Author: Antonia Malchik

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

The most recent Threadable reading* for Land Ownership was a selection from John Locke’s 1690 book Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V: Of Property.

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try the Threadable app and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now.

For anyone new to On the Commons an overview of this project is here. Please feel free to comment or email me with any questions.)

Locke’s Treatise is in the public domain, and there are many different places online where you can read the text. I have a hard copy (my eyes are always tired from copy editing, so hard copies tend to be my go-to), but there are online PDFs, such as this one from the University of York. The link in the first paragraph is to the Project Gutenberg ebook version.

It’s hard to know where to start with John Locke because, as with William Blackstone in the previous reading, his ideas about the basis of private property, especially private ownership of land, are both foundational and surprisingly shaky.

Locke’s idea was that men (only men, of course, and only white men I’m sure) gained ownership of land by “mixing” their labor with it: planting, tilling, harvesting, that kind of thing. Basically, once you worked the land you could claim it as your own.

That’s not actually nothing. He spends a fair amount of time dwelling on what happens in the space between, say, a piece of fruit hanging on a tree and its location in your hand, at which point it is “yours” to eat. Or is it? It’s actually a curious philosophical question. I’ve personally spent a lot more time thinking about what effect one’s private ownership of land, food, water, etc., has on other people. How much land can you claim for yourself before it deprives others of their right to survival? What property rights can you exercise before it start to erode others’ rights?

The fact of when something becomes “yours” feels a little different, more philosophical but also tangible. I can’t claim the pie cherries from my neighbor’s cherry tree no matter how many cherries I could personally pick—and despite the fact that they’re rarely in town when the cherries are ripe—because the tree isn’t mine. Yet when I gather chokecherries along the public paths in town, I transfer public claims over that fruit to my own private use and benefit. And to the benefit of whoever receives the chokecherry jelly I make.

(Also I deprive the bears of food. Or maybe they deprive me of food. I’m not sure, but publicly owned fruit trees and wildlife is an issue I’m having to think about now that I’m on the city’s Parks Board.)

So it’s not simply, as one Threadable reader pointed out, the Locke sees the mixing of labor as the first element of ownership, but the question of how one justifies claiming resources, such as food, for oneself—a claim that is necessary to live.

Locke’s perspective is one I didn’t really pick up on in the reading and it had to be pointed out to me: that the ownership claim is an extension of claim over oneself. That people* have ownership of themselves, and their self-ownership extends then to the property they own, whether land or gold or cows. “The body of a person extends to include all of their possessions with use value,” as this commenter wrote. “Limbs and lambs and land.”

*(Remember, for Locke only white men are people, and likely only white men who are property owners to begin with are people—not an uncommon view; Immanuel Kant believed that only property owners and those who held public office could be considered citizens; anyone who worked for wages was in his view disqualified. It’s important to remember here that it’s been less than 150 years since any kind of non-landowner was allowed to vote, including men. Being a woman, I would not be considered a person in Locke’s eyes.)

I kind of wish I’d included Mary Wollstonecraft in these land ownership reading selections because she has some major critiques of Locke, and of private property in general, but am saving her for when I start writing the chapter on ownership of people for No Trespassing. However, there’s a great paper on her feminist critique of property (paywalled, unfortunately; just love the enclosure of knowledge we swim in) in which the author, Lena Halldenius, makes some acute observations about Wollstonecraft’s views of property:

“Property is a selfish principle, invoked by the rich under the false name of liberty in order to protect themselves against the claims of the poor,”

a principle that not only prioritizes the lives of the privileged, but also completely excludes women from ownership of anything, since in her time women never could own themselves. They were the property of men, a state that plenty of U.S. lawmakers would like to see us return to.

On Locke, Halldenius explains his view that,

“Land, originally held in common, can be turned into an object of private right through a performative act of appropriation. Labor is his term of choice for that act whereby a thing is acquired out of the common stock and turned into a person’s property.”

It’s a pretty succinct explanation, and exposes the problems that I had with Locke’s logic, which came down to three issues: 1) Like Blackstone, Locke several times says that nobody will ever claim more property or resources (like food) than they can actually use themselves, and therefore privatizing the commons for one’s own benefit doesn’t harm anyone else; 2) his definitions of land as “unused” or “waste,” which—again like Blackstone—he uses much of North America as an example of, claiming that it’s okay for colonizers to privatize land on that continent because the people who live there aren’t using all of it; and that 3) both subduing nature (Earth) and the command to labor come from God and are therefore unquestionable.

Point (3) came up in Blackstone, so I don’t really want to belabor the point that a command from God isn’t a good enough reference point for private ownership of land. Both he and Locke really tried to press that point, and on that basis alone it’s disturbing to me that much of our modern-day conceptions of property law still rely on their philosophies. But aside from that, even if you believed in the religious claims he’s making, it doesn’t logically follow that a divine command to labor mixed with the gift of Earth from God translates into private land ownership. There’s no there there.

Locke’s claim about it being “wrong” to take more land and resources than one needs, and that it won’t happen, is flat-out frustrating. You can say it’s wrong until the sun turns chartreuse, but it doesn’t stop people from doing it. Referring to that and his idea of “unused” or “waste” land, he tries several times to say that private claim over them is always achieved by “common consent.” He says this without, however, ever giving any actual evidence. Whose consent? When? How? Why would anyone who didn’t personally benefit consent to private ownership and gain rather than something more equitable?

One of the reasons it was so frustrating for me to read that was because everything he wrote about letting his horse chew grass, or tilling a certain field, or gathering acorns, is easily applied to a commons-based shared-use system. No privatization is required for any of it. Aside from which, he never addresses how this “common consent” happens, only that it does. Similar, again, to Blackstone, who said that it was “on all hands agreed” that land was made better use of when it was privatized. I bet those hands were not the ones doing most of the work on that land.

What he’s saying in this above quote—“there are still great tracts of ground to be found, which lie waste, and are more than the people who dwell on it do, or can make use of”—is that if colonizers anywhere in the world see land that they perceive to be unused, they have a right to take it. Which contradicts any waffle he makes about “common consent” anyway. Whose consent? I think we know the answer, but Wollstonecraft said it succinctly:

“It is only the property of the rich that is secure.”

And by extension colonial and imperial powers.

Dwelling on Locke’s philosophical question about when something becomes yours to consume or use or simply to keep is an interesting one. But none of his ideas either defend or effectively argue for private ownership in land. Aside from all the other logical inconsistencies, he never addresses the issue of how someone can “own” land that others do all the labor on. Why don’t the people working on a farm or great English estate own the land? Because—he never says this in this section but its reality might be somewhere else in the Treatises—their labor is also owned. It’s just self-justifying hierarchies all the way down.

Neither Blackstone nor Locke nor any of the other people with their money and influence and titles and centuries of reference can answer the essential question: Where did private property begin? And why?

You can take an apple from a tree, and then it’s yours. And we can debate about the philosophy that happens between the existing and the taking and the consuming. But to justify the reams of legal principles and decisions around private land ownership—especially when we remember previous readings about enclosures of the commons, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. M’Intosh, and centuries of theft of Indigenous lands worldwide—we’re going to have to do a whole lot better.

I don’t think we can. After all these readings, “I took it; now it’s mine” is still all we’ve got going for private land ownership, and that is no basis on which to share an ecosystem, a planet, or a life.

Only two more readings left! Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass, and Mary Christina Wood’s Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age. I’m afraid neither of these are in the public domain but both are well worth reading. Hayes’s book is particularly delightful. He’s an engaging writer and doesn’t hold back his low opinion of private ownership of large English estates and the theft they originated in. He also includes his beautiful ink drawings throughout the book.

I am once again going to be offline for several days, and will respond to comments, etc., when I return. Thank you for traveling with me on this weird journey. Please enjoy this photo off into the wilderness from a ski day I took with some friends last week. The snow ghosts and cloud banks were off the charts beautiful.

Walking composition

“Scheming on a thing, that’s a mirage
I’m trying to tell you now, it’s sabotage.”
— “Sabotage,” Beastie Boys

Sunday night my daughter and I folded ourselves into the car to try to find some Northern Lights. The Kp index was at 6, well within our zone, and she’s been wanting to see the aurora for over a year. We drove up to Glacier National Park to walk by the lakeshore at Apgar about a half-hour’s drive from our house.

I’m not a good night driver. Even as a teenager I avoided it because my night vision is iffy. Walking is okay, but driving I can’t seem to process the headlight-lit information quickly enough and feel precarious. Every now and then, though, it feels good. To be out on the road at night, few other cars, ’80s rock on the radio except never the good ’80s rock, the songs you could never quite sing along or dance to but couldn’t headbang to, either. It reminds me of rare freewheeling teenage nights. Alone in my parents’ car before I wrecked it one icy day, sixteen years old and driving that same road back at night from my summer restaurant job near West Glacier. Listening to the same damn radio station.

I rolled into the parking lot and we walked out to the lakeshore under moonlight that moved in and out of clouds. It was still far too overcast to see anything but a few stars, and we kept turning around to stare at the Moon, shivering in the wind that blew across the frozen lake. We saw no aurora, but didn’t want to leave. Wouldn’t it be nice, we both said, if we could just spend the night here in the quiet under the stars peeking out of the gap in the clouds?

I took a photo, which was terrible, except I kept it because it looked like an oil painting.

“Should we try going up the North Fork?” I asked her, mindful of our mutual tiredness and my poor night vision and school the next day. She shrugged.

“Why not?” So we drove back south again, wiggled through the back streets of Columbia Falls, and headed up the North Fork, talking almost the whole time of the pains of middle school and the stupidity and cruelty of the Montana state legislature. An entity I wanted to assure my daughter I’d protect her and all the other kids and every vulnerable person from, but is that a promise any of us adults have shown ourselves capable of keeping?

