You might think me odd — well, additionally odd — but I like doing laundry. I love clean laundry, of course. Who doesn’t? But I like the process as well, with one caveat: I don’t much like the dryer. I’ve made my peace with owning the machine, but I prefer hanging clothes outside. I prefer the process and I prefer the result. I definitely prefer the cost. No spike in electricity use every week, much less maintenance on the machine, and no sign of needing replacement in over a decade. But really I just like standing out there hanging clothes on the line in my garden. Such simple luxury, pleasurable in so many ways!
I prefer simple methods and tools wherever I am given a choice because they are low-cost (which is a pleasure) and good for the planet (also a pleasure) and good for your body because it is good for the planet (also a pleasure) and good for your body in itself (also a pleasure). But the pleasure in hanging out the laundry is also intrinsic. It is pleasurable to hang sheets on the clothesline with the breeze and the sunshine playing about your body and the scents of clean laundry blending with the garden smells and the textures of cotton and linen, the interplay of cold damp fabric and hot air dancing over your skin. This is all intimate and visceral pleasure. And then there is the pleasure of taking the dry fabrics off the line, usually in the evening hours after an afternoon of warmth, with the sun low in the sky and vibrant washes of color painting the horizon in the startling beauty of endings, with the birds singing vespers and insects humming their drone notes, with the scent of sunlight trapped in clean cloth. And then… to use these sunlight-dried bed-linens and towels and clothes! There is very little that can deliver more pleasure to the body than the scent and caress of line-dried sheets enveloping you as you drift off to sleep.
Simple tools and methods are good for… but they are also intrinsically preferable, more pleasurable than the tools and methods of resource-intensive convenience. Yes, little is as pleasurable as line-dried sheets, but machine-dried sheets not only do not match the delight of line-dried, they bring little pleasure at all to the body, not in the work done, nor in the result.
I know you all know this with your body, but I think we all forget with our chattering minds. We believe that the work and the time involved, the allocation of space and the aesthetics of a clothesline in the garden, the low prestige of doing this work, we think all that cancels out the pleasure our body feels. We get more pleasure from avoiding the task than we do from doing it, we tell ourselves…
But why?
We might as well ask why these tools of convenience exist. Do they make our lives better? Anyone who has ever inhaled sunlight and summer air caught in cotton would never choose, instead, the chemical tang of dryer sheets. There is no pleasure in loading and unloading a machine often in a dank basement or stuffy laundromat. There is no pleasure in the ethics in doing this work, the pleasure in doing something good for yourself and the world. So, I think we can all say that at least the dryer is not an improvement in our lives.
Where is the fun in pouring stuff into a metal and plastic box and then shutting the lid and forgetting it? Where is the joy in kneading dough? Where is the sense of accomplishment? Where is the pause in the daily round that allows, even forces us to stop and focus on this process? A process that has substantial interstitial time that you can fill in myriad pleasurable ways, but that which you can not pass over and go onto the next needful thing. You must stay near the dough in its last rise. You must stay near the oven. You must pay attention. But there is nothing that needs to be done while you are paying attention. It is a rest time for your body, a time for reading and thinking and washing the dishes (which is also a rest time, one that is very good at stimulating thought). The bread machine takes all that away. You don’t pay attention. You are hardly involved at all with the process or the result. And… let me remind those who have forgotten… bread machine bread is never as good. The texture. The flavor. The appearance. All are significantly less pleasurable. And then on top of that we are robbed of our down time.
Which is getting close to the reason things like this exist. These tools of convenience are not really designed to convenience us. They are tools of efficiency, but the beneficiary is not us. Conveniences have a two-fold function. First, they take us away from the need to do things for ourselves. They make time for us to do more work — which sounds like a good thing, right? We can get more done for ourselves. But that is not at all the practical result, and I would argue it is also not the intent.
Freeing us from taking care of our bodies means we have time to labor for wealth, and not often our own, which is related to the second function of tools of convenience. All of them are costly. All of them require us to spend money rather than time and effort. All of them need repair and replacement and usually a good deal of energy to run — because the energy necessary to a given job is not lessened with these tools, it’s just displaced from your body to the machine’s fuel. You have to work harder to acquire the monetary wealth to buy and maintain these machines than you would if you just did the job with your own body. That wage work you do is labor that benefits someone else. Those wages that you earn in that wage work then have to be spent on the labor that you are not doing for yourself as well as the tools that make that not-doing possible.
