Things Fall on Me: Delights
If you stand in a forest long enough, eventually something will fall on you.
I don't think I need to provide attribution for that particular thought--it seems general enough, not that unique--but I did borrow it from The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. It's one of those statements that is simple and obvious yet feels like it holds a deeper, hard-to-pin-down wisdom.
I've only done minimal standing in forests lately, yet it seems much has fallen on me. Or maybe I've been seeking and noticing more. Either way, this is going to be a long one. I didn't start with a deep thought and plan a careful meditation on the contents, I've merely collected the things that have fallen on me, yet, after the more personal diversions in the first third, I think a few themes emerge that weave through them. Even if the unifying factor is only me, my values and beliefs and these things I've collected to confirm them, there is a vague unity to them. So read in intervals or skim when you want, but there's a lot of good material here worth digesting and ruminating on.
I couldn't help but feel a sense of joy at being seen when I read this, it resonated so.
She had never attended school before. . . . she had never had an actual teacher. She didn't even know what children did in school--she assumed they just sat quietly and read, like she did. . . .Their governess was a tidy Frenchwoman with dark skin and close-cropped hair named Madame Rousseau, and her job was to stand at the front of the room and tell them things they could have read in books in half the time. Not everything she said was interesting, and you couldn't skip over the dull parts. Ember thought it an inefficient way to learn.― Heather Fawcett, Ember and the Ice Dragons
I get impatient and bored so often in classes, trainings, and meetings when I feel I could have digested the information more efficiently by simply reading it. Granted, reading is my preferred learning style so I want to learn as much as I can in that manner, but I still feel there is much value in personal interaction as well--I just expect that interaction to be something different than the one-way transfer of information that occurs in reading. I want dialogue, exchange of ideas, playful interplay, and things that reading doesn't provide. So I can be a very demanding student/attendee and find myself easily checking out if I could have learned it more easily from a book.
Kind of like Bernie here.
Shared partly for the historical context, as this is an image of Bernie Sanders socially distanced at the recent presidential inauguration, an image that has been turned into all kinds of memes because of his expressive body language and outfit.
I've written before that I am very good at focusing on my thoughts and ignoring my surroundings. When I disappear into my head, I don't get distracted easily. Unfortunately, the opposite is not always true. My thoughts often distract me from things I should be focusing on, things like classes and trainings and meetings. And conversations, though not as badly. Virtual environments are especially bad. It's so easy to secretly pop over to another window and multitask, often with a fun diversion. Something to read to accompany my listening. (Though, I have to admit, in before times I would sometimes take books with me to classes to read while tuning in to the teacher with just my ears and half my attention.)
Of course, smartphones didn’t invent distraction – they’re just the latest culprit. Before that, we blamed television. And before that, it was the telephone, or comic books, or the radio. . . .As often as not, distraction is your brain ducking challenging feelings such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, fatigue and uncertainty. These are the internal triggers – the root causes – that prompt you to find the comfort of distraction and open a browser tab, Twitter or email, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Once you identify these internal triggers, you can decide to respond in a more advantageous manner. You won’t always be able to control how you feel – but you can learn to control how you react to the way you feel. A trigger that once sent you to Twitter can perhaps lead instead to 10 deep breaths.Distraction, in other words, is a symptom of a problem – not the problem itself. Those deeper and systemic reasons – such as an inability to cope with fear, anxiety or stress – deserve our concern, because it’s only when we start to address them that we can make real progress. When we begin to understand what we’re trying to avoid by clicking over to Twitter or checking the news for the 10th time today, we can begin to address the issue itself, and not medicate it through more distraction. We also begin to appreciate how habitual the act of avoiding discomfort via distraction can be, and how much it’s become a part of how we work and live. . . .Once you understand the depth of distraction, you can start to manage it and improve. . . .
But I don't wanna! I like distracting myself with something fun to read. Sigh. Okay . . .
