Category Archives: musing

Lest the tone of these posts tend to bring you down

I strive to make this blog more than a compendium of carping cavils, a cellar of acidic whines, a half-full glass of luke warm dysphagia with a dyspepsia chaser, despite an often robust appearance to the contrary.  

We all have our complaints, which sometimes must be shouldered out of the way before better things can come in to play.  Some of these posts are just grunts I put my shoulder into, to allow me to do something more productive.   Sometimes setting some galling absurdity into a few short paragraphs helps me move forward, though I am always happier when a post can help someone else move forward too, or allow some gentle, or even vicious, reader to pause and consider something from another perspective.  

It is a blessing to recall, when pressed, the blessing of all this; the gift of life.  The senses that sense, the limbs that work, the interactions with those we care about, the things we love to do.  Life is hard and grim, or easy and fascinating, partly depending on what we are undergoing and partly the result of our perspective.  

We learn now of a happiness gene, some people born genetically predisposed to feel good, be chipper and positive.  These types are apt to burst into song, because of the presence of a gene on their twisted coil of DNA.  We have long known of a predisposition to melancholia and other qualities that drag on the spirit.  A happiness gene, there’s a delightful fucking thought!  God bless the happy.

The narrative of a successful life is constant and pervasive: it is a busy life filled with tangible and regular achievement.   Hardly time to sit down in this tightly programmed life, let alone brood, and certainly not about problems well beyond your power to help solve.  On the other hand, those too busy to brood… I don’t know about them.  

Seems to me a person who doesn’t have time periodically to ponder things outside their own life is missing something.  On the other side, a person who has only time to ponder is clearly not doing enough with their life.

It’s possible that I have mastered nothing but the art of rationalization.  I have found the thing I most want to do with my life at this point:  be in a room full of kids who don’t have a chance and watch them excited about feeling like they have a chance.  Becoming a finger pointing to a world of creative possibilities.  

By the time these at-risk kids are grown up, if they make it to adulthood, water might be too expensive for them to afford anyway.  The oceans may have reclaimed cities everywhere, the world might be more like Mad Max than anything else.  The odds are clamorously against anyone who does not avail themselves of every advantage their life offers them.  The odds are always tilted against fairness and decency on any kind of large scale, particularly with a multiform mass media megaphone droning “fuck them!” 24/7.  Self-interest and the profit motive rule the world, Mr. Fucking Ahimsa-face.

“Slaughter sides!” screams the skinny kid on the team of losers, looking at the muscular, athletic giants chosen for the other side.

“Yeah, you got a problem with that, squirt?”  A game’s a game.  The game must be played, the hand dealt must be smelt.   

“The one who smelt it, dealt it.”  False, but at least it’s got a bouncy rhyme.

I’m rambling a bit here, and have to get back to my busy schedule, time is money and chop chop and all that rot, but take a few seconds to breathe one deep breath and let it out slowly.  

Seriously.  Take a moment and breathe, just once, deeply.

I’m doing it now. 

Nice.   Few things compare to that, my friend.  

Now, let’s take a quick look at some accidental, if minor, delight, provided by our friends in the world of professional sports.

While checking in on Tanaka’s and Scherzer’s pitchers’ duel yesterday, I noticed this, at the bottom of the box score.   I thought this was very nice of them, and a kindness you don’t often see in the macho world of sports:
Picture 3

When Thomas Jefferson’s beloved daughter didn’t write to him

Aggrieved that her beloved father had retired from retirement to get back into the intrigues of early American politics, mounted a vigorous and all-consuming presidential campaign and moved from Monticello to the nation’s capital, Martha took a break from their lively correspondence.  When she did finally write after he was elected president she did not congratulate him on his win or make any other mention of the presidency.

Damn!

Thomas Jefferson, now president, was long accustomed to keeping his darker passions subdued.  In fact, most biographers site his whipping of his horse bloody as one of the only outward signs of anger he ever showed.   His beloved daughter’s silence finally got to him, though, and he wrote to her:

“It is a terrible thing that people will not write unless they have materials to make a long letter when three words would be so acceptable.”1

Dig it.

