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| Paul |
Hope you are enjoying your Labor Day weekend. This month's newsletter makes me LOL (Laugh Out Loud). It's written by Paul and he's in rare form. (Mild profanity alert -- Don't read if his wild, straight from the hip style might offend you!) The rest of you, have fun!
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CORN PONE WISDOM
In my circle of friends there has been a lot of talk lately surrounding life philosophies, specifically those philosophies considered to be conducive to “success” in life.
For the most part these are common sense bits and pieces of advice and they tend to center around the whole “be positive and good things will happen” movement. I tend to call it, “corn pone philosophy.” Is that an insult? Kind of, but corn pone philosophy can be useful. I happen to like actual “corn pone” (it means “cornbread,” I had to look that up). Other terms for it might be homespun or homegrown. They all refer to it being common, widely known, simple things you tend to forget but need to remember because they are supposed to be useful. You know, “a stitch in time saves nine,” even though nobody sews by hand anymore. And if an article of your clothing gets torn you’ll probably buy a new one today because it makes more sense. But, figuratively, it means “fix something before it gets worse.” If I think about it, however, once I get all my sewing stuff out, thread a needle, set up a desk lamp, and sit down to sew—nine stitches is not a problem. Might want to wait until eighteen stitches are needed. If I did all that for one single stitch, I’d feel like an idiot. Hey, especially if I have a sewing machine that does, like, nine stitches per second on its lowest speed. And that’s why I’m writing this, I’m trying to fix something before it gets worse.
OK, so that bit of folk philosophy didn’t work so well. How about “measure twice, cut once.” Yeah, that means be more cautious before you commit. Right along the lines of “look before you leap.” There are plenty of corn pone philosophies directed towards avoiding serious injury, making some kind of mistake which could have been avoided, or the inexcusable sin of wasting material, “waste not, want not.” Most corn pone philosophy comes from humble roots. Corn roots. More specifically, people who are likely to plant corn, harvest it, grind it up, make bread out of it and eat it. Probably with milk from their own cow, the one they raised from a calf. And the butter on the corn pone—from the same cow, and they churned it themselves. Have you ever churned butter by hand? It takes forever. You wouldn’t do it today. Corn pone philosophy can be useful, especially if you’re growing corn, sewing clothes, or building a barn on a tight budget. Because, you know, we all do that. Or in theory we yearn to. There’s even a cookbook out right now, “Make the Bread, Buy the Butter.” Hell no, I’m not going to make the bread! Maybe I should grind the wheat into flour? What’s a loaf of bread, three bucks? I earn that in three minutes (sometimes). Increasingly in our society if you don’t earn that in three minutes you are encouraged to aspire to that and more. But why is the wisdom to aspire to an owner's class expected to to have been sprouted, grown, harvested, ground up and baked from the working class? It doesn’t fit. It won’t even grow in that soil. Wrong climate. But that’s where a lot of this current crop of success oriented philosophy came from. And just when you think you’re getting somewhere somebody throws in the nextgen “how do you define success?” questions or the “it is better to fail at something you love, than to be a success at something you hate” because. . . because fuck you, that’s why. Because it wasn't hard enough already.
It can be a problem when corn pone philosophy gets mis-applied. Especially when you consider that much of it is contradictory. “Strike while the iron is hot.” “He who hesitates is lost.” And of course I am having to address all this because “necessity is the mother of invention.” These “seize the day” statements directly contradict a lot of prior cautionary ones. Unless of course, you are Steve Jobs. He gets quoted a lot, because he made it out of the cornfield. He says things like:
Here’s to the crazy ones—the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently—they’re not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do. ~ Steve Jobs
and also
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. ~ Steve Jobs
and this one
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. ~ Steve Jobs
Which sounds a little bit like an old corn-pone saying, “faith can move mountains.”
But where Steve’s post-industrial, big-city, yuppie-class philosophy meets corn pone rural agrarian wisdom is where it really gets interesting. The farmers had kids. The kids went to college. They came home, briefly, but then they moved to the city where Jobs is, and where the jobs are. The city had its own wisdom, some of it cynical, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.” Then those kids got married and had kids, and so on, and that’s us, now, right now. The old sayings never went away. They just got new sayings added to them. I still like cornbread. But I really like sushi, too. I’ll have a ten-dollar glass of Napa Valley Merlot with my pulled pork sandwich, thanks very much.
Oh yeah, melting pot and all that stuff, isn’t life grand? Well sure, as long as it isn’t making you crazy. Literally crazy. What if your agri-rural descended grandparents filled your parents' heads with their corn-pone philosophy, to which they added all the new city philosophy, and then passed it down to you? What do you do with all that mess, to which you are no doubt adding a slew and a slurry of current day stuff? What if corn pone doesn’t mix well with caviar and trying to make it go just makes you violently ill. Well, “game over, man.” All your platitudes are belong to us. But then again, “I’ll be back.”
OK, I’m back. Let’s see if we can’t “kill two birds with one stone.” Under the best of circumstances philosophies, corn pone or otherwise, contradict. Some even are self-contradictory. They have to be evaluated case by case in any given circumstances. It’s wisdom that you’re shooting for, which some define as knowledge + experience. Furthermore, as Steve stated above, maybe faith and intuition trumps even wisdom because, after all, you’re only dealing with the dots you can see, and the dots you have seen already. The dots you will see are yet to exist, like subatomic particles they may obey the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, meaning you don’t quite know where they’ve come from or where they’re going to be, exactly. Maybe they appear and come into being at the space into which you stare at nothingness. Are you willing the dots to exist and order themselves? Are you the active creator or the passive observer? Or both? Or neither? Are you sure? Whoa dude, reality can get pretty fuzzy and yet there’s always somebody willing to tell you what to do.
Have you ever stopped to think that cautionary philosophy only works well on people who aren’t already cautious? That philosophical memes warning against deception only help the helplessly naive? That, for example, sayings promoting “Hard Work and Sweat!” are like poison to the workaholic? And that the partner to the perfectionist-promoting, Protestant work ethic, winning-divine-status-through-the-fruits-of-one’s-own-labor “pones” are actually a total contradiction to the old “the world is not fair, babe, nobody promised you anything” statement? And yet it always seems to be the same guy repeating these things back to back. “Work, work, work and you shall (not) be rewarded because the world is not fair, so follow the rules, because nice guys finish last but you should always be nice and the winner makes the rules, and by the way money is the root of all evil and something about a camel threading a needle, and just for good measure be it ever so humble there’s no place like home.” It’s a wonder we aren’t all insane.
Since we’re on the subject of insanity now, Steve Jobs may have been a genius and a leader and an innovator, but he’s also on record for a lot of other things. There’s the story of a clerk at Whole Foods finding Steve Jobs parked in a handicapped spot in his silver convertible Mercedes screaming into his cell phone “Not. Blue. Enough!” And yes, that’s an allegory. Just one more to make you completely nuts. Remember that next time you get "poned."
All I’m really asking for is some awareness, some inkling of calm compassion, perhaps a sense of humor. I don’t have a four line meme to answer all of life’s questions, although there might be a four letter word that will get you most of the way there. “Love” is a good one, but there are others. Pick one, I guess, and then stick to it because there is something to be said for consistency. In the absence of a meme I have a question: How much of your current life philosophy is based upon the post traumatic stress disorder of your ancestors? Come on, laugh, don’t think about it. It’s a joke. Geez.
-- Paul Hood, © Copyright September 2013
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