Doug Henwood wrote: ``I've never dug a ditch, and thank god for that.''
We all, however, know that Doug is a socialist of the Oscar Wilde sort...
Yoshie
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You all are amazingly ignorant of the virtues of heavy, degrading, bone breaking manual labor. So, I will take upon myself to enlighten you.
The soul needs labor. The deep, hard, sweating, and crushing kind of labor that connects every fiber and bone of the body to the earth.
That is, the entire center of being is found in labor that unites body and earth. Digging ditches or graves, picking up large rocks, loading sand and gravel by shovel and bucket, breaking stones, and striking down into the hard, reluctant, heavy earth--the body needs to feel all the blood and breath pounding as it opens the skin and vessels in a kind of cold electric shock that produces rivers of sticky, salty, smelly, sweat that runs down your flanks and the inside of your legs until your socks turn squishy. Your mind needs to swim in the pure pain and absolute exhaustion of it, for hours on end. It is essential to the core of human existence. Its massive assault on the sensibility is proof that something is alive and working against the enormous momentum of lassitude, emptiness and death. Why do you suppose child birth is called labor?
There is a reason that the stone facades of Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, China, Mexico, Peru stand against everything else ever accomplished. These are obsessions in time, where time is defeated in space by an endless labor in stone.
One begins a day of heavy labor, slowly and with deliberation in a rhythm that can be sustained, because later it will become almost unbearable to sustain it. You must be careful to drink before you are thirsty, eat lightly before you are hungry, breath, stand, and move with economy through each task so that it can continue hour after hour.
Have you ever cycled so long and so hard that you passed out and fell over? Have you ever climbed so many pitches that you had to crawl on all fours for the last several hundred feet? Have you ever run so long that the road began to seem like the side of some miraculous tunnel? Has the cold and ice and exhaustion ever turned your vision white and colorless? Have you ever cross-country skied and got lost? Wondered for hours in the darkening woods, sullen, silent, as the light falls into night and finally found the empty road in the moonlight? Have you ever labored so hard, you day dreamed of your own death just so that you could sleep?
But these are not enough in themselves, because they have to be matched to the warmth, the rest, the embrace of home, the burning fire, the smell of food cooking, writing, music, the smell of oil paint and wine, a steamed milk and coffee, a joint or cigarette, that end of labor, that end of day.
Has anyone read the Magic Mountain, and remembered the section titled Snow? Or remembered in War and Peace, the rabbit hunt that ends in Dmitri Rostov's game wardens cabin for dinner, and the slay ride at midnight?
Tonight for dinner I cooked a salmon head stew: cilantro, basil, salt, black pepper, garlic, paprika, sage, thyme, rosemary, celery seed, tabasco, chili power, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, brown sugar, and several cups of white wine. Cook with green beans, carrots, onions, and red skin potatoes. Serve boiling hot with baguettes cut into dipping sticks and ice chilled Sauvignon Blanc. This is essentially cajun style fish stew. And it is nice to know that I labored for that salmon: caught it, killed it, cleaned it, and ate everything but the head, which I took out of the freezer and cooked tonight.
Come on Doug, Yoshie, the rest of you lefties---you gotta learn how to work, labor, and live well.
Chuck Grimes