Middle Season #24

 

Some pretty Cosmos in a Hinsdale yard, some cottonwood leaves already brown and down, fall garden: radishes, a katydid that visited the living room window one morning.

A minuteness of observation

According to Richardson, Emerson was influenced by illustrator Charles Bell, who, in his book Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806), "Through careful description and numerous engraved plates... [tried to] 'lay a foundation for studying the influence of the mind upon the body.'  He is not much interested in anatomically inaccurate classical works.  He is not at all interested in stillness and tranquility.  Instead, he discusses and illustrates the anatomical expression of madness, rage, jealousy, grief, anguish, weeping, laughter, and sorrow.  Bell's interest in this book is not medical; he is concerned with expression in painting, and his point is that is the 'true basis of the art of design" and its benefit is to bestow on the painter ' a minuteness of observation.' 

Here is a website that shows Bell on "fear and wonder."

And her on laughter.

Captive Audiences

 

Tom Gauld "Captive Audience" March 8, 2021 The New Yorker

The "Cover Story" blog about this cover is here. 

A couple interesting things in the interview:

It’s nice to see more of my neighbors as they walk along the street—usually, many of them would be at work all day. And, when I take walks, I see a lot more people sitting by their front windows, often working on a laptop. The idea for this cover started when I walked past a building and noticed that there was a figure in almost every one of the windows. I tried to imagine an everyday event that might attract the attention of everyone in a building.

You draw people as featureless silhouettes. What magic did you use to indicate that they’re all looking in the same direction?

The magic of cartooning! It’s partly just careful positioning, so that these little circles suggest a head held in a certain orientation. But, more important, it’s about leaving space for the viewer to fill in the blanks, to build these simple shapes into figures that tell a story. The ball is just a tiny circle, but placed in the right position, with a line under it: it’s a ball in midair. And when we see a stick figure with an outstretched arm and a dog, we imagine the movement and create a story. Making this happen is one of the fun things about drawing cartoons.

The Daily Dozen

 

I came across the book "How Not to Die" by Michael Greger.  He creates a chart a lot like this in his book in the section about applying the ideas daily.  He says that he originally had it on a white board in his kitchen.

Someone online has adapted the white board idea to this printable:

I like that "exercise" is a checkbox.  (He argues that the CDC recommended amount of exercise is very low and very modest.  He wants 90 mins/day of brisk walking (4 MPH) or 40 mins brisk exercise.  It seems that the Fitbit that I have does a decent job of recording "active minutes" for this.  It counts certain activities/heart rates at a simple rate (one minute per minute of exercise) and doubles active minutes.

It makes me think I can adapt it to a daily dozen of other things that "should be done for heath" each day.... meditation, stretching, making something.  I have tried other versions of these before.  

Anti-Habit

Vase of Flowers, 1905 - Odilon Redon

Rob Walker writes recently (The Art of Noticing No. 50) about a podcast "No Stupid Questions" - from Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner.  They talk about the concept of habituation - "the human tendency to get used to things." 

Duckworth & Dubner chat about reasons to resist habituation and find time to appreciate the good things we’ve come to take for granted. (They reference the “three good things” exercise: “In this daily reflection, you list three things that went well for you, and why they went well.” ) 

Walker suggest a few noticing and attention prompts, not for daily use, per se, but as one-off exercises in fending off habituation right now:

• Identify a human-made miracle in your life you’ve come to take for granted.

• Same for a feature of the natural world: pick out some miracle of nature you encounter so often you’ve stopped noticing it.

• Consider a person in your life (IRL or digitally), whether close or a familiar stranger or anywhere in between, that you enjoy but have come to take for granted.

• Now go the other way: What’s a problem or annoyance you’ve gotten habituated to — but that can be solved? How could you solve it?

• Think of something you’ve never habituated to — a thing you love that everyone else takes for granted (or even dislikes). Duckworth mentions her love of wall-to-wall carpeting. Which I find crazy, but that’s the point: identify something unique to you.

• Finally, identify some thing or activity that you now take for granted that you’d be sad to lose if it were abruptly taken away from you.

The chief end of man

 "What," Emerson asks, "is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in few words, that he should explore himself."

-from The American Scholar

"His own culture -- the unfolding of his nature, is the chief end of man."

(and by that he means self-development, education, Bildung.)

Overflowing Plenty, of Energy, of Impatient Haste

Emerson's exuberence, according to Richardson, is often expressed in catalogs and lists. 

