The Way Forward

Posted on May 6, 2020 by John Swinburn

I wrote just yesterday that I recognized the need to steer clear of social media and engagements that trigger my unpleasant reactions to deeply offensive humans.

But part of my day yesterday was devoted to fruitless efforts to educate the ineducable. I hope I have learned my lesson; that I should stay off the Nextdoor community platform if I wish for even moderate levels of serenity and if I wish to limit my exposure to hard-core stupidity. I tried to inform the misinformed, educate the ignorant, and shame the shameless. All surrounding COVID-19. Needless to say, these people are either Trump voters or conspiracy theorists who believe Trump has joined the “Deep State” and has already handed the keys to the kingdom over to the socialist forces of evil. Arghhhhh!

I will not make that mistake again today. Instead, I will devote at least part of my day to finishing a writing project I long ago promised I would undertake. And I will serve as chauffeur for my wife, ferrying her to and from her physical therapy appointment. And I will take out the trash. And I will blow the leaves and pollen off my deck. And I may power wash the deck…again. And on and on. Tasks to keep my mind off the fact that I live in a pocket not just of opposition politics but, instead, in the midst of a geological outcropping that attracts and feeds (and feeds on) mental illness. How is this making me more serene? It is not. Let me try again.

Social distancing, including keeping my distance from social media, protects me from interacting with people with whom I share only one commonality: we’re of the same species. Social distancing, in all its forms, allows me to pretend I live in a fairyland of nature, where the sounds of songbirds fills my heart with joy and appreciation for all the natural world.

I understand, at least intellectually, the attraction of misanthropy. With enough practice, I believe I could become a reasonably proficient misanthrope. Well, if not a misanthrope, then certainly a recluse, enjoying separation from broader society in near-total seclusion. Despite my lifelong aversion to religion and its tendency toward magical thinking, I have long admired people who dedicate their lives to religious or spiritual contemplation. Monks and nuns, regardless of religious affiliation, have trained themselves (or allowed others to train them) to live in seclusion, taking comfort in privation. But my uninformed perspective suggests their vows of silence, celibacy, poverty, etc. may be simply behavioral cudgels that serve as reinforcements for training.

As I was exploring these thoughts this morning, I did some shallow digging to learn a bit more about monasticism. I learned of four types of monasticism: the skete, cenobitic monasticism, eremetic monasticism, and lavritic monasticism. I do not quite understand why there seems to be no adjectival form for the skete. Oh well, I’ll try to summarize what I unearthed:

  • Skete: a cluster of monastic communities that allows for isolation of monks, but provides shared resources and protection;
  • Cenobitic monasticism: a monastic tradition that stresses community among the monks.
  • Eremetic monasticism: a tradition in which individuals live in virtually total seclusion from others, for the purpose of religious or spiritual reflection.
  • Lavritic monasticism: essentially, as I understand it, eremetic monasticism with access to a church or refectory where hermits can, rarely, gather. A lavra or laura is a type of monastery consisting of a cluster of cells for hermits.

The definitions bend and adapt, depending on which Eastern or Western religious order is involved. There’s another semi-monastic tradition, referenced among all the other groupings, called the intentional community. The IC is a socially cohesive residential community whose members share some important commonality, whether religious, spiritual, political, or what have you. According to Wikipedia, “Intentional communities include collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, communes, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.”

I think my interests fall somewhere between eremetic and intentional community. That is, I want to be left alone, to my own devices, except when I want or need company or companionship. I think another term for that is self-centered egotism.  That’s only partly tongue-in-cheek. On the one hand, I love the concept of cohousing communities where everyone shares responsibilities and where opportunities for social interaction and friendship abound; on the other, though, cohousing requires an unwaivering commitment that I doubt I would ever be willing to give. And I am used to physical privacy and distance.

The physical attributes of monasticism, including the extent and amount of seclusion, would be important to me. But the intellectual and contemplative elements would be equally as vital; perhaps even more so. I think I live in my head to a much greater extent than I live in the physical world; so, that would have to play into it.

And, of course, there’s my intense passions for food, drink, and laughter. Those would have to factor in prominently to my monastic lifestyle. All of this assumes COVID-19 will eventually become at least manageable. Maybe I’m leaning toward lavritic monasticism, updated to reflect the modern world.

It occurred to me, just now, that my life today is essentially the life I say I crave, albeit with a significant number of  bumps, bruises, and bubbles. I have a lot of solitude, I have access to social interactions, and I can enjoy my interests and most of my passions. Yet there must be something missing; otherwise, I would not spend so much time and mental energy creating the “ideal” in my head. The key to understanding what may be missing and what I might be able to change is to think about it, not with my fingers as I’m doing now, but with my brain. Solitude and dedication to asking the right questions of myself is the way forward, perhaps. A light bulb just brightened above my head. Time to think, without the constraints of fingers on a keyboard.

Posted in Philosophy | Leave a comment

Farmers’ Rebellion

Posted on May 4, 2020 by John Swinburn

Kenneth “Hurricane” Whackman was confirmed as Secretary of Weather only three weeks after Charlene Floore was sworn in as the fifty-eighth president of the United States. Two days later, Tyson “Popeye” Monsanto was confirmed as Secretary of Agribusiness, the position formerly called Secretary of Agriculture. One month after Monsanto’s confirmation, President Floore’s address to the nation included the following statement:

“I have directed the Secretaries of Weather and Agribusiness to coordinate their agencies’ efforts with the objective of doubling, within one year, the crop yields for America’s farmers. To that end, Vice President Stewart is authorized to provide any and all necessary resources to those agencies in the furtherance of this goal.”

Brenda Stewart, who lost the Republicrat primary to Floore, was rumored to have hoped Floore’s poor health would catch up with the president early in her term, elevating Stewart to the position she felt she deserved but out of which she had been cheated by manipulation of the Electoral College, the archaic institution that somehow survived in spite of its long and checkered history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Hurricane Whackman approached the president’s directive with an intensity of purpose seldom seen in government. He immediately instructed his top scientists to engage in an undertaking on the level of the Manhattan Project, seeking to control precipitation, temperatures, wind, and atmospheric moisture. Popeye Monsanto, on the other hand, was more practical. He devoted his attention to the annexation of Mexico, reasoning that access to and control of the country’s agricultural bonanza would be the quicker way to enhance the output of “America’s Breadbasket.”

Stewart’s role quickly turned into referee between Whackman and Monsanto. Whereas Whackman believed his role was to manage weather in support of agribusiness, Monsanto believed Whackman’s role was to create devastating floods in Mexico, making the country’s politicians more receptive to the idea of annexation.

Monsanto’s focus on improving crop yields by absorbing Mexico’s agricultural infrastructure was not looked upon favorably by U.S. agribusiness interests. As far as those interests were concerned, Monsanto’s strategy was a direct threat to U.S. agribusiness. Mexican fruits and vegetables, in particular, would be even more competitive with U.S. produce, causing economic dislocations, they feared. Monsanto’s refusal to bend in the face of agribusiness lobbying led directly to what would be called the “Farmers’ Rebellion.”

Farming had become even more advanced, in terms of technology and required levels of investment, by the time Monsanto was confirmed than it had been only a dozen years prior. Farmers, virtually all of them employed by one of the Big Three agribusiness conglomerates, operated equipment that dwarfed even the largest tractors, cultivators, buckrakes, backhoes, loaders, and the likes in use at the turn of the 22nd Century. And, thanks to a cozy relationship between agribusiness and the Defense Department, virtually all of the big equipment was equipped with heavy artillery, missiles, highly developed GPS-navigation, and other such high-tech toys.

I think this is getting out of hand. I’ll have to stop here and decide whether I want to make this into a story, a novel, a political thriller, a piece of science-fiction, a manifesto, or something altogether different. A clue: Hurricane Whackman may (or may not) be forced to choose between supporting Popeye Monsanto or the insurgent farmers. Either way, what role will weather control have in how this ugly scenario plays out? Who knows? I sure don’t.

Posted in Fiction, Writing | Leave a comment

The Colors of Leaves, Pancakes, Social Engineering, Solitude, and More

Posted on May 2, 2020 by John Swinburn

Staying home during the pandemic is not terribly difficult for me. Though I have not confined myself to the house, I rarely venture out, at least not like I used to. Solitude is perfectly natural for me. Sure, I miss interacting with people, but I’m not a very sociable person, so restricting my contacts with others is not hard on me. In fact, I do maintain my interactions, just not face-to-face. I’m actively engaged via social media and, in fact, I think I’m more comfortable with electronic interactions than being in the physical presence of others.

At least that’s what I tell myself. Do I really prefer the solitude, or have I simply gotten used to it over the years? That’s a question a therapist may one day help me answer. If I ever visit a therapist. It’s not on my calendar at the moment. Actually, I’m a little fearful of what I might learn about myself. I already have plenty of doubts; I would rather not have them confirmed and multiplied.

How does a preference for solitude square with loneliness? I turn to the dictionary to explain lonely:

  1. affected with, characterized by, or causing a depressing feeling of being alone; lonesome.
  2. destitute of sympathetic or friendly companionship, intercourse, support, etc.

How do those definitions mesh with the definition of solitude?

  1. the state of being or living alone; seclusion.
  2. remoteness from habitations, as of a place; absence of human activity.

Okay, I see. Loneliness combines seclusion or remoteness with depression or destitution from engagement. So, most of the time, I am fine with my seclusion/remoteness. But there’s always an underlying sense of loneliness that occasionally bubbles to the surface. The combination of preferring solitude but wanting or needing companionship is, in some ways, untenable. The emotional states simply are incompatible. But there they are, side by side.

I have written about this odd emotional mix many times over the years, a fact that suggests I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around it and it continues to bedevil me. I think it pairs with my everlasting question about who the real “me” is under all the layers and veneers and pretenses I’ve built up during a lifetime of reacting to what I’ve been taught and what I’ve experienced. Maybe I am a very sociable person who wants and needs to be in the presence of people who share with me certain personality characteristics. Or maybe I am an extreme introvert who has been trained, or who has trained himself, to respond well to periodic injections of social interaction. Or, perhaps, I’m just confused and batshit crazy. That’s a possibility.

This business of writing about my feelings and emotions and perceptions of the world is getting tiresome.

***

I should be writing about the way the early morning sunlight, before the sun rises above the horizon, has an otherworldly yellow glow about it. I should paint a picture, with words, of the leaves on the trees outside my window changing colors with the changing sunlight. They begin the day, with just a hint of light in the sky, as dark green blobs, their shapes indistinct. As light begins to fill the sky, the leaves brighten, dark green turning lighter and lighter until they reach the color halfway between green and yellow, chartreuse. Oddly enough, once they achieve that halfway point, they begin to darken again. I am describing the trees nearest to me as I look outside the window. Some of the ones farther away, the pine trees, have needles that appear even more yellow than green, but then quickly turn much darker than the broad-leaf deciduous trees closer to the window.