An aside: the patterns on this downed tree are tunnels that insects carved when there was bark covering it. They're fascinating to look at, and sometime I want to go back without my kids and capture better images.
Not really a pandemic update, but something related to it that I shared on Facebook last week:
I was reflecting with our allergy doctor yesterday during my periodic check-in that we've had almost no illness in our family since we began pandemic measures last spring. Virtually no colds, flu, or anything else infectious. She said she's seen the same in her office, far less illness than usual, and that flu season this year has been almost non-existent.
She concluded that maybe masks are a measure to consider even during normal times as a general health measure. I prefer to see it as yet more evidence that people are evil and should be avoided at all costs.
It got a lot of likes, though I can't say if for the sincere thought or the sarcastic one.
Even InspiroBot has been impacted by Covid, as hand sanitizer hoarding is definitely a dynamic. In a bit of a holding pattern with Covid news, otherwise. My wife had her first vaccine dose and will get the second soon. High risk people are starting to get theirs; my turn won't come for a while. The holiday surge seems to be over so the rate of new infections has slowed, but the total numbers are still growing and new, worrisome variants continue to emerge and spread. A number of countries across the ponds are once again instituting stricter measures in response. President Biden is getting our response ramped up finally, so we'll see how he changes things.
Another share from Facebook, something that doesn't really relate to the rest of this post in any way, but I wanted to preserve it regardless. It could be something I revisit eventually. What I wrote:
I loved this song when I was a kid. It's the first time I've ever thought to look for it online, so the last time I heard it might have been on our old record player. But it pops into my head whenever the kids count by ten. We had plush Snoopy dolls with different outfits to change into for all his different personas, too. He was a favorite toy.
Shared with the YouTube video Snoopy vs. The Red Baron -- The Royal Guardsman.
Quite a few people commented that they too had the song on a 45 record. And this from my extended family:
Cousin #1: I vividly remember your snoopy plushies with different outfits! I enjoyed playing with them on a few occasions too. Didn't Grandma make some of the outfits? xx
Aunt: [Cousin #2] still has his Snoopy and some outfits!😊
Cousin #3: I still have all of mine!
My wife: Your mom told me your grandma made the outfits.
Lots of fond memories there.
I checked our basement and found a basket with mine, my brother's, and my sister's with lots of outfits; and it looks like my niece might have been the last one to play with them.
Part of the Red Baron outfit in the middle.
Related to getting old enough to reminisce about fond memories, I just reshared this from a work friend. He led with this:
My teen years are antiquated and old time-y.That's rad.
There was a time when it would have bothered me, but now I enjoy being able to say I am antiquated and old time-y.
(If you don't know the reference, What's Your Damage? The 10 Best Quotes from Heathers. Such a favorite.)
One more silly meme. Though, of course, like all good jokes, it is funny because it's true.
Bert notices the hat, but chooses
not to engage Ernie since he knows
it'll lead to some ridiculous shit.
One person responded, Is this a comment about work? I feel like it’s a comment about work. and another, I feel like this is a comment about red hats. (Meaning, I assume, MAGA politics.) It is both of those and so much more. I've always had a bit of an instinct for this in some circumstances, a "don't sweat the small stuff" attitude, but not at all in other moments and situations, so it's a skill I've been working on improving. And I feel it's a sign of age and wisdom that I've gotten much better. I've learned more than ever to listen more than speak.
