Trivia, Goddess of Crossroads by Patricia Monaghan

All of a sudden this season, it hit the media. The next big thing. The next trend. Tired of recycling? Feeling helpless in the face of storms, floods, famine? Wistfully remembering the old days when you worried about how stylish leather shoes were and not how many thousands of years they would last undecayed in a landfill?

"Green fatigue," the media dubbed it, echoing that appalling term of a few years ago, "compassion fatigue." Media saturation of an issue, designed to sell advertising space, results in viewers feeling inundated. They then grow spitefully irritated, not at media moguls, but at flood victims, starving children, and now polar bears and penguins. Add to that the "greenwashing" that we now learn has gone on at various large firms (look at BP's bottom line to see that the company is not "beyond petroleum"), and consumer cynicism grows. Besides, anyone who has tried to quit smoking (or in my case, tried to quit turning on the computer and reading email first thing in the morning) knows how hard changing habits can be.

Green fatigue has been the subject of dozens of recent articles, each sourly clever and cleverly sour about the environmental situation and our guilty part in it. MSN News, for instance, offers this advice: "The next time that annoying, righteous eco-friend invites you round to their eco-house for dinner, why not ask him or her just where their coriander comes from. I guarantee you that eight times out of ten you'll be party to the pleasure of watching them plummet from their high green walls faster than Humpty Dumpty." This insouciant sally concludes a piece about how b-o-r-r-r-i-n-g all the environmental news is getting and how no one is entirely pristine anyway, so screw it and let's go party.

Hey, I'm right there. Partying until doomsday sounds like a relief after a year of trying to get a single appliance replaced with a more environmentally sensitive one. It seemed so straightforward at first: I set a budget, did my research, made calls to tradesmen. And then everything fell apart, with packs of plumbers traipsing through the house emitting different diagnoses of the problem and offering alternative (and expensive) solutions that did not satisfy my original plan. A few months ago I threw in the towel on the tankless water heater project. The heater I have now still works; the information I got about the tankless system's efficiency in an urban area was discouraging; and I seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time talking to guys (see The Guy Zone, Do the Math, and It's Always Something). This was not working.

In these moments of discouragement, Trivia came to me. The ancient Roman goddess of three-way crossroads, she disappeared into the great sky-goddess Diana, Hecate-Triva

who in turn took on many of the attributes of the Greek wilderness goddess Artemis. In the process, Trivia was lost, surviving only as a title of Diana. She has so thoroughly disappeared that the Oxford English Dictionary does not acknowledge her, deriving the word "trivial" not directly from her name but from the medieval university course named for her. The "trivium" comprised rhetoric, grammar and logic — hardly trivial subjects, but today's word has little resonance with its ancient roots. Our forebears recognized the bedrock importance of the trivial. One doesn't get far in university without good grounding in the trivium, and one doesn't get far in life without attending to Trivia's importance.

Trivia's name refers to points where three roads meet, the places that, to the Greeks, were ruled by the witch-goddess Hecate (sometimes conflated with Trivia). These must have been "Y" intersections rather than "six corners" ones, because ancient roads were not so numerous as ours today. What was it about three roads coming together that held such threat and promise to the ancients?

Imagine walking along such a road, a dusty narrow lane. You find yourself at a "Y" crossing and stop to ponder which road to take. Were this a four-way cross, you could continue straight and assume you'd get to your destination. At a "Y," however, the main route can be unclear. Trivia's crossroads are points of choice and consequence; a wrong turning can take you many miles from your destination. What to do? Make an offering to Trivia and keep walking.

Interestingly, the "Y" intersection is significant in dynamical systems theory, because such bifurcations (dividings of a line) lead to chaos. By chaos, scientists do not mean disorder but complexity. That first bifurcation, chaos theorists tell us, leads us straight into complexity, from which new forms of organization can arise.

So, inspired by the idea of following Trivia and unwilling to give in to green fatigue, I decided to recast my home project. Instead of starting with a large complicated project, I'm going to dedicate myself to making small quarterly changes in the way we live. I can't afford $20 grand to replace my car with a hybrid; I can't afford $10 grand to replace all my windows. But there are smaller things I can do, right now, that will make a difference.

Our household is greener than many; most of our food, for instance, comes from within a 20-mile radius of our home. Eating local is a passion for us; we're both fanatic gardeners with a big vegetable spread. I love canning and preserving, too, and we like helping our farm neighbors by buying produce directly from them. We also buy most of our clothing and furniture at thrift stores and garage sales. (In the Midwest, I highly recommend the designer-recycler Nu-Look in Minneapolis and the locally famous St. Barnabas "estate remnant sales" in Mazomanie.) But eating local and buying used are, for me, the low-hanging fruit on the tree of saving-energy knowledge. I want to do more, and I will do it by honoring Trivia.