From the second half of septemeber 1836 to Early March 1837 Emerson was reading, thinking, writing, and talking at white heat.... Emerson was euphoric, full of energy.  His journal is exuberant, brilliant, expansive.... he tossed off lists and catalogs.  They are the inventories of his many worlds.... Image crowds on image in a tumbling heap of inventive abundance.... He loved 'the eight rowed corn, and the twelve-rowed, and the brindled, and the badger corn, and the Canada corn, and the sweet, the white, and the Missouri.".... [mostly] the impulse was a Homeric, a Goethean reaching out to the world...

Emerson write, "Let us paint the agitator, and the man of the old school, and the member of Congress, and the college professor, the formidable editor, the priest, the reformer, the contemplative girl, and the fair aspirant for fashion and opportunity, the woman of the world who has tried and knows."

He was like his admired Carlyle who, Emerson once said, use the language "like a protean engine which cut ,, thrust, saw, rasp, tickle or pulverize as occasion may require."

Emerson's lists are an expression of overflowing plenty, of energy, of impatient haste. "We peddle, we truck, we sail, we row, we ride in cars, we creep in teams, we go in canals, to market, and for the sale of gooes."  (pages 252-253)

The Incompetence Dodge

 From Ezra Klein's article in the NYT

In 2005, my colleagues at The American Prospect Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias wrote an essay I think about often. It was called “The Incompetence Dodge,” and it argued that American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. At the time, they were writing about the liberal hawks who were blaming the catastrophe of the Iraq war on the Bush administration’s maladministration rather than rethinking the enterprise in its totality.

Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.

“The pro-war crowd sees this as a mechanism by which they can absolve themselves of an accounting for the last 20 years,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. “Just think about the epic size of this policy failure. Twenty years of training. More than $2 trillion worth of expenditure. For almost nothing. It is heartbreaking to watch these images, but it is equally heartbreaking to think about all of the effort, of lives and money we wasted in pursuit of a goal that was illusory.”

 

key paragraph from the Yglesias article:

The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge -- a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place. In part, the dodge helps protect its exponents from personal embarrassment. But it also serves a more important, and dangerous, function: Liberal hawks see themselves as defenders of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention -- such as the Clinton-era military campaigns in Haiti and the Balkans -- and as advocates for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy. The dodgers believe that to reject the idea of the Iraq War is, necessarily, to embrace either isolationism or, even worse in their worldview, realism -- the notion, introduced to America by Hans Morgenthau and epitomized (not for the better) by the statecraft of Henry Kissinger, that U.S. foreign policy should concern itself exclusively with the national interest and exclude consideration of human rights and liberal values. Liberal hawk John Lloyd of the Financial Times has gone so far as to equate attacks on his support for the war with doing damage to the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself.

Habits of delight and enthusiasm

 In one of the chapters about Emerson's composition of his essay Nature, Richardson writes:

The words that come most readily and most frequently to Emerson as he describes his life in nature are "delight" (used four times at the end of chapter 1 alone) and "wild."  He uses the language of vision and rapture. He speaks of light and delight, of wild delights, of wildness, of exhilaration, of gladness, and of the wild beauty of Shakespeare's unmatchable gift for metaphor. Not only does Emerson accept the Greek idea that the universe is beauty, kosmos, but he emphasizes the experience of that beauty as a wild delight. This inner wildness, this habit of enthusiasm, this workaday embracing of the Dionysian is quintessential Emerson.  He is wild or he is nothing.

Patterns and Anomolies

 Bernd Heinrich; PBS Newshour - link

 He lives alone in a cabin, or camp, as it's called in Maine, he built 10 years ago

 In his science, Heinrich says, he looks first for patterns in nature and then for the differences, the anomalies that offer a way in.

 Anomaly means that there should be some reason for it.

 A reason why something's not going to pattern?

(in the video at this point, he's look at full leaves vs. insect-chewed leaves).

Yes, if you only see one pattern, you can't even think about it. It just is. But when you see a different one, then you can ask why. 

 

He also wrote "Trees in My Forest," which I read years ago. 

Books by the dead for the dead

 Robert Richardson on Emerson's reading choices:

Emerson was in perpetual quest of basic books, books that bore original witness, books that met Montaigne's stern query "What do I know?" -- books that were not just distilled from other books and that, as Whitman said, would probably pass away.  Emerson wanted books that declared solidly, without derivation or support, without apology or disclaimer, what the author observed and knew....  

