Curmudgeon in the ruins

As a child, I was fascinated with ruins and relics, playing in abandoned houses, the wreckage of old mills and factories. I preferred the rooftops to the streets, the spillway to the beach. I hid treasure in crawlspaces under carriage houses, in the insulation of attics. Nothing could beat the plunder of an old cracked leather trunk. Ruination is an ongoing process. By conventional wisdom, it's the flip-side of progress. More bodies, more mouths—the old must make way. But consider a moment--St. Lawrence County has roughly the same population now that it had in 1910. No more bodies. How does that change the logic of progress? What does the maxim "grow or die" mean, when we seem to have been doing neither for the last century? What would a development model look like where the new was seen as an option, not an automatic necessity? Growing older and more ruinous myself, renovation starts to look more attractive than demolition. After all, this new stuff is just the ruins of the future.

Sipping from the firehose

My friend Jim continues an old tradition of printing small inspirational broadsides from handset lead type. The one on my bulletin board is from T.S. Eliot's The Rock, and reads:

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Written in 1934, it could have been a challenge to today's media, particularly online media. Today we may swim in the plunge pool of a Niagara of information, but without a lot of effort, we don't "know" squat. For example, I've been talking about the origins of local placenames with Gregory Warner and we had a listener ask about Negro Creek. I can give you GPS coordinates for its location in Lewis County; I can point you toward the DOT survey of culvert locations on the creek; I can tell you that there are five Negro Brooks in New York, but only one Negro Creek. What I can't tell you is the story of how it got its name. And don't get me started on how hard it has been to find out who the candidates are in each of the NY Assembly and Senate races in the region. I can point you toward endless bloviation about the political landscape, but haven't been able to complete a simple list of the most basic of voter resources. For wisdom you are probably on your own, but adding to knowledge should be, at a bare minimum, somewhere in the media tool kit.

High maintenance

The internet police caught up with us this week, finally noticing that NCPR had more than 50% more audio online than the site was rated for. They locked us out of putting up any new content—such as the next day's news—until we had brought the site back within its budget. Eeek! So I spent a chunk of the weekend and Monday pulling off old audio and stashing it until we could negotiate a bigger dedicated server. This comes at a time when we are changing over our pledge and newsletter services to another vendor, and making other structural changes at ncpr.org. It brought to mind how issues of scale come eventually to bear on any situation. We continue to reach out for the new, the innovative, but as we build larger, more and more energy is required simply to maintain what has already been done. Trees grow beyond their ability to transport water upward, family homes ramble out over new crawl spaces until it becomes a full-time job just to keep it all from falling back down. An ant can lift twenty times its own weight, but if you scale one up to human-size, it can't even hold itself up. Fortunately, we drink a lot of coffee around here, and look forward to stunted growth.

Sense and memory

I've been editing old poems this week, which involves a lot of revisiting past trauma, folly and craziness. It's hard work, exhausting, frustrating, confusing. Sometimes the past becomes clearer with distance; sometimes it makes less sense than ever. But there is something in us that insists on explanation, resolution, context--some hole in the tooth of the brain where the tongue will probe, willy-nilly, until it is filled with the artificial amalgam of narrative. A similar process is underway everywhere these days as the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches. Part of me resists remembering the pain and horror of the day, part of me insists on finding a way to frame the horror in sense. While the consequence of getting the process wrong in a poem is small--one more flawed poem to shove back in the drawer--the consequences of how we tell ourselves the story of 9/11 could be written in blood and fear upon all the pages of the 21st century. Think long, write short, don't hurry.