Musings - The Diagonal Homestead: A Theory

 

    We who live in modern times are no strangers to verticality. Our skyscrapers and ladders of success. Our goal to "aim high" or at the very least propel ourselves "upwards and onwards". We are asked to scale mountains, at least figuratively, upwards, upwards, while postponing the horizontal pleasures of napping by the babbling brook. 

    The vertical is achievement. The horizontal is stagnancy - according to verticality culture. But what's wrong with a nap? What's wrong with curling up with baby and cooing, singing, laughing? What's so terrible about feeling the cool earth at your back while watching constellations spiral overhead throughout the night? 

    As it often does, art teaches humanity a third option. Puppetry shows us that the most aesthetically radical moments for human beings (though physically unattainable) are diagonals. These movements cannot be sustained by human actors or dancers for more than a moment. Diagonals are not sideways motions; they are cattywampus, awry, and profoundly playful. The diagonal is a potent and promising opposition to the verticality of our culture. Puppets can hover in this remarkable space.

    Peter Schumann, founder and director of the Bread and Puppet Theater, embraced diagonality as a message. "Diagonals are created from the leaning power of....verticals." A falling tree. A shooting star. These cannot occur without being on a continuum of change. 

    "The vertical is the exceptional human predicament, the up and forward striding ambition that manufactures history and warfare. The diagonal....is our common human fate, the hard to sustain in-between - life, neither up nor down."

    The diagonal needs to be held up or it will come crumbling down. But for every downside, there is an upside. "The diagonal is on the verge of collapse yet always containing the possibility of uprising." The diagonal also has a bright side, the opportunity to be uplifting.

    So imagine the puppet, he is suspended in the air, neither vertical, nor horizontal. He is diagonal. He could go either way. Is he injured/falling? Or is he raising himself up? While he is momentarily diagonal, neither up nor down, we have only questions.

    What does this have to do with homesteading? Farming, tending hens or goats, and canning jam seem to have little to do with this lofty idea. But in a world whose political and financial success hinges on complete social verticality in the form of dependence on corporations and governments to provide the products we need, homesteaders leaning toward food growing, children's education, food processing, and sustainable power production at home become a compelling power that questions and challenges both the verticality (earn more/have more) and the horizonality (producing none of what's desired or needed) of society. 

    Homesteaders ARE diagonals. Homesteaders are not eliminating consumption; they are simply not consuming from the same feeding trough as corporate consumers. And this is not simply another form of verticality (consume here OR there), because while they consume, they also produce. The system leans, not completely vertical, not completely horizontal, but somewhere between. The homesteader is the cattywampus citizen, leaning away from vertical dependence but not with an opposite and absolute goal of horizontal independence, but instead to live a natural and interdependent life: magically diagonal.

    Permaculture is a prime example of diagonality. Vertical farming takes linear actions for optimum production results - and it doesn't really seem to care what methods it has to use to get those. Those practicing permaculture techniques are not opposed to high production for increased food security, but the vertical climb that leads to desertification of land (think Dust Bowl) and practices that require poisonous chemicals in order to grow "nutritious" food is rejected. The vertical practice is kicked in the shins; vertical farming falls over. But farming, itself, is caught on the diagonal, and it has a chance to rise anew with more sustainable, healthy production and restoration of flora and fauna. Permaculture brings farming back into possibility. 

    Just as Bread and Puppet Theater grew out of the concern with U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and social and political issues of the 1960s, the draw to homesteading in the 21st century addresses (directly or indirectly) issues around children's education, family life, food safety and security, generation and use of energy. Rather than focus on the vertical life's obsession with commodities, the diagonal life embraces process and experimentation. The cycles of nature and human life are not just allowed but celebrated, and it is well understood that there is some navigating and dancing going on. It's not a vertical climb as we have been asked to believe. Life is playful and full of possibility as well as pitfalls. Homesteading is brave and askew and cattywampus. 

    Diagonals ask questions and are willing, like water, to flow around the obstacles and let them be part of the landscape, to learn from the land we tend and others who tend it. The gateway drugs of garden and chickens leads to goats. Diagonals grow not up or down but out, around, and all over the place. And it's all just glorious possibility.