Where are the windmills really located?

Image via Wikipedia

While watching the Tour de France last night, I couldn't help but notice the negativity of the English commentator's remarks about windmills. I find these modernistic additions to the French countryside totally in keeping with the beauty of the fields, rivers and forests that backgrounded the presence of these sustainable producers of electricity. He seemed to think that they were a blot on the landscape. I'm certain that most French people at least would disagree.

Let's take a step back from these controversial machines and look at them from the perspective of someone whose perception is yet to be befuddled by the vagaries of time, eg, a child's perspective. In the middle of a field is a substantial white pole grounded on to a concrete foundation in the middle of a field. The three blades are formed with precision and rotate with unnerving precision and silence. To be sure, these devices are large and imposing, but seem to operate with grace and ease, with minimal sensuous interference in the way of noise, unsightliness, smell and are of seemingly little or no danger to animal or man.

So what's the fuss? Why do some people insist on objecting to this progressive development of technology? Surely compared to the alternative here we have an attractive if minor contributor to the energy needs of a modern society with it's great cities and urban populations. Compared with the alternative, coal-fired, nuclear or gas generated plants, these modern variants of an ancient theme seem to be infinitely preferable.

At various times I have come across several types of power generators. My first experience was while driving in the La Trobe Valley east of Melbourne. There, electricity has been generated by brown coal fired generators for over half a century. My first impression was one of being overwhelmed by the magnificence of this huge plane, with coal being ripped from the adjoining open-cut mine. Strangely beautiful until one is confronted by the intensity of the noise generated as a by product, the scarring of the landscape, a feeling that one was in the presence of a power much greater than myself. It was almost like a homage to an idol of modernity.

I had similarly ambivalent feeling towards the nuclear reactors that I saw in the countryside and cities of both Switzerland and France. A strange mixture of beauty and ugliness that is somehow overwhelming. The ugliness is intensified only when one becomes aware of the by products of these relatively calm constructions. This repulsion is an afterimage only available to me once I consider that the waste material is highly active, burning and poisonous for many years after wards. Only once I realise that these devices produce such intractable danger and are really a front for weapons production in any case, does the beauty of these constructions diminish.

Hydro electricity is another case in point. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric plant is built in the Australian Alps, taking advantage of the kinetic energy of the snow that falls there over winter. The building of this a scheme has a legendary aspect in Australian culture as it employed so many male immigrants and gave rise to many marriages between these newcomers and the peoples of the surrounding districts. It was the harnessing of this human resource which ultimately made the harnessing of the power residing latent in the natural resource available to all.

Still, the intensity of the construction in the natural domain is quite dominant. The concentration of such a large plant detracts in a sense while adding to it. The whole area has been transformed into a built human environment. I don't mind this, but still, the magnitude of this project unbalances the subtleties of nature. Nevertheless, it still remains preferable to the previous examples in all impacts upon the senses. It is just, simply put, aesthetically a better choice.

While I was in the south of France holidaying with my then partner and our son, I was curious to see the windgenerators that had been recently built in the area. I noticed them in the distance and drove up and down country lanes in an effort to get as close as we could. From every angle they rose majestically above the bare undulating hills of the region. 

When we finally manage to stop the car close enough to appreciate these splendid machines, spinning slowly in the breeze emanating from the Mediterranean, we all stood in silence in the field with the blades peacefully rotating with nothing but the gentlest of low frequency sounds, in harmony with the impact that these machines had on the surrounding landscape and environment: minimal.

So, what exactly was this modern day Don Quixote tilting at? The windmills before him in his immediate field of vision, or some romantic notion of nature inside his head, where human activity is forbidden. An idealistic Garden of Eden that ensures the continuing destruction of the environment elsewhere, a peaceful solution or another bomb factory?

Human society is always faced with choices in how to proceed. As Hegel correctly noted, for every human act there is both intended as well as unintended consequences. Modern society requires electricity generation to ensure its survival. Life without it for the greater than six billion inhabitants of the world is well nigh near impossible without any sort of major conflict or catastrophe. Surely it is time to get the windmills out of our heads and into reality along with other renewable forms of generation capacity.

