No One Will Believe You if You Actually Get It Right

Not a lot to report this post, just a few quick personal updates, some brief reactions to recent reads, and then a bunch of thoughts from others to share. It will be an eclectic mix.

First, pandemic news. A text exchange between my siblings and me.

I'm got vaccinated today. A year and two days after my first post about this pandemic; slightly longer than that since everything changed. A huge sigh of relief. Many people are getting the vaccine now. The big rollout is finally here. Things really are looking up. We've even planned a family vacation for August.

I think I'm going to report on it with a comic book twist. Let's see . . . 

A masked government agent just injected me with secret super soldier serum. Everything must remain hush hush so they called it something else, of course, a whole cover operation to disguise the true intent. But soon I expect to have super strength, speed, and stamina, and, most importantly, invulnerability. Steve Rogers has nothing on me.

Anyway, I recently came across The Examined Life, a blog whose author has a style similar to mine. She likes connecting her thoughts to those of others, and her posts are full of quotes she ties together. I haven't delved deeply into older content, but I've been following on Facebook and reading the ones she shares. I want to comment on a couple that have resonated with me.

The Importance of Walking About

Walking connects mind and body and fills both to the brim with feelings of unity. . . . 

I verge to horizons, I am someone who walks. 2,300 miles across the United States, 100 miles up the Thames, half a mile in the Arctic wind with my daughter. Like Kafka, walking restores my unity, invites harmony, and addresses unwanted wakefulness. . . . 

I write while walking. Although I type indoors, I compose passages, phrases, paragraphs, and posts—or, rather, I step aside and sentences self-compose—while walking. In the midst of play, my mind works still. I repeat thoughts until I can retype verbatim. . . . 

Walking is a way of seeing. . . . 

Indeed, walking is about witness because it is about connecting. To people, to ourselves, to our mind, or simply, to our world. Connecting to others as we shuffle forward towards that heaven-verging horizon.

I haven't had the chance to indulge much since having kids, but the same used to be central to my activities.

And I can't find the post right now, but I know I've written nearly the same thing about composing writing in my head while walking or exercising. Working out the exact wording and phrasing until it is just right, then recording it when done as though dictating a completed piece to myself.

A couple of other related thoughts that I was able to find quickly:

Do You Incubate Your Brain?

I do my best thinking while engaged in repetitive physical activities like hiking, swimming, biking, and running. . . . 

Giving ourselves something "mindless" to do allows the majority of our brainpower to wander, making random connections between things that bubble up from below the surface of conscious thought, which allows us to open new channels to creativity and problem-solving that don't exist when we try to force them.

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The Calm After the Storm

Most of my most tranquil moments in life have come during quiet reflection after long, hard exercise. . . . 

I not only process the bad stuff and get past it, I do so in time to really enjoy my workouts and the moments after. It can leave me full of tranquility and feeling a happy sense of wonder at and communion with the beauty of the natural world all around me.

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Why I Run

Trail Running Is My Favorite Form of Meditation . . . "When I'm out on a long run," she continued, "the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn't going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It's just me and the movement and the motion. That's what I love--just being a barbarian, running through the woods." . . . 

"I'm an introspective person, and sometimes I think too much, about my job and about my life.  I feed an army of pointless, bantering demons.  But when I run, the world grows quiet.  Demons are forgotten, Krakens are slain, and Blerches are silenced." . . . 

Compare that to . . . 

The Need to Empty Ourselves

Hemingway once said he felt empty after he wrote. Early in his career, he’d write from his top-floor Paris apartment, empty his being, and then walk downstairs back into the world. . . . 

Most metaphors of life contain the concept of fullness, having, abundance. We pulse in energy, passion, feelings—things we hold within physically and metaphysically. . . . 

The fantastical Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami admits he has sought a void every day of his adult life. . . . 

"I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void." . . . 

With the writing came the running. The two were well-suited – “the whole process […] focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon” could be said of either.

In Pilgrim, Annie Dillard went into the woods with feelings of emptiness and “an open palm.”

Like Dillard, Murakami makes a distinction between emptying and being empty. Murakami extols the state of emptiness. He understood what many of us arrive at inadvertently: being empty expands our possible fullness. . . . 

The freedom of unmindfulness. The blank. I want to exist in that blank. In the void of Murakami, the oblivion of Strand, the empty palm of Dillard, the quiescent perceptiveness of Shepard. . . . 

