It’s already starting to sound a bit, well, pedestrian here. See, the Utopianist has a dark side. Though chirping with the birds is as important a pursuit to me, so is some good old-fashioned, pie in the sky, polemicizing.
As the good student I was raised to be, I’m doing my research: I’m reading Thomas More’s Utopia -I ought to know the source of my fantasy and alias, right? As the bad student I have always turned out to be, I’m reaching conclusions before I’ve even finished the first chapter.
Notes in the margin so far are showing that I indeed possess some qualities of a Utopian citizen. For those of you who don’t know, the main protagonist of More’s Utopia, and a citizen of its lauded lands, is Hythloday, which is Latin for The Peddler of Nonsense. He is exemplary of both the beauty and stupidity of Utopia.
Utopia isn’t a simple place; it’s not exactly good or bad. It’s open ended. It presents itself as a wonderful, egalitarian place, but also relies on a degree of absolutism for anything to actually work.
Like many of Hythloday’s irreconcilable maxims [giving examples is a little too term paper for me] a lot of my imaginings of a Utopian ideal really aren’t quite materialisable.
It’s like the blocks on our consciousness to grasp the expanse of the cosmos or time -we simply haven’t the capacity, the terms, the THINGS to really GET it. My Utopia doesn’t have a chance because not only does the language for it elude me, but the basis for it relies on a structure being in place that simple can’t be built here.
The trouble with Hythloday, and the trouble with me, is that we still believe in it.
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On a less bonkers-sounding end of things, in other research-based discoveries, I’ve already buggered up a couple of points on this blog.
FIREMAKING ERRORS
1. I wasn’t clear about the fact that taking DEAD branches from a tree is great for kindling, just be sure you’re not messing with LIVING branches –it does nature and your fire, no good. Dead ones are apparent from their spindly, dark, brittleness. They particularly easy to spot at the base of pine trees.
2. I meant to say LINT from your dryer is a great fire starter, not DRYER SHEETS, which are uber toxic [and you shouldn’t be using anyway].
(Which is leading me on an obsessive search to understand what to burn and what not to burn in terms of pollution and toxicity.)
My personal toxicity expert had this to say regarding the burning of lint:
"...it all depends on what kind of fibers are in it. if it includes all of those weird chemicals from dryer sheets that have been liquified by the water from the wet laundry and then dried, it might mean that it's no different than the dryer sheets themselves. in general, i guess if it's cotton, linen, or wool it's fine. looking around i did see a "recipe" for making lint firestarters by pouring wax into egg-cartons filled with lint, these could be tossed into fires. that's kinda cool."
Indeed it is -thanks Sarah!
3. Birch bark, is awesome kindling/starter. But I’m unclear on how cool it is to harvest it. I know that the oils in birch bark make it easy to light even when wet, so I’m going to say leave it alone on living trees, and pull it off of fallen trunks only…
Righty then…ironing out the wrinkles.
1 comment:
I never knew that about Hythloday! So funny!
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