When I was a child, even into my teens (and frankly well beyond into my recent adulthood), I wondered whether all people see colors the same way I do. I wondered, for example, if other people might perceive the color green I see in the way I perceive red. If our perceptions were always in parallel, though utterly different, we would all agree on what constitutes a color, but our minds would process the color differently. I still wonder about that. And tastes. And odors. What if, I ask myself, we all experience the world differently from one another? Fascinating stuff, to me. Thoroughly pointless, I guess, but fun to imagine.

***

I’ve returned to this post after taking a break to consume a breakfast of pecan pancakes, the recipe for which came from a book about foods from Route 66. The recipe noted that Texas had been second to Georgia in terms of pecan harvests until 2010, when New Mexico took the spot from Texas. The recipe is from New Mexico. The pancakes were delightful.

Jane and Michael Stern, who divorced in 2008 but continue to write as a team, are the authors of Roadfood. I’ve always enjoyed reading their work and listening to them on The Splendid Table, which I haven’t heard in years.

I find it interesting, but completely understandable, that couples can live together for the majority of their lives and then get divorced. People evolve differently, sometimes. The ideal pairings can become prisons when people change in radically different ways. I suspect it is especially difficult, though, when people continue to love one another but individually cannot continue to grow and develop within the relationship. Perhaps it’s no longer romantic love, but still a deep affection and unbreakable caring bond. Breaking that bond must be hard but, in some cases, essential.

I sometimes think society should almost require married couples and longtime significant other pairings to uncouple for long periods, after years of togetherness. If, say, after twenty years couples were expected to go their separate ways for ten years and, then,were required to decide whether recoupling made sense, people might be happier. Granted, that might be a terribly difficult set of dislocations, but considering the number of divorces, it may not be a bad thing. The financial ramifications of this sort of thing, though, could be difficult. And children. Hmm. Perhaps every other generation should be required to skip having children. I would make a pretty ruthless ruler, I think. My subjects might not like my policies.

How the hell did I go from pancakes to forced marital interruptions? My mind must have somehow been broken in a fall when I was quite young, assuming I was ever quite young.

Posted in Stream of Consciousness | 3 Comments

Better to Know than Not

Posted on April 30, 2020 by John Swinburn

I just returned from I expected to be a routine follow-up visit to my oncologist. Instead, I learned that my CT scan from earlier in the week showed some troubling changes. Nothing major, necessarily, but of sufficient concern that my oncologist wants me to have a PET scan within the next week or so. And I am to return to see my oncologist in two weeks. By then, assuming I have had my PET scan, she will decide whether the changes (development of a nodule and enlarged area of “groundglass attenuation”) warrant the next step, a biopsy.

This process—CT scans showing areas of concern, followed by more CT scans and then a PET scan and then a biopsy—is not new to me. I went through it when my lung cancer was first detected. This time, though, the “nodule” is very small and the area of “groundglass attentuation” also is not terribly large. But the area of groundglass attenuation is growing; from 1.7 cm before to 2.0 cm now.

The Impression section of the CT scan report says :

“Findings may be infectious or inflammatory in etiology. Metastatic disease cannot be absolutely excluded.”

I wish and hope the next series of tasks will remove the “not.” Whatever the outcome of the process, even if it reveals my cancer has returned and is in the process of metastasis, it is better to know than not.

It is only 10:45 in the morning and I feel absolutely wiped out. I guess I did not sleep much last night; or, at least, not well. I think I’ll try to take a nap and get this crap off my mind. I hope the cancer has not returned.

Posted in Cancer, Covid-19, Fear | 7 Comments

Life After Life, An Untold Story

Posted on April 29, 2020 by John Swinburn

An unfortunate fact about life is that it does not go on forever. Rather, life does not go on long enough for some of us to learn the ultimate outcome of intriguing circumstances swirling around us. Take the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, for example. I predict the global pandemic will have enormous, long-term, far-reaching consequences for:

  • the global and, especially, the U.S. economy;
  • the ways in which education is conducted;
  • traditional ways in which business is conducted;
  • the demand for commercial real estate;
  • trends toward (or away from) the geographic dispersal of the extended family;
  • the manner in which groceries and other household goods are purchased and delivered to the home;
  • medical care, especially for routine and non-urgent care;
  • commercial building design and construction;
  • restaurant design and layout;
  • mass transportation schedules and design;
  • the airline industry;
  • food prices;
  • reliance on animal products as part of the food supply;
  • immigration policies, especially visa requirements for “essential” workers;
  • practices relating to voter registration, absentee voting, and voting by mail or electronically;
  • the delivery of mail (and possibly the structure of, and continued existence of, the U.S. Postal Service;
  • the design of the urban core of cities (a very long-term consequence);
  • United States government budget priorities;
  • theories about how economies function and how they respond to stress, both internal and external;
  • considerations of governmental-guarantees of annual incomes;
  • laws and regulations relating to requirements for vaccinations;
  • the potential (frightening) merger of the missions of the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services;
  • and on and on and on and on and on.

With only a few exceptions, most of these items focus primarily on the United States. The global consequences are apt to be even more far-reaching. Alas, I will not live long enough to see them all play out, even if I were to live another thirty years (which is highly unlikely). Many of the consequences of COVID-19 will not even be traced back to the pandemic, except by intrepid historians who will examine every factor that led to each change that, ultimately, brought about the societal shifts I list above. I would like to know which of my predictions come to pass. I suspect most of them will, but many will not be measurable, nor their outcomes assured, during my lifetime.  And it is worth noting that some of the “consequences” are not consequences at all but, rather, ominous predictions that major changes will befall an entire industry; the airline industry, for example. The specific changes that will take place are, in many categories, impossible to accurately predict. The practical results of chaos theory, which I mentioned in my post entitled “Attractive Definitions” a couple of days ago, will contribute to innumerable unintended consequences of actions that will be assumed, when taken, to be minor.

I have neither the time this morning nor the inclination to expound on the list of consequences I predict, but I may, over time, dedicate some space on this blog to many of them. For now, I’ll say a few words about “trends toward (or away from) the geographic dispersal of the extended family.” What possible consequence of COVID-19 could lead to changes in trends toward geographic dispersal of the extended family? My thinking is this: the pandemic’s imposition of social distancing kept many, many, many families apart during a time that has traditionally been “family time:” Easter. Couple that with the inadvisability of travel, especially by air, during that time and the dramatic decline in the availability of hotel and motel rooms (lots of vacancies, but many places were closed), and the ease of family visits across country or even across town declined precipitously. My contention is that many people will think seriously about this inability to spend time with family and will, over time, cause family members who might otherwise spread their wings and move away for adventure, jobs, etc. to rethink such decisions. The value of familial cohesion and its effect on one’s emotional well-being may, I think, cause our society to reverse course in an attempt to recover the comfort that extended families gave our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. Okay, it’s pure conjecture, but I think it makes sense and has the potential to come about. I just wish I would like long enough to see whether my prediction is validated.

Thinking about such things always give rebirth to my intense interest in sociology. I could spend days and days and days thinking about each of these predictions, contemplating what sorts of triggers might cause them to commence and how other circumstances in society might derail them or change their course. It’s all such fascinating stuff. But I’m not an academician, so it’s really an avocational interest; I’ve never had enough discipline to make it my life’s work.

I suppose there are little pockets of desire inside my head that sometimes make me want to live forever just to see “how things turn out.” I know I won’t, I can’t, and I usually don’t want to. But if I could just view a quick playback of a tape of the future… Yeah, I can’t do that either. I just have to be satisfied to live as long as I do. The rest will be an untold story.

Posted in Covid-19, Demographics, Economics | Leave a comment

Attractive Definitions

Posted on April 27, 2020 by John Swinburn

A dictionary’s second definition of metaphysics is the one that pleases me most:

Philosophy, especially in its more abstruse branches.

The corresponding definition of the primary adjectival form, metaphysical, pleases me just as much:

Concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, or truth.

Let me first say I do not like to associate metaphysics or metaphysical with woo-woo thinking. Metaphysics is rooted deeply in philosophical dimensions that can be explored through physics, mathematics, and concepts that exist in harmony with the “hard sciences.”

I like the word “abstruse” because it captures the complexity of the universe. It means hard to understand or recondite, which truly applies to every subject if one is willing to consider all things and all topics carefully. Nothing is as simple as we make it out to be. Simplicity is spectacularly and intricately orchestrated complexity that hides behind a façade of supreme clarity.

Periodically, my mind wanders into metaphysics as it explores concepts of time and chaos theory and the fascinating relationships between mathematics and matter. I do not pretend to understand any of these ideas; but I find them impossibly attractive. In chaos theory, “the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.” In somewhat simpler terms, an article in American Scientist addresses the issue by explaining a question posed by Edward Lorenz: ““Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

Popular misunderstandings of the term notwithstanding, Lorenz did not suggest the correct answer to the questions was “yes.” Instead, he argued (according to American Scientist) for “the idea that some complex dynamical systems exhibit unpredictable behaviors such that small variances in the initial conditions could have profound and widely divergent effects on the system’s outcomes. ” That is, the complexity of the physical world is so great that many of its aspects are unpredictable; that is, minute variations of “input” can result in massive fluctuations in “output.”

The term “initial condition” is used in the explanation of butterfly effect. If butterfly effect is not sufficiently esoteric, try this: “initial condition…is a value of an evolving variable at some point in time designated as the initial time.” The explanation gets increasingly sophisticated as it delves into discussions of variations in discrete time and continuous time, differential equations, closed form solutions, linear and nonlinear systems, etc., etc., etc.

Abstractions are based on understanding of facts or realities. Predictions or forecasts are abstractions.  Lorenz, a meteorologist, argued (I think) that unpredictable behaviors are unpredictable precisely because seemingly minor variations of ambient conditions in weather could have enormous consequences at a later time and place. Mathematics and physics intersect with philosophy and simplicity in ways that are simply stunning in their complexity. Oh, and time. I’ve mused about time many times before, arguing that time is context-dependent. At least time as we non-physicists usually consider it. An Earth-year is vastly different from a Saturn-year. And, therefore, all components of a year (months, days, hours, seconds, etc.) must also be different, yes? Maybe yes, maybe no.

Physicists argue (again, I think) that the speed of light is constant. But is it? How does one accurately measure speed, which is time-dependent, when the duration of time itself may not be consistent? I wonder, sometimes, whether the instruments we use to measure the physical world are adequate to measure the physical world outside our own galaxy.

I do not have sufficient stamina, willpower, intellectual capacity, nor time to learn and process all the information I want to absorb. No one does. In fact, some of the information I wish I knew has absolutely no practical value as far as I can tell. What possible use, for example, might there be for knowing precisely the number of leaves on all the trees on planet Earth? It would be nice to know, though, wouldn’t it? Or the precise number of atoms in the universe? Would it be possible to know the number of atoms, given that nuclear reactions take place with such frequency in stars that counting them would be an impossible task?