So these conveniences? They are tools for generating wealth, and not yours. The wages we earn through labor are always less than the wealth that accrues to our employers. And then we must turn around and spend those wages on the machines of convenience, often the very things we have made in working for wages. They get us coming and going, these efficiencies.
This is not the human default. Those outside this socioeconomic system are always frankly flummoxed by this mass choice to do things that bring us little joy — indeed, that usually harm us — just for the sake of freeing up time to work for someone else’s wealth-building project. (And only monetary wealth, which is itself a conundrum to the outsider.) Why would we agree to such idiocy? Or are we, like some of my Native friends believe, being brainwashed? Drinking the Koolaid in our public-not-public water supply and subjecting our brain to earworms far more toxic than 80s music (which is also a symptom of our maladaptive system).
Well, we didn’t for a very long time. We didn’t cooperate willingly with this project. We spent generations fighting off this system. We died trying to defend our rights to live as we wanted without earning wages that then had to be spent to support a life that was in every way inferior and undesirable. We only acquiesced after centuries of violent coercion in which every alternative path except this one was eliminated.
And when we were beaten into submission, starved and shelterless, then the gaslighting began. We were told, repeatedly, continuously, loudly, that we wanted this, that our old ways of doing things were humiliating drudgery that made us yearn for escape, that these new urban lives were sparkling with freedom, were the best paths toward happiness — as long as you worked hard enough. We were told that our former lives were ugly, violent and brief. We were told that we never had time to live until these tools removed our need to care for ourselves. And this gaslighting is so pervasive and effective that we have forgotten that it is not true. Not in any way.
Not only have we forgotten, but now we can’t even perceive. We can’t feel the pleasure in the inefficient ways of being. We can’t see that efficiency was never meant to generate pleasure — and that it does not. We think that our dissatisfaction, our disease, our deep unhappiness are our own faults, that we are not good enough to be happy in this system. We don’t even recognize that we can’t be happy, that if we were to be happy, the system would fail, that the system is predicated on each of us, all of us, living every hour, every day of our lives in sheer, unrequited misery.
Because immiserating all of us is the only way to get us to spend money, and therefore work for the money to spend.
But we are given the slightest choice, we still prefer to do the work ourselves. It is more pleasurable in and of itself, and it leads to a life in which we labor just for our own needs. Meaning we labor much less than we do in using these tools of convenience.
Tally that one up… It takes a few minutes to hang the clothes on the line, a few minutes to take them down, and in between you are free to do other things, though it’s best to stay in the neighborhood of the clothesline. It still takes all the work that goes into washing, folding, ironing, and storing the clean laundry. There is no labor saved in anything except the few minutes extra on either end of the drying process. (And with most natural fabrics, you don’t even save that… they must be rack-dried anyway.) So the convenience is perhaps ten minutes of doing something that is distinctly less enjoyable that hanging out the laundry. You are saving ten minutes that might have been pleasurable. But regardless of the pleasure, it’s only ten minutes of labor.
Now add up the work that is necessary to save those ten minutes. Let’s start with your budget. You have to buy the machine or pay someone for the right to use theirs. You have to pay for space for that machine or pay for the space that houses the machines at the laundromat (which always costs more than having your own space for the obvious reason that you have to pay the business mortgage and property upkeep as well as pay for the laundromat’s profits and the much more onerous burden of the profits accruing to the landlords… because commercial rent is about the only reliable revenue stream left to elites… ahem…). You have to pay for the energy that goes into running the machine. You have to pay for repairing and replacing the machine and all its usually dysfunctional parts (because, duh, machines don’t like to run hot their whole life…). With all that expense, you have to spend far more than ten minutes laboring to earn the money to pay all these costs — in addition to the time you still must spend laboring to clean the laundry.
Now consider the work that is necessary beyond your budget. The machine has to exist. The materials that go into it need to be sourced and transported, usually not in entirely salubrious fashion. The materials that go into the factories that produce those machines also have to be sourced and transported. The whole mess needs to be assembled. Then the finished product has to be shipped and stocked and sold and transported yet again to where the machine will be used. The machine needs to have energy inputs which are also ridiculously complex chains of labor and resource use. The machine needs to be repaired, again using up years of cumulative labor and tons of resources. The machine will eventually need replacing, which starts the whole cycle all over again with the additional burden of disposal for the dead machine.
