning a chiffon top and touching ‘her mnemonic breasts’. ‘Not quite sure what this adjective is doing?’ I wrote in the margin. Almost every year there was a piece titled ‘Cunt’ from one of the drama students; I could’ve produced a small anthology.

Language was a living, evolving thing. ‘Cliché’ was always written that way now, even when it was an adjective: ‘That’s so cliché’. ‘Wary’ had become indistinguishable from ‘weary’ (‘I’m weary of him’) which made a kind of sense. Everyone was now both wary at putting a foot wrong online and weary at having to make their whole existence into a channel, a product and then market the hell out of it, since there were no real jobs left.

Fan-fiction was common, where you took characters from your favourite fantasy cycle and spun out alternate storylines for them; but even within these wacky universes where space and time were elastic, ‘She spent three years in a comma’ was surely not the intended meaning?

‘I am uninspired in Barcelona’ – that seemed like a very jaded opening, likely to lose the reader. But I soon realised this was not the Catalan city, but an informal settlement in Cape Town (Kuwait also caught me out that way).

It was a tough world out there: a Canadian exchange student wrote of getting badly sunburned on the open-top tourist bus, only to be told by her politicised housemates that they had ‘zero sympathy for the privileged’. I tried to add some supportive words.

Growing up absurd

‘I rely heavily on the following method of argument’, he noted in his journals as he worked on Growing Up Absurd: ‘I make a list of unaccomplished or lost causes and accumulate them as a programme for action…’

‘I am an anarchist and a patriot’ he wrote in his journal in 1958, ‘A curious kind of thing’.

The contempt late 1960s students displayed for liberal learning, so different from the spirit of the early teach-ins and Free Speech Movement, left him sick at heart. ‘There was no knowledge’ for such students, he concluded, ‘only the sociology of knowledge’. […] ‘The young are honourable and see the problems, Goodman wrote in 1968, ‘but they don’t know anything because we have not taught them anything’.

Heresy

Burning everything it touched and causing everything that touched it to burn: from the Pleistocene, through the Holocene to the Pyrocene, the entire human project, witnessed from space as a planetary time lapse, might be a noiseless flash, or a ripple of bioluminescence so quick as to be invisible. The sixth extinction? Tis but a scratch, a microsecond in earth time. The end of everything that humankind has known, built, sung, loved or remembered – life will reboot and run riot again, other worms and corals and fronds stitching and unstitching, unfurling and furling.

This is the odd, heretical paradox of running mental time lapse experiments, and of trying to inhabit non-human time. Opening ourselves up to it both reveals the severity of our predicament (human action has taken on the parameters of a geological agent, burning heedlessly through the credit balance of lithic landscapes) while also suggesting that in the long run (the very long run) perhaps none of it matters; perhaps it was always going to unfold this way: the proximity of fire-obsessed primates and such miraculous, addictive fuels. The result is the strange, dual demand of frenzied action and resigned fatalism (or is it rather a slow-motion grieving?) that seems a part of modern environmental consciousness: two ideas that are almost impossible to hold together in any rational argument, and yet can co-exist so intimately in the mind.

Honesty box

He spoke about family walks in alpine meadows. High up on the slopes you would find fridges stocked with cheese, solar powered fridges of Emmenthal made from the milk of cows tinkling in the valley below – just put some Euros in the honesty box.

Horror of politics

As a result, he finally acquired a language and a vision of his own. He developed an art culminating in the erasure of its own trace—the “window-pane aesthetic” whose very perfection lies in making one forget its existence. Such success comes at a price: pushed past a threshold, the desire for clarity can become a refusal of mystery, and may ultimately limit the field of perception. / Orwell’s style is to literature what contour drawing is to painting: one admires its rigour, smoothness, and precision, but sometimes feels it lacks one dimension. E.M. Forster described his language as “forceful and flat”, accusing it of lacking “reverberation”. […]

Alexander Nekrich merely summarised a consensus when he wrote: “George Orwell was perhaps the only Western author to have understood the profound nature of the Soviet world” — and one could cite countless similar testimonies from the East. On the other hand, when Alexander Zinoviev pointed out that reading Kafka is not necessarily more relevant for a Soviet than for a Westerner, only the ignorant and the naive were surprised. Living in a totalitarian regime is an Orwellian experience; living is simply a Kafkaesque experience.