Poet Gay decided he would adopt a practice for a year of paying attention to what delighted him and writing a daily "essayette" recording his related thoughts. This is his compilation of those journal entries. He writes in the prologue how the habit helped him develop a kind of "delight radar," as he became more aware of the delightful aspects of life at all times and happier for it, and his joy is apparent on every page.Gay writes with an intentionally free-flowing, rambling style (see the excerpt below). It captures the personality and spontaneity of his process, and readers come to know him, in some ways intimately, over the course of entries. Sometimes he stays focused on the delight, describing it in depth and what he takes from it; more often he meanders into related thoughts spurred by the moment, delving into memories or meditative, sometimes heavy, territory. Each digression brings its particular rewards. Themes emerge: gardening, friends and family, public spaces, physicality, racism, music. Gay comes across as personable and at least somewhat gregarious. Most importantly, Gay comes across. The pages portray a living, breathing, tangible person, modeling an inspiring process that brings readers their own significant share of delight.A sample to give the flavor, from an essay that is neither as moving as some nor as insightful as others, but describes one of his very deliberate rules for the undertaking. From "Writing by Hand":For these essays, though, I decided that I'd write by hand, mostly with Le Pens, in smallish notebooks. I can tell you a few things--first, the pen, the hand behind the pen, is a digressive beast. It craves, in my experience anyway, the wending thought, and crafts/imagines/conjures a syntax to contain it. On the other hand, the process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out its own archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is.For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing. The point: I'd no sooner allow that fragment to sit there like a ripe zit if I was typing on a computer. And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking, particularly the breathlessness, the accruing syntax, the not quite articulate pleasure that evades or could give a fuck about the computer's green corrective lines (how they injure us!) would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull. To be sure, it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it's kept.
I don't do anything nearly so disciplined, but I try to share my delights here and on Facebook. Like the picture below of my encounter with a happy little tree.
One of my recurring themes on this blog is empathy for the poor and the wrongness of blaming them for their poverty. Here's more.
A 2014 Pew Research report found that 39 per cent of Americans believed that poverty was due to a lack of effort on poor people’s part. When ‘effort’ includes an inability to properly weigh up the risks inherent in a decision, this suggests that, in the end, many of us think that people are responsible for their own bad luck.I disagree with this view. But my reasons aren’t solely political or moral in nature. Rather, insights from complexity science – specifically, computational complexity theory – show mathematically that there are hard limits on our capacity to make accurate and precise calculations of risk. Since it’s often impossible to get a reasonable sense of what will happen in the future, it’s unfair to blame people with good intentions who end up worse off as a result of unforeseen circumstances. This leads to the conclusion that compassion, not blame, is the appropriate attitude towards those who act in good faith but whose bets in life don’t pay off. . . .Indeed, the unpredictability of the course of our lives is partly due to rich causal complexity of the social world, with its interlocking web of economic, political, psychological and other factors. Under these conditions of extreme complexity, which are typical of most real-world systems, it’s rarely the case that people can ever meet the bar for blameworthiness described above. . . .Much of economic and social life in affluent countries is structured to require individuals to commit most of their resources towards one strategy for pursuing a flourishing life. Taking out a student loan or mortgage, or buying a taxi medallion, are all strategies that require a large, if not total, commitment of a person’s financial resources. Here, real hedging would require us to start from a place of considerable wealth, and so it isn’t a viable strategy for many. Most of us remain consigned to placing big bets in a casino where it’s effectively impossible to know the underlying odds. The precarity of this situation means that compassion, not blame, is the appropriate attitude to have towards those who end up on the losing end of these bets.Questions about the attitudes that we ought to have towards others are psychological and moral in nature. But they’re also politically significant. How we regard those who end up less fortunate informs how we address social inequality, and the extent to which we care about it. . . . Despair thrives where empathy is missing; right now, our lack of compassion for one another is killing us.Reversing this trend requires a policy response, but it also requires a shift in our attitudes towards those who end up worse off as a result of risky but well-intentioned decisions. The limits of our ability to infer the complex causal structure of the social world lead directly to the conclusion that blame isn’t appropriate. No matter how smart we think we are, there’s a hard limit on what we can know, and we could easily end up on the losing end of a big bet. We owe it to ourselves, and others, to build a more compassionate world.
See also (off the top of my head):
We owe it to ourselves, and others, to build a more compassionate world.
Last post I included a psychology article titled Selfishness Is Learned. It makes a scientific case that our default mode is cooperativeness. I was reminded of it reading this entry in The Book of Delights.
