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Foundation(alism)

10/21/2011

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It is now 21 October 2011. From late November 2010 we find an entry about clearing out the burnt-down barn's foundation. The post concluded with this sanguine prognostication:  "[The foundation] will support another barn.  We plan to build it in March 2011." We might re-phrase it this way: "by April 2011 a new barn will be sitting on that old foundation."

Upon what was this sunny belief based, nearly a year ago? Or, to pose a different but perhaps better question: why did I believe it?

The first question assumes a particular view of how knowledge works, known as foundationalism. When wondering about the justifiability of a belief, the foundationalist wonders what other beliefs lie "beneath" it, giving it basis. If we find, at the bottom of the heap, a belief that stands on its own legs--such as a "self-evident" belief--then the believer is justified in holding that belief way up on top. (Whether that belief happens to be "true" is a related, but different, question from whether it is "justified.") So take this belief: "today is 21 October 2011." Holding it up are beliefs about one's grasp on the passage of days, and about the accuracy of the calendar. Supporting those are beliefs about the reliability of those in charge of determining what day and time it indeed is (I favor the National Institute of Standards and Technology time service hosted at the University of Colorado-Boulder), and of one's own senses...etc. If one eventually arrives at some self-justifying belief...well, then there you have it.

Foundationalism has issues. Is there really a bottom to the stack, or are we instead stuck with "turtles all the way down"? And one person's self-justifying belief ("I think therefore I am") is another's self-delusion (crankily proposed by dear Neitzsche in the opening salvos of a late work). Well, some philosophical problems are solved, and others are just gotten over, so let's get over this one and consider the second question-why did I believe a new barn would be sitting there come April? Did I believe it because I thought it justified? Or true? Or did I believe it for other reasons? If you'd found yourself in the clear cool light of a late November evening, auguring a new barn...why would you have done so?

Let's move on to this important fact: IT'S OCTOBER 2011 AND THERE IS NO BARN, either on that old foundation or elsewhere here at 149 Murray Road. So...what about that belief of 11 months ago? Would I have been better off without it?


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Moving

10/19/2011

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There was a lot of build-up to the move. Vehicular options considered, sifted and selected. Belongings sorted and parceled out as their merits dictated. Family and friends lovingly conscripted. We loaded on a couple of days in late June, then set off into two days of blurry driving, followed by a full day of hazy unloading in three different locales.  I've moved several times, and clearly recall how liberating it was when I could fit everything into my Ford Aspire. Now, though, moving is decidedly limbo-like: one must die (or feel like it) to get there, into that quintessentially neither-here-nor-there experience. As others before and after us, we made it more or less intact, and none the worse for what we left behind. Sliding through it in a short slide show seems like the right representation. The panorama pix (the *good* ones) are by my brother, Eric Knisley.
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Asparagus

10/19/2011

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Last December I explained that we would be starting 1000 little asparagettes and driving them to North Carolina to transplant in spring 2011.  Here's a flat of them, all ferny and radiant, ready to roll.  Asparagus made sense.  It's a perennial, so could settle itself in while we returned to Maine for a few months.  It will be at least two and maybe three years before we harvest it, which is alright because we are planting ourselves for the long haul too--no rush.  Organic certification will take a couple of years at any rate, since there was fertilizer applied on the land within the last three years.  And we liked the idea of those delicate green fronds waving over the land...a flag, a signal, a stake.

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And so we pack them, several-by-several.  One of the revelations of gardening, for me, has been how unexpectedly tough seedlings can be.  They can be damnably delicate too...but often they'll take quite a bit more rough-housing that one would expect, given their puny appearance.  Eventually, all 1000 (more or less) were packed into a set of shelves built to fit into our farm vehicle: a steel blue 1989 Volkswagen Vanagon.  They bent their stems without complaint, and chugged along 1100 noisy miles in relative darkness, to arrive in North Carolina waving bright as before.  Impressive, really.  An example to the rest of us.

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Here's the aforementioned Vanagon, with Ed, Phoebe, and somebody's U-Haul for scale.  We had our own pull-behind.  Ed is the kind of guy who sees little sense in buying something he could build himself.  It will usually cost less, and all or surely most of its quirks will be known ahead of time.  And the time on it could well have been far more egregiously wasted on some other damned thing.  The trip was about as epic as our other Maine-to-North Carolina voyages in recent years--Phoebe calls them the "nighttime adventures," as they begin around 7:00 pm and conclude as evening approaches the following day.  Easy for her to say, snuggled in her carseat and dreaming of flying as we roll, roll, roll down Interstate 81.

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Family arrived to help, which was good because prodding flats full of hundreds of asparagus seedlings with one's toes in the rain upon cold clay North Carolina ground wasn't getting us anywhere. First, we double-dug the clay, visions of two beds with roomily-planted plants giving way rapidly to one cozily-planted bed.  We scootched along the ground stuffing seedlings into dirt for as long as our chilled fingers could manage. Romantic work, eh?  Shown here are Ed and big brother Eric demonstrating a little manly pride in having once again gotten something done. 

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