Da Blob
6th-November-2009, 07:16 PM
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." H. D. Thoreau
I wonder if there are not two types of philosophy? One is the philosophy of the natural world and the second, a philosophy of the man-made world. What philosophy would have Thoreau generated had he written “In Boston” and not “On Walden Pond”? Or for that matter, what this essay would have turned out to be, if titled “In Ruts” instead “On Ruts” – but I digress into the human relationships of prepositions…
I live on a farm that has been in our family (or vice versa) for over a century. Over the decades, it seems that a ritual has developed concerning for searching for “The Lost”. Cattle occasionally ‘disappear” and it is the responsibility of the Family to discover the whereabouts of the missing, because if the animal is in distress, then we are its only saviors. Unlike others, we do not cull the herd of the old, but rather allow an old cow to live out her life in the only home she had ever known. So, every so often, the search for the missing is the search for the dead.
Needless to say, that for me, these searches were often occasions to wax philosophical. During one such opportunity, I was at the Fence line, which was merely the suggestion of a boundary composed of a few strands of rusted wire, rather than a effective barrier that could prevent a thousand pounds of determined beef from transgressing it. Precisely 24 inches inside the fence was the path the cattle had taken while ‘walking the fence line”. I mused that the deep rut that had been created from that original path of the ‘first’ cow by untold thousands of cattle over the past century was actually a more effective barrier than the fence, itself. I wondered if the ‘walking the fence” behavior was not some sort of religious ritual on their parts or a scientific endeavor to learn “what is it that is “Out there” in the world that we can not travel to?” The third possibility, which was the most probable, and at the same time most disheartening was that the behavior was just a habit, a bit of programming caused by the causality of Stimulus and Response. Cattle are, after all, simply creatures of habit. But alas, so are Men also constrained by the imagined boundaries of habit rather than real boundaries…
But I digress – this particular rut was on a hillside and toward the bottom of the hill it had become a course for rainfall as well as a course for cattle, a sad sort of streambed with out any scenic attributes. Erosion is a powerful force in this part of the world and the element of Earth cannot stand against the combined onslaught of the elementals of water and air, so that this rut was only a streambed for a very short distance before it became a gulch. The last rain had taken ten feet from the path and made it a part of the gulch. At that place, I found the carcass of She that I was searching for… She oddly looked so much smaller crumpled in death, than when alive. I still wonder what caused that particular cow’s demise at that particular time and place. Could it have been an act of mercy, the culmination of the religious ritual of ‘walking the fence”? Was it the testing of a scientific hypothesis, that the path existed even though it was not observable? Or the third possibility, which is the most probable and yet most disheartening, that the cow was compelled into committing suicide by the force of habit.
Alas, Mankind also is enslaved by habits. Every habit is a temporal cycle that has evolved into a rut. Every psychological problem is merely a rut. The ‘high-minded’ city folks, with their buildings that reach to the barrier of the skies, actually live in the shadows of those buildings in deeply-eroded invisible ruts. However, this is a statement of a hick, an Okie, a country bumpkin… those who live in those Ivory Towers that reach to the boundaries of the skies have their own philosophy…
I wonder if there are not two types of philosophy? One is the philosophy of the natural world and the second, a philosophy of the man-made world. What philosophy would have Thoreau generated had he written “In Boston” and not “On Walden Pond”? Or for that matter, what this essay would have turned out to be, if titled “In Ruts” instead “On Ruts” – but I digress into the human relationships of prepositions…
I live on a farm that has been in our family (or vice versa) for over a century. Over the decades, it seems that a ritual has developed concerning for searching for “The Lost”. Cattle occasionally ‘disappear” and it is the responsibility of the Family to discover the whereabouts of the missing, because if the animal is in distress, then we are its only saviors. Unlike others, we do not cull the herd of the old, but rather allow an old cow to live out her life in the only home she had ever known. So, every so often, the search for the missing is the search for the dead.
Needless to say, that for me, these searches were often occasions to wax philosophical. During one such opportunity, I was at the Fence line, which was merely the suggestion of a boundary composed of a few strands of rusted wire, rather than a effective barrier that could prevent a thousand pounds of determined beef from transgressing it. Precisely 24 inches inside the fence was the path the cattle had taken while ‘walking the fence line”. I mused that the deep rut that had been created from that original path of the ‘first’ cow by untold thousands of cattle over the past century was actually a more effective barrier than the fence, itself. I wondered if the ‘walking the fence” behavior was not some sort of religious ritual on their parts or a scientific endeavor to learn “what is it that is “Out there” in the world that we can not travel to?” The third possibility, which was the most probable, and at the same time most disheartening was that the behavior was just a habit, a bit of programming caused by the causality of Stimulus and Response. Cattle are, after all, simply creatures of habit. But alas, so are Men also constrained by the imagined boundaries of habit rather than real boundaries…
But I digress – this particular rut was on a hillside and toward the bottom of the hill it had become a course for rainfall as well as a course for cattle, a sad sort of streambed with out any scenic attributes. Erosion is a powerful force in this part of the world and the element of Earth cannot stand against the combined onslaught of the elementals of water and air, so that this rut was only a streambed for a very short distance before it became a gulch. The last rain had taken ten feet from the path and made it a part of the gulch. At that place, I found the carcass of She that I was searching for… She oddly looked so much smaller crumpled in death, than when alive. I still wonder what caused that particular cow’s demise at that particular time and place. Could it have been an act of mercy, the culmination of the religious ritual of ‘walking the fence”? Was it the testing of a scientific hypothesis, that the path existed even though it was not observable? Or the third possibility, which is the most probable and yet most disheartening, that the cow was compelled into committing suicide by the force of habit.
Alas, Mankind also is enslaved by habits. Every habit is a temporal cycle that has evolved into a rut. Every psychological problem is merely a rut. The ‘high-minded’ city folks, with their buildings that reach to the barrier of the skies, actually live in the shadows of those buildings in deeply-eroded invisible ruts. However, this is a statement of a hick, an Okie, a country bumpkin… those who live in those Ivory Towers that reach to the boundaries of the skies have their own philosophy…