Tuesday mornings almost every week, I volunteer in my daughter’s sixth-grade classroom. I thought I was done volunteering in my kids’ classes after elementary school but her teachers decided on a book clubs routine enabled by parents like me who didn’t realize they were getting into a year-long commitment. So Tuesday mornings I walk her to her entrance and then go around to the front of the school to check in as a volunteer, make small talk with the office staff while they print out a sticker that sometimes, for some reason, has my old driver’s license photo on it from almost ten years ago when I still kept my hair short and my skirts long.

I’ve worked in textbook publishing for so many years that garnering enthusiasm for rubrics or worksheets is something I can no longer even fake very well. Does it matter if students can identify the main idea or give supporting details? Not really. Half the time those questions aren’t even written well enough for students to understand what they’re looking for, but that’s not the point. The point is that nobody really gets anything out of answering questions that are only designed to get them through standardized tests anyway.

Actually, that’s not the point either. The point is something I figured out when I first volunteered to read with kids in my son’s first-grade class, and the reason that later I created a math games program for third-graders with a couple of other women: you’re almost never there to help them learn. You’re there to be an adult that they can connect with, who can help a kid be seen—especially for the kids who are so often unseen, and the ones who might not have adults in their lives who make their own existence feel safe, much less special. Ideally, you can help them build the confidence they need to read the paragraph, or add up the numbers, or decipher the word problem, or write that personal bit of narrative. That they’re competent and smart and deserve to use their voice. That they’re important to someone. That they’re worthy. Because they all are. That’s why I show up.

My book clubs group is so far all girls. It just shook out that way somehow. The books we read are old-fashioned, which makes them challenging. Some of the girls don’t like to read. We have to read but I’m not going to force them to like it. I let them chat a bit. Talk about what their mornings were like and how confusing it is to figure out what’s going on in the story. The morning we met right after a lockdown drill, I let them spend the first few minutes telling me how stupid lockdown drills were and what they’d suggest doing instead. I can’t really say adults know better because we’re the ones who have somehow let a world with lockdown drills solidify around them.

Middle school is such a tough time. I went to four different middle schools and was miserable at every single one. At the last one, I joined cheerleading, which my father recently said he thought was because I was trying to understand the dynamics of popularity, but I had to let him down: it was my fourth school in three years, and as a very nerdy kid probably on my fifth or sixth reread of Lord of the Rings, I was just trying to fit in. (It didn’t work, but at least the other cheerleaders were nice to me.)

When I gather at the table with the kids and we try to make our way through the confusing old-fashioned book, I let them wander in and out of what we’re meant to be doing. Connect with each other, laugh over something, use Taylor Swift songs to explain vocabulary words, look up birds of the Arctic on my phone since that’s where the book is set and we don’t know any of them. Some time ago, I started bringing snacks, because I remember what it’s like to be the hungry kid who’d barely gotten herself and her little sister to the bus on time.

I bring our attention back to the worksheets to write down themes and predictions and vocabulary but with uncertain feelings: I don’t know what kinds of lessons will be most useful for them in the future. Do any of us?

As my daughter talked about school and dreaded gym class and asked questions about the Montana state legislature that it pained me to answer honestly, I drove the car up the North Fork Road until we hit gravel, the snow banks on each side getting higher as the trees closed in and the snow started to fall more heavily. We wouldn’t be seeing any stars, much less auroras, but drove further anyway until we got to the curve where the valley opens out, my mind split between the dark road in front of me and the one driving our conversation. Take a flamethrower to all of it, I thought of the current legislative agenda, and all the larger structures and paradigms it relies on. Of the rage of not being heard, of all the ways there are of not being heard; of the frustration of knowing that at the same time somebody has to be methodically digging for the roots of these structures so that burning them down doesn’t result in them sprouting back stronger than ever; and that somebody has to be building something new, or rebuilding something old—better, in either case. Something alive, something able to withstand the maw that eats everything good.

I turned off the car and we got out. It was so dark and quiet we couldn’t even hear the river. The snow fell in thick flakes, hard, like it was being driven by a growing wind but there was no wind. We stood and smelled the snow and pine and after a while went home, peering up as we drove for the first sight of moonlight.

The next day the sun came out and people posted photos of the brilliant auroras on social media. The newspaper printed one covering the whole sky from the same lake we’d driven up to, but several hours later. I’d forgotten that auroras are best seen in the middle of the night.

I walked through the far side of town for two hours, near the wastewater treatment plant, and spent a while by the river listening to birdsong. I couldn’t stop thinking of the questions my daughter asked, the things that worried her. How they were the seeds of the worries that anyone paying attention carries full-grown. Of her friends and the kids in her books clubs group and all the other kids here and everywhere and how different their choices might be from what mine once were when they’re old enough to drive that road at night. Of how tired I am of adults saying that they put their hope in younger generations, when it’s we who should be fighting for a world that gives them something to hope for. And of the sunrise that morning, cast pink, and the moonlight behind the lake the night before, where I wanted to stay.

Town felt warm, ducks active on the river, magpies everywhere. (But the magpies have been everywhere all winter long. They’re more than ready to take over my house.) The next day it snowed all day and into the night, piling up at least six more inches, but that one day you could tell spring was inevitable. I hope I can hear whatever lessons it has for me, and with clearer vision.

The first insistent birdsong I’ve heard this year, standing at this spot by the river. Definitely feels like spring is coming, despite the several inches of snow we got the next day.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Brave the Wild River, by Melissa L. Sevigny, about botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter and their 1938 Colorado River expedition to document the plant life of the Colorado River, is available for pre-order. I read an early draft of this book and couldn’t believe how quickly I zipped through it. Melissa is a beautiful writer. Her book Mythical River is I think one of the best books I’ve read about water in the American West, and in addition to dealing with its complex history and the entanglement of water governance and abuse, it highlights Sevigny’s ability to thread her poetic sensibilities with her journalistic expertise. Brave the Wild River came out of her riveting essay “The Wild Ones” in The Atavist.

• Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven in Aeon with a profile of Egyptian economist Samir Amin, his criticisms of Edward Said, and the concept of Eurocentrism: “Amin’s attention to how colonial legacies have shaped the economic and social structures of the world economy in a variety of ways opened the door for a wealth of scholarship on colonial legacies, imperialism and unequal exchange.”

• Shannon Mattern writing in Places Journal about public drinking fountains and visiting the 19 reservoirs that supply New York City’s water: “The project, he argued, was animated by the conviction that water should be ‘a commons, not a commodity. . . . That drinking water should be freely available to the public, rather than being a private good, bottled in plastic by a corporation and sold for profit. I believe that’s why conservative commentators have been so critical of this initiative.’”

• The movement for car-free cities or city centers is growing, writes Patrick Sisson in City Monitor, while reminding readers that cities long predate cars, and will outlast them. (Considering that pedestrian deaths from cars in the U.S. increased nine times faster than population since Covid started and large SUVs collectively emit more carbon pollution than many countries, a shift away from car-centrism is long overdue.)

• I think I’ve shared this one before, but recently reread Lee Nellis’s piece in Mountain Journal on seemingly radical land conservation ideas for the Greater Yellowstone area, including granting citizenship rights to migrating wildlife and a nod to Henry George’s Land Value Tax, along with a shift in the stories we tell. “We cannot combat the dominant myth with facts. Those of us who want to live in a world made magical by wildness must offer a better story. We must offer a compelling narrative of gratitude, humility, restraint, and reciprocity.”

• Longtime international journalist Indra Adnan on the Planet: Critical podcast on the failures of mainstream media and the alternatives people build when democracy feels like it’s failing: “You say there’s no low-hanging fruit. This is the low-hanging fruit. The possibility of relationship between people all over the globe, which means there’s a possibility of us coming into empathy with each other.”

• Tuesday I attended a four-hour webinar on the Doctrine of Discovery that had extensive discussion of Johnson v. M’Intosh (including a phrase-by-phrase breakdown of the decision’s reliance on paradigms of domination) and more recent cases showing the pervasive influence of that 1823 case. The organizers—including Steven Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land—have said they’ll put the webinar recording online when it’s ready, but in the meantime some of the materials are available in shorter versions via Red Thought.

“Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.” —Cory Doctorow

A few upcoming talks and activities:

• I’ll be giving a research-oriented presentation on walking (and walkability) and its role in personal and community well-being at the annual MTRPA (Montana Trails, Recreation and Parks Association) conference being held April 2–5 in Whitefish, Montana.

• I am incredibly grateful to the Dear Butte board for granting me a residency with them this year. I’ll be in Butte, Montana, in June, working on No Trespassing. I’m mentioning this mostly because the residency requires a community engagement aspect (which is such a cool idea for a residency), and what I’m working on will be—I hope—a walk through Butte led by a local (not me), with discussion of how communities can center and frame their collective stories, and that’s something I’d love to see considered everywhere.
  This idea came from a middle school photography project presented a few years ago here in Whitefish. The essence is that national and international media usually tell one story about a place and people, often a misleading one. How, in contrast, would the people in that place themselves represent their stories? It’s not exactly a new idea, but it’s good to be reminded that those who don’t know your place and people don’t get to define who you are. Maybe you can run with it where you live. Or where you spend time. (How does this change in communities whose members are physically distant, or mostly online?)

• July 9–12 the international Reclaiming the Commons conference (hosted jointly by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment [ASLE] and The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences [AESS]) will be held in Portland, Oregon, and I’ll be there giving a presentation on using narrative to reframe understanding of the commons. Not sure exactly what that will look like, but it will be similar to how I approach science and research-driven nonfiction writing.
  I am very, very excited about attending this conference. They haven’t even built the full schedule yet and it already looks amazing.

• The Threadable reading circle on Land Ownership will be wrapping up soon, though the discussions are always ongoing.

  I’ve agreed to do a second reading circle and am going for something still related to this commons/ownership work but from a different perspective: Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Belonging. We’ll be reading science fiction, fantasy, and speculative short stories that bring to life a sense of home, belonging, and identity. I haven’t chosen the readings yet, but the authors whose stories I’m tentatively choosing from include several of my favorites: N.K. Jemisin, Cherie Dimaline, Nnedi Okorafor, Hao Jingfang, Octavia Butler, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Anjali Sachdeva. I’ll provide links when the time comes!

