[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Kunstler's World Made by Hand

[Bill Totten]

Not just another book review

by Carolyn Baker

Speaking Truth to Power (March 26 2008)

A review of:  World Made by Hand: A Novel
by James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008)


"The world has become such a wicked place", she said quietly, just a
statement of fact.

"There's goodness here too".

"Where is it?"

"In all the abiding virtues. Love, bravery, patience, honesty, justice,
generosity, kindness. Beauty too. Mostly love."

"I'm afraid sometimes that we drove those things out of existence".

"No, we carry them in our hearts. They're always with us."

"I don't know what's in my heart anymore. It's too dark to see."

"Light follows darkness".


This dialog between the main character of World Made By Hand, Robert,
and his housemate-become-lover, Britney, offers a glimpse into the
anguish of those few survivors of collapse living in the small village
of Union Grove, New York in a post-petroleum world.

As I sit down to write this review, I've just finished lunch - a
generous bowl of organic broccoli slaw mixed with garbanzo beans,
tomatoes, diced turkey breast, and Caesar dressing. For dessert, a bit
of Hagen Dazs coconut sorbet chased with my twice-daily regimen of
vitamins and supplements. In a "world made by hand" I would have none of
this unless I were able to grow or raise it myself or trade something
for these items, assuming that they were even available. I would be
forced to rely on my friends and neighbors in close proximity, and they
on me, for life's fundamental necessities.

I was riveted to this stunning novel by James Howard Kunstler even as my
heart was laden with sorrow while turning every compelling page. Like
nothing I've ever read or imagined, the book takes the reader into the
smells, tastes, textures, sounds, and emotions of a post-petroleum world
devoid of electricity, media, sophisticated technology, and a plethora
of conveniences and distractions that are ubiquitous in twenty-first
century Western civilization.

Robert is a former corporate executive who has adapted reasonably well,
or so it seems, to a post-collapse world where "It was chilling to
reflect on how well the world used to work and how much we'd lost". (4)
In this world there are no cars, no rubber tires, no shopping malls, big
box stores, healthcare systems, radio, television, or paper money.
However, "Farming was back", and that was the only way people got food.
Travel in this world is about walking, riding horses, or hitching horses
to wagons with wooden wheels, and people make do by stripping everything
in sight - houses, stores, cars - anything that will provide materials
for survival.

The residents of Union Grove and the surrounding area have survived
horrible pandemics and were fortunate enough not to be living near Los
Angeles or Washington, DC when nuclear bombs went off, apparently
dealing the final blow to a tanking economy. Robert lost his wife to the
flu epidemic and a son who took off with a friend's son to "see the
world", and while Robert knows his wife is dead, he has no idea where or
how his son might be.

Union Grove is fortunate to have a doctor of sorts - Jerry, who
completed part of an internship but never received a license to practice
medicine. Much of his equipment was stripped from nearby hospitals, but
his inventory of medicine, anesthesia, and medical supplies is dicey at
best and sometimes non-existent. As with the local dentist who holds
similar credentials, opium is the substance of choice for numbing pain,
and the patient is never certain how comfortable or how agonizing a
visit to the doctor or dentist in Union Grove may prove to be, but at
least the village has one of each.

The national political system has collapsed with some figurehead
"president" ostensibly running the country from somewhere in Minnesota
and an "acting" governor of New York maintaining a lone office in the
dilapidated shell of what used to be the state capitol in Albany. All
commerce and social organization is intensely local, and almost nothing
is known of life outside Union Grove.

As I mentioned, no food is available in Union Grove unless one grows it
oneself; however, some crops, such as wheat are especially challenging
to grow due to "a persistent wheat rust in the soil that returned no
matter how you rested a field". (16) In some instances, certain fruits
and vegetables are luscious and abundant, and in other situations,
people make do with whatever is available at the time. Hints of global
warming abound amid a record-breaking summer heat wave, and we can only
speculate the degree to which climate change may be affecting the soil.

Most people have little access to electricity and generally leave their
radios on constantly just so they might know when the power is on and
when it isn't. News from electronic media is almost non-existent as are
newspapers. In fact, about the only thing that a listener might hear on
the radio is the ranting of fundamentalist Christian preachers. One or
two members of the community appear to have powerful generators that
offer a minimal and unreliable power source, but refrigeration to
prevent the spoilage of food or the decomposition of dead bodies is
unavailable.

In the summertime people fish rivers and streams that are less polluted
now that industrial society had collapsed. But no longer is fishing a
partially recreational pursuit but rather an absolute necessity. Nor can
individuals obtain new books with which to distract themselves; old ones
have to do. Likewise, "diversions like television or recreational
shopping" are no longer available. As is often the case when societies
collapse, Robert is now freer to pursue his hobbies, and he has created
a woodworking workshop on his front porch and has greatly improved his
musical skills with daily practice of the fiddle. Moreover, Union Grove
survivors are forced to live physically active lives which involved
intense gardening and walking. Theirs is not a world of couch potatoes
and the sedentarily obese.