47. The Sanctity of TrainsSomething I've noticed riding on Amtrak trains, like the one I'm on right now between Syracuse and Manhattan, is that people leave their bags unattended for extended periods of time. Maybe they go to the end of the car to use the bathroom, or sometimes they go to the far end of the train to the café, which smells vomity like microwave cheese. My neighbor on this train--across the aisle and one row up--disappeared for a good twenty minutes, her bag wide open, a computer peeking out, not that I was checking. She is not unusual in this flaunting of security, otherwise known as trust, on the train. Nearly everyone participates in this practice of trust, and without recruiting a neighbor across the aisle to "keep an eye on my stuff while I use the restroom," which seems to be a coffee shop phenomenon. Trusting one's coffee shop neighbor, but not the people in line, et cetera.I suppose, given the snugness of a train, especially if it's full, one might speculate there's a kind of eyes-on-the-street-ness at play, although it seemed to me, this morning, when I was first leaving my valuables on my seat for pilfering, my laptop and cellphone glittering atop my sweatshirt and scarf, most everyone was sleeping and so provided little if any eyewitness deterrent.I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that's really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what's too high, or what's been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.
The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Caretaking is our default mode.
As I stand behind him, it occurs to me just how much trust we put in other people. Complete strangers, friends. Everybody. Dalton's just sitting there, relaxed, trusting that I'm not going to lose my temper and stab him in the back of the neck with a fork. Every time we get into a car, we trust everybody else on the road. Every time we walk on the sidewalk, we put our lives in other people's hands. We'd never even leave the house if we actually thought about how little control we have over living and dying.― Coert Voorhees, The Brothers Torres
An aside: I love finding things like this culvert in the woods, because it means at one time there was some kind of a road or trail or path over it. If you look carefully at the terrain you can identify where it went, but you certainly can't tell from the flora. It feels like discovering a bit of treasure and makes me wonder what stories might be told about what has come before.
My delight in coming across this is pure confirmation bias, but I love discovering any and all evidence that might help us overcome our innate tribalism.
Studies have shown that people tend to feel more empathy for the suffering of those who are close and similar to themselves, such as someone of the same race or nationality, than for those who are more distant or dissimilar. This bias in empathy has consequences. For example, people are less likely to donate time or money to help someone of a different nationality compared with someone of their own nationality.Neuroscientists have shown that this bias is evident in how our brains process both firsthand and secondhand pain. . . .Perhaps many of us believe that inequality in empathy is right – that we should care more for those who are close and similar to us. In other words, loyalty is a greater moral force than equality. . . .When presented with stories in which the person feels either empathy solely for the friend/family member or the socially distant person, participants typically respond that it is more moral to feel empathy for the friend/family member. But participants judged feeling equal empathy as the most moral. Equal empathy was rated as 32% more morally right than feeling empathy for just one person in the story. . . .Feeling equal empathy for both people was again judged as the most moral outcome. . . .In a moment when fostering a culture of caring for those who are different seems challenging, our research may offer some insight and perhaps hope. It suggests that most people believe we should care about everyone equally.With the right approach, this belief in the morality of equal empathy may even translate to real changes. . . .We are all human beings, and we all deserve to be cared for on some level. Our research provides evidence that this principle of equality in empathy is not some obscure ideal. Rather, it is a tenet of our moral beliefs.
We might instinctively feel more for our tribes, but we believe that's a fault and should learn to feel just as much for everyone else. We believe in fostering a culture of caring for those who are different as a moral issue.
Back in September, in "Turbulence," I shared an article from The New York Times titled How Climate Migration Will Reshape America. This article features the real life story of a couple who has migrated to New Hampshire.