As a first step, I bought $100 worth of CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) and went room by room through the house, replacing light bulbs. This is my second stab at replacing the old bulbs. I had bought some CFLs perhaps 10 years ago; they were slow to illuminate, too big for most of my thrift-store lamps, and dim to boot. All my good intentions went out my eminently replaceable old windows and I went back to incandescents.

But things have changed: the new bulbs fit nicely even into my oldest lamps, they light quickly, and they last for years. Even better, a local hardware store had a sale on, so I got dozens of bulbs for my small investment and supported a local business at the same time. The energy savings are significant: CFLs are said to save 2,000 times their weight in greenhouse gasses. They save money too. compact fluorescent lightbulb

Despite their higher original cost, just 5 will save $35-65 on my annual electricity bill. I will have to replace them far less often, because compared to the 750 to 1,000 hours in an incandescent bulb, the CFL lasts 6 to 15 thousand hours (the lower number represents bulbs that are turned on and off frequently or used for only short periods). First to get replaced: those ceiling lights, replacement of which involves getting out the tall ladder.

CFLs are cooler, too, which should cut down on cooling costs. Having been brought up in Alaska, I find it easier to think about how to keep warm than cool, but the average American home uses more energy in cooling than in heating. Thus part of my Trivial approach to increasing energy efficiency will be to focus more on cutting down cooling costs.

I like that these bulbs were invented in 1973 by GE engineer Ed Hammer, who was concerned about energy independence and efficiency. But the bulbs didn't take off, because GE didn't want to make the upfront investment in a product for which they saw only a boutique (read: hippie) market. But slowly, interest in CFL and, more importantly for GE, sales of CFL have increased steadily. Campaigns by big box stores pushed the product, resulting in what is disingenuously called "greater consumer acceptance." (Funny how that acceptance seems to follow big-budget sales campaigns.) CFLs are no longer a hippie oddity but a mainstream product.

The old dull hum is gone, but the light is still cooler than our incandescent-accustomed eyes prefer. I found this morning, as I drank my tea, that I wanted to turn on extra lamps. But this led me to wonder where and when I had decided that instant bright light was better than sitting in the bay window and letting the dawn light slowly flood the room. Just another trivial moment.

crossroads, original image courtesy of Richard van Binsbergen (altered to illustrate this article).
Hecate-Trivia, courtesy of Wikipedia; original illustration by Stéphane Mallarmé, in les Dieux Antiques : nouvelle mythologie illustrée (Paris, 1880).
compact fluorescent lightbulb, image courtesy of Wikipedia and PiccoloNamek.