There are whole lifetimes of labor hours embedded in that ten minutes of convenience.
And we don’t see this because it is drowned out in the loud squawking forcibly wrenching our attention away from the lives we could lead if only we did see.
We are told we want this. We are told we don’t want to return to small lives with simple tools. We are told that we hated those lives. And we believe that.
You see, it is very difficult to earn money from simple tools. They are simple. They don’t involve all those hours of labor and all those tons of resources. They don’t cost much to use. They hardly ever break.
But there is a further level to this. It is hard to earn money from simple tools, but it is impossible to earn money from real pleasure. Pleasure is experienced. It is in and of the body. It can’t be synthesized without causing a good deal of harm to the body. Real pleasure costs nothing and can’t be bought, but not for lack of effort from marketing… It’s just not possible mimic all the complex interactions that lead to real bodily pleasure, which is also bodily well-being, joy, connection, meaning, truth, and, probably most importantly for economics, the alleviation and absence of need.
We smile at the adorably naive hippies who sang “all you need is love”. And maybe they didn’t actually know what they were saying, given their focus on self. One gets the feeling all they were talking about was human sex. But in the natural world, love is all you need. Love is that alleviation and absence of need because your needs are part of the whole and are met when the whole is healthy. Your needs are met in loving and caring relationship with the world. Not just the need for sex and validation, but your need for food and shelter and every other bodily desire. All this flows from the labor of love. And you can’t buy love. (Which is also a song the hippies sang and might have been about more than sex…)
This is the underlying truth that gaslighting is directed against. The body will never find that alleviation and absence of need in buying things. The body will never find sustained pleasure from anything bought or sold, nor even much beyond a few fleeting seconds of hormone release. The body will never feel happiness in this monetary system. It can’t or the system fails, but it also can’t, full stop. It is physically impossible.
So take pleasure in those small things. Savor everything good about them. And open yourself, your one and only living body, to the joy of doing things that bring you pleasure, knowing that true pleasure is in the relationship between your body and the enfolding world — with no synthetic monetary mediation between the labor and the loving happiness.
Wednesday Word
for 31 July 2024
corn
The Thing To Look Forward To rather went on there… but there’s still more. Because this is the week of Lammas, the Loaf-mas, the festival of the corn harvest, the grain harvest. In much of the world, the grain harvest is over by now. Harvested grain is already being processed into flours and other edible forms. In a few weeks it will be time to plant cold-season grains. But the indigenous grain in the Americas is maize, which English has named corn, a word that formerly applied to grain generally. And it is American corn harvest season.
American corn is like other grains in that it is a grass that has a seed head bred by humans to hold hundreds of enormous kernels. Like its grassy cousins, it can thrive in dry conditions as well as moist, though it does not like cold. Also like its grainy cousins, it has co-opted humans for reproduction and distribution.
But corn is different from its relatives in one important aspect — it is digestible in its raw state. In fact, corn is delicious in its raw state. Sweet corn is unlike any other grain. Heat it only slightly to break down the seed walls a bit and you have food, nutritious and delicious food, for very little work. This is what Americans look forward to in August, not the grain harvest and breads, but corn. On the cob or by the spoonful. Boiled, grilled, roasted. Salted or slathered in butter. Or, my favorite, chipotle and cumin dusted over a fire-roasted cob that has a drizzle of olive oil to hold the spices.
You can make bread with dried corn though there is no gluten to give the bread structure as there is in wheat. Still, flatbreads made with corn are delightful, especially turned into tortilla chips. You can brew alcohol from corn too. In fact, most of the alcohol that fuels your car is corn. But the best use of corn is eating it fresh. And that is the season that is upon us. In fact, the guy that sells bushels out of his pick-up at the traffic circle outside of town was sighted, for the first time this year, just this past weekend. I will be stopping by to fill up a few baskets, much of which I will freeze as blanched kernels that I can use all year round. But I will also fill up my belly, cob after cob, with the juices running down my chin. What a simple pleasure!
Do you have a craving now?