The impacts of climate change could prompt millions of Americans to relocate in coming decades, moving inland away from rising seas, or north to escape rising temperatures.Judith and Doug Saum have moved already, recently leaving their home outside Reno, Nev. . . .Doug Saum says they call themselves climate migrants."We had the idea ... not necessarily that we were going to a place that would be forever untouched by climate change, but that we were getting out of a bad climate situation that was only likely to get worse," he says. . . ."Impermanence might be the new normal for many of us," she says. "The idea that you have to live in one place forever, I think people have to forget that... And I think people who have been able to do that historically, I think it's a privilege that they should celebrate."But she says all this moving around can make people resilient. And if the places that will receive these new residents can be resilient and flexible, too, the communities might just benefit from it. . . .But it's hard to predict the scale and timing of climate migration. And an influx of newcomers during the current pandemic is showing just how disruptive unplanned growth can be."An increase in traffic, people getting evicted, a lack of hospital beds because there's more people – these are the kinds of things that create tension," says Anna Marandi, a senior climate specialist with the National League of Cities. "When the systems aren't set up properly in advance to hold more people, then the existing population can get resentful."
Impermanence might be the new normal for many of us.
This is fascinating and hopeful, most especially that Doughnut Economics is moving out of the theoretical realm and into the applied, real one.
In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” Laid out by British economist Kate Raworth in a 2017 book, the theory argues that 20th century economic thinking is not equipped to deal with the 21st century reality of a planet teetering on the edge of climate breakdown. Instead of equating a growing GDP with a successful society, our goal should be to fit all of human life into what Raworth calls the “sweet spot” between the “social foundation,” where everyone has what they need to live a good life, and the “environmental ceiling.” By and large, people in rich countries are living above the environmental ceiling. Those in poorer countries often fall below the social foundation. The space in between: that’s the doughnut.Amsterdam’s ambition is to bring all 872,000 residents inside the doughnut, ensuring everyone has access to a good quality of life, but without putting more pressure on the planet than is sustainable. Guided by Raworth’s organization, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), the city is introducing massive infrastructure projects, employment schemes and new policies for government contracts to that end. Meanwhile, some 400 local people and organizations have set up a network called the Amsterdam Doughnut Coalition—managed by Drouin— to run their own programs at a grassroots level.It’s the first time a major city has attempted to put doughnut theory into action on a local level, but Amsterdam is not alone. Raworth says DEAL has received an avalanche of requests from municipal leaders and others seeking to build more resilient societies in the aftermath of COVID-19. Copenhagen’s city council majority decided to follow Amsterdam’s example in June, as did the Brussels region and the small city of Dunedin, New Zealand, in September, and Nanaimo, British Columbia, in December. In the U.S., Portland, Ore., is preparing to roll out its own version of the doughnut, and Austin may be close behind. The theory has won Raworth some high-profile fans; in November, Pope Francis endorsed her “fresh thinking,” while celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough dedicated a chapter to the doughnut in his latest book, A Life on Our Planet, calling it “our species’ compass for the journey” to a sustainable future. . . .Raworth argues that the goal of getting “into the doughnut” should replace governments’ and economists’ pursuit of never-ending GDP growth. Not only is the primacy of GDP overinflated when we now have many other data sets to measure economic and social well-being, she says, but also, endless growth powered by natural resources and fossil fuels will inevitably push the earth beyond its limits. “When we think in terms of health, and we think of something that tries to grow endlessly within our bodies, we recognize that immediately: that would be a cancer.” . . .In fact, the doughnut model doesn’t proscribe all economic growth or development. In her book, Raworth acknowledges that for low- and middle-income countries to climb above the doughnut’s social foundation, “significant GDP growth is very much needed.” But that economic growth needs to be viewed as a means to reach social goals within ecological limits, she says, and not as an indicator of success in itself, or a goal for rich countries. In a doughnut world, the economy would sometimes be growing and sometimes shrinking.
Our goal should be to fit all of human life into the sweet spot between everyone having what they need to live a good life and the environmental ceiling. Enough, but not too much.