Simon Leys, Orwell: The Horror of Politics, trans. Myrto Petsota.

Just a perfect day

For better or worse, the utopian visionary sets out to remake the world by reordering life’s most basic features. The base unit of utopian thinking is not the individual or even the community; it is the day. One of the most consistent features of utopian literature is the description of the typical citizen’s typical day…

Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (2016).

Kafkanarchy

Kafka was a frequent attender of anarcho-syndicalist meetings; and that these were of peculiar personal significance to him can be proved by the astonishing negative fact that Brod knew nothing of them until after his friend’s death. He attended, said nothing, sat, ‘a colossus of silence’, with ‘great gray shining eyes’.

Paul Goodman, Kafka’s Prayer (1947).

Kif mentality

‘Slowed down. Easy-going. All things are equally important, nothing is very important. Trivial connections, coincidences seem remarkable. Feeling of being protected: everything will turn out for you. Other people come in + out of focus. Hard to stay with one subject very long talking – the mind drifts. Big oral appetite, often hungry. Powerful languor – want to sit or lie down. Very easy to change your plans, go with the moment. Cotton in your head – everything is “beautiful” – you glide toward it, away from it.’ (Susan Sontag)

Part of you wants to hide in the bird hide, to wallow in the kif state of mind, in the warm bath of its accepting, uncynical, unironic, mystical, post-verbal embrace. Whatever is, is enough. Part of you wants to get as far away as possible from that mental mush, to find the absolute clarity and beauty of full consciousness – clear as that high window under the eaves.

Knocking off

‘Everything is DIY, and this resourcefulness is admirable,’ writes Erik Reece about the drop city aesthetic in Utopia Drive, his road trip through various communal experiments in America (here he is in Twin Oaks, Virginia): ‘Yet the overall effect is one of disarray, even dinginess. Perhaps it’s just the heat of the day but the whole place seems to have a sag to it’. Building your utopia from recycled consumer detritus, one Twin Oaks resident complains, can lead to a serious clutter problem – something which Julian was very keen to guard against. His vision for the Earth School was less the clutter and more the Shaker aesthetic: those 19th-century settlements that amazed visitors with their spotlessness, their starched white linens and beautiful chairs, the endless sweeping of floors, perches, kerbs so that ‘the very dust in the road seemed pure’. We should go and look at the woodwork in the church at Bela, Emmanuel said, the teetotal mission town down the road, a place that had taken in freed slaves in the 19th century – so simple and so beautiful.

Awoken to the sound of Emmanuel’s gongs, then a short meditation – the days here began well. A walk through the labyrinth, that hairpinning pathway overgrown with succulents and fynbos; sometimes you had to step over an encroaching molehill. Maybe some lengths in one of the dams.

But by the end of the day, things could get a bit fractious, especially when people wanted to knock off. If there was one thing he didn’t want to hear, Julian said, it was the phrase: ‘But I’ve knocked off now’. Because they were transitioning to a community where what had to be done, had to be done, until it was done. Which was causing some friction with those who were not so ready to dissolve the work-life balance.

Luckily they can’t

How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t…The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

George Orwell, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ (1946).

My campus novel

A grim vision, she knew, but the fundamental joylessness of it all, the kind of moral pantomime that their line of work demanded – didn’t he sometimes feel that too? That it was eating itself? Assuming the worst about everyone and everything might win you a political edge, but it was no way to live.