It’s bitterly cold here in northwest Montana. I hope you’re adequately sheltered, wherever you are, and finding ways to take care of one another.

Walking composition

“Some things just ain’t easy to repair
The person who came here was broken
Can you fix it, can you care?”
— “What They Call Us,” Fever Ray

Last month I pulled a very sad box out of the garage. Three sad boxes, actually, one of potatoes and two of apples, but the box of potatoes was the saddest because those came out of my garden. I spent most of a warm-enough autumn day last year sitting in a shady patch of grass brushing dirt off of each one, and here they were frozen and thawed and beginning to mold.

We got about halfway through the potatoes by January, but the bizarre weather pattern of deep, intense cold followed or preceded by days of warmth and rain were too much for my careful winter packing to contend with. Ditto for the really excellent apples I’d bought from the seasonal produce stand near the airport. Only managed to eat half a box of those and the rest had to go out to compost.

Which means that one of my projects this year has to be figuring out better storage for the potatoes, apples, and onions (most of the onions did okay, but I think that’s because we used them up before they thawed again after freezing). I was prioritizing building a small greenhouse, since the seedlings struggled so much last year due to lack of heat, but I’ve got to figure out some form of cold-but-not-freezing winter storage or there’s little point to much of the digging and growing and weeding and harvesting.

I was recently listening to an interview with Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future, who talked about the brittleness of global supply chains and working on relocalizing food and teaching more people how to small-scale farm where he lives in England, and while he talked I thought of those lost potatoes and apples and then of the root cellar by the house I grew up in—a literal but good-sized dirt hole through a trapdoor and down some steps under the lean-to outside the kitchen—and the massive crock of pickles my mom used to keep on the kitchen floor, and all the other skills I’ve had to learn or rediscover when growing and gathering food. The variations in how to store carrots; why not to put onions and potatoes together; how to keep apples from freezing. All the canning and pickling that has to get done in the very hottest weeks of the year. How you end up with years’ worth of canned tomatoes because you never use as much as you think you will, and how the jam all gets given away as gifts because nobody in the house actually eats much of it. How you need a backup plan for all the frozen meat and fruit because the power will sometimes go out. (And why does freezing take so much plastic?) What is best dehydrated instead of frozen, and how to get fermentation to succeed when your kitchen is, like mine, rarely warm enough. (Still working on that one.)

And the flip side of it all, the inside-out systems most of us can’t escape depending on, the ones that mean I don’t really need to grow potatoes or onions or store apples and carrots through the winter. The ones that rely on damaged land and extracted labor elsewhere so that I don’t have to do these things. The ones that build dependence but still fail everyone: Why can’t I find my kids swimsuits in summer, when they actually grow out of them, but can easily buy my daughter fresh organic raspberries in January? Who’s picking those raspberries? Who’s packing them? Where is the plastic shell container made? Where are all the kids’ swimsuits in August? Why did the jeans I bought less than six months ago fall apart? Why do I need to special order a little connector to fix the toilet seat that’s been broken for months? (It’s a toilet seat! How does that have specialized parts?)

It makes no sense and it’s exhausting and deeply unjust and such a waste in so many ways. What are we all doing here?

Some time back, I wrote about being tired of metaphors. Not tired of metaphors exactly, but of the ways in which many of us use metaphors. How easy it is to turn almost anything into metaphor—in my case, it was thistles and knapweed into white supremacy and patriarchy, when really the thistles and knapweed are very real problems that need non-metaphorical solutions in the form of my labor. (You can eat thistles but only so many, and knapweed not at all. Nothing can except sheep.)

And yet, working as a copy editor involves a mindset in which every single word is filled with a rich, all-of-creation’s-worth world of metaphor.

(I probably spent more time considering that word “world” as I wrote this than almost anything else. Think of what it means! What your own meaning of it contains, and what it leaves out. Look it up in an English-language thesaurus and notice which adjacent words expand its meaning, and which limit it, and how. In Russian, the word for “world” is mir, which is also the word describing the traditional [pre-Soviet] shared-resource village commune, and is also the word for “peace.” The word “world” not only contains worlds; it contains different ones in different languages, even different ones within the same language.)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, since realizing that most people—even most writers—have no idea what copy editors do. Sometimes my copy editing job does involve fixing commas, though rarely. Proofreading at that level isn’t something I do often anymore, or only incidentally as I’m working. Most of the time it’s handling language like it’s a live wire. Every word weighted with meaning, both from the writer and from the readers who will eventually absorb the text (and does the writer care about the reader’s reception? That question plays a role, too. Many do. Many don’t. Many who think they don’t actually do in the end). Every word full of promise and potential and tripwires.

In their now-classic book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson unraveled the idea that language is a fixed thing, that individual words have objective meaning. Even the framing we give to a sentence holds assumptions about the way we see the world. “Argument is war,” for example, is a metaphor reflected in the way our dominant culture talks about arguments, their examples being: “Your claims are indefensible; I demolished his argument; I’ve never won an argument with them.” Or take the implications of their contrasting statements “love is a collaborative work of art” versus “love is madness.”

“If love is madness, I do not concentrate on what I have to do to maintain it. But if it is work, then it requires activity, and if it is a work of art, it requires a very special kind of activity, and if it is collaborative, then it is even further restricted and specified. . . . the meaning a metaphor will have for me will be partly culturally determined and partly tied to my past experiences.”

Think of how easy it is to misunderstand someone in face-to-face conversation, or to be misunderstood, much less over text messages or email or community chat channels. I enjoy working with language, but I might have become a copy editor in large part because I so deeply dislike having my own words misconstrued or assumptions made about my meaning, and want to save other people that pain. How we handle language with one another, in whatever medium, is about more than just the words. It’s about what the words mean to each of us, individually and together. Those meanings in turn affect how we respond, how we treat one another. Full of tripwires, as I said, but also full of potential.

In politics and social spheres, the desperation to fix meaning in place—like Lord Business with the Kragle in The Lego Movie—is an attempt to freeze all of us, life itself, into a static form acceptable to those dictating the definitions. To keep each individual experience from bringing their own meanings to language and stories. Lakoff and Johnson noted this when they were writing Metaphors We Live By back in 1980:

“The fear of metaphor and rhetoric in the empiricist tradition is a fear of subjectivism—a fear of emotion and the imagination. Words are viewed as having ‘proper senses’ in terms of which truths can be expressed. To use words metaphorically is to use them in an improper sense, to stir the imagination and thereby the emotions and thus to lead us away from the truth and toward illusion.”

This kind of belief in an absolute, objective truth often seems to me a fear of the rambunctious, glorious nature of life itself, of the way that humans simply cannot get it under control, no matter how hard they try. People who are scared of this reality try to control what they can. They’ll always fail in the end, but that doesn’t prevent them from doing plenty of damage in the meantime.

Soil makes an incredibly versatile metaphor, but, as I’ve written about before, it’s also a very real substance necessary to life and subject to increasingly intense commodification. What kinds of metaphors would allow me to feel the weight of that reality, to help others feel it? To figure out ways to garden that allow food to grow and my hands to rummage happily in the ground, but don’t require extraction of the dirt and nutrients needed for life elsewhere? Where does metaphor turn into values and choices and practice, and vice versa?

Maybe I’m weary less of metaphors than of the easy ones threaded through mainstream English. Not because of anything detrimental it does to the language, but because there is such a desperate collective need to see the world and life and possibility differently than most of us have been taught to. Metaphors in mainstream language, like so much else, feel exhausted. I’m not even sure what “mainstream” means anymore, or what I mean by it.

I haven’t thought of a metaphor for the potatoes I had to drag out to the back yard last month. Maybe there doesn’t need to be one. I’m just a bit sad about it, and focused on doing better by them this year.

A society where few of us know how to store potatoes for winter, or can’t buy jeans that last a year before falling apart (honestly, come on, that’s absurd), but where I can easily find organic raspberries in January and order specialized parts for a broken toilet seat (talk about a metaphor for a dysfunctional culture)—that’s a society that needs a different way of envisioning its relationship to words as well as to life.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Anoushka Zoo Carter with Future Natures on the history of and ongoing struggles over land enclosures and 3 examples of current, successful commons-based and cooperative land use systems: “When the concept of private land ownership dominates, so do certain values, beliefs, and assumptions of how land and life is structured in society. Owning land as a private good is often underpinned by the desire to commodify it, meaning its exchange value (usually monetary) is prized above all else.”

• Evolutionary biologist David Sloane Wilson was on Your Undivided Attention talking about the success of evolution being in cooperation rather than competition. (If you prefer reading, Wilson had a great essay about this same topic in Nautilus a couple years ago titled, “I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand.”)

• Gary Juffa, governor for Oro Province in Papua New Guinea, was on the Planet: Critical podcast talking about illegal logging cartels, the capture of government, and how he came to see it all as a war on nature: “They came into Papua New Guinea in the 1980s and they kicked out legitimate timber companies. They’re entrenched, and they’ve taken so much control of the various state entities that are tasked with checks and balances. They’ve compromised all of them.” (The link is to Planet: Critical’s Substack page, but the podcast is on Apple, etc.)

• Political science professor Mike Albertus on the In Common podcast discussed his research on agrarian reforms in Latin America and what happens when land is privately owned but property rights are neither well defined nor defended. What happens when you own land but your rights of ownership are vague? (This was a good challenge for me with regards to the importance of private property rights where land ownership is promoted, and clearly was for the host, too, who also noted that, on the other hand, owning land in common or collectively in the United States is purposefully very difficult.)

• Kenneth sent me this interview in Quartz on the Amish relationship with technology that relates to a previous post about AI and technology in general—before adopting a technology, can we learn to first assess the damage it causes as well as the benefits it might bring? “It’s very clear there are two technologies that, as soon as the community accepts them, they are no longer Amish. Those technologies are the television and the automobile. They particularly see those two as having a fundamental impact on their society and daily lives. . . . A huge part is that they shape our relationships with other people.”