Yes. I exercise to to be empty. And, like Hemingway, I write to empty myself. It's a constant cycle. I read, consume, experience, think, and gradually I fill up with feelings and thoughts in need of expression. Then I write a post or apply myself to a writing project at work and empty myself into those words and feel a great sense of relief. My mind is quiet for a while. Then it starts back up again. Both states are enjoyable, the fullness and the calm, but it's in the peaceful emptiness that I feel most content and alive.

But, I don't get as much of that lately because I have chosen to share my life with kids. They satisfy and amuse differently.

Recently they have used their TV time to watch YouTuber Aphmau, who plays video games with her friends. They all talk over each other in constant, loud, shrill, ridiculous banter that to this grumpy old man sounds like so much screaming and shrieking. But while laughing at them this morning [Older] (7) exclaimed, "I love his voice acting."

He's always had a flair for drama. This summer we enrolled them in a week of drama camp. I'm anxious to see what they think. Here's another.

[Younger] (5) is going through a phase where his temper is really bad. The slightest thing not going the way he wants sets him off, and he can turn drastically from happy to furious, contrary, and obstinate. His self-determined alternative to physical violence is to aggressively snap at people, in their faces whenever possible.

The other day was a random day off from school and we dropped him and his brother off at the daycare business we sporadically use for such things. The director called mid-morning to tell me [Younger] was throwing a fit, refusing to cooperate, causing trouble, and snapping at people. She tried to get him to come talk to me on the phone, but he stuck his fingers in his ears and turned his back on her. I suggested giving him a bit of time to calm down to see if his mood would swing back. It didn't, and she called me back ten minutes later to come pick him up because controlling him was taking her full attention.

I texted [Spouse] to let her know she'd only have to pick one kid up after work and gave her a brief explanation. When they were driving home this afternoon she asked [Older] for more details. My memory of her memory of how he put it: [Younger] and the director were in each other's faces "having a stare down. They looked like they were about to throw down and tussle."

And [Younger] has a hugely active imagination. He spends as much of his time in his fantasies as he can. Last weekend we were watching them play in the yard. After a break, he ran out the door in just his underwear, carrying a pair of pants. He approached his brother and they conferred for a bit, then [Older] stripped his pants off, they exchanged, and they got dressed again. I learned later it was so [Younger] matched the color of the superhero costume he was imagining himself wearing.

[Younger's] been having some trouble getting along at school, too. Not all of the time, but at moments. His kindergarten teacher sent us an email update the other day about a particularly bad moment, including this:

He was then making fists at me and squeezing his hands saying, “I don’t think you realize how big my muscles are,” “I’m going to flip over this whole table,” and “It’s your turn. I’m going to give you a consequence next.” 

At that point I thought it best that he take a break from the classroom. 

We found encouragement in this news report, at least:

Children Who Don't Listen to Their Parents Make Higher Salaries, Study Says

Research conducted by six scientists followed more than 700 children between the ages of 9 and 40, paying special attention to their tendency to break rules, sense of entitlement, willingness to defy their parents and amount of time they spent studying. They concluded that those who disobeyed their parents, interestingly enough, earned the highest salaries.

Yes, they should have high salaries indeed.

A poem for the season. I really like how he captures the frustration of trying to capture an experience to share with others. It makes me think of Ann Patchett's example (see: A Glossary of Enchantment) that writing her thoughts feels like capturing a butterfly and smashing it flat on the page, that's it's still a butterfly, but two-dimensional and lifeless. From Terrain:

March

by Nathaniel Perry

Yesterday, when I came home

from work there was a rainbow.

It’s the kind of thing one hesitates

to write about. You know

it’s remarkable—all those gaudy colors

set down in the stubble field

and arcing up into the greyshine

blue of sky that’s yielded

its clouds to light. But how do you get

it right without overblowing

the thing? You’re always a half step away

from unicorns with rainbows—

and that’s the thing with recording the world,

no one will believe you

if you actually get it right. The bird

that sings to me all through

the spring, whose song I know as if

it were my own, I can’t

describe to anyone (much less

the internet), so the slant

of its melody is all I have.

If I tried to use metaphors

to describe it you would probably laugh

at my syrupy rainbow words,

and if I tried to sing it to you

here, you’d close the book

I’m sure. It’s hard to handle singing

in a book. So I am stuck

not knowing what bird it is because

it is so beautiful.

