At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America
by Rebecca Kneale Gould
This is a great book. It smells wonderful, has a beautiful cover, and inspired all sorts of excitement in me when I first came across it at the UVA library, in the new books section.
It is one of those books that I almost wish I hadn’t read. Not because it wasn’t well written or interesting, but because the visceral and emotional thrill I got when I first ran across it could never be fulfilled through the act of reading it, no matter how well written.
So, before I say anything about what this book is about, let me explicate the self-defining moment of discovery. A couple of years ago, while I was fasting, in about my fifth day of the fast, I read a couple of articles that led me to volunteer at the local International Committee, and to get a subscription to Mother Earth News. That’s one of the beauties of fasting, that it breaks the routine, just from the very fact that meals are no longer a part of the day. It leads me to do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do without undue consideration, on a whim. And, since one of the beauties of writing is to bring seemingly unconnected things together, the point is that this book rekindled a part of myself I hadn’t been conscious of in a while, that back to the land reading is like pornography to me (whereas porn is like reading the evening news). This book, through the beauty of its cover, through the way it smelled, and the heft and feel of the pages, embodied the pleasures that I get imagining living off the grid in a semi-rural setting. And the fact that it mentioned spirituality in the subtitle brought up a geyser full of dopamine. I was almost jumping out of my skin in delight, and the double espresso I had just had, along with the wonderful visit with my good friend Nathan and improvising ideas didn’t hurt.
So, just to get it out of the way, the main gist of the book is that there is a cultural context in the modern homesteading movement, that the ideal of a return to nature goes hand in hand with modernity. What it offers spiritually in this context is a middle ground between traditional religion, and the modern tendency to emphasize the self as the focus of one’s spirituality. While traditional religion calls for obedience to the group and to tradition, creating the danger of groupthink, and modern spirituality focuses on the self, creating the danger of selfishness, the homesteading tradition allows one to move beyond both tradition and the focus on the self by emphasizing one’s relation to nature. Homesteading has been associated with a movement of “getting back to nature” and of remaking the self. No matter how culturally bound the idea of nature is, the homesteading ideal causes one to live in a different context than the self centered capitalist. Relying on the conveniences of modern technology that tend to privilege the comfort of the self masks the fact that our survival as both individuals and as a society depends on the quality of one’s relationship to nature. Homesteading, on the other hand, forces on to reckon with the fact.
I find all this stuff very appealing, mostly in a fantasy kind of way. I hardly think I have the passion for labor that it would take to live as a traditional homesteader. I do imagine that having a big garden and some alternative energy sources is a realistic approximation, though. And until then, I have the idea to get excited by. I just hope that when it comes time to actually make my move in that direction, that the thrill of anticipation is fulfilled. It’s just like Christmas morning, when the thrill before the gifts are actually opened seemed to always be followed by the letdown of the actually existing gifts. Kind of like discovering a beautiful book and then having to actually read it, only to wish that it was possible to sustain the thrill of discovery and anticipation without ruining it all by actually reading it.
Fredric Jameson has an interesting article that was published in the New Left Review last year, concerning Utopia. I usually find Jameson impossibly dense and complex, and therefore endlessly fascinating in a constantly receding horizon kind of way. I did manage to follow most of this article and what he says ties in to this whole issue of the pleasures of reading and the anticipation of knowledge. Basically, the utopian impulse has to, by its very nature, be unfulfillable. Only by being politically impossible can Utopian thinking become possible. If it were possible, it would be too focused on the practicalities of politics, and thusly, no Utopian at all. In this way Utopian thinking keeps the space open to alternatives, and when alternatives actually become possible, disappears. Here’s the quote that makes the main point that I took from the article.
I want to convey a situation in which political institutions seem both unchangeable and infinitely modifiable: no agency has appeared on the horizon that offers the slightest chance or hope of modifying the status quo, and yet in the mind—and perhaps for that very reason—all kinds of institutional variations and re-combinations seem thinkable.
As one approaches periods of genuine pre-revolutionary ferment, when the system really seems in the process of losing its legitimacy, when the ruling elite is palpably uncertain of itself and full of divisions and self-doubts, when popular demands grow louder and more confident, then what also happens is that those grievances and demands grow more precise in their insistence and urgency. We focus more sharply on very specific wrongs, the dysfunctioning of the system becomes far more tangibly visible at crucial points. But at such a moment the utopian imagination no longer has free play: political thinking and intelligence are trained on very sharply focused issues, they have concrete content, the situation claims us in all its historical uniqueness as a configuration; and the wide-ranging drifts and digressions of political speculation give way to practical programmes (even if the latter are hopelessly unrealizable and ‘utopian’ in the other, dismissive sense).
