Through the Prism: Enter the Mysterious World of Unanswerable Questions

As I reached into the car

to settle my work things,

I heard the tip-tapping

of clawed paws

trotting up behind me.

Turning, I saw only

crispy, wind-blown leaves

dancing down the middle

of the street.

What is this post about?

What do the fragmentary elements of this post have in common--what is the unifying theme?

Enter the world of unanswerable questions.

No individual thing or person has any intrinsic existence, but exists only relationally, dependent on everything else. The concept of an individual nature is, like one hand clapping, an illusion.

I pulled that quote from the article Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker. Here's a bit more from it:

When you enter the mysterious world of unanswerable questions, you will surely grow as a person and change for the better. . . .

Sitting with issues of life, death, and love requires us to admit the limits of our understanding--to say “I don’t know.” Researchers have demonstrated in experiments that people are highly averse to giving this response, but doing so is a sign of cognitive health. . . .

I’d like to see a revolution in existential thinking, a craze for pondering life’s mysteries. . . .

1. Schedule your mental workout.
2. Go for a long walk.
3. Invite boredom.

Saying "I don't know" is a sign of cognitive health.

I love this quote from thinker George Lakoff.

When we successfully reframe public discourse, we change the way the public sees the world. We change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

Reframing is not easy or simple. It is not a matter of finding some magic words. Frames are ideas, not slogans. Reframing is more a matter of accessing what we and like-minded others already believe unconsciously, making it conscious, and repeating it till it enters normal public discourse. It doesn’t happen overnight. It is an ongoing process. It requires repetition and focus and dedication. To achieve social change, reframing requires a change in public discourse, and that requires a communication system.

Conservatives in America have developed a very extensive and sophisticated communication system that progressives have not yet developed. Fox News is only the tip of the iceberg. Progressives need to understand what an effective communication system is and develop one. Reframing without a system of communication accomplishes nothing.

He recently posted it on Facebook as an excerpt from his book The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.

Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

Two scenes diverged in the woods . . .

[Older], (age 11) told me this is his representation of The Nightmare Before Christmas, with one half being Santa's Christmas and the other being Halloween Town's version.

I saw it before his explanation, and was glad he clarified.

I started a recent morning with a trip to the park to find the shoe we couldn't the prior night after dark, when we had to leave empty handed, unable to locate where it had landed after [Older] had thrown it at [Younger] (age 9).

My children love snowball fights. But. They won't engage in snowball fights unless I'm there to be their target. They can spend hours stockpiling ammunition, building forts, and otherwise preparing, but no attacking happens unless they can attack me. Such love.

A poem of gratitude.

Al Ortolani

SOMEWHERE IT’S ALWAYS THANKSGIVING

Last night when I crawled into bed and switched off the light,
too tired to read, too tired for an audio book on low volume even,
I said what I called my evening prayer, which is more of a recap

of the day and a short run down of all I should be thankful for.
I recalled how the day had blown by; more wind and chaff
than wheat spread on a sheet at my knees. I made a vow that

tomorrow I’d take a moment to put the rush of the day on hold,
pause for even a moment to scratch the dog’s ears, the two of us
in the backyard below the wet moon in the still dripping rain.

This would be the exact minute that I suck the air into my lungs.
We’re alive my boy, I say to him, and he nuzzles me with his
great nose and searches my face with his honey eyes.

We’ve only got a moment I say to him, and then tomorrow
it’s someone else in this same backyard with the same dogwood
we planted, drawing in its sap for the winter, protecting

the heartwood for another someone’s spring. But he already
understands all this. It’s why his eyes are so warm, so completely
given over to the one wish that matters. Ok, my boy, it’s ok.

—from Poets Respond

I suck the air into my lungs.

