Sicily 6/19/24
Absolute value: a foreign concept to this traveler from the brave new world.
My chosen circumstances force me to consider the true value of things. How far am I willing to walk, how much weight am I willing to carry, how much wood am I willing to saw through and burn, how many thorns am I willing to get stuck with, how much of the unknown am I willing to face, to get it?
Meat and ripe fruit inspire quasi-devotional thinking (which was perhaps already apparent to you, dear reader, from my previous missives). Rice with zucchini disappoints entirely when you calculate the labor invested in the fire. A raging headache is meaningless when you need water to wash your hair and dusty feet before bed.
None of this is a matter of personal preference, rather, it is an expression of the mind/body’s natural reward system, in place for the proper delegation of one’s energy. I can see how determined and inventive I am in this environment, where the rewards are good for me, and the byproducts of my efforts are good for me. It changes my thinking on being “an addict in recovery”, that is, someone with enough humility, enough courage, to admit that their life had come to revolve around a specific and destructive reward: perhaps I was in an environment where the given rewards had no purchase with me, no meaning, and so I chose something more immediate, with destructive rewards that I was nonetheless willing to suffer for.
We “know” this, of course, we all “know” that our entire society suffers from a perversion of the evolutionary effort-reward feedback loop, because nothing requires effort and we have access to limitless reward. When I was daydreaming about fasting and sunbathing and the ocean, what made me think not even twice before renting my now-beloved rifugio, was that somewhere not terribly deep down, I knew I would never be able to move beyond the fallacious pleasures of the New World unless I left it behind for a time.
The sweet odor of burning cherry wood wafts into my room as I make a pot of Scicli beans shortly after sunrise. Cherry is the hardest wood to saw through, but the scent makes it worthwhile.
There is a greater sense of urgency with cleanliness here. Not only because water is so hard to come by, but because you sweat through all of your clothes, flies will come and make an unholy racket over crumbs, and you’ll find ants in jars that aren’t hung up on the wall. I am always sweeping, washing, wiping, and burning away the traces of my existence so that I may continue to exist in peace.
It’s a matter of arranging, and balancing. Arranging resources and balancing needs in a subtle dynamic that solves problems when they are small. (Why collect and aggregate problems and try to solve them on a bigger scale?)
Man is not actually the pleasure-seeking monster modern life has made him out to be. Man is actually quite reasonable, quite savvy, when reason and savvy are rewarded.