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Trivia, Goddess of Crossroads by Patricia Monaghan All of a sudden this season, it hit the media. The next big thing. The next trend. Tired of recycling? Feeling helpless in the face of storms, floods, famine? Wistfully remembering the old days when you worried about how stylish leather shoes were and not how many thousands of years they would last undecayed in a landfill? "Green fatigue," the media dubbed it, echoing that appalling term of a few years ago, "compassion fatigue." Media saturation of an issue, designed to sell advertising space, results in viewers feeling inundated. They then grow spitefully irritated, not at media moguls, but at flood victims, starving children, and now polar bears and penguins. Add to that the "greenwashing" that we now learn has gone on at various large firms (look at BP's bottom line to see that the company is not "beyond petroleum"), and consumer cynicism grows. Besides, anyone who has tried to quit smoking (or in my case, tried to quit turning on the computer and reading email first thing in the morning) knows how hard changing habits can be. Green fatigue has been the subject of dozens of recent articles, each sourly clever and cleverly sour about the environmental situation and our guilty part in it. MSN News, for instance, offers this advice: "The next time that annoying, righteous eco-friend invites you round to their eco-house for dinner, why not ask him or her just where their coriander comes from. I guarantee you that eight times out of ten you'll be party to the pleasure of watching them plummet from their high green walls faster than Humpty Dumpty." This insouciant sally concludes a piece about how b-o-r-r-r-i-n-g all the environmental news is getting and how no one is entirely pristine anyway, so screw it and let's go party. Hey, I'm right there. Partying until doomsday sounds like a relief after a year of trying to get a single appliance replaced with a more environmentally sensitive one. It seemed so straightforward at first: I set a budget, did my research, made calls to tradesmen. And then everything fell apart, with packs of plumbers traipsing through the house emitting different diagnoses of the problem and offering alternative (and expensive) solutions that did not satisfy my original plan. A few months ago I threw in the towel on the tankless water heater project. The heater I have now still works; the information I got about the tankless system's efficiency in an urban area was discouraging; and I seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time talking to guys (see The Guy Zone, Do the Math, and It's Always Something). This was not working. In these moments of discouragement, Trivia came to me. The ancient Roman goddess of three-way crossroads, she disappeared into the great sky-goddess Diana, who in turn took on many of the attributes of the Greek wilderness goddess Artemis. In the process, Trivia was lost, surviving only as a title of Diana. She has so thoroughly disappeared that the Oxford English Dictionary does not acknowledge her, deriving the word "trivial" not directly from her name but from the medieval university course named for her. The "trivium" comprised rhetoric, grammar and logic — hardly trivial subjects, but today's word has little resonance with its ancient roots. Our forebears recognized the bedrock importance of the trivial. One doesn't get far in university without good grounding in the trivium, and one doesn't get far in life without attending to Trivia's importance. Trivia's name refers to points where three roads meet, the places that, to the Greeks, were ruled by the witch-goddess Hecate (sometimes conflated with Trivia). These must have been "Y" intersections rather than "six corners" ones, because ancient roads were not so numerous as ours today. What was it about three roads coming together that held such threat and promise to the ancients? Imagine walking along such a road, a dusty narrow lane. You find yourself at a "Y" crossing and stop to ponder which road to take. Were this a four-way cross, you could continue straight and assume you'd get to your destination. At a "Y," however, the main route can be unclear. Trivia's crossroads are points of choice and consequence; a wrong turning can take you many miles from your destination. What to do? Make an offering to Trivia and keep walking. Interestingly, the "Y" intersection is significant in dynamical systems theory, because such bifurcations (dividings of a line) lead to chaos. By chaos, scientists do not mean disorder but complexity. That first bifurcation, chaos theorists tell us, leads us straight into complexity, from which new forms of organization can arise. So, inspired by the idea of following Trivia and unwilling to give in to green fatigue, I decided to recast my home project. Instead of starting with a large complicated project, I'm going to dedicate myself to making small quarterly changes in the way we live. I can't afford $20 grand to replace my car with a hybrid; I can't afford $10 grand to replace all my windows. But there are smaller things I can do, right now, that will make a difference. Our household is greener than many; most of our food, for instance, comes from within a 20-mile radius of our home. Eating local is a passion for us; we're both fanatic gardeners with a big vegetable spread. I love canning and preserving, too, and we like helping our farm neighbors by buying produce directly from them. We also buy most of our clothing and furniture at thrift stores and garage sales. (In the Midwest, I highly recommend the designer-recycler Nu-Look in Minneapolis and the locally famous St. Barnabas "estate remnant sales" in Mazomanie.) But eating local and buying used are, for me, the low-hanging fruit on the tree of saving-energy knowledge. I want to do more, and I will do it by honoring Trivia. As a first step, I bought $100 worth of CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) and went room by room through the house, replacing light bulbs. This is my second stab at replacing the old bulbs. I had bought some CFLs perhaps 10 years ago; they were slow to illuminate, too big for most of my thrift-store lamps, and dim to boot. All my good intentions went out my eminently replaceable old windows and I went back to incandescents. But things have changed: the new bulbs fit nicely even into my oldest lamps, they light quickly, and they last for years. Even better, a local hardware store had a sale on, so I got dozens of bulbs for my small investment and supported a local business at the same time. The energy savings are significant: CFLs are said to save 2,000 times their weight in greenhouse gasses. They save money too. Despite their higher original cost, just 5 will save $35-65 on my annual electricity bill. I will have to replace them far less often, because compared to the 750 to 1,000 hours in an incandescent bulb, the CFL lasts 6 to 15 thousand hours (the lower number represents bulbs that are turned on and off frequently or used for only short periods). First to get replaced: those ceiling lights, replacement of which involves getting out the tall ladder. CFLs are cooler, too, which should cut down on cooling costs. Having been brought up in Alaska, I find it easier to think about how to keep warm than cool, but the average American home uses more energy in cooling than in heating. Thus part of my Trivial approach to increasing energy efficiency will be to focus more on cutting down cooling costs. I like that these bulbs were invented in 1973 by GE engineer Ed Hammer, who was concerned about energy independence and efficiency. But the bulbs didn't take off, because GE didn't want to make the upfront investment in a product for which they saw only a boutique (read: hippie) market. But slowly, interest in CFL and, more importantly for GE, sales of CFL have increased steadily. Campaigns by big box stores pushed the product, resulting in what is disingenuously called "greater consumer acceptance." (Funny how that acceptance seems to follow big-budget sales campaigns.) CFLs are no longer a hippie oddity but a mainstream product. The old dull hum is gone, but the light is still cooler than our incandescent-accustomed eyes prefer. I found this morning, as I drank my tea, that I wanted to turn on extra lamps. But this led me to wonder where and when I had decided that instant bright light was better than sitting in the bay window and letting the dawn light slowly flood the room. Just another trivial moment. Graphics Credits crossroads, original image courtesy of Richard van Binsbergen (altered to illustrate this article). Hecate-Trivia, courtesy of Wikipedia; original illustration by Stéphane Mallarmé, in les Dieux Antiques : nouvelle mythologie illustrée (Paris, 1880). compact fluorescent lightbulb, image courtesy of Wikipedia and PiccoloNamek.
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