Valuable values, perspective, and practical advice, is all I wrote for my minimal review of the book Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by Adrienne Maree Brown. (I previously mentioned her previous book, Emergent Strategy, in The Science of Breathing.) It is tightly focused on the practices of facilitation and mediation. Here's more about it from Goodreads:

Before she was an NYT bestselling author, adrienne was known for her work as a facilitator, mediator, and teacher. She still travels the country helping organizations, especially Black organizations, clarify their goals, articulate their values, and negotiate conflicts. This work is based on her theory of Emergent Strategy and often takes the shape of multi-day workshops called "Emergent Strategy Immersions." In adrienne's verson, facilitation and mediation aren't simply tools for organizations, they are life skills that we all must practice, and through which the goals and values of organizations will align with those of the individuals within them. This is to say that this is not just a book for nonprofits. Her core audience has been requesting a book on applying Emergent Strategy to facilitation and mediation work for a long time. This book will serve as a textbook for the many workshops adrienne gives each year and a primer for everyone else. The book is a deeper dive into practicing Emergent Strategy in real time, drawing from the lessons of her facilitation work, and a year and a half of experiments with immersing people into emergent strategy community through her Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute. The book will be intriguingly structured, with the introduction (or Heart) in the middle and the front and back halves of the book devoted to Facilitation and Mediation respectively. Beyond that, it borders on a choose-your-own-adventure book in that the lessons are brief and to the point, highly practical, and you can move through the book in a number of ways to meet your needs. Adrienne's approach is rooted in a Black feminist worldview. These days, the world is hungry to hear more about that worldview and to take leadership and learn best practices from it.

Here are some quotes from the book that I really appreciate:

Move towards ways of being that are focused on listening to each other deeply and accepting each other, whole. We need to learn ways of being in space together that help us see beyond false constructs of superiority and inferiority without asking us to sacrifice what has shaped us. We need to study being receptive and nonjudgmental with each other, letting the earth and community hold us until we remember we already belong.

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We shape and generate complex systems and patterns through our own relatively simple interactions.

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What you pay attention to grows.

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The stories people want to tell you are often not as helpful as the stories they are ashamed to tell you.

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Trust people and they become trustworthy.

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We learn through an accumulation of lessons. We change through an accumulation of practices.

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We are an ecosystem being told we should be a monocrop.

We are an ecosystem being told we should be a monocrop.

"How would you describe her?"

"Spiritually? I think it's safe to say she's a saint. All librarians are. They are keepers of information, guardians of athenaeums."

— The Supernatural Society by Rex Ogle

Another good message from Homeless Training by Ryan Dowd.

There are No Saints

There are no saints.
There are no perfect people.
There are no perfect beacons of light and righteousness.
If you look for the bad in others (and yourself), you will find it.

If you find that depressing, you shouldn’t…
The truth is far more hopeful.

Imperfect people are capable of selfless acts.
Flawed humanity has within it the seeds of greatness.
Your past deeds do not have to dictate your future.
If you look for the good in others (and yourself), you will find it.

Reject simple dichotomies and illusions of perfect saintly people.
Humanity is far too complicated (and hope-filled) for that.

There are no saints. Being flawed is not a flaw.

More good advice from George Lakoff.

How to Deal With Trump Supporters at Your Family Holiday Gathering

Unfortunately, political arguments are a guaranteed way to ruin a family holiday and make things even worse. So, what can we do instead?

Don’t argue with your grandfather. Instead, ask him to tell you a story about a time he did something good for someone else. Listen, and then ask him to tell you another one.

The simple but powerful idea: Empathy. Even by stimulating a memory of empathy, you can help activate empathy in the brain. Through repetition, this can help change people for the better.

Is it possible to stimulate empathy? Yes!

“But researchers have discovered that far from being an immutable trait, empathy can be developed,” reported the New York Times in 2018. “There are steps people can take to acknowledge their biases and to move beyond their own worldviews to try to understand those held by other people. Bonus: You’ll make new friends along the way.”

At the very least, opting to stimulate empathy rather than argument could result in a more pleasant holiday experience. And it's a subtle way to be be politically subversive without making a scene.

Besides, the science makes it clear: Arguing about politics is not very effective at changing anyone’s mind. This is even true when the facts are on your side. If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled.

When you challenge a person’s political opinions, they will generally perceive it as an attack on their identity – especially their moral identity. This will likely harden their position, since they’re not just defending their political views, they are also defending their egos.