The change over from out-moded forms to the newer and sustainable forms is a chance for great economic expansion and development in the next fifty or so years, an opportunity to reclaim landscapes lost to the barbarity of early forms of electricity generation, making way for a peaceable, quiet and gainfully employed world, and an end to the over centralization of society in general. 

Previous forms may have promised something like this, but can now be seen as having been an aberration in the direction of the human environmental interface. Hopefully, we are moving into a sustainable, democratic and peaceful future with an environmental balance in which human social development and conservation of nature can live side by side. 

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Fact stranger than fiction? Thank you A. Conan Doyle

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The adventures of Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr Watson provided me with much enjoyment once a upon a time. I remember being struck by the conversation between Sherlock and Watson; fact is stranger than fiction. At that point I gained an insight into reality and a faith in reality that has never left me in doubt that there is indeed a world out there, a world were everything is not always as it seems.

So cop this one all you whale and dolphin lovers out there; crows are in the same group of intelligence as these sea going mammals. That right, the humble crow can consistently escape from a cage when provided with nothing other than a piece of wire from which to design and furnish a key. No instruction or prompting. Just a cage with a lock and a bit of wire. The crow can get out of captivity, desires freedom above all else. How human is a crow? Not much,. Perhaps it's better to ask, how crow-like is the human?

Facticity of this research driven 'scientific' type is indeed strange, but Conan Doyle's character himself was fictional. His fictionality in fact was so powerful that people still walk up and down Baker Street in London looking for evidence of his existence. The same, too, is true of Verona's most famous virginal heroine, Juliette, which sees hordes of people looking for the balcony where she was seduced by the amorous young Romeo. Indeed, in these cases and many others, fictional reality threatens the stability of the factual world.

The difficulty for me is that reality has been so written by the fiction of scientific fact, that sometimes I loose sight of what is right before my very eyes. I can get so lost in the situation, denatured by the unending investigations and discourse that has become part of my thought processes often unwittingly, that I could very well be taken off by a false signal like the television set while the toast is burning. My focus and senses are distracted from what could be an actual threat to my well being and a potential fire hazard, to something else that is totally unnecessary but foregrounded against a background of expectation and desire: Who is going to win the match tonight?

The beauty of fictional characters is that they are very much drawn from the historical facticity that has given rise to their creation. At some other time when there is an intuitive convergence of events that coincide in some indirect way with the original characters milieu, suddenly that fiction becomes foregrounded in a totally new background, which also drags forward from the past the historical background of the times that it was created in.

An example in point is Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Here we have a stage character who has risen to power, and overcome by hubris brings about his own downfall. It was written around the time of the fall from grace of the elected Athenian oligarch Pericles. It was no wonder then, that when President George Bush started to rule by fear and hubris, the name of Oedipus came to mind. In an act of synchronicity I thought to myself, 'Yes, Oedipus Bush', only to find that when I did a Google search on those keywords, I was confronted with pages and pages of entries returning to my search request.

So, fact can be stranger than fiction at times and fictional characters more real than those we encounter in everyday life at other times. The problem is one of language. Fiction is a fact of human society and has at times been just as prevalent in the factual world of science as at the local book club. reality can only be grasped through a process of discourse, and yet discourse itself may fog the perception of any human, scientists included. Facts exists through a particular historical consensus at a given point in society. Today the sky is grey and the air still where I am. I don't think there are many who would argue with me on that (though there are always some).

So, just accept that crows, dolphins and whales are in a way equals. They are not that removed from us. They also at the same time very different from us and each other. Scientific fact can determine reality or it can obscure it. It can do this like any other form of human enquiry. To the extent to which it clarifies or obscures it does so through the complexities of language.

Scientific fact is as prone to historical context as fiction, while fiction has the possibility of remaining real for a much longer period of time, and in a variety of historical milieux. All human knowledge requires a context in which to be read. It is possible to read things out of their context, but do so at your own peril. While there may be such a thing as concrete knowledge, anyone who thinks they have a grasp on that knowledge is a potentially dangerous person indeed.

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Looking for similarities amongst the differences.

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It is an adult thing to live in a world of difference. Since childhood we have grown accustomed to differentiating objects in the world and naming them. Of course, this is a purely human occupation and part of our learning about the world we live in. In the end, though, we risk losing the ability to see things clearly for what they are, as this process of differentiation separates each object in our field of perception into individual elements.

