An Ambiguous Sense of Simultaneous Comfort and Unease

I’m reminded by the weather this morning—particularly ice on my windshield that wouldn’t melt even with the defrost on full blast—of an adventure I had in college. A friend and I planned a Colorado ski trip the first (maybe second) winter after graduating high school. Scheduled a time, bought cheap tickets and lodging, and planned the day-long drive to get there; west from El Dorado (KS) through Wichita on 54 to Greensburg, then follow the Arkansas River the rest of the way to the Monarch Pass ski area, near the river’s source.

The day before we were to leave, meteorologists started talking about an epic storm headed our way, to hit that night. We worried we’d get snowed in and miss out on our opportunity. We decided not to wait; as soon as I finished my shift at McDonald’s that night, we started driving.

By the time we were heading out of Wichita, serious ice was coming down. The roads were still usable but, even with the wipers going and defrost on full blast, ice kept accumulating on the windshield. We had to pull to the shoulder every 10-15 minutes to scrape anew.

The forecast had called for ice turning to snow. We powered through until we were driving into heavy snow, which was much better for a while. It was just us and the semis, driving through the night. We found Greensburg full of parked trucks, though, that had pulled off to wait things out, and most of our companions joined them. One kept going, and we followed it out of town, letting it clear a path for us through the snow.

Then 54 and 400 split. He veered left to head south, we jogged right for Dodge City. And we found ourselves on virgin snow. No vehicle tracks on the road ahead of us. No road apparent. Just a short cone of whiteness in front of us, then darkness. Hypnotic white-out flakes in the sky; the flat, featureless expanse of great plains on the ground. We could just make out a shadow where the edge of the road dropped and became shoulder, so we relied on that to keep moving forward, at maybe 20 miles per hour.

Eventually, near Dodge, we were passed by a snowplow. The roads the rest of our trip were more traveled, and everything after that portion of the drive felt a relief. Finally, the next morning, in daylight, we stopped at a picnic area at the Royal Gorge Bridge & Park, where deer ate peanut butter & jelly sandwiches out of our hands.

That's something I felt compelled to write after it hit me on my drive to work this morning. It was suddenly there in my head and wanted out. So here it is.

Often my writing works like that, sometimes after an intentional gestation to meet a specific need or goal, sometimes it just arises unbidden.

Aside from that story, this post will have fewer words than most I create and more pictures. Since I wrote in my last post about using photos to help myself experience more everyday awe, I haven't been able to stop taking pics. Some of that has been due to continuing to feel that muse.

And some of it has been the weather.

I did this screen capture on my phone a few days ago, right after we had nine inches of snow. Today is Friday, and we're getting a bit more precipitation, but the big thing we're looking at right now is the temperature drop.

It won't get above zero on Sunday. That might be normal in some places, but not so much around here. We get a few snows that accumulate each year, but they tend to melt before too long. This is a nice bit of variety, a big snow followed by enough cold to help it last a while.

The other day, just as that storm was starting, I wrote about the book The Mysteries by Bill Watterson and John Kascht:

I'm watching the world transform today. Watching a snowstorm through the windows, everything changing from browns and blacks and greys to white. Watching the power of the weather, of nature. And I'm reminded by these cosmic forces how small and weak I am in comparison.

Humans have forgotten this feeling, The Mysteries implies. Once upon a time, we were defined by an ever-present anxiety about our limitations, our finitude, our powerlessness. The world was big and scary and mysterious. Now, we believe we understand and control everything. Nothing is unknown; nothing need be feared. But we must remember just how many mysteries still lie--and always will--outside our understanding, and adjust our orientation toward the world before it's too late.

The sense of humility that comes from watching a snowstorm. The Mysteries evokes this feeling with its words and images. Powerfully. The universe is an awe-inspiring spectacle, far too mysterious to ever fully grasp, and we are but tiny specks in its vastness. And, if we're clever, we can pair our anxiety with awe and wonder.

That became my review.

Yesterday, a colleague (who has been to art school, I believe) who sees my photos on Facebook told me they have a "liminal" quality. It's a word I'm familiar with, but not closely. I decided to do a bit of googling.

From Wikipedia: The aesthetic may convey moods of eeriness, surrealness, nostalgia, or sadness, and elicit responses of both comfort and unease.

ArtRKL references The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows' definition of kenopsia, which

describes the eerie atmosphere of a location that is typically bustling with people but is now abandoned. These spaces give feelings of discomfort that we can’t quite name, but are a common human experience. . . . 

Liminal spaces allow us to reflect upon the effects of memories and nostalgia in art. The ability to create an image that evokes emotions that cannot be described and identified with words is extremely powerful.

And an article in The Atlantic says:

Liminal spaces can be both comforting and discomforting, nostalgic and unsettling, intimate and unnatural.

Liminal spaces seem to acknowledge that the world is in a state of transition, dragging us along with it. . . . If limbo is all we know, perhaps we take some comfort in the banality of its ubiquity.