One of the things cognitive science teaches us is that when people define their very identity by a worldview, or a narrative, or a mode of thought, they are unlikely to change—for the simple reason that it is physically part of their brain, and so many other aspects of their brain structure would also have to change; that change is highly unlikely.

It is possible to stimulate empathy in the brain. Through repetition, this can help change people for the better.

My review of Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein reads:

Fascinating, insightful, and useful.

Though the word is not in the title or subtitle, this book is about habituation, which is a generally good and useful human characteristic of acclimatizing to our normal, everyday surroundings and experiences. The more common it is for us, the less dramatic--the more dull--it becomes. This is helpful at times, as it allows us to tune out unpleasant odors we can't avoid, adapt to different climates, become numb to chronic pain, and focus in the face of distractions. But sometimes we need to notice those things because they're problematic and we should change them. And habituation means things we find joyful and wonderful become less so over time.

This book is about how to become dishabituated. How to overcome the numbing impact of habituation. The authors consider the topic in personal terms of experiencing more happiness, when variety is good and bad, how to wake up from social media, and becoming more resilient. They show how dishabituation leads to increased creativity, prevents lying and dishonesty, and fights misinformation. They consider the ramifications of becoming habituated to risk and unhealthy environments, to social discrimination and incremental descents into tyranny. How we can become habituated to low expectations that prevent progress, award victims fair legal settlements, and so much more. The range of topics they cover--the far reach and transfer of this one simple dynamic--is impressive and informative.

I would expect everyone to find something relevant and resonant somewhere in this accessible and readable book.

A few sample excerpts:

Pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires.

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"Perfect" is not a state people enjoy. . . . When we cannot learn, we get bored and unhappy. When change halts--when you stop learning and progressing--depression kicks in.

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Many of us try to maximize happiness; many try to maximize meaning or purpose. But you may also try to achieve another aspect of life beyond happiness and meaning--variation. You may try to live a life with new experiences, new places, new people, and new perspectives, and thus with diversity in what you see and do.

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The same neural principle that causes you to become desensitized to the smell of your own aftershave is also at work when you subconsciously believe repeated information. Neural processing is reduced in response to repeated stimuli. When it is effortless for you to process information because of repetition (i.e., less neural response), you are more likely to accept it as true. Effortless means there is no "surprise signal." You don't stop to ponder; you just accept.

Habituate to empathy.

On a different note, I also recently read the fiction title Eye of a Little God by A.J. Steiger, of which I wrote:

This is a compelling, creepy, character-driven story about people living on the margins in 1980s small-town Nebraska. About semi-nomadic, unstable, and possibly unhinged Vietnam vet Eddie and those he encounters in a strange, obsessive quest he undertakes. It's a blend of fantasy, horror, and mystery, with some surprising hope and love, and a dash of unexpected ruminative moments of wisdom. It kept me off-balance in a good way. Purposefully odd and enjoyable.

And I share it mainly because I wanted to share these quotes:

As anyone who has been alone for a long time can tell you--and I mean really truly alone--slaying your own dragons isn't empowering. It's exhausting and scary. Agency doesn't mean you get a happy ending. It just means that people can blame you when you don't. "Well," they say as you lay drowning and choking in your own blood, "you should have worked harder."

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To be fundamentally misperceived is a profound sort of solitude. Contact with others offers no relief when they only see the false self.

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In an abstract, mythopoetic sense, feral witch girls have a certain allure; in reality, it's hard to get past the lack of basic hygiene.

And this longer excerpt that I really like, both for content and for writing:

He finds himself thinking back to a conversation with his father on a sticky late-July evening. Credence was sitting in his favorite rocking chair on the back porch, Eddie sitting beside him. In the small, square, fenced-in backyard, Lady chased a squirrel up the old oak tree and bounced around it in mad circles, barking, tail spinning like a helicopter blade as the squirrel chittered down at her. The liquid glow of sunset soaked the grass.

"Dad?"

"Yes?"