Does that make sense? I hope it does

because I think that’s all

I can say about it at this point

without unmaking my point.

But to get us back to the rainbow, I

saw it drop and anoint

the smallish valley where the creek

begins to assert itself

as a creek in earnest when I stopped the car

to check the mail. The shelves

of color arranged themselves into

the field like birdsong. I thought

for a second that the rainbow actually

had an end. But then I caught

myself in my fantasy and remembered

that everything was the same

as always, just color had given a moment

its unbelievable name.

Like M.T. Anderson's Daughter of Ys who inherited it from her mother, I too have a "love of wild things and lonely places." (See: Just Saw My First Rabbit of Spring.)

At that moment there were two feelings inside Celeste's tiny, rapidly beating heart that made her feel as full, and as empty, as a gourd. The sheer beauty of this moment was perfect and sublime. But she was alone.

--Henry Cole, A Nest for Celeste

No one will believe you if you actually get it right.

I've witnessed and been part of a number conversations considering the limits of regeneration in comic book superpowers and Dungeons & Dragons magic. I never thought anything like this would be more than hypothetical silliness.

Keep Your Head: The Self-Decapitating Sea Slugs That Regrow Their Bodies – Hearts and All

Scientists in Japan have discovered that this species of sea slug can decapitate itself and then regrow an entirely new body, complete with a beating heart and other vital organs.

The process, from shedding all of itself below the neck to regrowing a new body, took less than a month, in an extreme example of a process known as autotomy. . . . 

While the bodies didn’t survive very long (from days to months before decomposing), the decapitated heads started feeding on algae within hours, and healed the “wound” within a day. . . . 

The scientists think the sea slugs may have developed the technique as a way of getting rid of a parasite in their body.

Another key part of the trick is finding a way to get energy when you don’t have a digestive system. 

The scientists think the sea slugs are using the energy from the photosynthesis occurring in cells that they’ve gained from algae they’ve eaten.

Life is endlessly fascinating.

So is this article from Aeon about imagination.

Phantasia

Imagination is a powerful tool, a sixth sense, a weapon. We must be careful how we use it, in life as on stage or screen

Like in a dream, the limbic mind experiences art as real. An actor or writer embodies the deepest traumas and joys of life so the audience can experience them vicariously. Acting (and other collective artistic work) can be a kind of mainlining of intimacy, and the audience partakes of this intimacy too. . . . 

Art is not just great for therapeutic emotional management and catharsis, but also produces knowledge, generating new ways of understanding and manipulating the world. Contemporary neurocognitive theory argues that the mind is a ‘prediction processor’. It builds mental models of the world, and tests predictions, always updating the model to reduce future errors. These cognitive processes are not possible without the imaginative faculty. The imagination helps us create possible futures (new architecture, medical breakthroughs, new political possibilities) but also helps us model other minds.

When art is good – when the acting and the script are on point, or a character in a novel is nuanced – the audience actually learns more about human behaviour than real-life observation provides. This is because the interior of the character is articulated in art, whereas it remains submerged in real social interaction. . . . 

Once we take account of the imaginative layer of mind (the filtering and modelling we do between the raw data and the reasoned conclusions or beliefs), we see that the world itself really is different for the atheist as opposed to the Christian; the Republican as opposed to the Democrat; the rationalist versus the QAnon devotee. . . . 

A potent conspiracy is a narrative arc in which the believer is a heroic character. Phantasia is a potent ingredient here. The persuasiveness of imagination consists in its embodied quality – the conspiratorial mind feels and sees itself as a protagonist in a drama. A dramatic story such as the QAnon theory is reinforced by a charismatic leader (politician/actor/clergy/celebrity), creating a phantasia layer that feels real, just as the dream feels real to the limbic system and the movie feels real to the audience member. . . . 

A charismatic leader is like the shaman/actor on stage. They have ‘gone before’ into the embodied belief, they evoke the emotions, they involve the watcher/audience so intensely that everybody gets deeply invested. The insurrectionists in their dress-up costumes at the Capitol are less like actors and more like fully immersed audience members­. The insurrection was a kind of malevolent cosplay convention in which superfans who had intensely internalised the narratives themselves took over the stage, only the ‘convention’ in this case was at the Capitol. Obviously, this makes them no less dangerous, because their guns are not props, and mob violence is wildly contagious. . . . 