1: Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History; Fawn M. Brodie  p. 327

Abuse on the sly

I was a U.S. Census enumerator in the 1980 Census.  I went door to door in apartment buildings, knocking and interviewing households on a list I got from a supervisor.  The list was comprised of people who had not mailed back their census forms.  The answers to these census questions were used by Congress to apportion funds, based on population.  It was important work for the neighborhood, the eye contact avoiding, Amish bearded supervisor impressed on us the first day.  Because my neighborhood is largely Dominican, I quickly learned to shout “Censo” through the closed doors in response to muffled queries.  Most doors, when they opened, opened reluctantly, some not at all.  I didn’t blame them, I hate uninvited knocks on my door, after all, even though it made my job harder when they didn’t talk to me.

It was a commission business.   We were paid strictly by the number of completed census forms we handed in every week.   There was one guy who handed in exactly the same number every week– a large number, he was the highest earner.  He undoubtedly wrote them out sitting at his kitchen table, or in the local diner, making up the information that nobody else was ever going to follow up or confirm, as fast as his hand could fill in the blanks.  It is likely his answers gave our part of NYC the maximum federal dollars for population, since he was, clearly, a canny fellow.

I, however, was raised to be an honest idiot, and so I walked to each apartment the required three times, at different times of day, times I duly documented in my sworn-to log, before filling in as accurately as possible an ‘estimated’ questionnaire based on asking a neighbor, or like my more successful colleague, my best and fastest guess seated at my kitchen table or on a park bench.  It was pretty dull work in any case, bubbling in circles with a number two U.S. Government Census pencil.  The memorable moments were very few, but there is one that stayed in my head and came up yesterday with sudden and disturbing clarity.

I was 24, and I recall one good-looking young woman being openly seductive, shifting on the couch in her scanty nightgown, which slipped off her shoulders and receded at the bottom to show most of her smooth, caramel colored skin.  Her skin was lovely, and her body nicely formed.  She had a pretty face, too, and smiled invitingly, sitting close by the spot she’d patted for me to sit, but I was hesitant to be seduced, only partly because she didn’t speak any English.   She asked me in Spanish if I was married, and I shook my head slowly with a small smile accompanied by the jarring thought of her jealous lover turning the key in the lock as I leaned in to kiss her, or worse, a few minutes later.  

But the visit I recall even more vividly was to a married couple in another building.   The very friendly man opened the door with a big smile and a welcome the guy from El Censo usually didn’t get.  He may even have offered me a beer, which I would have thanked him for but declined.   I recall thinking this fit, self-possessed, likable guy in the immaculate wife-beater was what’s known as a man’s man.

Behind him in the tidy kitchen was a woman with a tear-streaked face, her eye make-up a mess.  She made desperate, pleading, mad-looking gestures behind his back.   He was very relaxed, but kept an eye on her too.  Whenever he noticed the histrionics she quickly hid whenever he turned to her he would shrug to me and casually laugh it off.  “She’s very emotional,” he told me with a smile, his raised eyebrows adding “you know what I’m talking about, my man, I know you know.” 

He quickly and efficiently answered all the census questions while she said nothing, stood behind him mugging like a mad woman.  

“He’s going to kill me,” she mouthed distinctly behind his back as I wrapped up the questions and put the clipboard back into my official plastic U.S. Census satchel.  

I had a moment of confusion then, cognitive dissonance of a sort, but there was now no mistaking where I actually was, nor the sharp pang of fear I still recall.  The strong, friendly man in the wife-beater was actually a wife beater.  If I let on that I knew, he would kill both of us right there in the kitchen, the reality of that hummed electrically in the air.  Calling the cops once I left wouldn’t be the end of it either, it was her word against his, and I’d already seen how that would play when the cops arrived.  