Thinking about such monstrously complex ideas, ideas that far surpass my brain’s capacity to understand, helps me leave the problems of this planet and this life far behind me. By examining ideas and asking questions that have no answers, I can lose myself and emerge from the quicksand of day-to-day living. But I always return to the muck, as I am about to do.

In roughly three hours and then some, I will drink mocha-flavored barium and will then drive to Hot Springs for a couple of CT scans. My mind will leave behind the incredibly attractive questions and contemplations about the nature of time and complexity and simplicity. In their place will be worries about what the CT scans might reveal; or answers the scans may not give. I’ll be conscious of people wearing masks and others too self-centered and arrogant to cover their faces. Sleep, sometimes, is the best medicine for malaise. Or exercise. Or something. Oh, well, this was a nice little journey into the metaphysical world. I’m back to the plain old physical world, watching birds flit by my window. That’s not half-bad, either.

Posted in Mathematics, Philosophy, Physics, Time | Leave a comment

Musical Provocation

Posted on April 26, 2020 by John Swinburn

I listened to a mariachi version of Laura’s Theme from Doctor Zhivago yesterday afternoon, thanks to an email message Gustavo Arellano sent to his followers. Arellano is best known for his “Ask a Mexican” syndicated column that originated with the Orange County, California weekly tabloid, OC Weekly. And he wrote a book entitled Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.

At any rate, Arellano’s email, a semi-regular piece he writes weekly (more or less), reminisced about his mother’s death, about a year ago, and recalled one of her favorite tunes. Among the recollections in his message was a link to a piece of music on YouTube. The piece is entitled “Tema de Lara.” It was performed by Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano. I am more familiar with the English language title: Laura’s Theme.

Arellano admitted to crying, unabashedly, at hearing the music as he thought of his mother. And, of course, as I listened to it, my eyes watered much more than they should have, especially since I do not know Arellano, nor did I know his mother. I’m just an incredibly weepy guy. That should not bother me, because I am not Mr. Macho, but it does. Damnit! You can listen to it here. Should I be embarrassed at my weeping? Yes, but no. But that’s beside the point.

As I sat listening to the music and thinking about Arellano’s sense of loss, I thought of my father and a recollection that my mother told me, shortly after his death, that he had a strong emotional attachment to the hymn, Amazing Grace. I don’t think I ever spoke to my father about religion or his religious beliefs. I do not know what he believed or did not believe. So to learn from my mother that he was especially fond of a piece of religious music surprised me. And I suppose that unexpected revelation had a long-lasting effect on me, a decidedly non-religious guy. Every time I hear Amazing Grace, I think of my father and his affinity for a piece of music that, until after he died, I did not know moved him. Even though I was not especially close to my father, his attachment to that piece of religious music has found its way into my DNA. I, too, am emotionally attached to that hymn. For me, an admitted atheist, to be moved to tears by a religious hymn is odd in the extreme. My emotional reaction to the music have nothing to do with religion, nor do they recall a strong bond with my father. I really do not know from whence they spring; but spring they do. I do not burst into tears when I hear the music, but my eyes tend to water, as if I had a minor allergy to pollen.

I have a similar reaction when listening to Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. I was surprised this morning, while exploring the history of this particular piece of music, to learn that it was not published (and, therefore, rarely played or recorded) until the 20th century, despite having been composed around 1680-1690. It was written for three violins and continuo (which, as I understand it, means a keyboard instrument such as a harpsichord or organ); today, it has been adapted for and performed by full orchestras. Back to my emotional reaction to the music: in this case, I have absolutely no identifiable “trigger” to which I can attribute my response. Hmm.

As I think about music and my response to it, especially its capacity for causing my eyes to tear, I vaguely recall reading or hearing something about certain musical patterns (I think) that evoke melancholy emotional responses. The idea that sounds can spark emotions intrigues me. I should try to find the source of that information (which may be difficult, in that I am sure my experience in hearing or reading it was several…many, many…years ago). If not the original information, then something more recent. I readily can understand how music can be imprinted on a memory that, in turn, can trigger an emotional reaction; but how can music unattached to an experience do the same thing? I do not know, but I want to find out.

I’ve successfully pulled myself away from the somber, sorrowful path I was, thanks to Arellano’s writing, about to travel this morning. Instead, I seem to be aiming to engage in pointless research into something for which I have no use, other than to satisfy my curiosity. I have mixed feelings about productivity. On one hand, being productive gives me a sense of purpose and merit. On the other, productivity seems to me an artificial measure of one’s value. Value is both a nebulous concept and a quantifiable reality (value is equal to function divided by cost, according to value engineers). I prefer the amorphous definition.

The time is 6:03. I need to replenish my coffee. The cup and its contents have grown cold.

Posted in Emotion, Music | Leave a comment

Self-Care in Isolation

Posted on April 25, 2020 by John Swinburn

I had to search a while for the source of the list that prompted the modified version below.  A friend posted it on her Facebook feed; it took me some time even to find that post. Then, it was not so much of an effort to go to the originator. It was created by Linday Braman (https://lindsaybraman.com/). The original was entitled “Isolation Well-Being.” It was perfectly fine in its original form, but I wanted to tweak it just a tad so it would fit me just a little better; the new title fits my personality slightly better, too.

Self-Care in Isolation

    • Shower
    • Shave
    • Take necessary medication
    • Drink plenty of water
    • Clean one thing/space
    • Tend to something growing/living
    • Be mindfully present to…
      • A sound or song
      • A sensory feeling
      • Something you see
      • The appearance of the sky, whether cloudy or bright
      • Other person(s) who share your isolation
      • A spiritual or mental practice for your own serenity
    • Reach out to a person outside your home, whether by phone, text, email, or video
    • Spend a significant part of your day thinking about the well-being of others
    • Do one thing to get your heart rate up
    • Do one thing you’ll be glad you did later…write it down
    • Do one thing just because you want to
    • Get in at least one good laugh

Perhaps we should not need a reminder to take care of ourselves as we isolate from the world around us. Whether we should or not, we do. Whether it is a list on the bathroom mirror or a calendar reminder to spend three minutes paying attention to the “to-do” list, I think consciously thinking about taking care of one’s mental well-being is a wise investment of time. As dark as is the other post I just launched, we need to take care even in darkness.

 

Posted in Covid-19, Philosophy | Leave a comment

Hiding Behind Masks

Posted on April 25, 2020 by John Swinburn

Who are we, people who leave our homes with naked faces but who, before we interact with others, cover up with masks? Are we hiding our personalities behind those masks? Are we secretly glad to conceal our identities from strangers? From friends? Does the pandemic provide us with an opportunity to hide in public, an opportunity we’ve long wanted to take but never dared? Or are we hiding our infections from the world, hoping our contagions will not be revealed to the people around us who are similarly protecting themselves from recognition and judgment?

Will we wear masks long after the danger has passed? Will a new industry emerge from this period of fear, an industry dedicated to concealment and personal intrigue? So many questions bubble to the surface of our minds, yet no one has answers because no  one can foretell the future.

As I contemplate these questions, I wonder whether some similar calamity gave rise to the neck tie. Were men told, many years ago, that they needed to wrap their necks in fabric to avoid exposure to danger of some kind? But when the danger passed, the practice and custom remained, condemning men to the discomfort associated with nearly choking from dawn to dusk. I wonder whether masks will follow the same path, becoming a required piece of clothing that must be worn in public? I can imagine, centuries hence, anthropologists explaining that twenty-first century humans took up the custom of wearing masks as a symbol of concern for the health of their fellow citizens. People who refused to wear masks, the anthropologists will say, were judged unclean and unsafe and to be avoided at all costs. Naked faces, they will say, were the twenty-first century equivalent of lepers who were earlier confined in quarantine to leper colonies.

Quarantine. That word will forevermore be associated with masks. There will be artwork depicting people sitting outdoors in chairs spaced ten or more feet distant from other chairs. The people seated in the chairs will be sipping drinks, generically called “quarantinis,” as they raise, and then lower, their masks to give their mouths access to their drinks. I wish I were a talented artist; if I were, I could paint those scenes of pods of distant drinkers, shouting comments so they could be heard over the roar of the wind.

Masks hide more than our noses and mouths. They hide faces frozen in fear. They hide paralysis rendered by not knowing what to think, what to believe, what to do. If we could find masks that would hide our thoughts and fears from us, we would wear them. We would don helmets and breast plates if those medieval accouterments would silence the mental screams that keep us constantly on edge, worrying that we might somehow have failed to keep the virus out of our lives.

So many lives have been lost, as of April 24, 2020, to COVID-19. The number of deaths to date—52,400—is roughly equivalent to the population of any one of the following cities:

  • Normal, Illinois
  • Battle Creek, Michigan
  • Manhattan, Kansas
  • Pensacola, Florida
  • Hoffman Estates, Illinois
  • Novato, California
  • Revere, Massachusetts
  • Saginaw, Michigan
  • Euless, Texas

Imagine. If, instead of the novel coronavirus, a bomb vaporized the population of any one of those cities. That is what we’re trying to hide with our masks. And it won’t be long before the deaths will be equal to the population of White Plains, New York or Dubuque, Iowa or Reston, Virginia. And the numbers will keep climbing.

Masks are not funny, but we have to laugh or we’ll cry ourselves to sleep. We have to laugh at the absurdity of the President of the United States suggesting injections of disinfectants and light as a treatment for the coronavirus. We have to imagine him, a huge smile on his face, drinking from a plastic jug of Clorox bleach. Even dark humor is better than none at all. We cannot hide the darkness behind a mask.

People who have lost family and friends to the virus will not laugh. But the rest of us have to try, even as we console those who are grieving.

Posted in Covid-19 | Leave a comment

Elvin’s Exorcism

Posted on April 24, 2020 by John Swinburn

I’ll try something different today. Instead of attempting without success to craft a wannabe witty stream-of-consciousness screed, I’ll explain myself. My name is Elvin and I live inside a body that is not my own. I use it because it is not being used by its rightful owner and I do not have one of my own.

I am the outcome of an imperfect combination of mood and muscle, tempered with sufficient fat to hide the muscle and accentuate the mood. In my case, mood is a stand-in for personality. I learned early on that, in the absence of personality, one is essentially invisible. So I focused on mood, instead. Moods can be seen, felt, and—when either appropriate or fruitful—feared. Good moods almost make up for the lack of personality. Bad moods hide the absence of same. Together, they impersonate personality. But they’re not personality.