• And Julie sent a great interview with Amitav Ghosh from Emergence magazine: “So what Black scholars and historians, especially, have been saying for a long time is now shown to be true without a doubt—that you don’t get capitalism without colonialism and slavery. The geopolitical framework for the emergence of capitalism was, I would say, temporally anterior to the emergence of capitalism, and it was essential.” (I’ve had Nutmeg’s Curse on my shelf for a while, but might read it sooner rather than later after listening to this.)

• Aeon with a 6-minute video that does a good job explaining the Prisoner’s Dilemma and how it could play out infinitely. Prisoner’s Dilemma is a classic game theory scenario. It’s referenced all the time and I have never understood it. I get the math; I just don’t get the social aspect. It makes a bunch of assumptions about human behavior that are based on a very particular mindset, and I’ve never been able to imagine myself opting to so readily sacrifice someone else. It’s classic, but weird. Or, perhaps, WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic).

• Poetry isn’t something I usually search out to share on here, but I really loved this selection from Kimberly M. Blaeser, especially “Poem for a Tattered Planet: If the Measure is Life.” An excerpt:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  "Each splinter of language
  bent    in complicated formulas of inference 
  of ownership
  as fog forgets  then remembers         form.
  But we find measure     in metaphor
  vibration     earth     timbre."

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

The most recent Threadable reading* for Land Ownership was a selection from William Blackstone’s 1753 book Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, Book II: Of the Rights of Things, Chapter I: Of Property, in General.

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try the Threadable app and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now.

For anyone new to On the Commons an overview of this project is here. Please feel free to comment or email me with any questions.)

Blackstone’s Commentaries is in the public domain, and there are many different places online where you can read the text. Several of the sources retain the original text style, though, so you get those “s” letters that are shaped like “f” and it can make the reading a little difficult. The Google Books version is a 1979 publication, which is kind of fun to read. But given the factors of style and font, I found this one most accessible to my modern and tired eyes.

Note: There is one untranslated Latin line in the link above: erant omnia communia et indivisa omnibus, veluti unum cunctis patrimonium esset. Ballentine’s Law Dictionary gives the translation as, “All things were common and undivided, as if there were a single patrimony for all.”

There’s been a fair amount of dense reading in this project, and I want to make clear again that my interest in these texts is not academic. I really want to get to the roots and damaging effects (both historical and ongoing) of the current-day private property regime. Not just what it is but how a culture thinks about it, how people are trained and taught to think about it. What most of us assume is true about land ownership.

I doubt much about private property law will change in my lifetime, if ever, but I also think there’s more hope for change if we know the justifications and rationales that underlie beliefs about private property—beliefs that are intertwined with how the dominant culture views a relationship with nature, with the rest of life.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to overstate the influence of Blackstone and his Commentaries on legal thinking in general, as well as private property specifically. At the time he was writing, English common law was, from my understanding, a mess that even experts, much less lay people, had little hope of understanding. Blackstone took the mess and organized it, with lengthy explanation and legal philosophy. He is particularly known for his examinations of liberty, justice, and the role of government, and his Commentaries were very influential in the nascent United States, including with regards to property law.

Blackstone’s legal theories, and those of John Locke (which will be the next reading), seem to be baked into the foundation of how the dominant culture we live in thinks about private property in general and land ownership in particular. (Even though their theories disagreed, their utility for private property has been complementary.) It’s important, maybe even essential, to unearth the ideas and writings that exist in the law’s DNA.

Maybe more important than the law is the psychological DNA: the conscious and unconscious ways that most people—even many who question the dominant culture or don’t like it—think about land, ownership, and private property. The reason that so many can proclaim “private property is bedrock” without question.

Which makes it all the more interesting that Blackstone himself admits straight out that there is no actual basis for private land ownership.

“There is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land.” So why, then, do we have it? And why do we continue to defend it? It’s obvious that human societies of any size need a way of managing and sharing land, water, wildlife, etc.—but it’s not obvious why private, individual ownership needs to be the answer.

Blackstone engages in a long discussion of the right of occupancy—how occupying land originally gave a kind of temporary ownership over it in the form of exclusive use during a person’s lifetime, but it wasn’t something that could be passed on as an inheritance. Nor did occupancy necessarily grant adjacent rights that in places like the U.S. today are considered part of the “bundle of sticks” of land ownership, like the right to exclude others from the land. Trespassing laws are relatively recent inventions.

In one of a series of frustrating logical leaps, Blackstone then argues that occupancy did in fact give one permanent ownership of land, if you take into account the advent of agriculture and how a landowner/user had no incentive to cultivate their land, treat it well, and make it productive if their ownership of it were not absolute. The blithe phrase here, “it is agreed upon all hands that occupancy gave also the original right to the permanent property in the substance of the earth itself,” neglects not only his own failure to make any such case, but ignores England’s battles over enclosures of the commons, which had been ongoing for centuries by the time of his writing. There would have been no Kett’s Rebellion or other uprisings if “all hands” agreed that occupying the land by extension granted title to it.

The simple need of every human to eat, I suppose, didn’t qualify as an incentive to cultivate or care for land—an echo of the points in the last reading on Henry George about how “skin in the game” in the form of ownership somehow counts as “having a stake,” but skin itself, in the form of survival, doesn’t.

There are also a number of instances where Blackstone insists that chaos would ensue and civilization crumble without the security provided by private land ownership. A security that, as one reader pointed out, is a mirage.

Even if we pass over (and we shouldn’t) the incredible violence needed to make most of today’s private land ownership possible, it has not granted protection from tumults; it has not guaranteed “the good order of the world.” Blackstone, however, doubles down on this many times, arguing that private property is necessary for civilization to thrive.

His arguments neglect, again, England’s long and ancient history of commons systems of land use, not to mention Ireland’s Brehon laws that governed common land use, which would have been fairly recent history—Brehon laws were only fully dismantled in the face of English colonization crackdowns in the 1600s. It’s hard to imagine such an eminent jurist, someone who taught at Oxford and was for a time a Member of Parliament, would have been ignorant of these realities. He even, within the text, specifically pointed out the necessity of the commons themselves remaining in the commons—forests, “waste” grounds, wildlife, etc.—for civil society to exist.

This seems to be a central theme for Blackstone. Reading and rereading a long section explaining how inheritance of property came about, I was confused about a passage that seemed to reiterate that land ownership is made up, and therefore inheritance law is also made up, which led to a brief explanation in Threadable from a reader of private property’s codependency with the state.

The argument that property ownership is a “civilizational necessity,” goes back to a central problem I see with these legal philosophies, at least as related to property law: they often seem to be written and argued—not always well—in order to lay down justifications for a regime that already benefited only a few. Blackstone has been one of the most respected legal scholars in Western history, and his writing here still reads as grasping for straws. Are all these arguments in defense of private property simply about bolstering the integrity of the state and the privileges of its nobility and other elite landowning citizens?

Not to put too fine a point on it, part of the whole issue of colonization is that plenty of societies manage land and resources just fine before someone else comes in and imposes private land ownership and commodification on them. Who’s really causing all the tumult and disorder here?

In the end, Blackstone’s case for private property reads as pretty flimsy. He has only one answer to the genesis of human ownership of land, which is, of course, in Genesis, Chapter 1 Verse 26, of the Christian Bible, which reads (King James Version):

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Blackstone follows quotation of this passage with:

“This is the only true and solid foundation of man’s dominion over external things, whatever airy metaphysical notions may have been started by fanciful writers upon this subject. The earth, therefore, and all things herein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the creator.”

This is hardly a basis for what a dominant culture might deem “civilized society.” Or maybe it is. Maybe it’s all there can be. Some amorphous fog of instruction from a few thousand years ago, a line that continues to play a defining role into how this culture treats environmental concerns—life concerns—like, say, clean water. Whether it was intended to be instruction to care for life on Earth or not, or to steward it, that isn’t for the most part how it’s been employed, at least not in modern times.

Except for perhaps the most devoted Christian dominionists, Blackstone’s explanation is simply not a persuasive justification for the kind of theft and dominion-based land grabbing that has defined colonizing societies for a thousand years if not longer. And far from a private property regime leading to civil society avoiding tumult, it in fact has led to land theft and hoarding, deep inequality and violent rebellions, and probably extensive environmental devastation even long before his own time. All of which continues in exacerbated forms to this day.

Blackstone contradicts himself on the subject of colonialism more than once, claiming that land ownership can only be of “unoccupied land”—that is, you can’t claim as your own land that other people are living on—but then finds a way to justify it (or at the very least fails to fully condemn it) on the basis of the “civilizing” impulse. Is he being sarcastic or serious? I can’t tell, but he doesn’t seem to have the courage to call out colonialism for the theft that it is.

He then, maddeningly, contradicts himself yet again—twice!—in the footnotes, first in trying to answer again where ownership originates:

“But how or when, does property commence? I conceive no better answer can be given than by occupancy, or when any thing is separated for private use from the common stores of nature.”

(Or, as I’ve come to put it and you’re probably tired of hearing from me, the first law of ownership: “I took it. Now it’s mine.”)

Followed in the next footnote with an acknowledgment that the land of North America did in fact belong to the people who were already living here, and also that similar types of shared property models used to be the norm throughout the European continent:

“Among the aboriginal inhabitants of North America there was no private property in land; but the territory or hunting-grounds belonged to the tribe, who alone had the power to dispose of them. . . . Something like this is discoverable in the earliest accounts we have of the laws of the savage inhabitants of ancient Europe. Property in land was first in the nation or tribe, and the right of the individual occupant was merely usufructuary and temporary.”

So Blackstone acknowledges that land all over the world he knew of was managed in various forms of collective ownership and use. And that the only right of ownership he sees is the right of occupancy. On what basis, then, is private, individual ownership of said land justified? He says it was “agreed on all hands” that agriculture and civil society made it a necessity, but makes no real effort to back it up, or to address the disagreement between this reasoning and his other statements regarding occupancy.