Another from Ross Gay. A darker one. An important one, a way we fail at Doughnut Economics and a culture of caring and building a more compassionate world.
83. Still ProcessingUnraveling bindweed from the squash and buckwheat and onions and zinnias, I was listening to a Still Processing podcast about Whitney Houston. The hosts were discussing Whitney's early career, her royal family (she's connected to both Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin), and her relationship with Bobby Brown, which some channel decided ought to be a reality television show, and which, from the sounds of it, a lot of people thought made good TV. As I understand it, they were not having an easy time, which, yes, is a euphemism for they were a train wreck, and we do love a train wreck, especially if all the passengers on the train are black.I imagine you have to pitch a show like that. I imagine you have to have meetings and secure producers or directors, get a budget, things like that. Many decisions and agreements have to occur, probably many handshakes, some drinks, plenty of golf, trying to figure out how best to exploit, to make a mockery of, a black family, the adults in which have made some of the best pop music of the last thirty years. I never saw it, but it's old hat, the commodification of black suffering. If I had a nickel for every white person who can recite lines from The Wire. I have no illusions, by which I mean to tell you it is a fact, that one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness. Is to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blacknessandsuffering. Sufferingandblackness. Blackering. Sufferness. Blaffness.Which is clever as hell if your goal is obscuring the efforts, the systems, historical and ongoing, to ruin black people. Clever as hell if your goal is to make appear natural what is, in fact, by design.And the delight? You have been reading a book of delights written by a black person. A book of black delight.Daily as air.
[Not copied exactly, as the original text does some typographical tricksiness to overlay the two words as they become combined.]
An element of structural racism, of white supremacy culture, is the commodification of black suffering.
More from Kendi, who seems to be making regular appearances on this blog. We're giving away copies of his new journal to all the students in our program this year and cosponsoring a virtual lecture by him next month.
Because of the racist ideas that many white Americans still hold, it becomes almost impossible for them to see white people as terrorist threats — as the primary terrorist threat — and as the people who are making their nation unsafe, the people who are attacking democracy. Racist ideas tell us that white people are nonviolent. That white people are champions of freedom. That white people are the ones who save nations. And so the way in which people have constructed whiteness, and even their identity, or even the identity of white people, prevents them from seeing this white terrorist threat for what it is. . . .Denial is the heartbeat of America. At every point in history, Americans refused to look at themselves for who they truly were. Americans have tried to take these ugly sides of America outside of the American project and say these people, or this incident, or this type of politics is not who we are, as opposed to saying, yes, this is precisely who we partially are, but we want to be better, we want to be different. Instead, Americans have denied it outright, denied its existence, and then we wonder why the cancer continues to spread. . . .We’ve never had a president or an administration that stated, “We are going to support the anti-racist policies and practices that can eliminate racism once and for all.” There’s always been this worry about what white people are going to think or how white people are going to react or that there will be potential white opposition at the polls. I can understand that they’re elected officials, but on the other hand, either you want to become an FDR or an Abraham Lincoln, or you don’t. Meaning, either you want to make the hard decisions that can leave a permanent blueprint on the United States or you’ll make the easy ones and fade from history. . . .That’s what it’s really about: We acknowledge our past so we can transform ourselves.
Denial is the heartbeat of America. Of racism. We must learn to acknowledge our past--and present--so we can transform ourselves.
This pairs really well with the FiveThirtyEight data in The Police’s Tepid Response To The Capitol Breach Wasn’t An Aberration that I shared a couple of posts ago in Some Ordinary Thoughts.