Moods are simply manifestations of temporary states of emotional flux. They arise from battles between competing neurons; they are simply mechanical responses to chemical reactions. Personality, on the other hand, is an elastic fabric woven from threads of emotion, intellect, and experience, with threads of experience constituting the bulk of the finished cloth. Extract from me my moods and you would be left with the equivalent of a permanently locked piece of heavy luggage without wheels. Take away someone else’s personality and you’d have a fresh, clean canvas ready to receive an artist’s brush.

I’m deviating from my explanation of myself. I do that sometimes for reasons that have to do with my fear of revealing who I am without my moods. If I were able to spend time with an exceptionally capable psychologist or psychiatrist or both, I could learn more about my fears and what caused them. And I could learn about the body I occupy, the body that belongs to someone else who is in the unfortunate position of having neither moods nor personality. He is, I am afraid, not a fresh canvas but, instead, a dry-erase board that has been so thoroughly stained by the use of permanent markers that it is impossible to know who he was or is or could have been. There I go again, drifting away from my intended train of thought. I do that sometimes; wander down tracks that lead away from facts that are too difficult to face in the light of day.

When you look in the mirror, you see a reverse image of your face. When I look in the mirror, I see an unfamiliar man whose physical image is radically different from the one I expect to see. He is not the man whose body I occupy but, instead, a pasty-faced stranger whose jowls reveal an obsession with food and an allergy to exercise. The man whose body I occupy should be lean and chiseled were that the one I were to see in the mirror. His face would be naturally tan, with laugh lines around his eyes and dimples in his cheeks caused by his perpetual smile. At least that’s what I think. I’ve never really seen him. I’m just guessing about his appearance. Hoping, maybe. Wishing. If I had a personality, I’d be able to sculpt that image myself, because personalities can consistently command daily routines that can mold a person’s appearance. Moods, on the other hand, simply ricochet off windows and walls, changing with the frequency of a second hand on a clock. That chaotic whirlwind from good to bad to good to bad and back again makes progress impossible.

It’s interesting that we call moods good and bad. In reality, all moods are bad. They distract from a person’s underlying personality (assuming he has one), creating surface stress that can crack the veneer most of us use as a hiding place. Moods reveal the churning lives behind our masks.

Well, my attempt to explain myself has gone completely haywire. Off the tracks. Derailed so completely that the cars cannot possibly reach their destination. The fabric of the tale has become ripped and frayed and tattered.

Elvin blew it. Mea culpa. It was an ignoble effort gone further afield, deeper into the bowels of Hell. My attempt to explain myself was a ruse, wasn’t it? It was simply a way to exercise (or is that exorcise?) my fingers. Arthritic fingers. A symptom of personality disappearance.

Posted in Writing | Leave a comment

Testosterone Poisoning

Posted on April 21, 2020 by John Swinburn

A friend, when describing the affliction whose symptoms are characterized by machismo, also known as extreme masculine hyper-sensitivity, uses the sobriquet “testosterone poisoning.” I think the term describes the infirmity quite nicely. Until I heard the phrase, I did not fully comprehend what causes some men (primarily) to attempt to flaunt their masculinity in ways that make them appear stupid, narcissistic, ego-driven fools. Now I understand. They suffer from testosterone poisoning.

Several days ago, I went to the pharmacy and the grocery store early in the morning to pick up some things we could not get (or I forgot to buy) when making our most recent online order: paper towels, deeply-discounted lightly-salted peanuts (a staple), deodorant, shaving cream, blackberries (on sale), two kinds of potatoes, hummus, fresh thyme, and maybe another item or two. I noticed when entering both places that many people were not wearing face masks (as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control to help stem the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus, now pandemic). Most of the naked-faced creatures were male, though some females flashed toothy smiles or growls.

I am convinced those whose faces were exposed (and whose every breath might have distributed a light, virus-laden aerosol) probably were experiencing symptoms of testosterone poisoning. The men, who would feel embarrassed wearing a mask for fear of looking weak and unmanly, seemed to sport a facial expression reminiscent of the cowboy on old Marlboro commercial. That expression, translated into English, says:

“I am the strong, silent type, a man’s man, the kind of man who could wrestle a bear to the ground, hog-tie her, and snatch her cubs from the jaws of a ravenous wolf.”

Those were the guys in the stores. Deeply insecure, thanks to their innate inadequacies.

The women, on the other hand, never grew out of their tomboy phases. They, too, had a certain facial expression that said, it seemed to me:

“Hey, what are you looking at? You want a piece of me? You think just because I’m a girl I can’t kick your ass? C’mon, give it your best shot, snowflake!”

Needless to say, all of them would look perfectly comfortable in red MAGA caps. In a just world, their shirts would have been embroidered with text (which they, unfortunately, cannot read due to their illiteracy, which they view as a badge of honor) that says:

“I am stupid and proud of it!”

Yes, I’m suggesting testosterone poisoning either stunts intellectual growth or causes intellectual decline or both. Testosterone poisoning triggers dangerous behaviors that can lead to accidental self-inflicted gunshot wounds (also known as testosterone-induced lead poisoning), high-speed automobile accidents, falls from high places where no one should ever go, and a number of other engagements that can result in injury or death.

I’ve had a few brushes with testosterone poisoning myself and still suffer from an occasional flare-up. The best treatment for the malady is immersion in large-scale derision. Ridicule, which initially tends to exacerbate the symptoms, ultimate seems to cause genuine self-reflection. The treatment works, though, only on individuals whose measured or estimated IQ is greater than 70.

***

I can be nasty, scornful, and mocking. I shouldn’t be, but occasionally it’s great fun. Of course, I have to acknowledge that I can’t legitimately complain when I am the object of such derision. Turnabout is fair play, they say. Whoever “they” are.

***

Today, I have multiple appointments and obligations. First, I go to see a nurse about an unnerving symptom that developed yesterday: blood in my urine. Several times during the day, when I peed, the stream appeared to have emerged from a severed artery. As the day wore on, a pain developed in the lowest part of my lower gut. This concerned me, as one might imagine, so I called to see if I could get an appointment. I was able to get in this morning at 8:15. As circumstances would have it, the multiple occurrences of spurting blood stopped late in the afternoon and have not returned. I’m still going in, just in case. TMI, perhaps, but that’s just the way I roll.

Once I’m finished, I’m off to Little Rock, again (after medical visits there yesterday for my wife), this time for maintenance on the car. Depending on whether I need new tires (I think I do), I will get a loaner and will wander LR until the work is done. Perhaps I’ll stop by Colonial Liquors. Perhaps I’ll have lunch at the truck parked in the liquor store’s lot. Perhaps I’ll brave Trader Joe’s. Only time will tell.

Now, it’s off to shower, shave, get dressed, and face the day.

 

Posted in Philosophy | Leave a comment

Exhuming Memories

Posted on April 20, 2020 by John Swinburn

This morning, my creativity is at a low ebb. Instead of attempting to write something that would surely be hollow and dark, I’ll remember mornings when I felt more energy and more passion than I do at this moment by replaying snippets from past posts.

I have written so many posts that generated absolutely no response, mostly because they are rarely read. I wish some of them, though, would have triggered conversations about the thoughts that gave birth to them. I’m not in the mood to talk about them this morning, though. Reading the posts from which I extracted these snippets made me inexplicably sad, not necessarily because of their content, but because of what I was thinking when I wrote them.

  • Realistically, though, we effectively have only two parties, Democratic and Republican, neither of which is stocked with sufficient intellectual muscle to set aside its stupid partisan mantra for long enough to let reality seep into its world-view.
  • If the world’s population is allowed to grow unchecked, there will come a time when the planet cannot sustain those who inhabit it. Simple extrapolations of population growth, coupled with measured analyses of the rate of growth in food productivity, will show that there is a point at which productivity will fall below minimum demand. Famine and the attendant response to it are among the results one would expect.
  • Soon, my wife will wake up and will come into the kitchen, expecting me to hand her a glass of tomato juice and finish preparing our breakfast…I appreciate that expectation.  I relish it.  I enjoy meeting it. Life is good now.  Right at this moment, I do not need anything else.  Nothing else at all.
  • Inexplicable shadows mill about in the pre-dawn darkness, shadows that follow the early-morning walker, occasionally darting in front of him, then slipping quickly from view. Street lamps and the headlights of passing cars and the weak light of a waning moon and a still-distant sunrise give them sustenance.
  • Regret arises as readily from actions not taken as from mistakes made. The life unlived, due to efforts unmade, takes as much of a toll on one’s psyche as choosing the path of least resistance with a vengeance. Regret becomes a torment with no remedy if we permit ourselves to dwell on opportunities not taken, decisions not made, and risks avoided. The challenge is to forgive ourselves for being who we are. The absolution is more difficult than the punishment.
  • Let me suggest to you that, one day when no one else is around, you take the process of cooking in a slightly different direction. My suggestion is that you do this when you are preparing to make a shrimp dish, but you can do it with almost any ingredient that once moved of its own volition. I’ll assume you’re using shrimp.

    If the shrimp is frozen, thaw it. If it is headless, imagine it with a head. If it lacks a shell imagine it with its carapace intact. Try to put yourself in the shrimp’s place; not as it is now, but as it was before it was harvested as food. Consider the scope of the world in which that shrimp lived. Think of the salt water environment in which it lived. Understand that, very probably, the shrimp was not sentient in the same sense that you and I are, but that it was aware of its surroundings. Look around at the flora and fauna on and near the sea floor. Pay attention to the sea grasses dancing in the currents; follow their gyrations in response to moving water and to the turbulence caused by tails and fins as they drift by.

    Snap to the present. Look at the carcass before you. Consider that it once was a tiny, almost microscopic creature, then its mother gave birth to it, and then it matured in a protected environment until it was able to make its way in its watery world. That dead shrimp you are about to process into food spent its entire short life oblivious to your hunger. It was oblivious to your very existence. Suddenly, though, it was harvested. And here it is before you. It has no memories of sea grasses swishing in the undersea breezes. It has no recollection of its search for food. This corpse no longer feels pain nor hunger nor fear nor whatever else shrimp experience.

    You wonder why that brief life, lived in a place you cannot hope to understand, came to an abrupt end. You look down at that shrimp before you and you wish you could express in a way it could understand how much you appreciate and admire what it has done and will do for you. You cannot bring yourself to look in the mirror, for there will be eyes looking back at you, questioning what you are thinking. You dare not say.

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Big Dreams and Facing Facts

Posted on April 19, 2020 by John Swinburn

Facts often block the way for wishes, desires, and dreams. Facts dig wide trenches between here and there…between now and then…filling the channels with acid and alligators and creatures hungry to tear hopes into lifeless memories.

Those damn facts! Why won’t they conform to my view of the world? Why do I wake up each day to realize the nightmare was not a dream? Facts, with their razor-sharp teeth that shred aspirations into frayed ribbons, hamper our ability to live the fairy-tale existence we’ve come to expect. Facts interfere with the delusion that our privilege was earned and will last forever.