I call the contradiction “maddening” because, again, this thinking is baked into both the philosophy and the reality of our private property laws. It’s tangled up with the Doctrine of Discovery, which is still legal precedent in the U.S. and many other countries of the world, and with a narrow slice of Judeo-Christian ideas about humans’ relationship with the rest of nature and one another. (For further deep-diving into the entanglement of land beliefs, Christianity, colonialism, and white supremacist thinking, I recommend Kelly Brown Douglas’s 2015 book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, which I wrote about last year.)

In other words, despite this document being kind of a mess and riddled with honest to goodness logical fallacies, its intent—to defend private property as something societies need so that they don’t crumble into chaos—has been successful.

The other side of that success is due in part, I think, to John Locke’s notion that ownership in land is validated by one’s labor on said land. Which Blackstone disagrees with, arguing, with surprising clarity that,

“for mixing labour with a thing can signify only to make an alteration in its shape or form; and if I had a right to the substance before any labour was bestowed upon it, that right still adheres to all that remains of the substance.”

But we’ll save that until we get to Locke himself. After that it’s just two more readings, Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass, which is a fun read; and law professor Mary Christina Wood’s Nature’s Trust, part of which lays out the legal basis for dismantling private property rights over nature.

At some point someone is going to ask me exactly what I expect societies to do to overturn or reform private property law if I think it’s so awful, and the answer is that I don’t know, but a combination of Land Back movements, Rights of Nature, recognizing the commons and our dependence on them, and Wood’s ideas regarding the public trust and limiting private property rights over nature (especially for corporations) seem like a good start.

If you made it this far, you definitely deserve this sunrise from my daughter’s and my walk to school the other day.

Essay

I finished my master’s degree in creative writing a couple of decades ago, when I was in my late twenties. With a few exceptions it was an off-putting experience: the program felt designed to promote competitive jealousy and a slash-and-burn attitude toward others’ work. I’m not sure why I stuck with it except that it was a ten-minute walk from my Boston apartment and at that age I still believed it was a necessary step toward becoming a writer (and that “becoming a writer” was itself necessary, rather than just writing). I’m still friends with two of the people I met there, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Everything I learned about writing came after that. I eventually met good editors at various publications who taught me how to pare down my wordiness (not a lesson that seems to have stuck) and to really think about what I was saying. To question myself and the conclusions I came to, to broaden my perspectives. Good writers might be rare, but good editors are far rarer. Those editors taught me to write.

More importantly, they taught me that writing a narrative with some meaning for readers is nearly always a collaborative process. This was not something that my master’s program ever highlighted, and not something that aspiring writers usually get advice about. It’s always “Get an agent,” “Get a book contract,” “Get your pitches accepted,” not “What allows me to do the best possible work?”

I can’t think of anything I’ve published, anything I think well of at least, that didn’t lean heavily on an editor’s input, and often also on that of a few particular colleagues whose judgment I trust. Feedback isn’t always easy to receive—writing is a weirdly personal thing, even if the subject matter itself isn’t all that personal—but it made all the difference for me. Having my own newsletter means I can follow where curiosity leads and explore ideas that aren’t trendy enough for bigger publications, but I do miss having editorial feedback from people who know what they’re doing. Enough so that, as was the case with this essay, I often send On the Commons pieces to my older sister for feedback and corrections before I post them. 

There is a group of people involved in writing that came up even less often than editors did in my MFA, if they came up at all: readers.

The interaction between readers and writers is very different in the full-on internet age of today from what it was when I finished my degree in 2003, when print still dominated and readers didn’t have such easy access to writers. Even once writing started going online, for many years the hard rule was, “Don’t read the comments.” Because they were junk or abusive or both. (They really were.)

Things have changed. I’m not exactly sure when. I remember publishing my first essay for Aeon in 2015, and how thoughtful and well-moderated the comments were, and how I was surprised to enjoy the dialogue they fostered. That essay had tens of thousands of readers and hundreds of comments. Not one of them was a waste of my time to read, and in fact several led to further research that informed my first published book.

Something shifts when readers opt into someone’s writing, and it’s not just the tone or content of the comments. It’s the way readers’ ideas and enthusiasm and questions become, for me, part of the thinking and writing process itself.

What shows up here comes from me, the result of whatever happens in the strange internal process called creativity. But the content isn’t purely individual. It’s “my” work, but also “this” work, something that readers have a stake in. Or a voice. Or something I can’t find the words for, something collaborative but not collective, or maybe vice versa. 

Many of you send me emails with thoughts on something I’ve written, or suggestions for videos or books or podcasts, or personal stories of your own. Some of you post comments, or simply open and read the posts enough to remind me that people are giving their attention to whatever happens here. This writing comes from me—it is my mind, in a way. But that mind isn’t working in a silent bubble, absorbing books and articles and contemplative walks and conversations and churning out finished ideas. I think about you as I write. My first drafts, almost always written longhand in a notebook, are for me alone, but they can’t help but be informed by anyone who’s been reading and responding to what’s come before. The revision process also happens silently in my head, but it’s still a conversation with this group of readers and the world in general.

Where does this put ownership of the writing itself? And what changed once I started placing part of what I write behind a paywall? Who owns this work? Legally, I do—that’s what Substack and copyright laws say and let me tell you there’s a rich and tangled history behind creative ownership and copyright law—but isn’t it all of us? Isn’t this an ideas commons, too? I can’t even claim full ownership of this essay idea. It was Mike Sowden of Everything Is Amazing who presented the idea of “narrative ownership” to me.

When I switched to the paid version of Substack, I decided to make these essays free and the walking compositions paid because the “some stuff to read/watch/listen to” lists represent about a quarter to a third of what I read/watch/listen to and take me a significant amount of time to compile. Obviously, all the writing I do here is also work,* but those lists are a particular type of work that feels more like easily identifiable labor. I offer the option of a paid-subscription-for-free-on-request** because I don’t want anyone to be shut out for lack of funds, but as time has gone on I’ve also realized that it’s partly because I want people to have the option of opting into something. I’ve personally unsubscribed from a lot of otherwise good writing (mostly on Medium) because I felt flooded with content I could never keep up with. I don’t want to do that to people.

*This is a different conversation, but artists of all kinds struggle with being paid for our work. I don’t think it’s a struggle that we’ll ever resolve, even within ourselves, but it’s always worthwhile acknowledging that it’s there. And that, without art being paid for, generally the only people who can afford to do it are the already well-off. “You’re commodifying art” vs. “Then only rich people get to write” was an argument we had repeatedly in my MFA program. Capitalism isn’t dead yet, and until it is we’re kind of stuck with the trade-off.

**Your regular reminder that if you want the paid version and can’t or don’t want to pay, just email me the code word “tribble” and I’ll set it up.

When I described to someone last spring what I was going to do with my book No Trespassing, publish it here as I slowly write it, he asked me what would happen if a publisher later approached me about publishing it in edited book form. I told him I’d thought about that a lot, especially after analyzing my own feelings when a couple of Substack writers I subscribed to moved to big-name publications. I didn’t begrudge them that—a steady paycheck is nice!—but there was a sense of loss after their announcements. A sense of, “Hey, you invited people to support your work; I was happy to help you build that and a lot of other people felt the same.” It felt weird, like some sort of rejection, especially as I didn’t want to follow them to the publications they landed at. 

It’s an interesting feeling, not one I’m proud of or even fully understand, but one that did make me think carefully about what I was doing here. It feels akin to starting a relationship, I think, reaching out slow, tenuous tendrils that you can’t just retract on a whim if you change your mind, not without injuring both others and yourself. Whether you’re sharing writing or relationship, each tendril is made of trust, and you can’t impulsively walk away from those things without damaging that trust.

I told this person that I wouldn’t be averse to the idea, if a publisher were interested, but there’d have to be something in it for all the people who’d already been supporting this work, financially or otherwise. That I wouldn’t want to give a sense of “Thanks for your support, on to bigger and better things now.” What that would look like I don’t know and it’s purely theoretical at this point (and will probably remain so). Free copies? Acknowledgments? A promise to keep doing this work, here, together? 

It’s not a simple question, but to rebuild the commons—all the commons—it and others like it have to be answered, in some form, eventually.

No matter what, though, I can’t think of this Substack as something I myself own, that I myself am creating and can be possessive of any more than it was solely me who created any other piece of published writing with my name on it. Copyright law tells me one thing, but what I’ve learned from working with good editors over the years; and how I feel about ownership; and what I envision as a better, more reciprocal, way of doing this collective thing called life could be, is quite another.

I don’t plan on doing guest posts here, or interviews—I can barely keep up with my life and work as it is, and really isn’t everyone already overwhelmed with material to read and listen to anyway?—but I do think of this entire project as a kind of commons. I might be sitting here alone at a desk shaping narrative as best I can, but copyright law aside, nobody really owns these stories, much less the ideas that seed them. 

 What that means I’m not sure. I do know that, if you’re here with me, then I am equally here. With you.

Walking composition

“‘Things have been going wrong for a lot longer than you think,’ Alden said. ‘It’s just that they’ve finally gone wrong enough for you to notice.’” —Caught in Crystal, Patricia C. Wrede

The other day someone was showing me one of those ChatGPT artificial intelligence things that can write a letter for you given a few simple parameters. I don’t need an AI to write a letter for me, but the point was how well it performed the task: AI is learning so fast.

I snapped a little bit at the person (unfairly; it’s not their fault that I saw streams of threads about this on Twitter a few weeks ago and got heartily sick of it) because my immediate response was irritation at the ubiquitous, fascinated, admiring glee with which many people are lauding these chat AIs’ effectiveness. “You know what would be awesome?” I said. “It would be awesome if all the people falling all over themselves about the potentials of AI would direct that energy for a while to the potentials of human beings. How many kids’ minds would outstrip ChatGPT in months if we directed all that research and investment money to making sure they’re fed and get enough sleep and have safe, secure homes and neighborhoods? What about human potential?”