Eddie opened his mouth, then closed it again. He rubbed a finger over a dried stain on the sleeve of his shirt. Ketchup maybe. What he wanted to ask was, why does it hurt? The question didn't make any sense. He didn't have a scraped knee or a bruise. The hurt he felt was larger; shapeless. But his eight-year-old brain couldn't put this thought into words, so instead he asked, "Is there something wrong with me?"

The chair stopped rocking. The faint creaking fell silent. "What do you mean?"

He hunted for a path through the thick and scratchy hedge between his thoughts and the world. "The kids at school don't like me. Other kids have friends. I don't have any friends."

"What about Russ?" he asked, naming a neighbor kid Eddie used to play with years ago.

"He doesn't want to talk to me anymore."

The rocking chair creaked. "I didn't have many friends as a child either," his father said. "Children are fickle. It's no fault of yours."

"Is it easier being a grownup?"

Credence sipped his ice water. "It's hard in a different way." The ice cubes clinked in the glass. "Life is a series of travails." At Eddie's blank stare, he adds, "Painful efforts. It gets easier when you make your peace with that. If you chase happiness, it will always elude you. We feel pain and frustration when we are denied the things we want. We can find peace when we stop chasing and accept the path open to us." The chair creaked again. "Life itself does not get any easier. But you adjust. You do the things that must be done. You live decently and humbly, wanting little. And in some quiet moment when you least expect it, happiness will come to you and sit like a bluebird on your shoulder."

Eddie picked at a splinter on the old wood. He wondered how many years he would have to wait.

"Look at her," Credence said, pointing at Lady, who was gnawing on a stick. "She doesn't think about such questions. We do. That's what it means to be human."

"Wish I was a dog," Eddie said.

Credence smiled and ruffled his son's hair. His hand remained there, resting lightly atop Eddie's head as Lady frolicked and the sun sank deeper into its bed of clouds.

In an abstract, mythopoetic sense, that's what it means to be human.

An excellent article; so much insight.

Bunkerised Society – Why Prepping for End Times Is so American

Prepping has been part of the American ethos well before neoliberalism and even before our contemporary industrial supply chains. Americans have been urged and trained to prep as children in various scouting organisations, as homesteaders given a plot of land by the federal government in the colonial project of ‘taming’ the West, and as steady, patriotic citizens prepared to survive nuclear attack to keep the US alive in their bunkers. . . .

The logic of the bunker shapes how Americans relate to each other, the state, and how they construct their domestic lives, as a matter of individual isolation, preparation and savvy consumption. As such, bunkerisation posits that far from being at the fringes of US society, prepping is at the core of an American mythology of yeoman frontierspeople, from the Boy Scouts of America to the contemporary homestead movement. Bunkerisation as a process also plugs into the broader US phenomenon of mass consumption as Americans are asked to purchase their way to safety. . . .

This orientation paradoxically reflects a patriotic commitment to being an American by isolating oneself from other Americans in times of crisis. . . . Multiple psychological orientations, worldviews and political ideologies find common motivation in bunkerisation.

The US has always urged its citizens towards self-defence and self-sufficiency, and to be in a permanent state of alert for ideological and material threats not just to the individual, but to the American way of life that the individual embodies. The Boy Scouts of America disciplines the self to ‘be prepared’. The American handicraft movement popularised in the late 1800s and early 1900s responded to the loss of art, craft and self-sufficiency posed by dependence on industrial supply chains to provide for our needs. The atomic era urged citizens to mobilise their fear of communism and Soviet attack into preparation for the worst-case scenario, not because each individual’s life is so important, but because this would warn the communists that Americans were prepared to die as Americans, before succumbing to communism. Situating prepping at the centre of US life through the process of bunkerisation allows us to shift from how or why Americans prep, to analysing how we ended up producing the prepping American who shapes everyday life. . . .

Being an American often means understanding that, during instances of calamity, we all must do what we can to protect ourselves and our families. The tension in this construction of Americanness is both one of magnitude and responsibility. That is, if the power goes out because of a power-grid failure and one does not have the requisite amount of water on hand or did not buy a generator, that might prompt a discussion of individual responsibility . . .