Imagination recruits our natural empathy system and can amplify it. We see fear or joy in another person’s face, and we catch it like an emotional contagion. The actor has made a career of this natural human ability to recreate another’s feelings and perspectives within one’s self. Properly cultivated, this emotional mimicry can become ethical care, and art and artists play a crucial role in this cultivation.

Use your imagination for good, not evil.

Speaking of the insurrection, the extremists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were radicalized by what they consumed online and in social media. Experts who study radicalization say that should sound familiar: 10 years ago, ISIS used a similar strategy to lure in young people.

A Tale Of 2 Radicalizations

One of Cua's attorneys, William Zapf, told NPR that his client had been led astray by a steady diet of far-right content and conspiracy theories online that may have duped him into believing things that simply weren't true. And people who have studied radicalization say that should sound familiar. Almost 10 years ago, another group of young people were radicalized by what they saw and heard online. But in that case, the object of their attention was a foreign terrorist organization: ISIS. . . . 

While the radicalization of Abdullahi Yusuf and Bruno Cua might have been driven by very different ideologies, the process by which they became extremists was remarkably similar. What they saw and consumed and internalized online gave them a false vision of the world. There was a stolen election to overturn in one case, and innocent Syrians to save in the other.

What makes this different is that in Cua's case, one of the people who inspired him most was President Donald Trump. . . . 

"This rhetoric about patriotism is causing me to realize more parallels with these folks and some of the jihadis who understand the world in this very strict good versus evil kind of way," University at Albany's Jackson said. "They see themselves on the team of good fighting against the team of evil."

Lies become truth if we believe them enough.

This is from AllSides, which attempts to provide a corrective to bias by offering a balanced view of the news. This article is meant to counter narratives that one side is more compassionate than the other. I'm not sure it succeeds.

Are Republicans or Democrats More Compassionate? Research Says It May Be a Trick Question

According to research published by Dr. Meri Long of the University of Pittsburgh, Republicans and Democrats were equally compassionate . . . 

Republicans and Democrats had equal levels of compassion, and the overall compassionate scores among both parties were statistically indistinguishable. . . . 

While Republicans and Democrats showed similar levels of compassion when surveyed, compassion played a different role in each respective party’s political preferences. In general, Democrats’ policy positions were more related to their feelings of compassion; in contrast, Republicans took positions on policy based on their feelings of compassion less frequently. . . . 

According to Long’s research, Democrats and Republicans who had not voted for Trump in the primaries were equal in terms of their personal levels of compassion. Yet Republicans who supported Trump in the primaries had significantly lower personal compassion levels.

So Republicans and Democrats are equally compassionate, but only Democrats take compassion into account in policy positions. That, to me, is a huge difference. What's the point of feeling compassionate if those feelings don't impact your actions? We need compassionate policy, not feelings. It's like "sending thoughts and prayers" after a tragedy but not actually doing anything to help.

And then there's the caveat that president 45's supporters have less compassion than anyone else. Thank you for proving what we already knew.

The NRA Way of Life Is Ruining Our Nation

Decades of gun propaganda has created a nation of sociopaths

The right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

Pollster Frank Luntz recently held a focus group of vaccine-hesitant Republicans, and one of the justifications offered for refusing to get the vaccine was chilling precisely because the defiance was conveyed so matter-of-factly: "We are not all in this together." . . . 

When it comes to what they owe others, their answer is all too often less than nothing. . . . 

Indeed, all we hear is that it's an assault on their alleged "freedom" to allow their neighbors the ability to go about simple tasks of life without fear of being gunned down . . . 

Blame the NRA and the gun lobby in general. . . . 

The gun industry shaped its marketing around the sexist and racist impulses of the worst people in the nation. So while fewer people overall are buying guns, this shrinking minority end up building small arsenals, trying to stifle their own insecurities with ever more gun purchases. And the gun lobby, aided by a massive right-wing propaganda machine, has convinced them that anyone who questions the wisdom of gun mania is clearly coming for your "freedom". . . . 

The right-wing belief that "freedom" depends on others having to die for pointless reasons now manifests in all sorts of ways. It can be seen in the resistance to even the most reasonable efforts to fight climate change because heaven forbid you have to get a slightly different kind of light bulb so that your grandchildren can enjoy living on a planet that isn't beset by biblical levels of natural disasters. Or the temper tantrum over Obamacare, which was largely fueled by a willingness to let other people die rather than run even the smallest risk that your doctor's appointment might have to be scheduled a week later. And lately, it has manifested in the right-wing whining over wearing masks in grocery stores or being asked to vaccinate, because the idea that others must die to spare them the slightest inconvenience is a bedrock belief of modern conservatism.