The cops would clap him on the back and thank him for the beers as they went out smiling, especially back in 1980 when people were not so aware of the dynamics of domestic violence.  If the guy even spent part of a night locked up he’d get out and come directly to find me, which would not take long, I lived alone a couple of blocks away.  When he spotted me he’d yell “cabron!”, race across the street, catch me by my collar, beat the shit out of me, break both my arms and my legs too.  The smell of fear was all I smelled as I smiled and shook his powerful hand.

I am not proud, all these years later, that I did nothing, even as I know there was not much I could have done.  Today I probably would have done something, I like to think.  I have done brave things for weaker people in such situations a couple of times since.  Plus, times have changed over the decades, the cops today would not necessarily roll their eyes at the emotionally worked up woman and or uncritically buy the calm, easy patter of the affable guy.  

And yet– people live in terrible situations, not to blame victims for being victims, mind you, but people, for twisted psychic reasons they themselves are mostly clueless about, place themselves in hells that they stay in, like that apartment I visited… like crummy and beautiful homes everywhere, behind the walls and doors of which unspeakable cruelties are routinely and systematically committed.

Blessed Are The Peacemakers

A peacemaker takes people in pain and anger and, if she is good, leaves them with less intense bad feelings, able to picture a time when they will reconcile and forgive each other.

Many people want to make peace, but it is an art few people master. Inartful attempts to make peace remind me of Rodney King’s “can’t we all just get along?”  Convincing people to pretend it was all a misunderstanding and that everybody actually loves each other is not peacemaking.  There are situations where this may be the case, mutual misunderstanding leads to war.   But until the hurts are acknowledged, you might as well just squirt lighter fluid on the smoldering ashes.

Making peace is hard, often impossible, but blessed work, and the principle is simple and universal.

The first requirements are humility and empathy toward the parties. Judging the angry parties does not help make peace, only understanding the harsh reality of their feelings does.   The peacemaker cannot make peace (except in the case of the Colt .45 sardonically named The Peacemaker, which left the quarrelsome party silent at the end of the session)– the peacemaker can only bring calm, patience and listening skills to a situation from which these elements have fled.

The power of calm, patience and listening cannot be overstated.  It is aggravating not to be heard.  “I know what you are about to say and you seem unwilling to admit the possibility that you’re completely wrong,” is a poor strategy for a would-be peacemaker.  

Good luck to those who would be peacemakers, the impulse is commendable.   Few things in this troubled world are more blessed than making peace where there was implacable hostility.  Don’t forget, though, to check your own frustration at the door before you attempt it.  That’s all I’m saying.

Excavation

I should be excavating the foot deep surface of my desk.  I have misplaced a very nice new 0.9 mm mechanical pencil and it’s bugging the hell out of me.  I hate losing things, and don’t often lose things, in spite of the swirling chaos in here.   I’ve looked everywhere, superficially.  It has to be somewhere under this nest of papers all around the computer screen.  Why this reluctance to tackle these heaps of papers?

Is it related to the reluctance to tackle more difficult things?  Brooding over an inability to tidy is preferable to thinking about the vexing impossibility of the larger challenge, I suppose.   People build huge edifices to protect themselves from the things they fear the most, like the reality of their eventual extinction.  Lives are spent busily making monuments to the self that will vanish without any other trace when the animating light goes out.  Denial of death is not just a deadly river in Africa.  

“You are riffing hard on the back pedal, son, because you fear to take even a mincing, tiny step forward,” says Hmmmm.  

A worn out device, like the rest of these devices… observes one to none.  

I give a fleeting thought to a lamentable thing.   In reaching the limit of my forbearance, when an old friend’s obliviousness finally cut me too deeply to tolerate, I lost something rare that I valued greatly.  Whatever else his flaws, he is a quick-witted fellow I never had to worry did not follow a divergent remark.   Lightning quick to catch on, which made it a pleasure to banter with him.   This feature, oddly, was one of the best things about my father, whose sense of humor was similarly dark, irreverent and instant.  Interestingly, both of them were often driven by self-hatred.