New Harmony

‘Some of the married women had prettier children than others — and this was a source of inequality,’ read one satirical report. ‘Some were without children at all, and sorely envied their more happy next door neighbours, whose pretty little curly-pated machines were playing themselves into perfectibility on the lawn before their doors…[Owen] had serious thoughts of cutting off all the women’s noses, to bring them to a level.’

In Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (1928).

No saint

This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ (1949).

Not an evangelist (my mother’s Bible)

A loose slip has written on it: ‘Nov. 1942. American troops going through CT in force, to battlefields of Europe.’ And on the other side: ‘The wise teacher will instruct all, but convert none’ with my grandmother’s comment: ‘Retain this: it is why I am not an evangelist’.

One Wheel (Face to face with Ranger One)

First he signed up with the Rangers, those people patrolling with walkie talkies. He was paired with a crew-cut American, a silver-haired veteran of Burning Man in Nevada. This guy’s call sign was One Wheel, because when off duty he got around on a unicycle, pedalling furiously to keep its chunky tyre going in the soft desert sand. One Wheel constantly compared everything to the original event in the US. ‘Back in the States, this would be eight times as big.’ ‘Back in the States, we would park this SUV like so, not like so.’ One Wheel called him a darktard. The kind of retard, in other words, who didn’t go round draped in fairy lights, was therefore invisible at night and could easily be run over by a mutant vehicle out there on the playa. One Wheel had seen many a bicycle being crunched like that, laid down in the dust by its darktard owner. They were no longer in the default world; he should remember that.

The shift was five hours long and extremely dull. Mainly they trudged around the outer camping areas, the suburbs, where families from Bloemfontein or Bellville had intricate setups of safari tents, camping tables and solar showers. All now stood empty since their occupants were out partying. His feet ached from the previous night’s attempt at dancing.

This was the sector they’d been assigned, but One Wheel seemed to take pleasure in keeping them as far as possible from the action, away from the inner circle where acrobats swivelled naked in silver hoops, where four-wheel drive whales spumed blue fire and saxophones tooted from the top of mutant mushrooms. Where people were, for no good reason, setting the world alight.

He wanted a go on the walkie talkie, but One Wheel said you had to do a few training shifts first, learn the lingo. Anyone could listen in on the public radio channel they used, also the police, so there was a whole system of call signs and codewords. If there was a mass fatality at the event, the Rangers’ kitchen would be turned into the morgue – the fridges could keep corpses chilled. But you should never use words like fatality, dead or death on the radio – it could cause a panic. Instead, you should ask for an in-person meeting with the head ranger on duty, like this: I need a face-to-face with Ranger One.

There was a lot of jargon in this Temporary Autonomous Zone. There was ‘radical self-reliance’ and ‘leave no trace’. There was Matter Out of Place (MOOP), trash that is, which could be dealt with by a MOOP-swoop. There was also Sound Out of Place (SOOP), which was harder to address. SOOP was invisible but inescapable, said One Wheel, given that human beings had eyelids but not earlids. There was Checkpoint Charming, the entry gate where he’d queued for three hours – not that he was complaining. In a non-commercial space you couldn’t be a customer or complain like a customer.

Paperweight

‘This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.’

George Orwell, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ (1946).

For me this translucent, mineral eye is somehow linked with the glass paperweight that Winston Smith finds in an antique shop Nineteen Eighty-Four, a fragment of coral set in glass: ‘There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.’ It is one of the only beautiful things left in the world of Airstrip One, all the more beautiful because it is useless – the trace element of utopia in dystopia.

Pontiffs of Love

Utopias of renunciation versus utopias of physical pleasure and passion – passion was the key word for the French eccentric Charles Fourier (just a few books away) whose imagined a ‘sexual minimum’ for everyone, a world where ‘Pontiffs of Love’ would preside over carefully choregraphed orgies, and every proclivity and mania would be catered for. If many utopians want to change and discipline human nature to fit their schemes for improvement, then Fourier worked in the opposite direction: ‘He dreamed of creating social institutions that were adapted to the wild variety of human particularity – jigsawing crazily shaped holes of fit each crazily shaped peg’.

