Rustic

Clearly my interest in the rustic comes from some misguided distaste for contemporary culture, some deluded sense of fictional nostalgia and my unwillingness to agree tacitly with the world. That is all to say, it is both good and it is bad and that it just is the case. And I'm happy that it is the case because I like. It's a vicious cycle without the teeth.

My rusticity (you may not believe that that is actually a word, tho' it is) has come out in previous posts already, specifically the one about furniture and well...the existence of things. Let me introduce this next rustic topic with the caveat (much like many of le messanger's) that I am not saying older is better just that different is worth a try. That it is always worth wiggling oneself out from under the thumb of whatever is easy or habitual, to get the distance to reflect.

None of this however is the idea. The idea, one of my pet ideas, has a lot to do with rusticity, with the past and with a difficult. (I can't get over the fact that ever time I say rusticity that I am not saying 'of or like Russ' but 'of or like the rural -symbolically the old or out of date', indeed I'd be happy to think I was saying both, cause I am.) I have been thinking a lot about camping recently, about the novelty of it and how it was invented directly after the things that make up camping stopped being essential. Basically people in the West were living in tents in the woods and cooking using camp fires. And then when they stopped, people kept doing it because it was fun to 'rough it' (to use the title of Mark Twain's book about his travels in the West).

My idea here is that people caught on right quick that there was some disconnect happening in modern culture and they created (an albeit commodified form) of keeping some of that one with the land ness alive.

For me one of the greatest expressions of this is cooking. It is cooking because cooking takes time, it takes part in the landscape and the surroundings and it takes work and well...it is essential. That is, cooking especially in cast iron and on top of fires. Basically what I mean is blunt versions of everything that is so meticulously crafted in our modern world. Blunt, but also essential. The basic elements. Heat and a thing to take up with heat and hopefully regulate it and the stuff that goes in the pan for cooking.

So cook a whole beast or a whole potato. Go out camping and do the same over a fire with a flimsy metal and wood spit concoction. There are regulations that makes these things harder than is good. But I think it is worth our time to be reminded of what's around us on the earth and in time.

*Only little addendumy side note I want in on this post is that I realize that I am calling up a past that was already itself full of a huge set of advancements that made the world easier and already thought of itself as partaking in the glorious benefits of industry. That is to say, it is cultural nostalgia in its purest form because it is accessing a sort of cultural ghost transmission...not say...how they did it in the 1480's, but how they did it in the 1880's. I, however, will not be daunted by infinite regression because I've read enough philosophy and postmodern literature to know the sort of trap that creates for you. One, which quite frankly, is not easy to return from and probably doesn't give you any 'allegory of the cave' type enlightenments anyways. Or it does and I'm just too lazy.