“Ah, buck up, Sport! That morose attitude has no place in an environment stoked with costume jewelry and assorted other shiny accoutrements of wishful thinking! Leave those negative thoughts behind you and enter our magical kingdom! Waltz in through the massive doors of our castle built of sand and enjoy a rich and rewarding fantasy life!”

Yes, that’s what we’ve heard most of our lives. Everything will be all right. Never fear, some sort of supreme, magical being will swoop down and protect us from reality. Then, later, we’ll get on a conveyor belt that will deliver us either to Heaven (if we’ve been blindly obedient to a rigid dogma designed in part to thwart curiosity) or Hell (if we’ve dared challenge that dogma). If the former, the remainder of eternity will be spent among billions and billions of dreamily happy ancestors who float along in bliss, as if they have been fed LSD. If the latter, we will burn in excruciating agony for the remainder of time and then some.

I’m drifting away from my original thoughts; I know that. Although my original thoughts may not have been what I believed them to be. I thought I was lamenting the intrusion of facts into my dream world. But, in fact, I was just introducing the idea that we must get over what we wish for and, instead, focus our attention on what we can realistically achieve, given the facts before us. Yes, we can bellyache about the injustices confronting us and everyone else but, unless we are satisfied with bitching and moaning without accomplishing a damn thing, we need to shake ourselves awake and do what is doable.

First and foremost, and this is hard (for me, anyway), obstacles should be viewed as opportunities for creativity. How can we get around, through, over, under the challenge? With respect to the current impediments to our happiness (i.e., the coronavirus pandemic) and its impact on our economy, the intelligent response is NOT to hurry up and go back to the way we were before. That will only result in thousands more people sick and dead and an already overstretched healthcare system finally collapsing under the stress. I think we need to focus on how we can radically alter the way we go about engaging in productive work, in social interactions, and in viewing the world in which we live.

I think a global effort, a thousand-fold bigger and more aggressive than the Manhattan Project of World War II, should be undertaken to remake human society. The participants in the effort should be the brightest, boldest, most audacious thinkers of our time. They should come from every field of human endeavor, from medicine to transportation to psychology to engineering to sanitation to…on and on and on. Their mission should be to transform planet Earth into a place in which every human being is adequately clothed, fed, housed, free to act in her own interests and in the interests of other people, and protected from disease to the extent humanly possible; and every stream and field and ocean is maintained in as near a natural state as possible. This elite group (which is the wrong term, really, in that its members will include slum dwellers with expertise in “making do”) would also be tasked with the objective of eliminating artificial borders. Pie in the sky? Of course! But with such grand and boundless objectives, even partial success would catapult humanity toward a more just and robust future.

The primary hindrance to beginning such a grand global effort is the lack of leadership. The only world political leaders who come to mind who might be capable of guiding such an enormous undertaking are Angela Merkel of Germany, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Justin Trudeau of Canada,  Barack Obama of the United States, and Michel Suleiman of Lebanon. This list, obviously incomplete, is lacking representation from Asia and Africa. Inasmuch as one of the objectives should be the dissolution of artificial borders, that might be acceptable; but it’s not, in my view. And the leadership group needs to include representation of deeply oppressed people, such as impoverished Salvadorans and the Uyghurs of China. The group should be as diverse as the people of the planet.

Aside from a lack of leadership is the presence of a malignant leadership in the person of the president of the United States. No progress of any consequence can be made until he is removed from office and his voice silenced on the world stage. As far as I’m concerned, he could be allowed to bellow all he wants within the four walls of his tiny dark cell.

I cannot continue this diatribe at the moment, as much as I think its direction paints an increasingly important picture of where we (the people of Planet Earth) need to go. Maybe I’ll come back to it with a more coherent and specific “plan of action.”

***

Ach! It’s 6:20 and the temperature, according to my computer weather widget, is fifty degrees. Cloudy this morning, with rain developing this afternoon. I might try to power wash the deck this morning, though that might not be a good idea, given my breathing difficulties of late. I do need to take care of several other tasks around the house. So I shall.

***

We had a great Zoom chat yesterday afternoon with our good friends who live (in isolation) in Fort Smith. We all agreed to do it again in a week. Our mutual reciprocal visits have been put on indefinite hold until the world has righted itself. I hope we all live that long.

***

I hope my mood improves today. I’ve been trying to smile and be cheerful, but it’s increasingly difficult to fake it. But I shall work on that. Now, more coffee and, perhaps, an entirely new approach to breakfast.

***

I decided to come back to write a little more after I watched and listened to our virtual church service this morning. The minister gave the congregation a charge to do what we can, today from our homes, to make the world a more just and loving place. I realize the jeremiad I wrote earlier had the seeds of justice and love in it, but I sliced off the gentle twigs just after they sprouted. I will return, today, to the positive elements of my screed. And I will reach out to someone today to try to make their world a little better; more just and more loving.  Would that we all do that.

Posted in Ideas, Justice, Philosophy | Leave a comment

December 29, 2019

Posted on April 18, 2020 by John Swinburn

I’ve decided to post some of my unposted items from months gone by. Sometimes, reading my words from times gone by helps me understand how I think; if that’s what it is. I will use my writing time today to explore how I would approach healing society as we attempt to recover from the novel coronavirus pandemic. We should not attempt to “return to normal.” We should construct a new, and better, civilization.

December 29, 2019

Ach, after listening to Story Corps, I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. Yesterday’s story included a conversation between Asma Jama, a native Swahili speaker born in Somalia but now a  U.S. citizen, and Dawn Sahr, the sister of Jodie Burchard-Risch. Burchard-Risch hit Jama in the face with a beer mug because Jama was speaking Swahili in an Applebee’s restaurant in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. Sahr befriended Jama, taking a stand against her sister and other members of her family. Jama, who spoke at Burchard-Rissch’s sentencing, said she forgave the woman who hit her. Forgiveness. It’s the only way one can achieve peace in the face of a real or perceived wrong. That sounds like religion speaking; it’s not religion, it’s humanity. It’s a matter of offering one’s own pain, caused by someone else, to the person who caused the pain; that person can then do with it what they will, but the pain will no longer control the victim. Ach, again.

***

I’ve missed closeness all my life. I still do. Emotional intimacy. It is the fuel for happiness. Absent that fuel, happiness dissipates in the wind, replaced by vacancy or anger or fear or some combination thereof.

***

The Universe spins time like an impeccable spider web. Time, blinding in its splendid and beautiful mathematical precision, cannot be improved nor can it be erased. Time is ever-present yet never contemporaneous. It is gone before it can be measured. Yet it remains, teasing us to try to capture it, if only for an instant.

It does one no good to realize that time sprints through the heavens at twice the speed of light, though; recognition does not correspond with control, which is what I’ve been after all along. Knowing time’s propensity for taking place even before it happens affords one no special capabilities. Time moves too fast to capture its leavings. And there are plenty of leavings. The residue of time is cast in alabaster statues, placed haphazardly in forgotten graveyards as monuments to unnecessary loss and irrevocable heartache.

The speed with which the year is spiraling toward its completion is stunning. Days go by between the heartbeats of a hummingbird. I hardly have an opportunity to acknowledge Sunday before Friday stands before me, edging toward Saturday and chiding me for being slow to recognize the obvious: Time has been mainlining methamphetamine cocktails while riding a bullet train through the fuselage of a supersonic jet.

I realize I am rambling. I realize my words only make sense if the reader (and the writer) accepts the impossibility of understanding the true nature of time. Even then, my words are woven into a fabric cobbled from strips of broken threads and a breath of futile hope.

***

Over lunch today, as I listened to others engage in conversation, I realized my wife and I were unnoticed observers. The people with whom we had lunch are nice enough, but they wouldn’t have noticed our absence if we had simply disappeared, just as they didn’t notice our presence. People (and I include myself in that classification) sometimes don’t take the time to embrace others outside their normal spheres. In the case of today’s neglect, I wonder whether it because we just are not interesting or that they just are not interested? I felt, today, like I should just slink off, away from these people who love their cliques, and explore another world. A world in which my wife and I matter.

***

 

 

Posted in Philosophy, Time | Leave a comment

Acknowledgement

Posted on April 17, 2020 by John Swinburn

Our society should reproach ourselves for failing to acknowledge that some of the lowest paid, least appreciated people are among the most indispensable. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, a long list of jobs and the people who fill them were treated, essentially, as occasionally-reliable servants who deserved only the meager pay we were willing to give. Now, finally, we recognize how vital they are. And we seem to want to pat ourselves on the back for acknowledging their value. Whether we’re willing to accord to them compensation equal to the value they bring to us remains to be seen. Who are these people?

  • Farm laborers
  • Grocery store clerks
  • People who stock retail shelves (with products like toilet paper and dry beans)
  • Truck drivers
  • Restaurant workers, from chefs and cooks to waitstaff to delivery personnel
  • Gas station attendants
  • Bank tellers
  • A thousand others

But we ignore them in “normal times,” times in which their servitude is judged acceptable and adequate.

I wrote a piece, just more than two years ago, that touches on some of this. In my post entitled The People Who Feed Us, I expressed an interest in knowing more about farmers and ranchers and farm laborers and people who work in canning factories and restaurants,  people involved in transportation of foodstuff, etc. The post acknowledged how important those people are to our lives; how, without them, we might starve. But I haven’t done what I suggested I wanted to do: talk to some of those people and express my appreciation. All talk, no action.

I am upset with myself for failing to adequately express the value these people have to the rest of us. My acknowledgements of their contributions to society were safely tucked away on my blog, read by a dozen people, if that. I should have tried to publish my newfound recognition in a more visible place, seen by many, many, many more people.

Now that we are coming to realize how vital they are, we’re giving more lip service to how much these critical people mean to us.  Hedge fund managers and football players and actors and corporate CEOs earn astronomical sums of money. But in the real world, where food is absolutely vital to survival, why do we value those people more than we value farm laborers?

As I think about all the people all of us truly NEED, I have to acknowledge that many people with whom I agree on many progressive issues take a different position than I when it suits their agenda. For example, many people who (like me) clamor for alternative, earth-friendly, fuels seem to be contemptuous of the people responsible for extracting and refining and delivering petroleum products. As much as I want to stop polluting the earth with petroleum-based products, until there are sufficient alternatives, we need the products and the people who ensure our needs are met. And we need to do more than say “thank you and goodbye” to those workers when we find alternatives. We have to ensure that those people are prepared to do other jobs that pay as much as or more than they earned in the “dirty” jobs.

The complexity of the issues surrounding society’s needs is almost beyond comprehension. But when we’re confronted with issues that impact the supply chain and, therefore, our standard of living, we must understand this: humanity is a collective. People need other people. We all have, or should have, a role to play in feeding and clothing and giving shelter to everyone on the planet, as well as all the other living beings that share this place we occupy. Whether that role is planting and harvesting corn, driving truckloads of bushel baskets of the stuff to market, or writing about the process, everyone matters.