Speaking quickly and unchecked is a pleasure rare in this world, where we often have to explain, pull punches, consider the other person’s squeamishness and taste before riffing.  It was like rare moments in jam sessions where the kernel of an idea would pass, lightning quick, and we’d be on it at once.

Oh, well.  Time to get back to work rolling this hoop down the joyful road.

NY Times on the importance of play in early childhood education

A friend sent me an article from today’s Times, making the same point I’ve been trying to make for the last few years.  Play is a key to getting young kids interested in learning and interacting as part of an inventive, inquisitive group.  I was glad to get the piece, which supported my thesis, though it also aggravated me slightly to read it.  

Written by a freelance science writer in the well-balanced style that is the Times’ trademark, it quoted several educational researchers who believe that more play should be part of early schooling, instead of the accelerated academics pushed by our country’s misguided, corporate-driven educational mandates.  “No Child Left Behind” (surrrrrre…), the article suggests, may underestimate the academic value of young children discovering learning in joyful play, rather than by forcing them to do cognitive tasks at an age when they cannot fully understand or participate in them.

True enough.  Play is crucial for a lot of reasons, at all stages of life, but particularly for kids beginning school.  Glad to see the NY Times printing an article about it.  Here’s the thoughtful, well-written piece.

A sardonic tendency, ingrained by my father, no doubt, twitched after reading an article which, to me, stated the painfully obvious and brought this unfortunate analogy to mind:

“Seven-year multimillion dollar Harvard study of 100,00 children and young adults strongly suggests that children forced by abusers to engage in sexual activities are far less likely to be enthusiastic about sexual intimacy later in life.  Researchers debate….”

I know, I know.

We get to the heart of the discussion on play vs. academic tasks for tykes with this paragraph:

The stakes in this debate are considerable. As the skeptics of teacher-led early learning see it, that kind of education will fail to produce people who can discover and innovate, and will merely produce people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors. Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?

The answer really depends on who you ask, as many answers do.  Those who profit from a passive, easily manipulated consumer society have a vested interest in keeping masses of Americans as stupid and gullible as possible.  Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?  It depends on who “we” is.  If it’s the good folks who make billions on ever more sophisticated standardized tests for tykes?  No brainer.  If it’s those who believe that democracy can only work properly with an educated, thinking populace able to intelligently discuss and creatively tackle problems?  

Well, you and I know which side we’re on– but then, nobody is paying us the big bucks to be on the side of profiteers at any cost.  Easy to condemn educational profiteers, I suppose, but, on the other hand, everybody’s got to make a living.

Grow Up or Throw Up

 A child raised by angry parents spends a lot of time wondering what they did wrong.

“You did nothing wrong,” a rare, compassionate friend of the parents might eventually tell the kid.  “I love your parents, you know they’re my best friends, but they are unhappy people.  Unhappy people get mad a lot.  There is nothing you could have done differently.  It’s not you, it’s important for you to know that.  It’s just that your parents have their own frustrations that have nothing to do with you and they often took them out on you.”

Holy shit, you think, I’m fifty years old and just finding this out.  Wow.

My father remained in his terrible twos until he was eighty and hours from death.  Then it hit him.  “Goddamn it,” he wheezed, “I’ve been a horse’s ass.”  Never heard him use the phrase before, but he was at a loss, I suppose, to explain why he’d been such an implacably choleric two year-old his whole life.   A few moments later, there it was again: “I feel like a horse’s ass.”

It hit me recently, how destructive, if understandable, my anger at my father was.  Once I realized how much it hurt me to carry it, how reasonable I was to feel hurt by his actions and refusals, how incapable he was of doing any better, I was able to start letting go of it. Not of the damage his rage had done, only a bit of that ever slipped away, and it waits like a nightmare to leap out at me in moments of weakness, but I was done with my need to carry anger at a father who was not able to do any better than he did.

“He was a grown man, a father, he lived an otherwise responsible and moral life, why let him off the hook after he cursed at you and your sister every night, screamed and threatened and undermined, did his best to make you cower, even if you didn’t cower, even if you turned the rage against yourself sometimes, even as you banged your head against a wall.  Why let him off the hook for what he did?” says an angry friend.

