Good Habits
(+ a wonderful free find i found on the streets of Berkeley. now my favorite tea cup! background art from @imogenalisonreed)
As Kirkegaard once said, "'repetition' is and remains a religious category."
As someone who has never been raised under stability or the familiarity of repetition, I am quite fond of borders. November is the border between autumn and winter, the persimmon is the border between eve and day of, and a sewing needle is a border between what is seen and what can be constructed. The border is longing, it is to be in a direction, perhaps in discretionary, but a direction nonetheless.
Something interesting I've recently learned is that making a poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not a reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses, it remembers that the involvement of an author in the production of literature has become discretionary. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us.
There will always remain dimensions in our rituals: rhythm, content, shape, and feeling. The accretion of life must be felt so that the space in my mind becomes the gray, automatic, and square Berkeley rain that falls in sheets. The front yard gardens, the dejected furniture battered by weather, the fried bread, the walls of fabric, the heaping plate of rice and fish. I believe during times like these it is incredibly important to make our organizing spaces beautiful and for myself to accept that the aroma of tea brewing on the stove is what holds me together. It's colder to sleep next to the window, but the opportunity cost of waking up to a light that fills my bed is higher than temporary warmth.
When I repeat my morning routine of running through the North Berkeley streets, it makes me trust my organized spaces, to pick up silly frivolous possessions like crumpled tea mugs that have been abandoned by my neighbors to be repurposed through repossession. It's nice to think that generosity persists in the context of repetition when I was always taught that people rarely give--that it is easier to keep than to risk entering debt. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself, or rather to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving,
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I finished reading Xizowei Wang's Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside. I found her courageously iterated self-conflict for seeking a middle ground between her nationality's normative standards for progression and ethnic community's odd conformity quite applicable to how I feel about my own current contexts. Wonderful read and beautifully written, very highly recommend!
"Conducting research in rural China meant that I could, selfishly, return to villages that I love being in. There was an allure to living at a pace and scale that felt comprehensible, to living in a place that felt grounded. It is easy to romanticize rural Chinese villages as idyllic scenes of nature, small and disengaged—yet many of them are sites of economies and agricultural practices that are foundational to our world. And as numerous historians, such as Robert Brenner and Sue Headlee, have shown, shifts in agriculture and rural politics were crucial for the transition into industrialization and capitalism throughout the world. In thinking through agriculture, through a sense of place and belonging, I was influenced by the writings of bell hooks and Wendell Berry, for whom being and belonging acquire a sense of urgency—especially in a political and economic system that dislocates people from place and community. It would have been easy to attribute the loss of belonging, of place, to just technology accelerating us into the singularity of despondency.
But challenging my metronormativity meant challenging these ideas of the digital world versus the physical world, and pulling back the idea that becoming a Luddite and disengaging is the only way to reclaim a sense of belonging. “Why are you here?” I am here because looking at technology in rural China, in places that produce the technology we use, places that show how globally entangled we are with one another, allows me to confront the scarier question that technology poses: What does it mean to live, to be human right now? Looking at tech in rural China forced me to examine the ideologies that drive engineers and companies to build everything from AI farming systems and blockchain food projects to shopping sites and payment platforms. These assumptions about humans and the way the world should work are more powerful than sheer technical curiosity in driving the creation of new technologies and platforms. Embedded in these tools are their makers’ and builders’ assumptions about what humans need, and how humans should interact.
It is not enough to critique these assumptions, because in simply critiquing, we remain caught in the long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess. Tech creates isolation, tech connects marginalized communities. The difficult work that we face is to live and thrive beyond binaries and assumptions, and to aid and enable others to do so. How do we begin this work?"
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