The issues I raise here are far too involved and intricate to be addressed in a single post. Or, for that matter, in a hefty book. They are sufficiently complex to require an encyclopedic treatise. Even that would not be adequate to truly acknowledge all of the interconnections between the billions of pieces of the puzzle. I will end this rambling diatribe by saying “Thank You!” to all the people on whose efforts we depend to keep us content and alive.

 

Posted in Economics, Employment, Food | Leave a comment

Lacking Credentials

Posted on April 16, 2020 by John Swinburn

Poetry fills an aching need within the poet to express emotions that cannot be expressed otherwise. And poetry enables poets and their audiences, whether readers or listeners, to establish intimate emotional bonds. Sometimes—more often than not, it seems—the words of a poem are less important than the beauty of the way they intertwine with one another. The images arising from a flood of words ordered just so jolt the senses and force a radical shift in perspective. Poetry does not necessarily lead to deeper understanding, but frequently it leads to unearthing the understanding buried beneath the scree of an avalanche of daily tasks and challenges. I sometimes get lost under piles of mindless routine. Poetry helps me find my way out.

Yet I know of people who view poetry with disdain, believing it to be the embodiment of arrogance and pretension. I think those people may also think poetry is evidence of the poet’s weakness or emotional fragility. By extension, they see people who read or listen to poetry as weak and emotionally fragile. That may be true of some poets and some aficionados of poetry. The same might be said for some producers of violent video games and their followers; that is, there is no causal or correlational connection, in my view. I think good poets are sensitive; that is, their perceptions of their surroundings is highly developed. But sensitivity and weakness are not synonymous. Not at all.

Prose sometimes does the thinking for the reader. Poetry usually requires to reader (or listener) to think for himself or, at least, fill in the gaps between images or ideas. It is poems’ incompleteness that makes them belong to both the poet and the consumer of poetry. What the poet intends in writing the poem may not be what the audience understands the poem to mean; that difference is part of the appeal of poetry.

I write about poetry as if I were a poet or a scholar of poetry. I am neither, though I do write poetry from time to time and I read poetry. When I read poetry, I do not read to understand the poet; I read it to understand myself. So, I am no scholar. But I am a cheerleader for poetry in general. Yet I am not an apologist for poetry that I think is either badly written or so cryptic or labyrinthine as to be incomprehensible. I may not know poetry, I know what I like. And I may appreciate poems I do not like.

Just like the population of prose writers has its share of bad writers who think they are beyond genius, there are among writers of poetry plenty of hacks with no talent. For some reason, I simply dismiss bad prose writers, but I find hack poets contemptible human beings that deserve ridicule, scorn, and banishment from the writerhood. I’m not quite sure why I feel that way. I may well be one of those writers of poetry who, were I reading as a disinterested outsider, I would classify as a hack poet. I’m glad I’m on the inside looking out, unable to distinguish my contemptible flaws.

I have no credentials that warrant my expression of opinions about poets and poetry or writing in general. I’m just opinionated. And my opinions can change, when I am exposed to illuminating information. That is, I am subject to waffling.

Posted in Poetry, Writing | 2 Comments

Ethereal Normal

Posted on April 15, 2020 by John Swinburn

The concept of “normal” is fiction. There is no steady state that conveys a sense of normalcy. Normalcy can be understood only in a context of unending change. Chaos, in other words. The moment we think we have entered a smooth state of normalcy, which we equate with routine, internal or external forces interrupt that state. The apple cart loses a wheel or  the cart’s driver gets annoyed or drunk or both. Crushed apples and disappointed teachers litter the landscape.

The “new normal,” another brand of chaos, is just as ethereal as the old normal, just dressed in gauze of a different color. It consists of a repaired apple cart, driven by a Buddhist teetotaler who, when things appear to have settled down to a reliable routine, will be charged with either murder or manufacture of methamphetamine in a middle school art studio.

I wrote not long ago that fiction is truth clothed in costumes. If I am right that normalcy is fiction, then normalcy is chaos dressed up to look like serenity. Another assertion I made when I wrote about truth in costumes seems to apply here: normalcy is the view of serenity from the other side of the mirror.

If I knew myself better, I could write myself into a story as protagonist. But without knowing a character’s motives and what drives his reactions to his version of normal, a story is saddled with a wooden, two-dimensional character. I know more about characters I’ve written than about me. Of course some of those characters may have arisen from seeds planted in my mind and nurtured with the same nutrients that sustain me.

 

Posted in Philosophy | Leave a comment

Talking to Myself

Posted on April 14, 2020 by John Swinburn

I have started, and in a few cases finished, several new posts over the last several days that have yet to be published. Even the “finished” posts, though, are incomplete. There is something about the words I have written or the messages I have tried to capture that is not quite right. Or not quite finished. Or not worthy of sharing. Or too revealing of my emotions. Or too raw. Or something. By writing this post, I’m attempting to force myself to figure out just what it is that is keeping me from posting those drafts. Unlike unfinished pieces of fiction, which I readily share because…why not…these drafts are too personal to share before I am absolutely certain they reflect what I am thinking or feeling. I do not want to say something, publicly, that I would later feel compelled to retract as an erroneous expression of an incomplete thought.

But are those reasons I’ve just given myself really true? Am I simply deluding myself? Or am I engaging in a flat-out lie? I need to explore the posts more thoroughly. And I need to examine my reasons for writing what I wrote.

To start, here are the titles of the posts in question:

  • Swinburn’s Law of Antagonistic Surrender
  • A Life in Disarray
  • In More Normal Times
  • Bodily Adherence to the Mind’s Commands

But as I examine all the drafts in my drafts folder (353 at the moment), I realize it’s not just the non-fiction that I’ve opted not to share or not to finish or both. There are plenty of pieces of fiction I have yet to post, including these recent ones:

  • Gerund the Fabulist
  • Liam’s Life
  • March on Mar-a-Lago
  • Sarah

Some of the language in the fiction could get me in trouble with the American Gestapo, so I think I know the reason I have chosen not to post those pieces. And one of the vignettes (Sarah) bothers me because it tries to be funny but fails (Sarah’s last name is Femm, which gives another character license to harass her mercilessly).  The other fiction is just not ready yet; even more unfinished than most of my unfinished fiction.

But back to the non-fiction. As I skimmed those pieces just now, every one of them is incomplete. Every one is missing crucial elements that would finish them. Yet I do not know if I will ever incorporate those elements because… I do not know. There are enormous hurdles standing in the way, between me and their completion, that I do not have the mental energy or the stamina to clear. It is not that I do not have the strength to do it; it’s just that I don’t have the drive, I guess.

The reality of writing—my writing, at least—is that some of it is so poor that an enormous amount of drive (mental energy, stamina, call it what you wish) would be required for it to achieve adequacy, much less superiority. But the ideas contained in even bad writing are sometimes so appealing that it is hard to let drafts die. An intelligent writer would simply extract those ideas and save them for another piece of work. But I let them linger in drafts until either I delete the drafts or stumble upon them, read them, and realize all I need to do is take the ideas and insert them into another story.

Laziness. That’s part of it, too. The work involved in finishing drafts or polishing finished pieces is sometimes too much; laziness prevents me from injecting the necessary amount of energy into the process.

This post is just another excuse. It’s okay to simply take a break from writing for as long as necessary to rekindle the fire. Just jot notes when ideas form to ensure they do not get lost. And, then, when the mood strikes, retrieve the notes; use the ones that remain of interest and write. Keep the other notes, too, in case they fit another mood or another story. Just don’t feel compelled to write or to finish. Relax. Take a breath. Take a walk. Retreat for a while. And then critically judge drafts or unpublished pieces. Do not feel compelled to post them. If they are not worth posting, delete them. And go through the posts already on the blog and delete the ones that should never have been posted. A leaner blog is probably better, anyway.

Now, have another cup of coffee and consider big questions.

Posted in Writing | 1 Comment

A Stretch of Beach

Posted on April 9, 2020 by John Swinburn

A long stretch of desolate beach, barely visible in the budding sunrise. Miles of sand, unsullied by tire tracks or footprints. Early in the morning, before the heat of the day causes gusty winds, the stillness of the air is otherworldly. Pelicans glide near the surface of the water, almost touching the ripples of waves, searching for food.

I am utterly alone in this picture in my mind. I am on this beach, watching the day begin to unfold. The desolation and isolation and emptiness seems to me a gift. Here, there are no worries. There is only this beach and its natural inhabitants. I am at peace here, watching crabs scurry across the sand. They belong here and so do the clams burrowing into the sand. And then there is me, the only unnatural inhabitant.

The realization that this place pleases my senses and softens my mood and brings to me a sense of serenity bothers me because I do not belong here. I am an intruder, an interloper who in that realization rightfully feels ill at ease in the presence of creatures that do belong here. I am embarrassed at my comfort where I am out of place.

I do not belong anywhere. Two hundred thousand years ago, I would have belonged on this beach. I would have belonged anywhere I could roam. I would have been a natural inhabitant seeking food and shelter. Whether my emotions would have been the same as the ones I feel today I do not know. But I can imagine seeking solace in desolate places, looking for a small group of creatures like me whose wonder at the universe around me would mirror mine.

Solace. That’s an odd word to use in connection with early humans. I wonder whether early humans needed to be comforted in their pain? Are other animals really different from us? When whales or pelicans or foxes are injured, do they simply soldier on through the pain, or do they feel a need for others of their kind to comfort them? I tend to anthropomorphize animals. But I think the concept should be turned on its head. Perhaps humans’ need for solace arises from our origins deep in the animal kingdom. We simply honed a want into a necessity; craving became a condition for life, like breathing.

I am no longer particularly concerned about the pandemic. I am satisfied to stay at home and let the world spin as it will. While I’d rather not go out to pick up groceries or medicines or mail, I do. That, too, is a necessity. I would rather ride out the pandemic on on a secluded stretch of sand, though. But I would feel just as out of place there as I feel anywhere else.

Humans have outlived our utility. We have raided and pillaged the planet on which we and so many other species depend. It is an embarrassment to life that we have done such unspeakable damage to our only home. And the damage has invaded us, as well. We have damaged our minds and we are unable to repair them. We seem unable to return them to a natural state. We are beyond atonement for what we have done. Departure is the only redemption available to us. But we won’t go. Because we are self-centered and egotistical and convinced of our superiority over every other living thing. I thing we are Nature’s most visible mistake. We represent Nature’s extraordinary complexity gone horribly awry. We could have become gifts to life on Earth. Instead, we became deadly parasites.