Emerson was a vast reader, and it sometimes seems as though no book published from 1820 until his death evaded his attention completely.  But he was not an indiscriminate reader. There where whole categories of books he would not read.  He would not read theological or academic controversy, for example.  He disliked books intended to comment on other books.  In a blunt moment he called them "books by the dead for the dead." He wanted original firsthand accounts -- travel books, memoirs, testaments, statements of faith or discovery, poems.  He would read your poem or your novel but not your opinion on other people's poems or novels.

Unearned happiness

 Ralph Waldo Emerson's first wife, Ellen, died in 1831.  Richardson says "Ellen's death caught Emerson without any personal (that is to say, earned) defenses against loss.... As time passed, he kept her memory sacret - she became for him an ideal, as Beatrice had for Dante -- but the also strove to prevent himself from ever having to endure such another loss."

Ellen had been associated in Emerson's mind with strong, self-effacing religious faith right from the start.  Their engagement, their wedding, her death, and -- from now on -- her memory were always associated with private statements of faith and dependence, with feelings of humility, unearned happiness, and with an impulse toward prayer.

Middle Season #23

 

Squirrels are leaving messy piles of hickory nut trash in piles all over.  It's the end of the road of lots of cicadas.  My impatien, which has been glorious all summer, is getting shaggy and not so vibrant any more.  Black swallowtail caterpillar spent most of the week on my dill plant, getting fatter and fatter, and then disappeared.

Fleeting and Evanescent Flowers of the Mind

 The year 1834 was a great one for Emerson, when a confluence of ideas came together and he began to write (in The Old Manse in Concord) the first biographical essays and Nature.  His notebooks were an essential part of the process of writing. 

According to Richardson, the content of his notebooks changed.

He was now trying to capture not just major conclusions and insights but the slightest, most evanescent hints and glimmers that rose to the surface of his mind and then as quickly sank from sight: 'For the best part... of every mind is not that which [a person] knows, but which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed before hime.' Emerson's journals show that for years he fished along the edges of consciousness, eager to note down the smallest fresh suggestion or hint of a suggestion. He made an effort to recall and write down dreams, to record first impressions, not second thoughts, to recall 'what so rankled at heart and kept the eyes open all night.' These were al struggles to forestall and cheat the repressive processes of the mind, to snatch and write down everything that reached the surface of consciousness.  Much of Emerson's journal is not intended as finished work or public utterance, nor een as the record of private conviction.  He is concerned to explore -- and then to save -- impulses, essays, hints, trials, spurts, exaggerations, the most fleeting and evanescent flowers of the mind.

Emerson developed a system to keep track of these ideas by indexing. "Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks."  He developed a method that he shared with Elizabeth Peabody:

He advised me to keep a manuscript book -- and to write down every train of thought which arose on any interesting subject with the imagery in which it first came into my mind.  This manuscript was to be perfectly informal and allow of skipping from one subject to another with only a black line between.  After it was written I could run a heading of subjects over the top -- and when I wanted to make up an article -- there were all my thoughts ready.

Putting your ear close to the soul

Emerson was deeply influenced by Quaker ideas.  When he went to New Bedford in 1835, Emerson already believed in something resembling the Quaker's fundamental principle of absolute trust in the inner voice, the "Inner Light."  

Quakers consider themsleves under an obligation to follow virtue, "bound to give up such of the customs, or fashions of men, as militate, in any manner, against the letter of the spirit of the gospel," not ordinarily, "but even to the death."  This leads to prohibitions (no music, no dancing, no novels, no theater, no destruction of animal life for pleasure) and social activism (refusal to pay taxes for support of ministers, abolitionism, equality of women, pacifism).  The spirit is considered as the primary and infallible guide -- and scriptures but a secondary means of importance.  According to Thomas Clarkson's Portraiture of Quakerism (1802), "This spirit" is "a primary and infallible guide, has been given to men universally and sufficiently.  Those who resist it, quench it."

According to Richardson's Emerson biography, "the real strength and energy of the Quakers comes from neither prohibitions nor theology but from "the centering of life on the realities of inward intercourse with God." Quakerism is supremely committed to the individual's own experience.  

Mary Rotch was a major influence on Emerson. She was a so-called "New Light" Quaker, who believed that the final authority by direct influence from "the Influence" (what she called God) and was kicked out of the Quakers.  

Emerson wrote about her ability to listen carefully to herself and believe it unquestioningly.