Early on in the novel Kunstler sets up a dichotomy between a large group
of newcomers of a religious sect, the New Faith group, and the mostly
non-religious residents of Union Grove. Eccentric, austere, and
proselytizing, the New Faithers at first appear to be adversarial
newcomers but over time prove to be invaluable allies of the community.
In the absence of an official justice system, the values and survival
skills of the group are useful to Robert, who eventually becomes mayor,
in containing the barbaric lawlessness and sadistic violence of a local
pot dealer who could only be described as a quasi-Hells Angels, trailer
trash outlaw.

At one point Robert and a half-dozen other Union Grove residents journey
by horseback to Albany to retrieve a boat and crew who had disappeared
after sailing down the Hudson from their village. There, they discover
incomprehensible corruption and violence so egregious that shots are
exchanged, and Robert is forced defend his life by shooting someone who
had fired at him. Hardly the utopia hailed by some proponents of
ecovillage living, Kunstler's post-petroleum world is volatile and often
savage. It clearly behooves anyone who wishes to protect herself and
loved ones to own and sometimes carry a weapon.

While Union Grove is a village in which people still know how to party,
make music, and dance long after the world around them has collapsed,
and although they are incredibly resourceful in distilling mood-altering
beverages and cooking up scrumptious, festive dishes, one cannot read
Kunstler's exquisite description of them without feeling the gray pallor
of sorrow that pervades their community. More than once while riveted to
the saga I could not put down, my throat constricted, and my eyes
moistened.

Not infrequently in and around Union Grove, insanity and suicide
prevail. "Depression" was a word the residents of Union Grove had
dropped, according to Robert, because "despair was a spiritual condition
that was as real to us as the practical difficulties we struggled with
in everyday life". (17) And on another occasion he states, "I tried to
avoid nostalgia because it could destroy you. I was alone now."

In terms of an immediate family, Robert was alone, but in ways that were
both poignant and lovely, he was held in a community of survivors and
friends who assisted each other with dogged loyalty and a quality of
compassion that neither cynicism nor despondency could erode. The spirit
of cooperation demonstrated by the Union Grove survivors was stunning -
so much so that the reader must acknowledge it as one of the most
desirable byproducts of collapse.

I didn't need to begin the first chapter of World Made By Hand to be
moved to tears. That began when I opened the book to a quote by my
favorite poet, Rilke, immediately following the dedication:

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
Your path struggles on through incomprehensible
Mankind. All the more futile perhaps
For keeping its own direction,
Keeping on toward the future,
Toward what has been lost.

Every time that I have allowed myself to deeply and graphically imagine,
without restraint or rationalization, a post-collapse world, I
experience a bone-marrow sorrow and a palpable sense of loss that defy
words. Jim Kunstler has captured those emotions masterfully in World
Made By Hand. In fact, this novel provides extraordinary reinforcement
for an ongoing theme to which I've devoted a great deal of writing in
the past year, namely, how can we possibly expect to prepare ourselves
to live in a post-petroleum, post-collapse world by attending only to
the stockpiling of food, water, land, and skills without emotional and
spiritual preparation?

How can we not acquire the tools necessary for navigating the emotions
of sorrow, despair, overwhelm, grief, rage, terror, and yes, clinical as
it may sound, depression? What will give us meaning? What will console
us? What will allow us to keep going when any sense of purpose has
eluded us? And perhaps most importantly, how will we communicate with
each other? How will we skillfully and compassionately speak our truth
and listen deeply to each other? What specific skills in these areas do
we need to learn and practice right now?

Personally, I find it difficult to believe that the residents of Union
Grove, or any other post-collapse community, could function as
harmoniously as they do in the novel without transforming the
interpersonal land mines all of us have incorporated from living in the
soul-murdering milieu of industrial civilization.

These questions are not addressed in World Made By Hand or any of the
few fiction and non-fiction works so far published on collapse, each one
of them underscoring the urgency of my own forthcoming book The
Spirituality Of Collapse: Restoring Life On A Dying Planet.

So I thank Jim Kunstler for his extraordinary novel, not only because he
is bolstering my commitment to my own work, but because he has provided
us with an incredibly well-written depiction of the demise of
civilization and what that has already begun to mean and will mean for
all of us and for future generations. At the same time, World Made By
Hand offers a desperately needed dose of reality and an exhilarating
reverence for the kind of world that human beings were meant to create
and cherish. After all, light follows darkness.

_____

Welcome to Speaking Truth To Power - a website owned and managed by
Carolyn Baker. Carolyn is an adjunct professor of history, a former
psychotherapist, an author, and a student of mythology and ritual. This
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