Since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide, an NPR investigation has found. NPR reviewed police, court and other records to examine the details of the cases. At least 75% of the officers were white. . . .For at least 15 of the officers, such as McMahon, the shootings were not their first — or their last, NPR found. They have been involved in two — sometimes three or more — shootings, often deadly and without consequences.Those who study deadly force by police say it's unusual for officers to be involved in any shootings. . . .An examination of individual cases reveals the myriad ways that law enforcement agencies fail to hold officers accountable and allow them to be in a position to shoot again. In many instances, the criminal justice system refuses to prosecute, often resulting in departments putting officers back on the street instead of desk jobs where they have little contact with the public. Other times, police unions protect officers from accountability. And sometimes, departments are so desperate to recruit officers that they ignore warning signs such as an officer's troubled past and hire them anyway.
Accountability needed. And honesty.
Another from The Book of Delights. In It's the Culture I wrote last summer about the idea of white supremacy culture, how it assumes certain values to be universal and normal, and sees anything that deviates as wrong. One of the big characteristics of that culture is a sense of urgency, a need to always be productive. Ross here describes a different orientation toward time from a different set of values.
87. LoiteringI'm sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commandsNO SOLICITINGNO LOITERINGstacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by a buying a coffee, and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it's no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.The Webster's definition of loiter reads thus: "to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose," and "to travel indolently with frequent pauses." Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered critique or, nouned, epithet ("Lollygagger!" or "Loafer!"). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must've been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be "loitering." Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book not the Bible and you're almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying Lord.)It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption. And it's probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed--in a Qdoba in Bloomington, in a bar in Fishtown, in the Harvard Club at Harvard. The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order are our bodies in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight. The moment of laughter not only makes consumption impossible (you might choke), but if the laugh is hard enough, if the shit talk is just right, food or drink might fly from your mouth, if not, and this hurts, your nose. And if your body is supposed *to be* one of the consumables, if it has been, if it is, one of the consumables around which so many ideas of production and consumption have been structured in this country, well, there you go.There is a Carrie Mae Weems photograph of a woman in what looks to be some kind of textile factory, with an angel embroidered to the left breast of her shirt, where her heart resides. The woman, like the angel, has her arms splayed wide almost in ecstasy, as thought to embrace everything, so in the midst of her glee is she. Every time I see that photo, after I smile and have a genuine bodily opening on account of witnessing this delight, which is a moment of black delight, I look behind her for the boss. Uh-oh, I think. You're in a moment of nonproductive delight. Heads up!Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one's time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one's time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one's own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is. And while having interpolated the policing of delight such that I am on the lookout for the overseer even in photos I have studied hundreds of times, on the lookout always for the policer of delight, my work is studying this kind of glee, being on the lookout for it, and aspiring to it, floating away from the factory, as she seems to be.
Being nonconsumptive is a crime in America.
Of course, for all that I love to play with ideas and consider information and theories, arguing about them usually doesn't change minds. Sometimes you have to ignore the red hat to avoid the ridiculous shit and figure out behaviors for getting along. We're ultimately all part of the same tribe, after all.
They declared that they want to live in a different America from the one the rest of us inhabit, ruled over by a different president chosen according to a different rulebook. And yet they cannot be wished away, or sent away, or somehow locked up. They will not leave of their own accord, and Americans who accept Biden’s lawful victory won’t either. We have no choice except to coexist. . . .Here’s another idea: Drop the argument and change the subject. That’s the counterintuitive advice you will hear from people who have studied Northern Ireland before the 1998 peace deal, or Liberia, or South Africa, or Timor-Leste—countries where political opponents have seen each other as not just wrong, but evil; countries where people are genuinely frightened when the other side takes power; countries where not all arguments can be solved and not all differences can be bridged. In the years before and after the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, for example, many “peacebuilding” projects did not try to make Catholics and Protestants hold civilized debates about politics, or talk about politics at all. Instead, they built community centers, put up Christmas lights, and organized job training for young people.This was not accidental. The literature in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict prevention overflows with words such as local and community-based and economic regeneration. It’s built on the idea that people should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate. That doesn’t mean they will then get to like one another, just that they are less likely to kill one another on the following day.
People should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate.
Of course, I am antiquated and old time-y.
posted by Degolar @ 7:25 AM
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