Because he’s dead, dude.  Because, based on what was done to him when he was a baby, he couldn’t have done otherwise.  Because, lucky for me, and for him, I had let go of that anger at him by the time I was standing by his death bed hearing his last confession like a priest who’d never dream of fondling a parishioner.   He was contrite, apologized for the first and last time for his inhumanity.  I reassured him that he’d done the best he could.  I have gone over this many times in my head, here on this blagh.  The main thing, though, was that seeing him as incapable of doing better made me realize how pointless it was to be mad at him for it.  It’s like being mad at a cat for not addressing you in perfectly accented French.

I thought of it just now because I’ve been angry sometimes at people who have not helped me advance my idealistic plan.  The insight came late — they have no idea how to help me advance my idealistic plan, nobody helps them, life is hard.  Their incapacity to help makes it ridiculous for me to be disappointed that they don’t help.  They cannot help, even if they wanted to, except in the rare case when they actually can, but the rare case is extremely rare.  They have less of an idea than I do about the best way to proceed doing something that is most likely impossible for one person to do.

“But what about me?” snarls an angry former friend. “You pretend to be Jesus Christ to everybody else, you talk a good game about mercy and forgiveness, but you could hardly have been less merciful to me.”    

Ah, yes, there is that.  Aware of the harm that was done to me I’m determined never to be treated that way again.  My father apologized as he was dying, an apology that was perhaps 45 years overdue.  My sister never got any apology.  If I tell you time and again that you are harming me, and you justify yourself and plead your case instead of acknowledging that a friend should have acted less hurtfully?  

Well, my father was my father, I had strong reasons for trying to look beyond his faults.  But in the case of someone I am friends with, someone I’ve told multiple times that just because I can take a punch doesn’t mean I like being punched?  Well, “but, I don’t get to hit anybody, and I’m mad as hell, and you can take a punch, and I really didn’t mean to hit you in the face again…” only means one thing to me in the end.   Time to go.  

But that popped into my head just now in answer to an obvious question.  What I really intended here was to acknowledge, in black and white, how silly it is to expect people to do things they are not capable of doing.  If they don’t do something they have no idea how to do you can’t be mad about that.  They can do many other things, many of them good.  Don’t get hung up on the one bad one, I remind myself.  It is a relief to remember this.

Unless the hurtful thing they do is bad enough, objectively, and they make a habit of it and won’t acknowledge they’re acting hurtfully.  Then it is probably best to take a two second break from trying to be Ahimsa-Boy and say, with all necessary mercilessness: sayonara.

The importance of creativity

Adaptation of something I wrote two summers ago, all bitter references to unhygenic assholes removed, for marketing purposes:

Think of a world without creativity.   No music, comedy, repartee, great food; no movies, books or even articles, no television worth watching, no mischief, nothing worth laughing at, no cause for that good cry that is sometimes so needed.

Creativity, much spoken about by educators today, has always been at the heart of learning and good teaching.  

All creativity involves a certain amount of spontaneity.  It is play. The great John Cleese describes the essential conditions for creativity in a wonderful clip, unfortunately no longer available on youTube.  The five factors he talks about are:  place, start time, ending time, confidence and humor.   

For young children, who are naturally creative when given the slightest chance to be,  we’ve reduced the formula to this:

Have fun and help each other.

You can’t have fun if people are bothering you.  Don’t bother anyone. If you can’t help, don’t hurt.

When it’s time to be quiet for a minute or two, be quiet.

Cleese locates the creativity, you need a space to do it.  How about a room filled with art materials and a camera stand to shoot frames? With a recorder to make soundtracks and a computer to assemble the animations.

Cleese discusses the importance of a time set aside, a time with a beginning and an end, ideally about two hours.   He points out that it takes up to a half hour to leave the pressures of life outside and begin to play.  With luck you will play for 90 minutes or so.  Then play must end, as play always does, because it doesn’t feel like play forever. 