Despite all this, I long for that desolate beach. The isolation and the glorious sunrise and the soft sounds of gentle waves lapping the shoreline at this early hour call out to me. In spite of my role as an intruder, if I have to be an intruder, that is where I want to do it. I suppose I’ll have to just let my fantasy play out in my head, because I cannot get to that beach. I don’t even know where to look. Humans have invaded beaches that once were pristine, empty places that welcomed us, as long as we promised to visit and leave. But when we decided to move in and take over the shoreline, those desolate, isolated, soul-nourishing beaches disappeared. In my mind, though, they still exist. I will go there.

Posted in Just Thinking | 4 Comments

The Breaking Point

Posted on April 7, 2020 by John Swinburn

Finally, months after the fact, we had Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey, dressing, broccoli and rice casserole. But no cranberry sauce. No condiment tray. It was just the two of us, so pulling out all the stops would have been wasteful. The meat was just a fragment of the original bird; a frozen breast taken from the freezer and immediately placed in the oven. But the rest of the meal was prepared from scratch. Turkey remains, even after two full meals, but we finished the rest. Today, we’ll have turkey sandwiches for lunch. And that will be that. Thanksgiving 2019, late by four months and then some.

***

The weakness in my wife’s legs does not seem to be improving after a few sessions of physical therapy. She still cannot make it up or down even a single step without assistance. She tires after three minutes of walking. I worry that her condition may be permanent.  I hope I am wrong. I urge her to exercise to improve her strength and stamina, but she resists and get upset with me. Damn.

***

I have been saving some seeds lately. Tomatoes and jalapeños so far. I intend to save seeds from bell peppers and zucchini when next we have those vegetables. When I crack an egg, I wash the shell and keep it to use as a miniature seed starter. I fill it with potting mix, put a few seeds on top of the soil, cover the seeds with more soil, and spray water on the tiny planters. I won’t know for a week or more whether any of the seeds germinate. If they do, I will coddle them until they are of sufficient size and strength to put in larger containers. I may buy seeds from Burpee; my good friend suggested ordering online, since I am unable and/or unwilling to venture out during the plague to find seeds in stores crowded with virus-laden hillbillies.

***

I may change the settings on this blog to require a password to view the contents. Even the little traffic this blog gets seems to be coming from SEO factories that are trying to lure me back to them and their client websites. If the volume of the few regular visitors drops off because they do not want to be bothered with a password, so be it. I’m not in a compassionate mood at the moment.

***

It is too early to tell whether the massive disruptions to human life on earth visited upon us by COVID-19 will lead to a huge spike in suicides, but I believe the numbers will rise dramatically  in time. I’ve already forecast, on this blog, an increase. I thought I had, but I checked to see; it was in my March 20 post (and maybe others). When I searched for “suicide” in my blog posts, I was surprised to see the results: fifty posts contain the word. I am not fascinated by suicide, but I think I understand what drives people to decide it is their only option to relieve their pain.

***

I cannot say with certainty but I believe being “cooped up” is having an impact on my psychological well-being. I’m increasingly angry at nothing. I feel like screaming in rage at nothing in particular. I’m just mindlessly upset. I do not like being around myself when I’m in this odd, foul mood. If I could split myself into two people, one being calm and the other being a raving lunatic, I would do it. And then I’d drown the crazy or or throw him off the back deck. What the hell causes such obvious madness? Is it really just staying indoors? I could go out for a long walk, but leaving my wife home alone when she has such a hard time maneuvering steps is unacceptable. Ach! Meditation. Maybe that’s what I need. Meditation.  Or medication. A stiff drink before 6 a.m. I can’t even fathom a drink at this hour. But I can fathom a more relaxed me. This, too, shall pass. It always does. Well, it always has.

***

I shall stuff orange bell peppers with a heavily-spiced mixture of ground beef, rice, and canned tomatoes. I will roast said peppers and they will serve as dinner tonight. I am more in the mood for pasta, but that will wait until another time. Maybe I will be in the mood for stuffed bell peppers by dinner time. Maybe not. There’s no telling. Only time will tell. If anything does.

***

Coincidence can appear malicious. Accidents of time and inattention can seem deliberate. They may appear to be premeditated snubs meant to pick at wounds and rub salt in them. Assuming pernicious intent in its absence offers evidence of paranoia. Yet treating neglect as merely an unplanned oversight risks being blinded to reality. Sometimes, coincidence is not coincidental. Sometimes malice was, indeed, the point. The challenge is to determine whether a behavior, or its omission, sprang from a conscious decision or from oversight.

***

What does “at the breaking point” mean? Does it mean a person snaps, as in loses his mind? Goes stark-raving mad? Breaks plates and glasses? Or do those things happen only after a person PASSES the breaking point? How can one tell whether a person is AT the breaking point? These questions kept me awake for a while last night. But I slept until 4:00 this morning, after dozing off early and then, waking with those thoughts on my mind around 1:00. I was asleep again before 2:00, I think. But I have no way of knowing when I actually went to sleep again. Strange thoughts in my head at this hour. It’s closing in on 6:00 and I’m no more sane now than I was at 1:00. What the hell is “the breaking point?”

***

There is, within each of us, an aching need for an embrace. Not simply a hug, but a willing acceptance of all that we are; all the flaws, all the blemishes, all the tarnished achievements never made. We want, perhaps even need, hopeful signs that might dispel the notion that we are not good enough to be loved.

Posted in Stream of Consciousness | 1 Comment

Thought-Skipping

Posted on April 2, 2020 by John Swinburn

Today’s post is evidence of thought-skipping, that experience in which one’s thoughts skip across many subjects in a short period of time. It’s like a smooth, flat stone thrown across the surface of a body of still water, the forward force of the stone causing it to touch the water surface, break away, and touch the water again; sometimes for several iterations. I won’t document all the thought-skipping this morning; just two or three.

***

Yesterday’s post ended on a weakly upbeat note, suggesting people the world after COVID-19 might have different attitude, having been taught that we need one another. After reading and essay by Robert Malley and Richard Malley in Foreign Affairs, even my weak optimism fizzled into gloom, tinged with despair. The writers argue that developed countries, even though they face their own monstrous challenges with COVID-19, should supply massive aid to developing countries in the face of the pandemic. Their reasoning is that conquering COVID-19 only in some places of immediate concern to us (our own countries, that is) will result in its return. They go on to argue that:

Many developing countries could suffer massive death tolls, economic meltdowns, and skyrocketing unemployment and poverty. The resulting social upheaval could take many forms, from violent intrastate conflict to massive refugee flows, a growth in organized crime, or terrorist groups taking advantage of the spreading chaos—each of which could eventually affect Europe and the United States.

The reason for my gloom and despair is that the developed countries, including Europe and especially the U.S.A, will be unlikely to be able or willing to provide the massive aid needed by countries in which containment and mitigation are extremely difficult or impossible. In my opinion, humanitarian arguments will not be sufficient to assure the necessary aid. But neither will the practical arguments about potential effects in the developing countries.

In places where people live in crowded ghettos with no running water, insufficient toilet facilities, and unspeakable poverty, the idea of “shelter-in-place” is akin to a death sentence; with no income, even from salvaging and selling valuables from garbage dumps, staying at home means starvation and dehydration. But ignoring steps to minimize the spread of the disease is just as much a sentence to death. The only realistic alternative is the injection of historically enormous types and amounts of aid. Depleting our own resources to dangerously low levels may be the only way to save the world and ourselves.

I doubt we have the collective will to accept and, indeed, embrace the concept of dramatically lowering our standard of living to give millions and millions of the poorest of the poor a fighting chance to stay alive.

Pessimism is an unpleasant attitude to have about this pandemic, but optimism seems irrational and ill-informed. Pessimism seems more aligned with realism. But the world may surprise me. I hope it does. I hope humanitarian decency blossoms with such force that we will collectively vanquish COVID-19 and improve the lot of all the people in all the developing nations, all while we are saving ourselves. Hope. Pessimism. Realism. Hope.

A significant part of my pessimism is rooted in my sense of the world in which we live, defined by a word I learned earlier this morning. Read on.

***

I read the word for the first time, I think, this morning. The word “kakistocracy” was included in an online image; no context, just the word. Naturally, I looked it up. And I discovered there exists a word for our experience with governance today. We are living in a nation that gives life to the word;  a living, breathing  definition.

According to Merriam-Webster:

kakistocracy
noun
kakistrocracy: kak·​is·​toc·​ra·​cy | \ ˌkakə̇ˈstäkrəsē \
plural kakistocracies
Definition of kakistocracy: government by the worst people

***

This evening, I am hosting a Happy Hour Videoconference. Thus far, nineteen people (me included) on Facebook have expressed an interest. Only two of the eighteen are people I have never met face-to-face. That’s interesting to me. I don’t know what it means but it could mean many things. It could mean that people I’ve known personally miss personal connections that have been lost (for a relatively short while so far) to the COVID-19 pandemic. It could mean that people I have not met face-to-face but who are on Facebook do not regularly read my posts and are therefore unaware of the event. It could mean that people I have not met face-to-face are less likely to want to engage with “strangers” in a live video interchange. It could have no meaning at all; it’s just coincidental.  Time will tell.

***

I am in the mood to prepare a meal I’ve never prepared before. (That’s a remarkably dense statement, isn’t it? Of course I’ve never prepared the meal before if I haven’t yet prepared it!) Something that combines pasta with turkey broth and vegetables; maybe with some fresh mushrooms thrown in. The turkey broth includes quite a lot of tiny bits of meat from the turkey. (I smoked the turkey quite some time ago and boiled the carcass to make the broth; I strained the broth, then picked the remaining meat off the bones and cartilage. The broth, which had been frozen, has been thawing in the fridge for days.) Some red pepper flakes might be advisable, inasmuch as we like food that wake up our mouths. What other spices should I add? I don’t know yet. I think I’ll have to taste the concoction before deciding.  Okay. Time to quit this and start the day.

Posted in Covid-19, Food, Language | Leave a comment

Transforming the Way We Relate

Posted on April 1, 2020 by John Swinburn

Last night, I posted a comment and question on Facebook: “Let’s have a long distance happy hour soon. Wine (or tequila or bourbon or…) and munchies via Zoom! Say when, people! Tomorrow?”

Nine people initially responded in the affirmative; an additional four “liked” the post, suggesting to me that they, too, might be interested. So, I scheduled a Zoom video-conference for tomorrow evening and sent an announcement to group members who responded. I look forward to seeing how it goes, assuming people actually connect.

This afternoon, I will go to the building that houses our church to be recorded as I read a poem I wrote about this strange new reality that has been visited upon us by the novel coronavirus. No, that’s not true. The poem is not about the new reality. It is about our reaction and response to the new reality.  The poem is based, in large part, on my post of March 18, Life in the Times of Pestilence. In fact, I gave the same title to the poem and used some of the same phrases I wrote for that post.