It wasn’t the technology that got me; it was the attention. How much of it these developments get, as if yet another technology will completely change the paradigms of the dominant human society and how we relate to one another; whereas the actual relating we do, and the actual suffering that happens both separate from and caused by many of these same technologies, is ignored.

One of my favorite childhood books was Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. I’m not sure it made its way out of the U.S., or even how many people in the U.S. have read it—though it was pretty popular—but if you haven’t, I think it holds up relatively well, with some caveats. Being both a math person and a word person (and someone who’s easily entertained), I enjoy the cities Dictionopolis and Digitopolis equally.

But my favorite city concept in the book is Reality, which became invisible because people stopped looking at it:

“One day someone discovered that if you walked as fast as possible and looked at nothing but your shoes you would arrive at your destination much more quickly. Soon everyone was doing it. They all rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went.”

Milo remembered the many times he’d done the very same thing; and, as hard as he tried, there were even things on his own street that he couldn’t remember. . . .

“Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all.”

“Hasn’t anyone told them?” asked Milo.

“It doesn’t do any good,” Alec replied, “for they can never see what they’re in too much of a hurry to look for.”

Attention is a fascinating thing, and despite being frequently mentioned in criticisms of digital technology, I don’t think it gets nearly enough attention of its own. There’s a reason our attention plays such a big role in tech companies’ profits, and why news media dove so hard into clickbait (to get our attention). And why so many of us feel frequent urges to smash our smartphones with all their mental demands.

Attention means something. It’s not passive. Attention, and what we give ours to, has real-world effects.

The person showing me the AI’s letter-writing skill happened to be my spouse—who’s worked in cybersecurity and data protection for decades now; it’s part of his job to follow tech’s cutting edge and its inherent risks—so he took my brief annoyed digital tech rant in stride. He’s heard it before.

I’m not anti-tech. I wrote about this directly in A Walking Life. The fear that “we might become cyborgs someday” slightly exasperates me. We’ve been something like cyborgs since the first hominins picked up tools. Spoken language is a technology. So is visual art, and reading, and so are glasses and shoes and decorative jewelry and walking sticks. We interact with objects we find or make in ways that make them part of us all the time, and have done so probably since before Homo sapiens were even a species.

This doesn’t, though, mean that all technology is good for humans, much less the rest of life, or that every development serves to make our lives better. The Luddites, as I wrote about in the book, didn’t smash knitting frames because they hated technology. They smashed them because the owners of the factories were replacing skilled human operators with either machines or less-skilled operators of those machines because they could make far more profit, leaving the people without work and therefore without ways to feed and support themselves and their families. And churning out shoddy materials in the process.

I got into the subject of Luddites and technology because A Walking Life, being about walking, by extension was also about cars, car-centric culture, and how much destruction they’ve caused. The history of resistance to ceding our roads and streets to cars—which was immense in the early 1900s—has been wiped from our collective imaginations, convincing us that this is the world we wanted.

With digital technology, we’re in the very first steps of going down a similar path. I give attention to AI not because I think it’s cool, but because its development and implementation are integrated—often invisibly—with private property, ownership, and any hope of an equitable future.

Attention is not enough to control technology’s impact on our lives. It never was and never will be. But it is a necessary element, and we only have so much of it on any given day. What could change, what needs could be met, if a classroom of hungry kids and the beauty of every starlit night got the same attention given to every twitch of AI development? If every story about digital tech were centered first on the fact that no technology is going to solve our problems on its own?

Our attention plays a role in where we go from here, and where we end up. Giving attention to the wrong stories allows those in power to conceal a fundamental question: Does this technology serve us, or do we serve it?

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Speaking of attention and car-centric culture, this interview with the War on Cars podcast about a study by environmental psychologist Dr. Ian Walker on what car culture has done to us psychologically was really interesting. Especially when he pointed out that even people who don’t drive give “car behavior” a pass.

• And speaking of tech, The Markup did an analysis of how tech companies largely gutted a Right to Repair bill in New York State: “These particular TechNet edits all have a common theme—ensuring that manufacturers retain control over the market for the repair of their products.” (I was thinking about the Right to Repair this morning as I pulled out a pair of jeans I bought less than six months ago that I already need to patch. What if I were only allowed to use fabric and thread and methods approved by the clothing company that made the jeans? Or had to send them to a certified technician?)

• Kate Wagner writing in The Baffler about architecture firms’ complicity in the travesty that is NEOM, also known as “The Line,” the 105-mile-long completely enclosed and automated city being envisioned in the desert of Saudi Arabia: “The year-round ski resorts, indoor shopping malls, and bespoke manses of NEOM will be built on the backs of human suffering. They actively harm the world, not improve it. This is obvious to anyone with a conscience.”

• This episode of Building Local Power, the podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, isn’t that long but packed in a lot of information about the role of monopolies in inflation: “In 2021 these markups skyrocketed, way beyond the cost of whatever a company might need to acquire in order to sell a thing. . . . It’s the highest level on record, and the largest one-year increase on record. . . . This is straight corporate profiteering.” (I particularly appreciated the few minutes of focus on the loss of pay and worker rights in the trucking industry starting in the 1980s.)

• Iraq war veteran and author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene Roy Scranton writing in Emergence magazine on what people mean when they say, “the end of the world.” “We can hardly make sense of it without attending to the realization that the world has already ended, over and over, for countless peoples and epochs.”

• My head’s been lingering in bleak places recently, so I’m immensely grateful to Sherri Spelic for sending me this hour-long conversation between Ross Gay and Clint Smith about Gay’s recent book Inciting Joy: “You scratch a little bit and everyone’s broken-hearted.” (There was so much to love in this conversation. One thing that really stuck with me was his point that there’s a lot of discussion about epigenetic trauma, but none about epigenetic joy. That literally never occurred to me.)

• And an interview on the podcast Storytelling Animals with Stan Rushworth and Dahr Jamail, co-editors of one of the more important books I read last year, We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth. (The podcast link is to a YouTube audio file, but Storytelling Animals seems to be on all podcast platforms.)

Walking composition

“Being independent of Nature was considered one of the defining characteristics of freedom itself. Only those people who had thrown off the shackles of their environment were thought to be endowed with historical agency; they alone were believed to merit the attention of historians.” —The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh

It’s barely February, and my fingers are already itching to rummage through the box of seed packets I have stored away. I’ve been thinking of soil, and digging, and planting. Of the new bed of strawberries my stepmom and I planted last year, and the golden raspberry starts my mother gave my daughter that we planted by the fence. Of ordering compost for delivery in April, and of some new plant starts a neighbor’s promised to give me and teach me to care for and harvest that I’m very excited about.

It’s been snowing a lot this last week and the temperatures have stayed cold after easing up from another sub-zero dip, so it’s not a change in weather that’s got my mind turning to the garden. More light, maybe? Slightly longer days? I hadn’t thought of this possibility until reading Bryan Pfeiffer’s recent Chasing Nature post on longer days, birdsong, and squirrel sex. I’d always, without thinking much about it, assumed that life, humans included, responded to the warmer temperatures of spring, but now I’m thinking it’s the slow drips of added light that have me wanting to get my hands in the dirt.

I heavily over-ordered seeds the last couple of years, so don’t have the satisfaction of browsing through the seed catalogues to find new things. Except for potato and onion starts, which I get locally, there’s more than enough in my box to be going on with.

There is nothing like food and seeds to make me both hopeful and hopeless about how we relate to land, the planet, commons, and one another. The social and environmental challenges where I live feel enormous. Most days it’s hard to force myself to keep my energy and time directed at work, family, friends, and the few areas where I can make a difference.

But then seeds arrive while snow is still deep on the ground, and I look inside the little packets and think about the tiny specks that somehow turn into food enough to feed multitudes, how my own little garden more than fed three families last year. And am reminded that if we can somehow turn this damn thing around, dismantle this system, and start caring for one another and disable any incentives to hoard and take, that somehow, miraculously, most of what we need is right in front of us.

Yesterday I got a brief email update from a sawmill I once worked at in upstate New York, New York Heartwoods. Although I now haven’t lived there in nearly a decade, I stay subscribed because I can honestly say working there helped save my life once, not necessarily physically, but emotionally and mentally. I had two very small children at the time, and had never intended nor desired to be a stay-at-home mom, not to mention being one and working at the same time (most of which happened in the middle of the night, a capacity I no longer have). But there I was, rapidly dying inside, when I had the chance to take a rustic woodworking class at the nature museum* where one of my kids went to preschool twice a week, and from there to New York Heartwoods, which the rustic woodworking artist introduced me to. I learned to run a small Wood-Mizer mill and they sent me on a chainsaw safety course in midwinter. Which taught me that I never want to use a chainsaw again if I can help it. I can, but I don’t want to.

*(This one-minute video features that nature museum’s playground. The rustic woodworker I learned from designed it and built the amazing gate you can see at the beginning, and the preschool kids got to build the little bench stools with wooden mallets he’d made for each of them. It was an incredibly cool project, and it still makes me laugh to remember that with all of the fun rustic features that were built, the kids’ ever-favorite thing to do was to pound the sand pile with wooden mallets.)

Working at the sawmill a couple days a week—interning, really—helped keep me from going completely numb and got me into embodiment research, but I was also intrigued by their mission: they only worked with downed or scavenged trees. The point of the mill was to introduce circularity within a wood milling system, which fit right in with efforts I’d been making toward local food systems and a long-term despair over single-use plastics.

We worked with a lot of city ash trees felled by emerald ash borer, for example, and cedar that had to be cleared from farm fields. I spent one entire day planing cedar planks for someone who’d rescued them, already milled, from her family’s farm and was making an art installation out of them; and another day dragging enormous old barn beams out from a fallen building and taking them back to the mill to be sawn into boards that would be lightly sanded and used for shelves. The mill’s shady, forested yard was full of beauties, every one of them cared for, whether milled and kiln-dried or not. I don’t ever plan on moving away from Montana, but do sometimes miss working with hardwood.