I’d like to think that the pleasures of reading come into play in the same way. When one reads for no practical reason, the pleasure of possibility takes the foreground. If one moves into a situation when one can actually apply what one reads, the pleasure moves to the background. So, as long as I’m strictly a homemaker, with the limitations of possibility that that entails, I’m gonna enjoy me some reading. After that, when the options actually become possible, who knows. You might never hear from me again.
Just for a lark, I’d like to end with a synopsis of the above mentioned article that I created using Word Autosummarize, a function I’ve only recently started using and have found to be surprisingly helpful. Not sure if this is a good example, but here goes: 5% of the text highlighted. A 15 page article transformed into one. The wonders never cease.
The POLITICS OF UTOPIA
The two uses do seem somehow to overlap, and imply that a politics which wishes to change the system radically will be designated as utopian—with the right-wing undertone that the system (now grasped as the free market) is part of human nature; that any attempt to change it will be accompanied by violence; and that efforts to maintain the changes (against human nature) will require dictatorship.
Banishing evil
Let us begin again, then, with the textual utopias themselves. If there have been not just one human nature but a whole series of them, this is because so-called human nature is historical: every society constructs its own. I would not call this a vicious circle, exactly; but it certainly reveals the space of the utopian leap, the gap between our empirical present and the utopian arrangements of this imaginary future.
The citizens of utopia are grasped as a statistical population; there are no individuals any longer, let alone any existential ‘lived experience’. Let’s now return to the distinction I have been making between the two utopian perspectives, that of the root of all evil and that of the political and social arrangements.
Genres of political will
What can be said is that such analysis helps to determine the particular relationship to the political as such, entertained not only by utopia as a text but by utopian thinking and impulses generally. It is a peculiar and a paradoxical relationship, as I have already hinted; utopia is either too political or not political enough.
Mental play
How should we then formulate the position of utopia with respect to the political? Those stretches of human history are for the most part passed in utterly non-utopian conditions, in which none of the images of the future or of radical difference peculiar to utopias ever reach the surface.
This explains much about the various debates and differences that have peopled the history of utopian thought. The weaker alternative, in our time at least, is the term standing in for nature, affirmed unacceptably as human nature in the free-market idiom. I want to conclude by looking at the fear of utopia, of the anxiety with which the utopian impulse confronts us. Is it not possible that the achievement of utopia will efface all previously existing utopian impulses? Something is to be said for the proposition that the fear of utopia is intimately linked with the fear of aphanisis, or loss of desire: the sexlessness of utopians is a constant in the anti-utopian tradition, as witness John Boorman’s well-known film Zardoz.
by Rebecca Kneale Gould
This is a great book. It smells wonderful, has a beautiful cover, and inspired all sorts of excitement in me when I first came across it at the UVA library, in the new books section.
It is one of those books that I almost wish I hadn’t read. Not because it wasn’t well written or interesting, but because the visceral and emotional thrill I got when I first ran across it could never be fulfilled through the act of reading it, no matter how well written.
So, before I say anything about what this book is about, let me explicate the self-defining moment of discovery. A couple of years ago, while I was fasting, in about my fifth day of the fast, I read a couple of articles that led me to volunteer at the local International Committee, and to get a subscription to Mother Earth News. That’s one of the beauties of fasting, that it breaks the routine, just from the very fact that meals are no longer a part of the day. It leads me to do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do without undue consideration, on a whim. And, since one of the beauties of writing is to bring seemingly unconnected things together, the point is that this book rekindled a part of myself I hadn’t been conscious of in a while, that back to the land reading is like pornography to me (whereas porn is like reading the evening news). This book, through the beauty of its cover, through the way it smelled, and the heft and feel of the pages, embodied the pleasures that I get imagining living off the grid in a semi-rural setting. And the fact that it mentioned spirituality in the subtitle brought up a geyser full of dopamine. I was almost jumping out of my skin in delight, and the double espresso I had just had, along with the wonderful visit with my good friend Nathan and improvising ideas didn’t hurt.
So, just to get it out of the way, the main gist of the book is that there is a cultural context in the modern homesteading movement, that the ideal of a return to nature goes hand in hand with modernity. What it offers spiritually in this context is a middle ground between traditional religion, and the modern tendency to emphasize the self as the focus of one’s spirituality. While traditional religion calls for obedience to the group and to tradition, creating the danger of groupthink, and modern spirituality focuses on the self, creating the danger of selfishness, the homesteading tradition allows one to move beyond both tradition and the focus on the self by emphasizing one’s relation to nature. Homesteading has been associated with a movement of “getting back to nature” and of remaking the self. No matter how culturally bound the idea of nature is, the homesteading ideal causes one to live in a different context than the self centered capitalist. Relying on the conveniences of modern technology that tend to privilege the comfort of the self masks the fact that our survival as both individuals and as a society depends on the quality of one’s relationship to nature. Homesteading, on the other hand, forces on to reckon with the fact.
