Saving, Salving, Salvaging
Hey everyone. Thanks for your patience as I meant to finish and send this since last Saturday. I hope it hits at the right time for you.
Blessings on you who are humble and lowly! The earth will be yours. (Matthew 5:5)
Maybe we’re best / close to the ground. (Over the Rhine, “Faithfully Dangerous”)
Around age ten or eleven, whichever was the height of knobby knees and revolutionary zeal, I got a hold of a slim book with a blue and yellow cover called 50 Ways to Save the Earth. I believed we could do it. I begged my parents to put an empty milk carton in the toilet tank to conserve water. I sent away for the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) sticker with the panda. I squinted up at the sky and wondered about ozone holes. We were smack dab in the 1990s wave of environmentalism. Greta Thunberg came blazing onto the scene a little later while I was living in France as a university student and by then my interests had shifted from scientific inquiry to philosophy and literature, but I do remember the lightning-rod quality of that student movement and feeling a shiver of kinship. One of those moments where you wonder what life might have been like if you’d chosen a different path.
save. (v.) c. 1200, saven, "to deliver from some danger; rescue from peril, bring to safety," also "prevent the death of;" also "to deliver from sin or its consequences; admit to eternal life; gain salvation," from Old French sauver "keep (safe), protect, redeem," from Late Latin salvare "make safe, secure," from Latin salvus "safe" (from PIE root *sol- "whole, well-kept").1
Throughout my years as a teacher thereafter, I was lucky enough to teach all kinds of things that pointed to human awakening. I stumbled out of Socrates’ cave with students about a dozen years in a row. We examined shifts of world power in Thucydides. We wondered about the Forms, and forms of French verbs. All along, my love of the natural world hummed along underneath, sustained, emerging more obviously from time to time when a walk outside with a fellow faculty member led to the discovery of goldenrod galls, or students found a toad to examine during poetry readings in the rain garden. I found that life was less prescribed and straightforward, more wild and improvised. It wasn’t so much 50 Ways to Save the Earth as One Thousand and One Nights where we were hoping that the stories we told every day would keep ourselves alive. (You would not believe how much is quietly at stake in a suburban high school.) It was hard work, low to the ground. But it was good work. Even under the monotone of light fluorescent, we found Life transcendent.
Then that Life too came to an end. It’s a story for another time (with a backyard fire and a bottle of wine). Suffice to say, it was an End.
salve. (v.1), "to apply medicinal or sacramental ointment to," Middle English salven, from Old English sealfian "anoint (a wound) with salve," from Proto-Germanic *salbojanan (source also of Dutch zalven, Old Frisian salva, German salben, Gothic salbon "to anoint"), from the root of salve (n.).2
Most of us are unpracticed in endings. They are especially difficult when our work has become intertwined with larger ideas about Making a Difference in the world. And that is where At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine comes in. After following Dougald’s podcast and substack for a year, I finally bought his book and read it. He had been in climate work, and I in education; but we had both come to an End of worlds as we knew them. After I finished the book, I wrote to him straight away. Thank you. Your book amplified voices that have been whispering in the back of my head for some time. It was a kind of salve to my questioning soul, as endings have a way of making us fling but why around in a desperate kind of way. Helpfully, Dougald offers four kinds of work in the ruins to consider for starters:
What good can be salvaged from the ruins of the world that is ending? What are the gifts that we are able to carry with us?
What good must be mourned because we cannot take it with us? Tell the stories of the things that could not be saved.
What things were never as good as we told ourselves? Discern what we are being given a chance to walk away from.
What dropped threads from earlier can be picked up and woven in? Which skills, practices, knowledges were forgotten?
It turns out that endings are full of gifts, albeit strange ones at times. We are given the opportunity to be brought low, reminded of our dusty origins there. Today I read to my sons: Blessings on you who are humble and lowly! The earth will be yours. There’s a relationship to lowliness and the earth itself, the ground. It will become yours because you know it intimately. You have not fought for it tooth and nail; you’ve just got it embedded in the fingernails of your worn, wounded hands.
The view from below also grants us the chance to perceive many smaller paths to restoration. There are rumblings of trying to use big tech and big money to jump on a superhighway of “progress” that will be even more delusional. The posture of our heart in this moment will determine which path(s) we will choose. As Dougald says:
Two possibilities arise from this newfound sense of vulnerability. It can be a humbling moment in which, brought down to earth, we are able to hear at last what those on the receiving end of Western projects of colonisation, salvation, modernisation and development have been trying to tell us for generations. Or it can be the license for the grandest version of that project yet; an attempt to turn our planetary home and all those we share it with, our human kin and more-than-human kith, into a world of global management and control, and all in the name of ‘saving the world’ (Hine, 101).