This is squarely a social question about political will and collective action to confront shared threats together. Yet bunkerisation encourages us to see the prepping American as a vector of individual and consumer responsibility, and not a question of the social scale of meeting shared threats. Instead, the prepared American is asked to focus only on security practices through consumption at price points that their means allow. This bunkerised approach to making preparation a matter of individual initiative and savvy trickles into everyday life more generally. . . .

Towards those ends, more than 10 million Americans have Ring camera surveillance systems, in addition to the number of Americans who have other brands of security systems. Nanny cams, firearms accumulation, the proliferation of gated communities and private security services are all manifestations of a bunkerised society. More than preparing for anticipated episodes of disruption or violence, a bunkerised society maintains a permanent state of readiness, not as a feature of a sub-cultural association, like doomsday preppers or homesteaders, but as a condition of living in the hollowed-out shell of a state that does not take infrastructural stability and basic need satisfaction as a right but as a good one must supply for oneself through consumer choices on the market. . . .

The myth of the yeoman frontiersperson taking individual responsibility for any catastrophe is baked into the bunkerised life of the prepping American. Overcoming that is not simply a matter of attitude, but a political project of reinvigorating the collective dimensions of public life.

Being an American means isolating oneself from other Americans in times of crisis.

Animals are people, too.

Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought

Crows and ravens, which belong to the corvid family, are known for their high intelligence, playful natures, and strong personalities. They hold grudges against each other, do basic statistics, perform acrobatics, and even host funerals for deceased family members. But we keep learning new things about the savvy of these birds, and how widespread that savvy is among the corvid family.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia and the University of Bristol found that a species of crow called the hooded crow—which has a gray bust and black tail and head feathers, making it look like it is wearing a “hood”—is able to manage a mental feat we once thought was unique to humans: to memorize the shape and size of an object after it is taken away—in this case a small piece of colored paper—and to reproduce one like it. . . .

The new hooded crow findings suggest that the ability to learn this way could be more widespread than we thought . . .

For biologists and comparative psychologists, understanding the ways corvids use mental templates can help to illuminate not just the nature of bird intelligence, but of intelligence across the animal kingdom and evolutionary time.

How widespread that savvy is across the animal kingdom.

And a final poem.

Nancy Miller Gomez

STAND OFF

There are 14 men in the lunchroom. Some are sitting in chairs, some standing,
some prowling around the edges of the room. They are men who have grown
used to being on a schedule, and this is snack time. They are waiting for a door
to open and a cart to come out. Sometimes it’s oranges, sometimes apples. But today
they have been here too long. Impatience builds like snow before an avalanche.
We want our fruit, they say. But the man watching from the protected enclosure
tells them, You’ve already had your fruit. Eyes narrow, arms cross. No, they say.
We’ve been waiting. And no one has brought the fruit. The man behind glass
repeats into the speaker, You’ve already had your fruit. It was there on the tray.
And now it’s gone. Where’s the tray? the men say. Where’s the fruit? Their hands
fly up in protest like a flock of startled birds. They have NOT had their fruit.
The man in the booth looks at me as if I am the witness who will save him.
Maybe I will say that I too saw the fruit. Only I’ve just arrived. I haven’t seen
anything. I stand there outside the guard station with my backpack filled
with poems watching the men watch me. Is it possible it’s still in the kitchen?
the instructor of the class before mine suggests. She wants these men
to come back to the room where she is teaching them life skills: how to balance
a checkbook, how to find a job, how to be honest in a world that isn’t.
She knows they won’t pay attention until they’ve had their fruit.
Can I just go to the kitchen and look? she asks, and everyone quiets to hear
what the man will say. Then he passes the key through the bulletproof portal.
It scrapes across the metal. She scoops it into her hand and heads to the kitchen.
Everyone waits. Minutes later she re-appears carrying a tray piled with 14 bananas.
The men form a circle around her, each in turn taking one, and then
they are eating and no one talks. Now they aren’t angry men.
They are hungry boys who have just been fed.

—from Punishment
Rattle Chapbook Series Selection