The Baby Wolf

JWise Photo of the Day

Sharie Monsam, Jutta Engelhardt, and Caroline Wise at Fiber Factory in Mesa, Arizona

It was 11 years ago at a Navajo Weaving workshop led by Sharie Monsam (left) at Fiber Factory in Mesa, Arizona that Caroline first started becoming acquainted with this corner of the fiber arts. Pictured are Caroline and her mom Jutta Engelhardt setting up a warp which is often considered the most difficult part of dressing a loom to start weaving. The Navajo rug that my mother-in-law started on this night was finished prior to her return to Germany, it sits on her couch to this day.

Caroline Wise at Yarn School in Harveyville, Kansas September 2007

Just the year before, Caroline and I found ourselves in Harveyville, Kansas, where she attended Yarn School with Nicole Lohr. The following year we again headed into America’s heartland of Kansas for another go at Yarn School. Critical mass about all things fiber was taking hold.

Caroline Wise with her first loom in Phoenix, Arizona in July 2010

By 2010 Caroline inherited a counterbalance loom and the die was cast. From May of that year, it would take until July before Caroline was ready to start weaving. The loom, by the way, was an ancient mess that required Caroline to look far and wide for information about how it worked. I wrote a short snippet back then which can be read by clicking here. Caroline’s guild member Bernie was instrumental in walking her through the warping process and several sets of towels were eventually woven on this loom.

Fiber Arts Books

Books, videos, tutorials, joining fiber guilds, attending conferences, joining workshops, visiting museums to explore exhibits regarding the history of the craft were on our schedule for the next decade. Caroline’s interest has few limits and certainly, geography is not one of the constraints if there are any. The ethnic history of what the peoples of the earth have explored with cloth is of profound interest to my wife. In her search for complexity and the novelty of finding things beyond the extent of her knowledge, Caroline too has a similar drive to learn more and is nearly on the constant lookout to extend what she knows. She has her own antilibrary that is considerably larger than my own but then her ravenous appetite to read is greater than my own too.

Caroline Wise with her new Baby Wolf Loom from Schacht

Through the various organic and synthetic fibers, yarns, methods of weaving, knitting, making lace, spindles, carders, and a multitude of other interests she’s worked through the uncertainty if she’d still be interested in all of this tomorrow. Turned out that she’s as deeply affected by her curiosity to know more today as ever. With that background, she finally came to the conclusion that gifting herself a treasure wasn’t so unreasonable anymore.

Caroline Wise and Carma Koester of Fiber Creek in Prescott, Arizona with a new Baby Wolf Loom from Schacht

With some arm twisting of assurance that she could spoil herself without feeling guilty Caroline had her eye on a special 50th-anniversary cherry wood loom from Schacht out of Colorado. This “portable” loom is known as the Baby Wolf and while Caroline obviously sits on the left, Carma Koester on the right is the owner of Fiber Creek in Prescott, Arizona, who ordered this beautiful piece of engineering that Caroline is likely to use for the rest of her life. As soon as fabric starts to emerge from the loom I’ll be sure to share more photos of the first thing she makes.

Antilibrary

JWise Photo of the Day

New Reading for John Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

Redefining my reading list and expanding the corner of our antilibrary* that is a large part of our small living space. The roots of this change in programming started earlier this year when I was in Frankfurt, Germany. A meeting with an old friend Olaf Finkbeiner triggered thoughts of media philosophy ranging from Joshua Meyrowitz to Jean Baudrillard. Then about a week later in Weimar, contemplating yet older thoughts attached to my readings of Nietzsche, Goethe, and Schiller, I started reminiscing on the intellectual proclivities of people who think. Upon my return to the States, I came across the blog of a guy I’d met a couple of times back in the ‘90s when I was living in Frankfurt, his name is Achim Szepanski. Back in the day, I learned of the work of Gilles Deleuze through Achim but by that time I was deep into other subjects and not interested in pulling in one more thinker of obtuse complex ideas.

There seems to be a convergence of thinkers whose work is entering my orbit. Again, I have to return to Achim, as it was his website non.copyriot.com that enchanted me with his complex visualizations of thought experiments, turning the page into a canvas to explore the current evolution of political and economic landscapes.

Then, over the course of summer, I see references repeated, again and again, spurring me to resolve why all of a sudden I’m seeing these patterns. At this point a kind of frenzy of curiosity grabs hold and I need to know more. Cursory investigations point in a direction that over time nods to particular sources and the degrees of separation dissolve to the point I must follow some of these threads.

