Everyday Systems: shovelglove: message 275 of 649

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--- Chris Highcock <chrishighcock@...> wrote:

> 
> 
> I have not contributed recently - bit of a family
> crisis diverted me. My Mum was rushed into hosptial
> with a ruptured bowel. She is ok now, but my
> parents are about 225 miles away so visiting the
> hospital was a bit time consuming!

Welcome back! Glad to hear Mum is well.

> 
> Anyway, while chatting to my Dad the other night we
> ended up looking through a load of old family papers
> - birth and marriages certificates etc. On my
> grandmother's birth certificate I found out that my
> great grandfather's profession was a "labourer at
> coke ovens".

That's fascinating. I think most of us, however
sedentary our professions, will find that it doesn't
take many generation's digging to find a farmer,
factory worker, or miner. My dad actually grew up on a
small low tech farm. He's distinctly unromantic about
it and was happy to get off, but my uncle, who took it
over from my grandfather, loved it and quit only very
reluctantly, after it had become completely
uneconomical due to its small scale. He got a desk job
in the local town hall and can't believe how easy it
is, that people are payed more than he ever made as a
farmer to do "essentially nothing."

> 
> Needless to say, this transformed my next SG
> session, with me now visualising life in the
> 1890s/1900s shovelling around the coke ovens....

There's a crazy crackpot science theory by a
well-credentialed but thoroughly mad scientist called
Rupert Sheldrake called "Morphic Resonance," which, in
a nutshell, holds that the laws of nature are not
fixed and eternal but evolved, that they're more
"habits" of nature. The more times something is done,
from crystal formation to the Sunday crossword, the
easier, more natural it becomes. So maybe your great
grandfathers years of shoveling have cut a habitual
groove for you to tap into...

http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Morphic/index.html

Warning: this guy *is* crazy. 

> 
> If I keep digging round the archives I might find
> the ancestral lumberjack, and those 14 minutes will
> never be the same again!

Morphic resonance or no, it is a kind of communion.
We're so cut off from our ancestors nowadays, such
temporal provincials, for all our cosmopolitan
internationalism, that we could sorely use a dose,
even if it's just in our exercise routine. Good luck!

Reinhard