A child perceives the world as a whole field of moving and stationary objects. There is little differentiation at first. The first foregrounding of an object is possibly its mother's smiling face followed by the teat presented as a source of oral satisfaction and food. Still, at this preverbal stage the objects are yet to be named and exist in the foreground against a background constructed to varying degrees in a way deemed suitable for the raising of a child.

   

Almost immediately the child is introduced to its mother tongue, and to  the process of the linguistic linking of objects in its sensory field with names learned both in isolation and connection with one another. This learning continues well into adulthood for many, as every more complex objects become integrated into the matrix of language which go to make up each persons vocabulary.

The integration of these words into this matrix becomes knotted with the increasing differentiation between the individual words. Also, this knotting is accentuated in when one considers the individualism prevalent in complex late-capitalist societies, where each persons vocabulary is pitted against the next persons in a battle for linguistic superiority and acceptance. This process is a dialectical one between fractured individuals living in disparate communities each jockeying for placement and meaning within a their community and each community positioning itself for access to scarce resources.

Rather than seeing this as an historically contrived evolution, post-modernists argued instead that this was in someway the natural state of affairs. That language was a process that constructed meaning through the differànce amongst words, assuming from Saussure onwards, that words are learned against each other, that an object is defined as this and not that. Words are learned as discreet units relating to discreet objects and only later against other objects. They are just as commonly related to similar objects. Post (post) modernism or the return to the future of the modernist impulse recognises this.

 

I passed onto my children language in the form making connections between words and pictures of objects as well as through reading picture books to them. Words and narrative were related to them and to a visual representation of what they signified. In going out amongst the real world, the children would spontaneously practice asking, Car? while pointing at a variety of automobiles, or Cat? while pointing at a small dog on a leash. No that's a doggie, I would say in reply, or yes! that's a car. Anyone who has parented a child knows the routine which is both rewarding and at times tiring.

 

 A similar effect can be observed through the learning of narrative. Imagine a child running out dressed as a fairy complete with a magic wand and a tiara. Here, a cluster of words go together to make a fairy. The fairy is not made against goblins or superheroes. In fact the child is likely to quiz an adult 'What do I look like, Daddy?' confirming for the child that he or she has got the cluster of meaning right. If a Superman appeared discretion would be called for if the child insisted on being a fairy. I've never seen such an occurrence but I suppose it is possible. 

 

Once the language matrix is formed, however, in all its complexity and in social competition with siblings and peer groups, a process of differentiation appears to take place with the way these words are stored. Similar objects become isolated from each other and differànce becomes an operational function of the way words are used. This is a margarine container and that is a plastic storage container. The tree outside is alive while the wooden desk is dead. The matrix has integrated differentiation within its structure and blinds the body to the similarities between the containers both being plastic and the tree and the desk as both being made out of wood.

 

When I awoke this morning I started to think of similarities between the objects in my sensory field. The sun is warm like me. It is a body that throws off heat just like my body does.  It is rises every morning and sets at night, it begins and ends just like a story, and just as my body is bound to do. When it sets it goes somewhere else just as I will when I am gone. 

 

The tree outside of my window has branches and I also have limbs. Through its limbs flow a fluid just like a fluid flows through my limbs. I recognise it through its similarity to my body. It is alive. So too is the sun which is full of fire as I am full of heat. It is irrelevant to me what the source of that heat is and how hot it is. To me the suns rays caress my skin as if they were emanating from another body close to mine. I don't care how far away it is. That is not for me. I am not a scientist.

Once out of bed I logged into my Facebook account. Somebody was full of this post-modernist difference asking me to see that men and women are different, begging me really. Well, I would have thought that was self-evident I wrote in reply. Gender hatred is based on this differentiation. So too is racism and any other form of hatred, this desire to see difference amidst overwhelming similarity. Hatred in based on this impulse to neglect the similarities in favour of differences. 

 

The knotting of words becomes a knotting of the body, a posture full of anger towards the objects of the world, with muscular energy displaced towards objects outside of itself, either towards externalities or the inner self, resulting in self-hatred and loathing. There are differences between men and women as was written, but the similarities are overwhelming, the variations slight.  We are human. Of course the differences have to recognized and tolerated because of the similarities and not in spite of them.