Pravic

Shevek knew that the concept of superiority, of relative height, was important for the Urrasti; they often used the word “higher” as a synonym for “better” in their writings, where an Anarresti would use “more central”.

[…]

“And take care, in Abbenay. Keep free. Power inheres in a centre. You’re going to the centre. I don’t know Sabul well; I know nothing against him; but keep this in mind: you will be his man.”

The singular forms of the possessive pronoun in Pravic were used mostly for emphasis; idiom avoided them. Little children might say “my mother,” but very soon they learned to say “the mother.” Instead of “my hand hurts,” it was “the hand hurts me,” and so on; to say “this one is mine and that’s yours” in Pravic, one said, “I use this one and you use that.” Mitis’s statement, “You will be his man,” had a strange sound to it. Shevek looked at her blankly.

A refusal of mystery

Orwell famously wrote that good writing should be like a windowpane. But even a staunch admirer like Simon Leys can see the limits of this approach: ‘He developed an art culminating in the erasure of its own trace – the “window-pane aesthetic” whose very perfection lies in making one forget its existence. Such success comes at a price: pushed past a threshold, the desire for clarity can become a refusal of mystery, and may ultimately limit the field of perception.’

Spaghetti factories

In his table talk, discreetly recorded by party officials under the direction of Martin Bormann, Hitler enjoyed planning the colonization of the Ukraine that would follow the conquest of Russia by German armies:

‘The Crimea will give us its citrus fruits, cotton and rubber…The Black Sea will be for us a sea whose wealth our fishermen will never exhaust. Thanks to the cultivation of the Soya bean, we’ll increase our livestock. We’ll win from that soil several times as much as the Ukrainian peasant is winning at present…We shall get between ten and twelve million tons of grain annually. I think we ought to build spaghetti factories on the spot; all the prerequisites are there…’

John Carey, The Faber Book of Utopias (1999).

Sabotage

The mind was odd. It tried to trip you up, to sabotage your happiness by defaulting back to unpleasant things. For a while – and this was something she’d never shared with anyone – whenever she’d had sex was on the verge of orgasm, her brain would flash up an image of her mother in the hospice, mouth and cheeks sagging. It felt deliberate, like there was something malevolent at work in her psyche. Now she was here, trying get in on the act with Camp Protocol, but all she could think of was that other place, those terminal beaches where she’d walked and walked, anxious to see what the ocean had retched up, her thoughts tangled up with the by-catch and flotsam in the tide line, the seals with shotgun wounds because they were in competition with the fishermen, the washed-up plastic and the wind.

Shifting baseline syndrome

There was group of Boy and Girl Scouts also doing the trail. They were here, they explained, to get their outdoor woodsman, fire safety and camp craft badges. They were tramping the pines in their neckerchiefs and woggles, singing Scout songs, they were having a great time. Their enthusiasm was undimmed, no matter that they were wading streams clotted with polystyrene or eating sandwiches on a hard shoulder, sucking down diesel fumes. Perhaps they were just young. Perhaps they had a different baseline of expectation of what being outdoors meant, of what a nature trail was.

There was also a party of teachers from a high school in Krugersdorp. They started off very jolly with brandy and Coke, but things soon got strained in their group – you could sense it. Some of them were out of shape and would come limping in long after dark, head torches on. They didn’t want to talk to each other, cooked their sausages in silence, turned in early.

Tales of prison life

When I was asleep in the Ignorance, I came to a place of meditation full of holy men and I found their company wearisome and the place a prison; when I awoke, God took me to a prison and turned it into a place of meditation and His trysting-ground 

Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Aphorisms.
Tales of Prison Life.

Yin utopia

‘Utopia has been yang,’ Le Guin writes elsewhere, drawing on the Taoist philosophy which was a life-long influence for her. In one way or another, from Plato on, ‘utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip’:

Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot. Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal. …To attain the constant, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold.