Wherein a Good Idea is Laid to Rest....

“An expert is a man who has made every mistake which can be made in a narrow field.”
Niels Bohr

We have a very fine solar-powered textile dehydration unit (aka “clothesline”) in our backyard.  It’s painted the same blue color as the trim on our house, so it is very inconspicuous, even for those who can see it, and thanks to some clever landscaping, that does not include very many people.  Our next door neighbors can see this contraption, but that will soon change, as our new black currants,  blackberries and grapes on the eastern side of the house reach maturity.

So, that part of our laundry de-mechanization has gone according to plan.

However, as we reviewed the budget (both fiscal and physical) this spring, we came to the realization that now just is not the time to invest in a hand-cranked laundry ringer.  The calculus is simple – we have approximately $5,000.00 in capital improvements we can make each year, so we have to budget that money very carefully, with an eye towards return on investment (ROI).  In addition, we are operating at a deficit on time available to work on our various projects.  If we are going to invest more money, it needs to be for something which will give us more produce, or barring a financial ROI, it must give us more time.

Put simply, Mr. Myrtle Maintenance has a day job; between home, chickens, and children (not to mention various friends, acquaintances, and stray needy folk, oh and a home delivery herb business) Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance has three day jobs.  Neither of us has the time or energy at the end of the day to hand-crank that blasted manual laundry contraption.  And the cheapest one we found would have run us several hundred dollars.  Several hundred dollars, and it will increase our time deficit?  No thank you!

We suspect that our willingness to put our money where our laundry is will increase dramatically once our youngest farm hand is old enough to turn the crank.  Child labor laws, after all, only apply to those who would pay their under-aged assistants.  Room and board don’t count, right?  So, don’t expect us to follow through on our manual laundry experiment for at least six or seven more years.

That having been said, our failure to launch on this particular project is an excellent example of balancing personal values with the scientific method in action on a small-scale sustainability project.  Science, remember, is not the art of explaining what we ought to do; it is the art of explaining what is observably true – there are some major caveats to that definition, of course, but we needn’t be concerned with precision here.  Our point is that we must continually balance what is true with what we ought to do about it.

The ancient Greek philosophers were the first recorded rhapsodizers about the tension between mythos and logos – between passions and reason, between Dionysus and Apollo, between DeForrest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy.  However, because the Greeks had their heads in the clouds (or, at the very least, in their wineskins), they pondered all sorts of ridiculous questions which had nothing to do with home and garden.  Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”?  Puh-lease.  How was that supposed to make someone a more productive farmer?

We kid, of course; there is much to be gained from reading Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and the gang.  However, there is a kernel of truth in the notion that the Greeks hid as much wisdom as they uncovered.  Prior to the rise of the Greek pantheon, the most prominent Mediterranean deities had strikingly different personalities from those we know as “Olympian”.  And even the Olympian gods and goddesses we think we know are filtered through 2,500 years of literary interpretation, and may bear little resemblance to the gods and goddesses the Greeks actually worshipped.  For evidence see:  Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or Disney’s Hercules.

Many heavenly job duties were reassigned when the military might of the hellenic peoples overcame the more pastoral sensibilities of the predecessors of the Greeks – and yes, we know, there were some powerful military predecessors, too – just look at the surviving Minoan artifacts on Santorini, provided you’ve got a clear enough head after too many shots of ouzo.  The point, though, is that the number of Greek gods and goddesses imbued with martial zeal and skill far outweighs Greek gods and goddesses imbued with knowledge of home economics, agronomy, or poultry science.

And those who do represent non-military ideals are far different from their predecessors.

Aphrodite, for example, is often considered a hellenized version of Ishtar or other manifestations of prehistoric “Earth Mother” goddesses.  So, too, with Demeter.  And many scholars attribute to the Eleusinian Mysteries – rites related to worship of Demeter and Persephone – ritual elements which seem strangely out of place for a mere “garden goddess” like Demeter – eroticism practiced underground for the purpose of ensuring crop fertility – these folk were clearly cut from a different cloth than the protestant west of modern America.

The division of divine job duties can provide countless hours of fun for those of us who enjoy watching scholars of obscure subjects get into nasty debates no one else can understand, because every classics scholar worth his or her salt is absolutely sure of the position they have painstakingly researched, in spite of the fact that equally qualified scholars with opposing points of view are fairly easy to find; the aforementioned Aphrodite – Demeter – Ishtar comparison, for example, for which of course there is only conjecture, not proof, could get a Greek specialist and a Sumerian specialist spitting at each other by their third respective glasses of wine.

Pardon the tangent – what does this have to do with our decision to keep our electric washing machine, even in the face of our own strong arguments against doing so?

Just this – we struggle constantly not to be trapped by ideology, particularly of our own creation.  Far too often, people are trapped by strong-armed arguments about what ought to be, even when those visions fly in the face of what is.  We have often said “You can be a fundamentalist anything,” and it is true.  We would love to have the perfectly independent “off-the-grid” homestead, but we don’t live in a perfect world. 

Compromises must be made which ensure that the larger vision is retained.  Eventually, civilization as it is crosses the borders of our dream worlds as we think they ought to be.  Ted Kaczynski faced this dilemma when loggers invaded the woods where he had built his survivalist shack; we think he picked the wrong solution to this intrusion on his dream world.  If he’d just swallowed some pride and kept grading papers at Berkeley instead of trying to divide himself from the human race, he’d have a lot more garden space now than he currently enjoys.  As Spinal Tap reminds us, “It’s a thin line between clever and stupid.”

In the case of the Greeks, in the grind of time and changing tides of civilization, we lost the poetry of Sappho, but we retained the recipe for baklava.  You win some, you lose some.  At Myrtle’s place, we have given up on quickly getting rid of all of our electrical appliances; it’s a mistake we have learned and moved on from.  We’re still investing time, sweat, and money in other environmentally friendly ideas, though.  We hope you do, too.

Happy farming!