 

The birds were singing this morning. So, too, was I. I felt we were both singing for similar reasons. It was a beautiful sunny winter's morning. The birds were expressing there joy at a new day bodily in the same way that my body was expressing joy. They seemed less inhibited about their singing than I did perhaps, but nonetheless, we were both honouring the warmth of the sun. We were behaving similarly. I am able to think of this because they too share a body like mine, a body that moves in the world and seeks shelter in a storm and some food in the morning. There is of course one big difference of course. I only wish I could fly.

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Living in the Here and Now.

So, now I'm on the money. If I can crack this I can crack anything. It's a cold winter's night here, and right now it's peaceful and quiet. I've just returned from a bus ride home after having dinner with my youngest son and his mum.

 

All the way home I couldn't help thinking of an earlier post where I'd inadvertently written pantechnicon instead of panopticon. Well, it's all Greek to me. I must have got Anthony Giddens' 'Juggernaut of Modernity' confused with Michel Foucault's guard towers that keep watch over an imprisoned populace. A simple error really, if one considers that I'm writing these reflections off the top of my head.

But that was all before. Now I'm here at home out of the cold. As soon as I enetered my tiny bungalow, I turned on the heater and sat down and checked my Facebook accounts. Nothing of interest. And now I'm here typing away to an unknown audience who is perhaps going to read this at some time in the future. Already I'm finding it quite difficult to tell you exactly what is happening right now.

 

First of all, my bum is sore already. I do not have my glasses on and so am struggling to read what I write as I write it. My shoulders are soreish and I notice that I feel a little sad right this very minute. Ernst Tölle would no doubt be proud of me. I'm not sure exactly what he'd be proud of as I haven't read any of his books on the subject apart from the titles. In any case, all this information is always already there in the here and now to the extent that I am recalling this passed memory into the present moment as I type.

 

Theodor Adorno would also be proud of me being proud of him as I think I have used one of his terms when in fact I'm not quite sure whether I have or not. Now, the above terms  are no doubt contributing to the nodal complexity that this post will make to the web. I haven't posted it yet, but nevertheless feel that perhaps it will one day be read and just maybe spread through a variety of nodal points on its way to being read. I think that this post my be rapidly moving to prove Karl Marx's point that philosophy is indeed an impoverished form of communication.

Reflective philosophy certainly is to the extent that all I am in fact doing while reflecting is just looking back into what has already been out there. I am leaving the now to reflect on what has been so that what has been becomes present again albeit in a different form. I try to think of what might  have been or imagine what might be. It is a romantic and idealistic notion in the worst possible way, and usually ends in either resentment for past failings attributed to another person, place or thing,  or conversely fear of the future. Alternatively I may either sentimentalize the past or in dreaming idealize the future. Whatever,  reflection is an impulse away from the world, turning my back on it to wallow in my revenge on reality as I escape from it, whether it be of a positive or negative emotion deriving either my from recall or imagination.

I can't get out of this trap. Reflecting on the here and now can only occur if I first escape from it. If I truly want to live in it then all I need to do is to read the title of Tölle's book and then to live as if by example. As soon as I read what was written I'd be escaping from my here and now into that of the author's which was probably written to the future in any case as the author projected imaginatively into the hard nosed realm of making a profit from his book, of satisfying the editorial staff, and of the well earned holiday he would reward himself and his family with when he had finished his labour.

Oh well. Perhaps I've just punctured another hot air balloon. I always was the clumsy type. The problem seems to me quite complex, but the solution rather simple: Live each day as a self-contained unit, refusing to think about anything that happened the previous day or that will possibly occur tomorrow. I certainly would need to avoid either regretting or glorifying the past nor to worry about or fret about the future. As a rather philosophical old boss of mine once said to me, 'Don't worry Peter, it might never happen.'

  

Anyday I like, I can choose to live in the problem or live in the solution. The solution is acceptance of what I cannot change about the present moment, coupled with the courage to change what I can. The only thing I need to work out is what can and cannot be changed. I cannot change the past and the future has not yet arrived.

 

Perhaps the solution then is to just enjoy each moment to the best of my ability and to share this with someone else so that just perhaps there will be someone else out there who is able to share this path of acceptance and joyful participation in the present.

 

Who knows, writing this was fun so perhaps reading it can be as well.

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