The inability to nail down a definition of liminality also speaks to the slipperiness of the emotion it tries to represent. . . . “Through acknowledging this darkness,” he writes, we can “seek new ways of seeing by another light.”

I love it, and couldn't feel more flattered. I wouldn't say I consciously try to achieve this quality with my pictures, but, since I feel "an ambiguous sense of simultaneous comfort and unease" as my near constant experience of life, I can't imagine a more perfect emotion for art to evoke. To know that I've communicated that to someone else means a lot to me.

I'm vaguely reminded of that old lyric from The Police's Message in a Bottle:

Seems I'm not alone at being alone.

If limbo is all we know, perhaps we take some comfort in the banality of its ubiquity.

The first of a few things from the news:

The Threshold at Which Snow Starts Irreversibly Disappearing

In January 2024, at long last, someone has figured out a formula of sorts for how snow reacts to climate change, and the answer is: It reacts nonlinearly. Which is to say, if we think snow is getting scarce now, we ought to buckle up.

Nonlinear relationships indicate accelerated change; shifts are small for a while but then, past a certain threshold, escalate quickly. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, two Dartmouth researchers report finding a distinctly nonlinear relationship between increasing winter temperatures and declining snowpacks. And they identify a “snow loss cliff”—an average winter-temperature threshold below which snowpack is largely unaffected, but above which things begin to change fast.

That threshold is 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Remarkably, 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpack exists in far-northern, high-altitude places that, for now, on average, stay colder than that. There, the snowpack seems to be healthy and stable, or even increasing. But as a general rule, when the average winter temperature exceeds 17 degrees (–8 degrees Celsius), snowpack loss begins, and accelerates dramatically with each additional degree of warming.

Already, millions of people who rely on the snowpack for water live in places that have crossed that threshold and will only get hotter. “A degree beyond that might take away 5 to 10 percent of the snowpack, then the next degree might cut away 10 to 15 percent, then 15 to 20 percent,” . . . 

Using machine learning, they found a clear signal that human-induced climate change was indeed forcing changes in the snowpack in the places where most people live. The sharpest declines were in the watersheds of the southwestern and northeastern United States, and in Central and Eastern Europe.

Sigh.

A second.

Study: Flowers are Starting to Self-Pollinate Due to Fewer Insects

“Our study shows that pansies are evolving to give up on their pollinators,” said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. “They are evolving towards self-pollination, where each plant reproduces with itself, which works in the short term but may well limit their capacity to adapt to future environmental changes.”

It's amazing that we can observe this happening in real time.

And, this one.

Cyborg Computer Combining AI and Human Brain Cells Really Works

After growing a brain organoid from stem cells, the UIB team placed the tissue on a plate covered in thousands of electrodes. They could then use traditional computing hardware to deliver electrical pulses to the organoid and record its responding neural activity. . . . 

Brainoware was less accurate at speech recognition than a traditional computing system running an AI, and keeping the organoid alive required a CO2 incubator and other power-hungry resources.

In other words, the system isn’t an improvement on the tech we already have — but it could prove to be a key stepping stone on the path to more advanced biocomputing systems in the future.

I had no idea so much (or any, really) progress was being made in this area.

A thought from Wait But Why.

An ambiguous sense of simultaneous comfort and unease.

I intended my last post to be an implied hint in the direction of New Year's (seek awe), and I'll add a couple more explicit things now. I'm late to the party because I refuse to do this kind of thing until the year is fully complete then I was on vacation, but here are my annual lists.

[Degolar]'s Favorite Kids Books Read in 2023

[Degolar]'s Favorite Teen Books Read in 2023

And a poem.

Abby E. Murray

THE NEW YEAR MAKES A REQUEST

It wants us to stop wishing for peace

like it’s the one guarding some goldmine

of surrender or compassion, like the act

of not killing each other really is

as easy as pouring tea into mugs,

like it’s something we could have had

years ago if we needed it enough

to get up and make it ourselves.

The new year is broke. The new year

wants us to put dinner on the table

for once, wants to arrive in January

without pouring a drink for anybody,

wants us to rub its swollen feet,

and while we’re at it, stop drawing it

as a baby, too. Can’t we tell how old it is,

how it’s been growing for ages

the way we give it no choice but to do,

its face withered as the leather of believing

that wishes are akin to changing?

The new year is tossing our demands

out the window like laundry, and here we are,

catching them like the birds they are not,

just a bunch of prayers as useful

as limp underpants and socks:

who will destroy the guns? the dictators?

the injustice? we shriek. Who will bring us

what we’re waiting for? and the new year

points to so much peace within reach of us

in the shape of rubble or sweat

or estrangement or disapproval or debt,

needing to be gathered, sorted, and kept.

Get it yourselves, the new year says,

and its voice is as clear as a mother’s.

—from Poets Respond

January 1, 2024

More pictures to finish.