This is exactly what happens in the animation workshop.  For ninety minutes the kids have all the time in the world.

The other aspect of time is patience, taking your time, having a block of time you can use for play and dreaming up ideas.  You cannot be very creative while watching the clock, just like you can’t productively meditate keeping an eye on time.  You have to let things develop in their time, comfortable with not much happening sometimes.  

Asked what she liked best about the workshop, the Idea Girl said “it gives you plenty of time.”    

Confidence is necessary, because if you think you can’t dance, or sing, or draw, or animate, you probably won’t be able to.   What gives a person confidence?  Another one smiling and giving a thumbs up when the idea is presented.   What takes away confidence?  Critical comments, ridicule, skepticism, indifference to your best efforts.

The last part, humor, happens quite naturally in a room where children are playing, relaxed, involved, having fun, trying out the craziest ideas they can think of, not worried about anyone bothering them.

The nature of the straw that breaks the camel’s back

The straw does not have to be any special straw.

In the fable the man piles straw on his camel’s back until the camel is at the limit of what he can carry.   The man wants to bring just a little more straw on the journey, to make it worth his while.  Seeing the camel straining, he decides to add just one more straw.  Camel’s back breaks.

This is how accretion, the adding on aided by gravity, can bring down many things.  Resentments, for example, grow by accretion if we do not resolve them.  I am strong, we may reason, I can look past this insult, this betrayal of trust, this small injury.   We carry this one, and the next, and believe we can be philosophical about it.   Most of the time we can be, but we must continue to carry whatever we do not resolve, it has a weight and causes a certain drag and friction.  

A trauma of some kind comes up, the other party, arguably intending no great harm, does one more thing that weighs in on top of the pile of grievances we already bear on our backs.  Boom!  Done, broken.

When times are relatively good we can carry more without breaking. At the breaking point, the final straw can be relatively light, it will tip the scales and the thing will break, whatever it is.   Forgiveness has its place, and it is a wonderful and essential place in a good life, but only if the thing forgiven is not endlessly repeated.

Otherwise the thing forgiven, papered over, minimized, agreed to disagree about, ignored, lost but not forgotten, is carried on an already burdened back.  The straw is waiting to fall on to the pile, as it is always poised to do.

So, in a nutshell

“I didn’t wind up painting yesterday,” she said, “but I looked at the colors and the brushes and I had a thought.”

“OK,” he said.  

“I realized what frustrated me so much the other day when you were probing about something that had made me angry.  I don’t mind the probing, but I object to the premise– ‘you believe you were wronged but there is another possibly equally valid side to the story and isn’t it possible that you are completely wrong, and in fact, the one who wronged the other person?'” she said.

“Not an unreasonable premise,” he said.  

“No, not unreasonable. Even something worth discussing.  Only there was one thing missing– you jumped to that premise without recognizing how hurt I was and that, possibly, I was entirely in the right to feel hurt.” she said.  “Even if I later realized I was wrong to be hurt, after reconsidering in light of your new insights, I was badly hurt at the time and you brought up something that was a painful experience for me. And brought it up with no expression of sympathy before trying to convince me I could have been wrong to feel the way I felt.”

“Yes,” he said, “but isn’t it equally possible that you were wrong?”

“Possible?  Yes, particularly if I was a thoughtless and emotional person who reacts to things impulsively.  Equally possible?  No, not even remotely equal.  If you heard my side of the story, which you did, and couldn’t admit you’d feel hurt too, which you eventually did allow, after an hour of batting back hypotheticals, you would have to recognize that I had good reasons to feel hurt.  You would have felt hurt too.  Might have acted much like I did, maybe better, maybe worse.  In the end, you might have convinced me to reconsider, but not if you didn’t at least acknowledge that I had a right to feel hurt.”  

“So this is all about you?” he asked.  

“Listen to me carefully: I am going to paint now,” she gave a wan smile and turned to head out into the garden.

“I will never have true peace with this person,” he thought hopelessly as she went.