She was much disciplined, she said, in the years of Quaker dissension and driven inward, driven home, to find an anchor, until she learned to have no choice, to acquiesce without understanding the reason when she found an obstruction to any particular course of action.  [When she was in a depression, her friend told her] to dwell patiently with her dreariness and absence, in the confidence that it was necessary to the sweeping away of all her dependence upon tradition, and that she would finally attain to something better. And when she attained a better state of mind, its beginnings were very, very small.

Emerson reflected in his journal: "Can you believe, Waldo Emerson, that you may relieve yourself of this perpetual perplexity of choosing, and by putting your ear close to the soul, learn always the true way?"  Above all, Emerson was struck (according to Richardson) "by the serene and perfect assurance of Miss Rotch."   

On the March 21st, while reading the records of the debates about Rotch, he wrote "The subject that needs most to be presented, developed, is the principle of Self-Reliance, what it is, what it is not, what it requires, how it teaches us to regard our friends."

Active Filtration and Constant Intention

 Robert Richardson describes Emerson's amazing power of taking on the ideas of others.

With Quakerism, as with de Stael, Coleridge, Carlyle, Kant, and Hinduism and Stoicism, Emerson was not so much converted as he was confirmed.

Later

We all read hundreds of books, but the reading does not make us great writers, nor does it very often change our lives. When we have canvased Emerson's vast reading, it will by itself have told us little or nothing about the creative process or the growth of character.  Sometimes the books of a month of Emerson's life are merely an inventory of a month's distractions. Anyone can amass an impressive amount of reading. But the active filtration and the tight focus of constant intention which convert that reading into real life experience and then into adequate expression, these are the exclusive properties of the great writer.

Lifting the common moments of everyday life

 Robert Richardson writes about Emerson's poetry, especially "Each and All" and "The Snow-Storm" and "The Rhodora" and how they represent something fundamental to Emerson's developing consciousness.

All these poems are animated by the same fundamental insight that is now a living, emotionally experienced reality for Emerson. The world itself is the great poem, the source of all the verbal approximations of itself. When the poet can hold fast to this connection, he has access -- through his own poor powers - to the world's power and beauty.  This is one of the central insights of Emerson's life. Not only did it never leave him, it never lost its sweet urgency, its sensuous hold on him, its ability to lift the common moments of everyday life on the updrafts of awareness that reader are always wanting to call mystical experience. At the core of Emerson's life from now on is this willed surrender, this giving oneself over to the unregarded epiphanies of every blessed day. (179)

My Mother's Body by Marie Howe

 My Mother's Body

Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,

grew louder. From inside her body I heard almost every word she said.
Within that girl I drove to the store and back, her feet pressing

the pedals of the blue car, her voice, first gate to the cold sunny mornings,
rain, moonlight, snow fall, dogs . . .

Her kidneys failed, the womb where I once lived is gone.
Her young astonished body pushed me down that long corridor,

and my body hurt her, I know that—24 years old. I’m old enough
to be that girl’s mother, to smooth her hair, to look into her exultant frightened eyes,

her bedsheets stained with chocolate, her heart in constant failure.
It’s a girl, someone must have said. She must have kissed me

with her mouth, first grief, first air,
and soon I was drinking her, first food, I was eating my mother,

slumped in her wheelchair, one of my brothers pushing it,
across the snowy lawn, her eyes fixed, her face averted.

Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers,
our voice in my throat speaking to you now.

---

I love this song of praise.  It responds empathetically to the young women who suffered for the speaker's existence, and for her current long legs, "her long arms and fingers" "our" voice.  And the weaving of the past and present.

The World by Marie Howe

 The World

I couldn't tell one song from another,
which bird said what or to whom or for what reason.

The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words.
I couldn't decide which door to open--they looked the same, or what

would happen when I did reach out and turn a knob. I thought I was safe,
standing there
but my death remembered its date:

only so many summer nights still stood before me, full moon, waning moon,
October mornings: what to make of them? which door?

I couldn't tell which stars were which or how far away any one of them was,
or which were still burning or not--their light moving through space like a
long

late train--and I've lived on this earth so long--50 winters, 50 springs and
summers,
and all this time stars in the sky--in daylight

when I couldn't see them, and at night when, most nights, I didn't look.

***

There's a devastating ending to this poem. I appreciate that last line which emphasizes an the appreciation of (or astonishment at) the unappreciated beauty of the world, the realization of the temporariness ("only so many summer night still stood before me..."