The brief email update about New York Heartwoods reminded me of how much work needs to be done in bringing consumption, and responsibility for it, closer to home. And to make it accessible—though I admire the company’s mission and was happy to be learning from it for a while, the clientele tended to be art galleries and high-end clothing stores, not, say, the local public school district.

It maybe came through more forcefully to me because I’ve been reading Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (one of you suggested this book to me, and I’m sorry I’ve forgotten who!), and had just the night before read the chapter on garment workers in Bangladesh. If I needed a reminder of the interconnections between commodification, profit-making, poverty, climate-forced migration, and hardened militarization of borders, well, this book says it all, and very clearly. It’s not just “Who’s Your Farmer?” it’s who’s making everything. Whose labor is being exploited, whose water is being poisoned, whose home and land is being taken, whose forests are being razed, whose children are starving . . .

Who benefits from all of it. And how it might be possible to begin changing these dynamics and dependencies while serving the people who suffer from them rather than those who profit.

Only four corporations control more than half of the world’s seed supply, by which I mean they own patents on the seeds and prosecute anyone who even seems to violate those patents. It can be difficult to find seeds that are unrelated to those corporations or their control, even seeds that aren’t genetically modified—before I started watching for it, I’d sometimes come home with plant starts that I then noticed were labeled with “illegal to propagate.” How, I wondered, is it possible to make planting seeds illegal? But as the history of property ownership shows us, you can make almost anything legal or illegal, no matter how immoral or nonsensical.

The first year I moved back to Montana, I took my kids to an annual spring Free the Seeds event at the community college, which featured workshops on things like composting and growing microgreens but was mostly about encouraging people to bring and freely exchange seeds. Over a thousand people were there, and it was one of the most encouraging sights I’d seen in a long time.

There is a lot of research that traces privatization, commodification, and ownership back to two probable original subjects of purchase and control thousands of years ago: seeds, and women. The keys, in other words, to life.

Maybe that’s why the fingers itch to get in the soil, why planting seeds feels so satisfying and foraging berries and roots never feels as tiring as sitting at a desk. In doing these things, we can serve something bigger than a system designed to crush the life out of everything. At the very least, we can feed one another. But with a little extra effort, the seeds we share can be a subversion of the forces that desire to own and profit from all that makes life possible.

It’s been so persistently overcast lately that seeing fringes of sunset last night after days of heavy snowfall was just . . . words don’t do justice to how it made me feel, and neither does the photo I took.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch (this is a podcast-heavy one, so it’s mostly listen):

• Stories for Action podcast with ethnobotanist Rose Bear Don’t Walk on Indigenous food sovereignty, native plants, and her “Recovering Our Roots” program: “Traditional plant knowledge has kind of been diminished in how we exercise our own food rights here. And it’s really interesting that that’s a piece of knowledge that’s decreased, because when we talk about our creation stories, for the Salish in particular, the animals and the plants were here long before the human, and they coexisted on the land to really understand how to live and how to have symbiotic relationships. When the humans arrived, the animals and the plants taught us everything that we know about being Salish.”

• Also from Stories for Action, a conversation with Patrick Yawakie, founder of the People’s Food Sovereignty Program, about food sovereignty and his work with Billings, Montana-based, Indigenous Vote.

• Looking back at 20 years of the Scottish Outdoor Access Code and the future of the Right to Roam in Scotland and England on the Scotland Outdoors podcast.

• From The Conversation, a review of 7,000 studies on loneliness that looked at how infrastructure and design contribute to feelings of loneliness and isolation. (I particularly liked the tidbit about Dutch supermarkets that have introduced “slow checkouts” for people, especially older people, who like to chat and have a little connection while getting groceries.)

• Two episodes about using AI to watch, forecast, and locate wildfires from MIT Technology Review’s podcast In Machines We Trust: “You know, if you get a big fire up here, you get all these people that are up here in VRBOs and who, you know, maybe got a taxi or an Uber, or they have these mountain shuttles that bring people up here. But that adds a whole new complexity to it cuz now they don’t have an avenue to get out. They don’t have a vehicle to get out and they, half of ’em don’t know how to get out or where to go.”

• Rethinking clothing through considering “fibresheds”: the life cycle of fibers from soil health to raising sheep to spinning mills to dyes to designers to workers, to the end product itself, a three-part series from Farmerama: “Natural dying is something we’ve been doing for thousands of years. . . . There were some scraps of blue cotton died with indigo that was discovered by some archaeologists in Perus in 2016, and they’re estimated to be 6,500 years old. . . . right up until the mid-19th century, when synthetic dyes were developed. Just 170 years later, 99% of our clothes are colored with synthetic dyes, whether the clothes are made from natural fibers or from synthetic fibers. Synthetic dyes are made from crude oil.”

• I finally got around to listening to most of Burn Wild, the newest podcast from Leah Sottile and the BBC: what goes into defining “ecoterrorism” and who’s accused of it? I really think Sottile is one of the most important journalists working today, especially the way she approaches extremism, as I wrote about at more length in the wake of the U.S.’s attempted coup—oh, look, exactly 2 years ago today. Weird.

• From Grist, a report on a study about how to drastically reduce lithium mining and its extremely toxic impacts. (This is kind of a no-brainer—massively build out public transportation options and convert cities to being walkable/bikeable, plus a reduction in vehicle battery size, which means a big reduction in average vehicle size—but so are most of the answers to this planet’s physical problems. At least, all the answers that will have any real effect are. We need to have infrastructure that makes using less even possible for most people.)

• A barely-over-three-minute video about waste and what this craving is for new things and who cleans up the discards through a reimagining of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, via Dark ‘n’ Light magazine.

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

The most recent Threadable reading* for Land Ownership was a selection from Henry George’s 1879 book Progress & Poverty, Part VII: Justice of the Remedy, Chapter I: The Injustice of Private Property in Land (in my copy this is pages 333-346.)

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try the Threadable app and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now.

For anyone new to On the Commons an overview of this project is here. These Substack posts are for anyone who doesn’t have iOS or doesn’t want to use Threadable but still wants to know about the readings; the subtitles are marked with “Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership.” Please feel free to comment or email me with any questions.)

Progress & Poverty is in the public domain (released from private enclosure!), and there are many different places online where you can read the text. On this archive.org link, the selection we are reading starts on page 333 and ends on page 346, the end of the chapter.

I put off writing this post because when I start talking about Henry George, I find myself unable to stop, and I don’t want to inflict all the passages I underlined in the entire book on everybody, no matter how compelling I think they are. It just gets hard for me to curtail a tendency to quote from his book because when it comes to land ownership, George says almost everything.

I first read George’s Progress & Poverty a couple of years ago, and was immediately taken with his ability to go straight to the heart of land ownership and its injustice. The section we read on Threadable prompted a lot of discussion about land, ownership, and, unexpectedly, the Puritan ideal of productivity and what it says about who has a right to live and participate in society. This was an important point because part of George’s argument takes off from John Locke’s philosophy that ownership is given by mixing land with labor. I think he’s partly using that philosophy to bolster his arguments rather than relying on Locke entirely, but would have to go back into earlier parts of the book more carefully.

Fundamentally, George maintains that land ownership is unjust, inexcusable, and the root of most of the wealth inequality he observed in his time. That inequality shocked him—the title of his book reflects his initial question regarding how land and people could have so much wealth and “progress,” and at the same time such immense poverty.

The quoted line below, from the beginning of the reading selection, states his perspective directly: “When it is proposed to abolish private property in land . . .”

That is George’s desire, to abolish private property in land, and he makes a strong case for it. The “justice” he speaks of is the vested interest that landowners already have in the land they have title to. But as I’ve quoted somewhere else in this newsletter previously, part of his case is that, the further back in time ownership goes—his example is closely tied to big landed estates and nobility in England—the more compounded the injustice of that ownership is and the more harm it has caused and will continue to cause in the future.

This came up briefly in the comments on the last On the Commons post, that once land is owned, it is much easier to control other aspects of people’s lives because you control their access to survival, something that George repeatedly addressed when it came to labor and ownership. I disagree with Locke’s idea that labor grants ownership, but George’s point was that when land is privately owned, many more people are prevented from laboring on it or for it at all, except at the behest or whim of the owner.

Even if you’re, as one reader said it seems that George was, a productivist and lean on the idea of labor and productivity to back up ownership, that doesn’t in fact give an answer as to the genesis or the morality of ownership itself. Thomas Paine wrote about this himself in his own theory of property rights:

“There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue.”

George, unlike other writes on land ownership, doesn’t shy away from the question at the base of it. There is no real answer given to the question of where ownership comes from. There are centuries of legal opinions and philosophical arguments, but go back far enough—or not even that far—and ownership comes down to one thing: “I took it; now it’s mine,” with all the power and dominance and entitlement that ownership entails. Extend that attitude to water, seeds, labor itself, data, air, attention, historical narrative, . . . all the things of the commons that comprise not just human life but all life, all of it can be enclosed and commodified. Not because it’s a law of nature, but because it was taken, and the taking was then justified.

Within Threadable, we had a discussion about how land ownership was until very recently—not even 150 years ago—bound up with a right to vote, even for white men, and what that says about how people think of having “skin in the game.” As one reader put it when I mentioned homelessness and affordable housing objections, we are still living with a legacy of property ownership somehow implying “skin in the game” while skin itself—being alive, fed, housed; the right to exist—doesn’t. When I hear current objections to affordable housing and renters and who has a “stake” in the community they live in, it differs very little from the kind of vicious language directed at people kicked out of their homes and villages during enclosures of the commons in England hundreds of years ago.

There is much more here and I could keep going, but if I do I probably won’t stop! George’s book is within the public domain, but there are also many Georgist economists quietly at work around the world. And there is a Substack devoted to George, Progress & Poverty, and how some of his ideas could be put into practice today.

It’s all wrapped up in the injustice of land ownership. As George points out toward the end of his book, those injustices have an effect on what are classified as more abstract human rights as well: equality, happiness, the freedom to speak, to be heard, to vote, to have a say in one’s society.