I video-recorded the same poem for Wednesday Night Poetry last week (was it last week?); the person responsible for recording Sunday services (now in the absence of the congregation) asked me to send him the video file so he could incorporate it into the video for last Sunday’s service. But my video file apparently was not compatible with church video files and so could not be used. I was asked to come read the poem at church so the file could be used for next Sunday’s service.

These two experiences amplify the reality we have been experiencing for a short while. I suspect the necessary isolation and distancing will continue for a good while; it could be months. It is possible the coronavirus will impact our lives for years. The virus may reshape the ways in which we interact with others.

I remember thinking, not long after reading recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control about maintaining at least six feet of separation from other people, that the recommendation might be harder in some cultures than in others. There’s a term in sociology, proxemics, which is the study of humans’ use of space and the impact that population density has on social interactions. I suspect epidemiologists’ recommendations about personal distance may influence cultural norms on “personal space.” In North America, “acceptable” distance between acquaintances engaged in conversation is about four feet. Italians, on the other hand, tend to be comfortable with closer proximity, two to three feet. Consequently, I think it may be harder for Italians to adapt than for North Americans; but it’s apt to be a challenge for both cultures. And I wonder whether, in another ten years, both North Americans and Italians will have adapted to greater physical distance between themselves and others. Might the cylinders of their “personal space” grown larger to the point that those who study proxemics will be unable to measure any significance between the cultures?

Though physical distance might expand, we might witness a transformation in interpersonal video. Rather than seeing on screen what commonly is, today, an image of a person’s upper body, we might see close-ups of faces, so we can share the unmistakable changes in our expressions when we smile or laugh or frown. I can envision that expectations of technology might change; consumers may demand that computer cameras have the ability to zoom in and out. Why out? Think of the stereotype of Italians; their hand gestures are as much a part of their vocabulary as their words. It’s not a manufactured stereotype, by the way.

What if? What if? What if none of the transformations in the way we relate, physically, to one another come to pass? What if the virus subsides and disappears? What if this entire episode becomes just an ugly memory? No matter what happens, if we are intelligent beings, it will have changed the way we relate to one another as human beings. It will have taught us, for the umpteenth time since humans began walking on two legs, that we need one another. It will have taught us that the well-being of others, even those outside our immediate spheres, matters. It will have informed us that looking out after the interests of everyone (every creature, every living being, too) is the only way to survive as a species. It will have taught us, but will we have learned? As I often say, time will tell.

 

Posted in Communication, Covid-19 | Leave a comment

Fiction and Reality, One and the Same

Posted on March 31, 2020 by John Swinburn

There was a time, not so long ago, that I found it easy to write about fictional dystopian horrors, experiences unlike anything I ever experienced. My imagination allowed me to picture those ghastly nightmares as a dispassionate observer, watching through an artificial lens and analyzing from the safety of abstract distance. I think I can still write about such horrendous ordeals, but the process is no longer as easy as it once was. The pain and fears associated with fictional calamities too closely resemble the reality I see playing out worldwide today in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I wonder whether the harsh reality of catastrophic events becomes real only when the events come so close they cause the hair on the back of one’s neck to stand up? The anguish suffered by Syrian refugees in recent years has been visible, but distant. The pain and starvation that famine-plagued Somalians experience today is horrible and upsetting…but sufficiently distant to cushion the punch-in-the-gut horror the Somalians must feel. The terror and hopelessness that drive Central Americans to risk everything to reach the United States are real to me, but only in the same sense that a newscast about a fatality highway accident is real to me.

My hunch is that the intensity of my emotions about those events would expand exponentially, were I in the midst of them, watching from inside out, rather than from outside in.  Compassion and empathy in the abstract morphs into love when confronted with concrete human suffering, I think. When realism embraces us and forces us to see ourselves—and feel ourselves—in the shoes of others suffering from the throes of unthinkable experiences, we become saturated with humanity. I am not suggesting that only when thrust into horrifying personal circumstances can we truly understand others’ suffering, but suffering must surely accelerate the process of understanding.

I watched a video sermon recorded by our church minister last Sunday. He closed the sermon by saying he hopes our collective experience with COVID-19 will lead us to greater tenderness with each other when the crisis passes. I think that’s what such experiences do to and for us. We become more understanding and compassionate toward others in similar circumstances; we do become more tender, I think. I hope we do. If we do, will it last? Can it fundamentally change us, the collective “we?” Time will tell.

In the meantime, I will continue to write about challenging experiences and dystopian futures, but it will no longer be as easy to do. I think my writing will show characters’ compassion grow as they thrash their way through the brambles.

Posted in Compassion, Covid-19, Empathy, Writing | 2 Comments

Barbara, Fill in that 40-Year Gap

Posted on March 30, 2020 by John Swinburn

On New Year’s Day this year, after taking a short respite from my blog, I returned to it to find a comment on a mid-December post. The comment was from a person with whom I had had no contact for forty years. The comment was from Barbara, a woman with whom I worked in my first association management job. I was surprised (and honored) to read that she credited me with instilling in her an appreciation for the value of good communication skills. My memory, clouded by forty years of intervening events, tells me I called her Barbara Jane or B.J. back then. Maybe not. It may have been just Barbara all along.

When I discovered her comments, more than a week after she left them, I checked for the email address for the person who left them (I don’t permit anonymous comments here—to post a comment, visitors must leave an email address). I wrote an email to her, thanking her for her generous comments and inquiring about her life. I never heard back from her. It’s possible she left a bogus email address; I might have done the same, protecting myself from the possibility that I might be dealing with a stalker. Too bad. I would have liked to learn about what has transpired in her life during the past forty years.

As I sit at my window, watching woodpeckers and flickers drilling and drumming on tree trunks in search of food, my mind wanders back in time to various people with whom I’ve had occasion to work. Don, the tall Chicagoan who, along with his wife, took up scuba-diving to explore shipwrecks in Lake Michigan. Augie, the owner of the association management company that employed me for awhile. Mary, the co-worker with whom I grew extremely close and kept in close contact for many years after I left Chicago. Gus and Finis and Peggy, co-workers at the same organization where I worked with Barbara. Mike, the Canadian who moved to New Zealand and invited us to visit his venues there, treating me like royalty. Darrell, the guy I hired to be a  magazine editor and who, years after he left the job, started an architect search firm.  David, the British coatings specialist who treated us like family when we visited him during conferences in London. The guy, whose name escapes me, who insisted I try a main course of kangaroo when I visited his stadium in Melbourne. Like the birds that stop briefly at the trees outside my window, those people probably will never re-enter my life. Some of them, I know, have died. Others have may done the same. And still others have moved on to live lives of which I know nothing. Like Barbara, who might have remained in Houston or may be living in Paris.

The people I did not like or respect also come to mind occasionally. But I spend only fleeting moments thinking about them. It’s true that people remember how others made them feel. I suspect I am not remembered favorably by too many. I can’t change that now; the opportunity has passed.

Barbara, if you stumble across this post, tell me about your life these last forty years. The same goes for Mike and Don and Peggy and Mary. You all know who you are.

 

Posted in Memories | 2 Comments

Love Letters

Posted on March 28, 2020 by John Swinburn

I tend to keep personal letters I receive in the mail, whether handwritten or typewritten. Maybe my practice is driven by their rarity. Or perhaps they offer evidence someone thought I was worth the time and energy required to write and mail them. I think it’s the latter. The letters have no value except to me. I’ve come to realize over time their value declines. Though I hold on to them, sometimes for years, eventually I discard them. The desire for order and minimalism ultimately overtakes sentimentality, I guess. But sentimentality always returns.

The topic of letter-writing and letter-keeping is on my mind because I spent time the other day reading a letter I received from a friend ten years ago. Not a close friend; more of an online acquaintance with whom I developed a relationship. We still keep in touch on rare occasion, but the ties between us seem to have frayed to threads. That happens, I think, when communications wither over time and distance. The very few times (three, was it?) I met her in person were brief. Once, in New York city, my wife and I had dinner with her. Another time, I met her and her friend (I don’t recall his name) for dinner; I think it was dinner, anyway. And a third time she joined my wife and her sister and me briefly for a segments of our train ride between Boston and Aurora, Illinois (to attend a memorial service for my sister-in-law’s husband).  The details of our friendship are irrelevant to my musing about the exchange of letters, aren’t they? Yes, but that’s what old letters do. They dredge up experiences long since buried under the rubble of time and experience.

Though I treasure the exchange of letters, I seldom write them. It’s not a matter of being lazy, though that might contribute to the dearth of written communication in my history. I think it’s that I’ve learned through experience that other people do not necessarily appreciate letters as much as I. Many people do not seem to attach much value to letters; neither writing them nor receiving them. Have I always responded to letters I received with letters of my own? I doubt it. Thus, I suppose others might wrongly assume of me what I may wrongly assume of them.

I have never been one to write letters by hand; I always type them. While some say a handwritten letter is more personal and intimate than its typewritten counterpart, I say my handwritten letter would be impossible to read. That having been said, I do appreciate handwritten letters I receive; they do seem more personal than typewritten letters. But my handwriting has long since deteriorated into the illegible scratch of an illiterate chicken fed hallucinogens, bound with stiff wire, and given a paint brush dipped in tar to use as a writing implement.

Letter-writing has become so rare, it seems, that sending and receiving letters are almost deviant acts. Recipients of personal letters are assumed to have overly-intimate connections with senders, as if the letter was an open admission of a sordid relationship. The same assumptions are made of senders. They must be engaged in some sort of disreputable affair, the details of which are contained in the private communication. Yes, I’m overstating the type and scope of judgment about those who exchange written communications by mail; but I’m not sure just how far beyond reality my overstatements are. Email and text exchanges do not seem to enjoy the same bad reputation as letters send by mail. However, they may be on their way to condemnation and shaming. We shall see.

It is interesting to me that a letter that runs two or three pages or more is viewed as a precious gift, illustrating the value the sender places on his relationship with the recipient. On the other hand, people often decry a lengthy personal email, judging it overly-wordy and ego-driven. Maybe I’m wrong on both counts; I am touched to receive either form of personal communications. But especially when sending an email, I try (but often fail) to limit its length for fear a longer missive will be set aside for later reading, only to be forgotten and ultimately discarded, unread.

I predict personal letters will one day experience a resurgence. As some point in the future, society will reach a level of emotional isolation that triggers a backlash. Letter writing will be part of that reaction. When? Tomorrow. Or five hundred years hence.

I love letters. When I receive them, my day brightens. They elevate my mood; even when it’s already good, it becomes stellar. Tiny leaves beginning to peek out from naked tree branches after a long, bare winter lift my spirits. Letters have the same effect on me.  Whether I receive replies or not, I think I will begin writing more letters to people I have not seen in a long while. If nothing else, the letters will surprise them. Perhaps letters will delight them. There’s no way to know without mailing them, now, is there?

Posted in Communication, Just Thinking, Philosophy | 2 Comments