First Draft

 Jeff Tweedy posted the first draft of a new song "30 Below" here as part of his blog/newsletter.  This feels like an example of Kleon's idea to "show your work" and Tweedy's own advice to write a song every day (or continue working on one) and to share it with someone.   It's like Tweedy feels like it's his job to write and record songs.  Period.  Make them and get them out.  Both of these songs say that they'll be "behind a paywall" soon, which makes me a bit sad, because I love the roughness and good-enoughness of them.  

Here's another one called "Ambulance" which he says: This is the kind of song that feels like it came from somewhere else. Came out almost fully formed, like a story I was reminded of.

Kids as Half-Formed People and Other Thoughts from Jason Reynolds

Image credit: Ben Fractenberg (link)

Jason Reynolds was interviewed on On Being with Krista Tippett.  Here are some remarkable perspectives, mostly about the young people.

In Tippett's introduction, she names that kids POSSESS and DEMAND compassion and clear-eyed honesty: 

Jason Reynolds is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature of the Library of Congress — and a magnificent source of wisdom for human society as a whole. He’s driven by compassion and the clear-eyed honesty that the young both possess and demand of the rest of us.

Reynolds describes his work in opposition to the "hack work" of many authors who Tippett describes as writing is "pain porn or trauma porn."  Reynolds says that we do a disservice to kids if we don't show the complicated and tough truth; and it treats kids as "half-formed."  This reminds me of the child psychologist Haim Ginott (who in another context talks about "you create the weather in the classroom") who says we should value the specific and short-lived powers of adolescence.

I think that the fervent nature of finding humor and lightness and levity is a remarkable gift of youth, honestly. And so for me, I’m not interested — look, I write that which I believe is real and things that happen, and I don’t want to shy away from things that are complicated and tough, but I also want to write whole stories about whole people. I think sometimes we reduce children and young people to half-formed things, and so we write half-formed stories about them. And even that ties to the way people talk about children’s literature. People talk about children’s literature as if it is a category that is full of half-formed work, but that’s because they too believe that children are half-formed. [laughs] And so I think those of us who acknowledge the humanity of young people, those of us who acknowledge the complexity and the beauty and sophistication of childhood know that when you’re writing it, all those elements have to be present.

Here, he coins the term "alchemy of language."  It's in a section where he talks about the important job of keeping the imagination of young people alive.

My whole life is around figuring out — is playing around with the alchemy of language. That’s my whole jam. I want to figure, what exactly are the chemical reactions that take place when you put this word next to this word? That’s something that — I think about the poet John Ashbery, that was his whole thing. It’s like, I don’t know what this means, but if you put these two words together, what does it make you feel? And I’m curious about that.

Here's Reynolds on the importance of imagination in a world that vacuums it from us.  He wants to "fortify" kids in mind, body, and spirit.  Partly the answer is just to go home a different way.

I think that my role, for as long as I am on this plane and as long as I am doing this work, my role will always be to figure out how to create fortitude in the minds and bodies and spirits of young people. I’m trying to fortify them. It’s also the reason why I do so much around imagination — this is a big deal for me — or why I do the whole “let’s create synonyms,” because at the end of the day, ultimately, I need young people — we, the collective we need young people to be able to activate their imaginations. If they cannot, if they don’t have — if, by the time you’re out of high school, your imagination is shot, we’re in trouble, bigtime. We’re in trouble. But how does one keep an imagination fresh in a world that works double-time to suck it away? How does one keep an imagination firing off when we live in a nation that is constantly vacuuming it from them? And I think that the answer is, one must live a curious life. One must have stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the inside of their bodies. And those books don’t have to be the things that you’ve read. I mean, that’s good, too, but those books could be the conversations that you’ve had with your friends that are unlike the conversations you were having last week. It could be about this time taking the long way home and seeing what’s around you that you’ve never seen, because most of us, especially city folk, we stay in our little quadrants. We stay on the five-block radius, wherever the coffeeshop is and the school and the church.  

On young people's "irreverence."

no one wants to live in a world where young people are not irreverent, first and foremost. A world where young people are not irreverent is not a world for me, because it is a world that is not growing. They have to shake the table. If you like your young person’s art and music, your young people are doing something wrong. The truth is that — right? It’s just the natural order of things. It’s the natural order of things. It is their time to mold what they want the world to look like

What's the role of adults?