“These rights are denied when the equal right to land—on which and by which men alone can live—is denied.”

The next reading is from William Blackstone’s 1750s writing on property ownership. (Spoiler alert: he can’t find good grounds for land ownership, either, and ends up leaning on Genesis from the Christian Bible and dominionism.) After that it’s John Locke and his idea that labor creates property (Blackstone disagrees), followed by Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass and finally Mary Cristina Wood’s Nature’s Trust as the final reading.

I’ll be offline for a few days and will respond to comments and thoughts when I get back.

Walking composition

"I will not forget where 
I come from. I 
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved 
near and our chanting 
will be dancing. I 
will not be played. I 
will not lend my name 
nor my rhythm to your 
beat."
—from "What I Will," Suheir Hammad

There’s a story my father’s told me that I’ve referred to many times, in essays, in my book, in tweets when I had a Twitter account, in conversation, in my mind. It wasn’t even a story, really. More of a line. A moment or an image, of him and his parents and his two older siblings sitting around their dining table in Leningrad in the 1960s, reading loose-leaf pages of Solzhenitsyn and passing each page on as they finished it.

Almost exactly twenty years ago, my older sister and I interviewed our father while we were visiting him in Moscow, and he told that story again. Or told the moment. The line. I’ve been trying to listen to some of those old tapes for parts to share here (my tape recorder is giving out, so the sound’s been wonky), and when that section was playing a few days ago, there was an undertone I had only vaguely remembered: how important literature was to ordinary Soviet citizens during those times. Essays, novels, short stories, poetry—the way my father describes it, whether it was his parents or him and his teenage friends, people couldn’t get enough.

This 10-minute recording is taken from hours of interviews done over several days in 2003. The excerpts I quoted here are from this recording. The shrill sound about 30 seconds in is the phone ringing. Apologies for that.

“Starting in early 60s, we started reading all underground literature that wasn’t published at all. It was just typed on typewriter and given from one to another. At that time started reading Solzhenitsyn’s novel, and we would get into loose leaves, like this folder, and we would go in our family around the table—we had a big dining room table, so we were sitting around this table and we would have this book, like Cancer Ward, for one night, and we would sit around the table and give each other leaf. After one read, we would give to next person, and we would go around the circle and read the whole novel in an evening. And that happens to a lot of underground literature. I loved a lot of Soviet literature, too. But I read, I read everything, so much stuff.”

Do you think literature was a big part of Soviet society? I asked him. I remember sitting there on the couch in his old apartment in the Frunzenskaya district, my sister trying not to fall sleep, the horrendous, shrill drill of his apartment phone interrupting us.

“Oh, during Soviet times specifically, but I think overall, I cannot vouch for whole population because I worked as a metal worker when I was going to the unique school, and workers in my—”

How old were you?

“Fifteen. I was fifteen, I went to work as a metal worker. There was a pretty substantial class of people, a layer of people, that were very much into literature. You know, if you’d go by tram or bus, like 80 percent of people were reading book. And some of them were reading detective stories, simple things, but most of them were reading literature. So to a degree it’s a pretty vast difference from what I saw in the United States. . . .

We had to stay the whole night in line to get subscription to like 18 volumes of Dostoevsky. Some books—when finally Pasternak volume was printed, you would have to go through hell to get the book, because it’s a very limited edition, and you would have to go through friends of friends, etc., pay tremendous amount of money, and etc. to get a book of Pasternak’s poetry. Same with Marina Tsvetaeva, small, small volume finally came out. . . . Chekhov, you would get a volume of Chekhov, and you would have to put a special effort to get the subscription for like 15 volumes of Chekhov’s. Same with just about any classic writer.”

Do you think—was it more important to people because it was Soviet times?

“It had something to do with it. It was, you know, outlet for ability to do creative thinking or enjoy something. But I don’t know. It’s a big, big discussion.”

---

The original epigraph I chose for my book on walking was a poem in the Coleman Barks version of Rumi, the one that goes:

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

I thought it was a lovely way to say what I meant by “walking,” a way of being as fully present in the world as is possible for each individual person.

Somewhere near the end of the writing process, I ran into a version of that poem that was slightly different. It would have been fine to stick with the version I had, but I always make an effort to double-check facts and quotes when it’s possible. So I emailed Coleman Barks, along with a couple of random Persian poetry professors for good measure. Barks wrote back a very nice, brief message saying that either version worked and I was welcome to use them for my book.

The professors were another story. One of them wrote me back and asked which translation I was looking at. I wrote back that it was the Barks version of Rumi and he answered something along the lines of, “Oh, if you’re using Barks then it doesn’t matter. His poetry has nothing to do with Rumi.” I thanked him for the correction and asked him if he knew of better translations, but he didn’t respond again.

So I did some research and found a version of the same poem, translated by a Persian speaker (which Barks is not), that had very little resemblance to the one I liked. And then some more browsing around online to wander into the rich world of conversation about how much Islam is in Rumi’s poetry and how completely it’s been erased for Western audiences (if you’re curious, this New Yorker article is comprehensive).

I looked around for something else to use as an epigraph and ended up with a stanza from “Walking,” by 17th-century English clergyman Thomas Traherne, a poem I like that was more suited to the book anyway:

“To walk is by a thought to go;
To move in spirit to and fro;
To mind the good we see;
To taste the sweet;
Observing all the things we meet
How choice and rich they be.”

After that, I considered letting go of the copy of Rumi that’s on my shelves, which is, like most people’s in the English-speaking world, the version by Coleman Barks.

I left it because those poems are lovely and inspiring; it just seems that they should be sold as “poems by Coleman Barks inspired by Rumi” rather than Rumi himself. They mean something to people. They’ll continue to mean something. I’d like to become more acquainted with Rumi’s actual poetry, or as close to it as I can get without being fluent in his language and knowing his culture better, but I don’t want to take away what people have gotten from Barks’s work.

People use Barks to get through loss, through divorce, through angst, through pleasure, through the day. What does Rumi offer that can get through those things but also oppression and belonging and faith or lack thereof and the sheer, lonely pain and joy of being alive?

---

When my father was growing up in the Soviet Union, literature was of tremendous importance, as were music and art. These are the things that can hold people together when trust frays and authority is a threat. Stories have always had that power.

“People to some degree in many respects they couldn’t express themselves freely. They didn’t realize it,” my father said.

“I had a great time when I was young. I had great friends. I enjoyed life, I listened to music, I would go to see movies, I would go to museums, I read books, I walked the streets, I talked to friends about philosophy, literature, politics, everything. So I can’t say that I felt suppressed. But there was always boundaries. We knew that what you talk with friends about, you don’t talk to everybody. The official life was completely separate, and officially you would be somewhat a different person. And that’s what I call kind of schizophrenic society.

But we lived in it, and we were very angry in many respects at the Communist Party, at the actions, etc. But we didn’t quite realize how artificial the situation is, how completely wrong the situation where you have—where you live kind of free life at certain level, at another level you had to be a different person.”

Story, in all its forms, moves who we are. It constantly changes us. The way we perceive ourselves, the way we shape and tell and narrate and live and rearrange our own stories. The way we cope with situations we have no power to change.

People like those Barks poems, I think, because they—we, since I enjoy them, too—like who they see themselves as being through them. Like Barks-as-Rumi is a river of self-story moving through everyone who reads it, eroding banks, depositing sediment, changing the way we meander through life and the world. As all stories do.

---

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Without a Whisper, a not-quite-30-minute documentary on the influence of Haudenosaunee women on well-known American suffragists. Women’s rights in North America began long before the Seneca Falls convention in 1848: “My Grandma would say, ‘We’re not feminists. We’re the law.’” (Really worth watching this one.)

• The second photo in this post was just me messing around in the caragana hedge in my yard after being inspired by Bryan Pfeiffer’s post in Chasing Nature about the naked buds of winter and the meaning we wrap them in.

• In her newsletter Feast for the Curious, botanist Erin Zimmerman gives a brief history of women’s role in developing botany as a science, and how they were eventually nudged out of the field: “Botany crossed socioeconomic lines, with working-class botany groups forming as well. In the mid-19th century, there was a push by a group of more academic botanists based in London to change botany’s image. They wanted it to be a more respected science, on par with the physical sciences.”

• In Psyche, Sarah Boon explores the potentials of journaling—finding material in old journals for her book-in-progress about her time as an Arctic field researcher, and the question of how people use journals to explore and define themselves: “And as another American writer, Susan Sontag, said in ‘On Keeping a Journal’ (1957): ‘In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent.’ Didion and Sontag saw journals as a respite from the everyday world, a place to revel in and reveal oneself – on the page, instead of in public.” (I like that “vehicle for my sense of selfhood.” That’s probably how I use mine, which, unlike the notebooks I draft essays in, are utterly private and destined for the fire pit when they’re done.)

• On a recent copy editing project, I got hung up on a definition given to fifth-graders for the word civilization, which the textbook defined as “human society.” Wait a minute, I thought, and ended up dragging a handful of colleagues into the question with me. We pulled together some articles on the colonial intertwining of the word civilization itself to share with my client, and one colleague sent me this funny but also informative historian’s riposte to a 2018 reboot of the BBC’s show Civilizations: “The truth is, despite some good-willed attempts to make ‘civilization’ something universal, it was never stripped of its original, Eurocentric essence.”

• I was listening to this episode of the Smarty Pants podcast while taking a long walk home from a meeting at school, and was so riveted that I walked straight into the bookstore and ordered the novel being discussed, by Uyghur novelist and poet Perhat Tursun. Tursun is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence in a Uyghur detention center. The interview is with one of his translators, Darren Byler.

• Another gem from my copy editing job: A Marrakech Tale, a half-hour documentary on a Marrakech master storyteller’s work with younger people—particularly with novice storyteller Sara Mouhyeddine, who wants to perform in a square and art normally the realm of men—to revive the 1000-year-old tradition of storytelling in Morocco.