One of those moments distilled my curiosity into picking up books by Nick Land (Fanged Noumena), Reza Negarestani (Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials), Alexandre Lefebvre (The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza), Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency), Alain Badiou (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil), Paolo Virno (When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature and a couple of others). There are other authors I have my eye on and a couple of things I pulled from the shelf of my antilibrary as I look for something that seems just out of reach.

What I’m on the hunt for is an understanding of humanity’s direction both socially and economically. I’m trying to glean some small insight that will let me feel I’m not on the outside of our trajectory.

Do I have hope that these texts and treatises will help light the way? In some small way yes but not in the profound red pill kind of way. Maybe they can act like slivers that penetrate the body of my mind infecting it with a non-lethal mix of tiny new inspirations that the antibodies of thinking can harness while strengthening my neural pathways into taking roads unseen.

* Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his book The Black Swan: “A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

Sunn O)))

JWise Photo of the Day

Sunn O))) live in Mesa, Arizona

Sunn O))) is a kind of Druid aural embodiment of alchemy set before the temple channeling earth’s power to allow the laity to intuitively understand the work of bacteria on a global scale. You tremble before their sonic storm of vibrational lucidity as you are brought to the precipice of being reduced from human to simple organic matter. We are rendered as constituent elements of the primordial earth, while before us is the sun that energizes life. With the help of our star, wakefulness rises and the opportunity to explore is gifted to the various species of earth. Cosmic illumination from the galactic center explodes into our senses. For fleeting moments as measured in the infinity of time we attempt to discover some sense of meaning, but the intensity arising out of the totality of reality is too expansive for minds that only relatively recently left the cave. So we continue to explore the boundaries on our search for what any of this means.

Translation: we went to a concert in Mesa last night featuring the Seattle, Washington, band known as Sunn O))).

Final San Diego Impressions

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts

Menya Ultra Ramen in San Diego, California

San Diego ended up being largely boring. There were a few high points, such as this Tonkotsu Chashu Ramen from Menya Ultra. There are two locations in the San Diego area, but expect both to have lines out the door, and these are the only two locations in North America. My 20-minute wait was absolutely worthwhile. So, there may be some interesting dining options here along the coast, but you must be prepared to drive. Should you want great Mexican food, you might need to visit Chula Vista down south, so at the best of times, if you are up north, it’ll take you 45 minutes to drive the 23 miles or more than 75 minutes if you are attempting this when the freeways are slammed.

There’s a coastal train line operated by Amtrak that travels between San Luis Obispo and San Diego. The pricing is okay, but I’m putting this here because the track it runs on is close to some cliff sides that are disappearing. The Pacific Surfliner takes about 8.5 hours to make the trek that would take 5 hours by car, and there’s free wifi onboard, so while I’m fairly bored here, I could easily see Caroline and I making the trip out this way on a weekend during the late fall for the trip north and back south. Strangely, we’ve never traveled with Amtrak anywhere in America though we have taken subways in New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles, steam trains in New Mexico and Colorado, and a couple of old lines in Arizona, one that took us through Verde Canyon and the other from Williams to Grand Canyon National Park.

Drake the Dog

My routine of walking Drake saw him leading most of the time. This vet’s office saw us at least once a day, sometimes twice. I never learned what it was that drew him here, but this dog loved sniffing their door. He seems to have grown used to me after about ten days of Dion and Ylva’s absence, but still, he’s a cantankerous dog who knows where he wants to go and got quite aggressive, pulling in the direction he wanted to go.

I never grew to appreciate that dogs are a full-time job where their needs must be met every day without a break. How people grow accustomed to the dog’s needs and the inflexibility the relationship offers is far beyond my ability to understand.

Writing

More than the beaches and restaurants, this was the most common view I had while here in Southern California. Never did I truly feel inspired to liberate my spleen and find a thread to flow within. Maybe adequate cloud cover or the potential for it is required for my writing? Not a chance, as I live in Arizona and find myself writing quite often. So, what’s the writer’s block that was affecting me here?

Bathroom

Another common view of mine. This one is from a sitting position and is typically only had once a day.

Eating at Red Tracton's in Del Mar, California

I’m at Red Tracton’s Steakhouse in Del Mar, and the only people under 50 here are the staff. Matter of fact, the majority of diners are well into their retirement years. Every table I see has some stiff drinks on it; a couple has wine, and only one has a beer.