I'm so tired of hearing about empty cries of "freedom."

I love this.

These Five “Witness Trees” Were Present At Key Moments In America’s History

A witness tree begins its life like any other tree. It sprouts. It grows. And then it’s thrust into the spotlight, playing an involuntary part in a significant historic event. Often, that event is a devastating, landscape-scarring battle or other tragic moment. Once Civil War soldiers march on to their next battle, say, or a country turns its attention to healing after a terrorist attack, a witness tree remains as a biologically tenacious symbol of the past.

Witness trees have been known to hide bullets they’ve absorbed beneath new layers of wood and bark, and they heal other visible scars over time. While they may look like ordinary trees, they have incredible stories to tell.

Travelers, history lovers, some park rangers and others have embraced these exceptional trees as important, living connections to our past. In 2006, Paul Dolinsky, chief of the National Park Service’s Historic American Landscapes Survey, led the development of the Witness Tree Protection Program, a pilot project that identified an initial 24 historically and biologically significant trees in the Washington, D.C. area. Written histories and photographs of the trees are archived at the Library of Congress. 

“Although trees have longevity, they’re ephemeral,” says Dolinsky. “This will be a lasting record of the story a tree has to tell.”

While the pilot program has gained some traction, the number of witness trees in the U.S. remains unknown. . . . 

Communing with a witness tree offers a true, one-of-a-kind thrill. “It’s a live thing,” says Joe Calzarette, Natural Resources Program Manager at Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland. “There’s something about a live thing that you can connect with in a way you can’t with an inanimate object.”

In other good news:

Evanston, Ill., Leads the Country with First Reparations Program for Black Residents

The nation's first government reparations program for African Americans was approved Monday night in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, action that advocates say represents a critical step in rectifying wrongs caused by slavery, segregation and housing discrimination and in pushing forward on similar compensation efforts across the country. . . . 

The Evanston City Council approved the first phase of reparations to acknowledge the harm caused by discriminatory housing policies, practices and inaction going back more than a century. The 8-to-1 vote will initially make $400,000 available in $25,000 homeownership and improvement grants, as well as in mortgage assistance for Black residents, primarily those can show they are direct descendants of individuals who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 and suffered from such discrimination.

The housing money is part of a larger $10 million package approved for continued reparations initiatives, which will be funded by income from annual cannabis taxes over the next decade. Black residents make up about 16 percent of Evanston’s population of 75,000. . . . 

In the wake of anti-racism demonstrations that swept the country last summer — after the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville — California established a task force to propose a model for reparations. Chicago and several other cities are discussing reparations programs of their own.

Historian Jennifer Oast, an expert on institutional slavery at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, expects that the Evanston program in particular will have a “snowball effect” on proposed federal legislation.

And this:

Catholic Order Pledges $100 Million to Atone for Slave Labor and Sales

In one of the largest efforts by an institution to atone for slavery, a prominent order of Catholic priests has vowed to raise $100 million to benefit the descendants of the enslaved people it once owned and to promote racial reconciliation initiatives across the United States. . . . 

The pledge comes at a time when calls for reparations are ringing through Congress, college campuses, church basements and town halls, as leaders grapple with the painful legacies of segregation and the nation’s system of involuntary servitude. . . . 

Roughly half of the foundation’s annual budget will be distributed as grants to organizations engaging in racial reconciliation projects, Jesuit and descendant leaders said. About a quarter of the budget will support educational opportunities for descendants in the form of scholarships and grants. A smaller portion will address the emergency needs of descendants who are old or infirm. . . . 

About 5,000 living descendants of the people enslaved by the Jesuits have been identified by genealogists at the Georgetown Memory Project, a nonprofit group.

And an assortment of little things that have amused me in some way.

It's me:

Want to know what it's like to be Generation X? This captures it perfectly:

What about ages 35-54? Might as well not exist.

Only a principal would be able to write this unironically:

As much as I love the Myers-Briggs and many other personality and preference tests, I've never gotten into the Enneagram. When people ask me my style I always forget. I took a few free online versions recently and I'm going to post this here so I have a place to look at my results when needed.