I find all this stuff very appealing, mostly in a fantasy kind of way. I hardly think I have the passion for labor that it would take to live as a traditional homesteader. I do imagine that having a big garden and some alternative energy sources is a realistic approximation, though. And until then, I have the idea to get excited by. I just hope that when it comes time to actually make my move in that direction, that the thrill of anticipation is fulfilled. It’s just like Christmas morning, when the thrill before the gifts are actually opened seemed to always be followed by the letdown of the actually existing gifts. Kind of like discovering a beautiful book and then having to actually read it, only to wish that it was possible to sustain the thrill of discovery and anticipation without ruining it all by actually reading it.
Fredric Jameson has an interesting article that was published in the New Left Review last year, concerning Utopia. I usually find Jameson impossibly dense and complex, and therefore endlessly fascinating in a constantly receding horizon kind of way. I did manage to follow most of this article and what he says ties in to this whole issue of the pleasures of reading and the anticipation of knowledge. Basically, the utopian impulse has to, by its very nature, be unfulfillable. Only by being politically impossible can Utopian thinking become possible. If it were possible, it would be too focused on the practicalities of politics, and thusly, no Utopian at all. In this way Utopian thinking keeps the space open to alternatives, and when alternatives actually become possible, disappears. Here’s the quote that makes the main point that I took from the article.
I want to convey a situation in which political institutions seem both unchangeable and infinitely modifiable: no agency has appeared on the horizon that offers the slightest chance or hope of modifying the status quo, and yet in the mind—and perhaps for that very reason—all kinds of institutional variations and re-combinations seem thinkable.
As one approaches periods of genuine pre-revolutionary ferment, when the system really seems in the process of losing its legitimacy, when the ruling elite is palpably uncertain of itself and full of divisions and self-doubts, when popular demands grow louder and more confident, then what also happens is that those grievances and demands grow more precise in their insistence and urgency. We focus more sharply on very specific wrongs, the dysfunctioning of the system becomes far more tangibly visible at crucial points. But at such a moment the utopian imagination no longer has free play: political thinking and intelligence are trained on very sharply focused issues, they have concrete content, the situation claims us in all its historical uniqueness as a configuration; and the wide-ranging drifts and digressions of political speculation give way to practical programmes (even if the latter are hopelessly unrealizable and ‘utopian’ in the other, dismissive sense).
I’d like to think that the pleasures of reading come into play in the same way. When one reads for no practical reason, the pleasure of possibility takes the foreground. If one moves into a situation when one can actually apply what one reads, the pleasure moves to the background. So, as long as I’m strictly a homemaker, with the limitations of possibility that that entails, I’m gonna enjoy me some reading. After that, when the options actually become possible, who knows. You might never hear from me again.
Just for a lark, I’d like to end with a synopsis of the above mentioned article that I created using Word Autosummarize, a function I’ve only recently started using and have found to be surprisingly helpful. Not sure if this is a good example, but here goes: 5% of the text highlighted. A 15 page article transformed into one. The wonders never cease.
The POLITICS OF UTOPIA
The two uses do seem somehow to overlap, and imply that a politics which wishes to change the system radically will be designated as utopian—with the right-wing undertone that the system (now grasped as the free market) is part of human nature; that any attempt to change it will be accompanied by violence; and that efforts to maintain the changes (against human nature) will require dictatorship.
Banishing evil
Let us begin again, then, with the textual utopias themselves. If there have been not just one human nature but a whole series of them, this is because so-called human nature is historical: every society constructs its own. I would not call this a vicious circle, exactly; but it certainly reveals the space of the utopian leap, the gap between our empirical present and the utopian arrangements of this imaginary future.
The citizens of utopia are grasped as a statistical population; there are no individuals any longer, let alone any existential ‘lived experience’. Let’s now return to the distinction I have been making between the two utopian perspectives, that of the root of all evil and that of the political and social arrangements.
Genres of political will
What can be said is that such analysis helps to determine the particular relationship to the political as such, entertained not only by utopia as a text but by utopian thinking and impulses generally. It is a peculiar and a paradoxical relationship, as I have already hinted; utopia is either too political or not political enough.
Mental play
How should we then formulate the position of utopia with respect to the political? Those stretches of human history are for the most part passed in utterly non-utopian conditions, in which none of the images of the future or of radical difference peculiar to utopias ever reach the surface.
This explains much about the various debates and differences that have peopled the history of utopian thought. The weaker alternative, in our time at least, is the term standing in for nature, affirmed unacceptably as human nature in the free-market idiom. I want to conclude by looking at the fear of utopia, of the anxiety with which the utopian impulse confronts us. Is it not possible that the achievement of utopia will efface all previously existing utopian impulses? Something is to be said for the proposition that the fear of utopia is intimately linked with the fear of aphanisis, or loss of desire: the sexlessness of utopians is a constant in the anti-utopian tradition, as witness John Boorman’s well-known film Zardoz.