I think this choice is also presented to those of us who have our hands in educating the next generation, whether as teachers or parents. What does School mean? School of What? Will we “scout old signs and start community” or just relax into the comfortable, managed world of prepackaged, industrialized information? (There never was a better time to read The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. You can listen to it here in just over an hour.)
salvage. (v.),"to save" (from shipwreck, flood, fire, etc.), 1889, from French salvage (15c.), from Old French salver "to save" (see save (v.)).
Once there was a room I visited nearly every day. In the middle of that room was a Table where we gathered, ate, talked, worked, shared life. That space was one of the most convivial I have ever known and will likely never be matched. I mourn that as a very real loss.
But there’s a salvage side to this story.
At the beginning of this year I decided I’d like a new Table to place at the heart of our home. Maybe many Yous would gather around it frequently. Maybe even for ages upon ages. So when I unexpectedly received a Christmas bonus, I started casting about for the right one. I found it sooner than expected.
In his master work I and Thou, Martin Buber speaks of the movements of history (both personal and grand) as hinging on whether humans remember to return to I-You relationships. If they don’t, exchanges break down into making each other into things, or Its. “When a culture is no longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process, it freezes into the It-World which is broken only by the eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits.” This sounds like flickers in the ruins to me, brief flashes of hope. But if more of these folks can find each other, a rebirth may come about:
Only thus does a human cosmos become possible again and again; only now can man again and again build houses of worship and human houses in a distinctive conception of space and from a confident soul—-and fill vibrant time with new hymns and songs and give the human community itself a form. (Buber, 168).
And his bold, final words of the book bring it home —
The theophany comes ever closer, it comes ever closer to the sphere between beings — comes closer to the realm that hides in our midst, in the between. History is a mysterious approach to closeness. Every spiral of its path leads us into deeper corruption and at the same time into more fundamental return. But the God-side of the event whose world-side is called return is called redemption.
How about you, fellow Sherezade? Tell me your story. What death or end are you staring down? What do you hope to save, to salve, to salvage?
Harper, D. (n.d.). Etymology of salvage. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved January 20, 2025, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/salvage
Harper, Douglas. “Etymology of salve.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/salve. Accessed 20 January, 2025.
Hey Abbey. Salut these tables among the ruins! I just saw your note on one of my posts asking about this Illich quote-ish:
“The limit of political possibility today is the number of people who can sit around a table and share a meal together.”
Dougald Hine loosely attributes this to Illich. It rings well and often in my ears. Not knowing Illich enough, I asked where the quote came from. “I'm actually not sure I've ever written it down publicly,” he told me, “ and to my knowledge there's no written record of the quote, but I heard it from one of Illich's friends in 2007 and when I ran it by Sajay Samuel a few years later, he said, That certainly sounds like the kind of thing Ivan used to say."
It would please me even more if Illich had not actually said it, but it had grown up from what he left unsaid, begged from the peripheries. Illich Midrash if you will.
The good thing about the gift of Midrash is its all knowing and all seeing. It was there, everywhere, and can always find the bits of inside information it needs to say it true, maybe even truer than it was never said before. Best of all, the litero-certain can't access it because, still alive and loose in the world, it hasn't laid down on the exam table for the instruments.
I also wondered with Dougald what might be the confederation of tables adrift in this sea of worlds-not-yet-imagined. Flotilla it is, I think. And the communiques of flotillas I now suggest would be short-wave radio bits and messages in bottles. Messages, like Celan says, might just wash up on heart-land. Those hearts that precede the maps. Sounds familiar....
I agree that endings “are especially difficult when our work has become intertwined with larger ideas about Making a Difference in the world.” I recently retired from cello teaching. This is something I thought I would never do since I have always felt called to be a good teacher (I suffered many mediocre teachers so have spent a lifetime trying to be a good teacher) for young people who want to learn the cello. But I no longer have the energy and finally made the decision to retire. I have sorted my cello teaching books and made a pile that I am ready to give away. Those that I have left on the shelves, I do not want to part with even though it is unlikely I will need them. Salvaging books that I am unlikely to use seems wasteful. But I will keep my educational website learningthecello.com going since that has been and can continue to be helpful to anybody with Internet access. I mourn the loss of connecting with families who provided the structure for their child to practice daily and who encouraged a love of music. But there were families who wanted their child to learn only in order to rack up achievements for boosting status. I think what I have gained most is that cultivating a relationship of mutual trust, a willingness to sacrifice, and a respect for the dignity of each person is what allows for a good education and a thriving community. Thank you for posing the question and giving the space for a response.