Ralph Thurston
Loving Allis Chalmers follows decades of a reluctant, meandering journey that takes the reader from the backroads of impoverished rural Idaho to the backyards of the rich and famous in resort towns just hours away. Ascetic in a hawker’s stall, Marxist in a capitalist’s guise, the author relates the subjective changes that arise when melding the incompatible. Whether weaving spare desert prose with esoteric Buddhist doctrine, ecology with existentialism, or agriculture with Greek thought, Loving Allis Chalmers is a book as rarified as its subject matter, tracing the trivial to the profound, the anecdotal to the universal with graceful and unexpected turns. No reader will go unchallenged—and no reader will go unrewarded.
Ralph Thurston lives with his wife, watercolorist Jeriann Sabin, their two cats Romeo and Tenzing, and ninety species of cutflowers on five acres in the high desert of Southeast Idaho.
Wisdom, method. Mind, hand. Ideally, the two evolve together. More than a half-century ago, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky posited that “well developed thought” arose as the child manipulated and combined real objects, and then almost simultaneously arranged similarly the words attributed to those objects. “The central moment in concept formation,” he wrote, “…is a specific use of words as functional ‘tools’.” The hand speaks to the mind, the mind to the hand—method to wisdom, wisdom to method.
Though his method was clumsy and blunt on a monumental scale, Mao spoke to this union when he exiled hundreds of thousands of scholars and professionals to the fields during China’s Cultural Revolution. The effort failed, much as a similar, simultaneous movement in the U.S. did, where counterculture enthusiasts voluntarily headed back to the land. Apparently, the schism between the sambhogakaya and the nirmanakaya is easier to recognize than to repair. Wisdom, for at least some of us, must come more easily than working with either the tools of the mind or those of the hand—to think, to feel, to understand and recognize, is simpler than both speaking and doing.
Words can come from the hand as well as the mind. We know that sign language originates in the same area of the brain as the spoken word, since the deaf who suffer brain damage in that region lose the ability to sign just as speakers lose speech. It is, perhaps, why some gestures are universal while spoken words are not, the hand being more fundamental than speech.
If the way things go together in our hands determines our internal language, then our categories and words—our tools—must in some way mimic our environment. So the mind of a child working with plants and animals will differ from that of one handling only cement, glass, plastic and steel, and the shepherd’s mind differs from the hunter’s, the woodworker’s from the steelworker’s, the academic’s from the agrarian’s. Each, accustomed to physical things going together a certain way, has a mind connecting them similarly. In this way, we routinize our paths—even when they should not be routine.
For concepts do not weld together like steel, wood does not herd like sheep—objects, physical or mental, do not necessarily respond to the patterns imposed upon them. Yet, impose those patterns we do—and so the steelworker tries to bend life as he bends steel, the woodworker’s patience fails him on more urgent materials, and the academically minded, who can shape words and concepts, has no skill in regards to the mechanical. Though the Buddhist ideal would have us practicing method in working-with-others, how do we recognize who or what exactly we are working with, when our lives and minds are so different, our categories clashing against the objects both in the other’s mind and in his world?
There is a temporal window for learning language that once closed can never be opened. “Wolf” children—those raised in the wild without language—have been taught words after having passed that age, but they are unable to learn grammar, the connecting tools that make words a language.
One wonders if a similar window doesn’t exist for more abstract tools, for concepts, meta-concepts and organizing principles that can’t be understood if not entered into before the proper age has passed. The child that does not grow up organizing and playing with ideas might have ideas just as the wolf-child has words, but he might not understand them in conjunction with other ideas, lacking the connecting principles of a higher order of thinking.
And what about Buddhahood—is there a temporal window for that, as well? Can the dharma be experienced by someone who has passed the period of learning wisdom? Can I understand that things aren’t discrete entities but related, that the self is impermanent, that nothing is satisfactory if I haven’t been “inoculated” by thought at that level during the proper period? Is the emanation body not of the world, the enjoyment not of the mind, the dharma not of the connection of the two through higher thinking and being? Do those windows close when not used—if I live too much in the mind, do I prevent myself from returning to the body? Too much in the dharma, do I keep myself from both thought and action?
Bondage, Atisha called it—rightly so. Those of us in either upaya or prajna are trapped, unfree.