At about $100 a person, the casual conversation is largely about money. One nearby table is discussing their racehorses which makes sense as the Del Mar racetrack is nearby.

Maybe there are some individual diners in the bar area, but I’m the only solo guy in the main dining room. Dinner was okay, but it wasn’t worth what was paid. This joint and my meal were kind of boring just like the city all of this in. As the baby boomers continue to die out, so will this type of restaurant.

Sunset at Solana Beach in California

There are probably many things to like about this area along the coast, besides the coast and sunsets, I found things difficult to enjoy. If we were to live here, I’m afraid we’d be like most San Diegans who don’t want to deal with parking near the ocean and the perception that the beaches are crowded, so we’d take for granted that we could go at any time and then put it off for years while claiming the ocean is part of the allure. Traffic and cost of living are the chief complaints about life here, which is the same I’ve heard from San Francisco down to Los Angeles, but the jobs that pay high wages are spread throughout the Sunshine State, so people stay. As for me, I’m looking forward to getting home to the dry 110-degree desert where we don’t need to pretend that we reside in some cool, hip place unless we live in Scottsdale.

The Shape of Caroline

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts

The shape of Caroline Wise

This is the shape of Caroline in outline form. The person is not present, but I know what belongs between the lines. She’s made up of yarn, music, seashells, crashing waves, tears, smiles, uncertainty, love, curiosity, words from a dozen languages, characters from books, movies, cartoons, German bread and pickles, and people she’s met. Caroline is larger than her physical being as her eyes have consumed the stars, the ocean, the mountains, and the trees. The desert knows her, and she knows it, but neither is bored of the other as there is so much to try to know. This woman is resilient and fragile, expansive and tiny, sometimes difficult and sometimes so very simple.

From her outline, you cannot see her eyes, but I can. You will never know her scent as I do, nor the softness found along the contours of her skin. A pencil drawing doesn’t explain her exacting need for certain things to be in order while other things are allowed to fall into disarray. Why does an outline of her even exist? Because she has dreams that extend beyond her sleeping hours for things, she can adorn herself if only she can examine herself in real size.

If this outline were filled with the words “I love you” from all the times she’s heard that from me, there would need to be hundreds of these stacked one upon the other. The only thing missing in the drawing above is one of me next to her, holding her hand, because that is the eternal image of who we are.

Avarice

JWise Thoughts

dollar

For the past 50 years, we’ve been at battle with ourselves. Following the post-World War II boom leading into the 1960s, America was experiencing its first enlightenment before it put on the brakes to examine what had happened. Out of the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, environmental, and hippy movements, there came a trigger that apparently alienated those who were riding the wealth catapult and had the ruling class recoil at the social changes that came with these structural changes to society. So, a type of war was silently declared against the rising intellect of the masses.

A large part of society would start being nudged toward mediocrity starting in the early 1970s, and there was little clue as to just how many were on their way to being on the losing end of financial advancement. At the same time, those who were benefiting from the emergent global economy continued to benefit right up through today. With the upper class and their wealth came creeping avarice and maybe fear that the populace would learn of the imbalance. Promoting fear among the masses instead of spreading a vision of the future worked: people cowered, afraid they might lose the little they had. Sadly, the growing majority is now nearly powerless to change this equation as they cannot fathom the complexity of tools that have been used against them.  All that’s left for the powerful is to lift these masses onto the shoulders of nationalism, rewarding them through patriotism for their loyalty to jargon and jingoism, and finally pushing the lemmings off the cliff of civil war.

Let’s rewind the clock about 700 years to the 14th century when a class of royalty relied on and exploited the uneducated masses in Europe while fighting endless wars at the expense of the survivors of endless plagues. Then, in the early 15th century, the Renaissance kicked into high gear, and then moveable type and the printing press forever changed the distribution of knowledge. Those advancements would need to simmer for another 300 years before the Enlightenment would take hold. Now, after 250 years of progress, we find ourselves replete with all of the tools, capital, and ability to take a quantum leap forward in intellectual and planetary stewardship, but we are flailing about like infants.

Leadership is not fulfilling its role, as greed and fear are rife throughout society. On one hand, you have those afraid of losing their privilege and having to face change, while on the other side, a vast majority do not know how to deal with change either, so we are doing nothing. I suppose this requires me to point out that America hasn’t failed to introduce great change upon the entirety of humanity, but a lot of what has been introduced has been delivered by a relatively small percentage of our population and, in many ways, has bypassed the majority of our population who should be reaping the rewards of progress.