In this moment, it isn’t just — I’ve heard people say, “We got to get out the way.” Here’s the thing. I think that they don’t want us out the way. Despite what you may hear, it’s not that they want us out the way, I think what they want for us to do is to listen to them, because I think — what I’ve learned over the years is that when we talk about entitlement, what we do is we say that young people are so entitled, yet I don’t know a group of people more entitled than adults and older people. I mean, we really believe that we deserve their respect simply because we have years on them, and the truth is that that respect must be earned. And I think what they’re saying is, “Please, make a seat for me at the table. You can’t talk about my life and not include me. You have to make a seat for me at the table.”

That is our role in this movement. It’s that simple. It’s like, look, I am here. If you need help, you need strategy planning, you need to understand how this works, you need some historical reference and context, I’m here to do all those things.

You need somebody to help you take some breaths, you need somebody to help you make sandwiches and make sure that you all got the proper shoes on, these simple things, and if you’re going to walk into harm’s way, I’m going to pull your coattail and say, “Hey, hey, hey, are we certain? Let’s go over the rules. Let’s make sure that we are doing what we want to be doing.” But if you are emotionally broken, if something happens that hurts you emotionally, then it’s my job to step in and say, “Let’s process what has happened. Let’s figure out where the failure is. Let’s figure out how to grow from it, how to get strong, and then we need to get back out into the street.” 

 

Why the Novel is Necessary but Sometimes Hard to Read by Marie Howe

 Why the Novel is Necessary but Sometimes Hard to Read

by Marie Howe

It happens in time. Years passed until the old woman
one snowy morning realized she had never loved her daughter . . .

Or Five years later she answered the door, and her suitor had returned
almost unrecognizable from his journeys . . .

But before you get to that part
you have to learn the names—you have to suffer not knowing anything about
   anyone

and slowly come to understand who each of them is, or who each of them
imagines themselves to be—

and then, because you are the reader, you must try to understand who you think
each of them is because of who you believe yourself to be in relation to their
   situation
or to your memory of one very much like it.

Oh it happens in time, and time is hard to live through.
I can’t read anything anymore; my dying brother said one afternoon.
Not even letters.
Come on; Come on, he said, waving his hand in the air.
What am I interested in—plot?

You come upon the person the author put there
as if you’d been pushed into a room and told to watch the dancing—
—pushed into pantries, into basements, across moors, into
the great drawing rooms of great cities, into the small cold cabin or

to here—beside the small running river where a boy is weeping,
and no one comes . . .

and you have to watch without saying anything he can hear.

One by one the readers come and watch him weeping by the running river,
and he never knows

unless he too has heard the story where a boy feels himself all alone.

This is the life you have written, the novel tells us. What happens next?

***

I like the image of the reader trying to make sense of the story, and how living in time, especially when time is short, is hard.  Ultimately, it forces us to ask the question at the end.  Novels are filled with people making sense of their lives, of stories they have written, and in the end, it forces us to ask the same question: here is our life, that we have written... and what will happen next?

Middle Season #22

 

Trip to Morton Arboretum on August 1st found glorious profusion of flowers in the prairie.  Bottom right is rattlesnake master, which I had at my old house.  

Five Dimensions of Curiosity

Mars Rover "Curiosity" (NASA)

 Todd Kasdan, author of Curious? has adapted and updated his understanding of the types of curiosity.  In an article in Psychology Today, he identifies five:  

1. Joyous Exploration. This is the prototype of curiosity—the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge and information, and the subsequent joy of learning and growing.

2. Deprivation Sensitivity. This dimension has a distinct emotional tone, with anxiety and tension being more prominent than joy—pondering abstract or complex ideas, trying to solve problems, and seeking to reduce gaps in knowledge.

3. Stress Tolerance. This dimension is about the willingness to embrace the doubt, confusion, anxiety, and other forms of distress that arise from exploring new, unexpected, complex, mysterious, or obscure events.

4. Social Curiosity. Wanting to know what other people are thinking and doing by observing, talking, or listening in to conversations.

5. Thrill Seeking. The willingness to take physical, social, and financial risks to acquire varied, complex, and intense experiences.

7 Lessons from the Olympic Games

Over on Twitter, Steve Magness writes about 7 lessons he drew from this year's Olympic Games.

#5 is about 

5. Create Space, Stay in the moment, Focus on one thing at a time. After every high jump, Nicola McDermott writes in her notebook. She ranks herself in different aspects of the jump. Then chooses one area to focus on for the next jump

Here's a link to an article about her in the Guardian.

Contempt and Criticism

According to Zach Brittle (from the Gottman Institute), contempt (one of the Gottman's Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse) is not the same as hatred, not like "you go your way, I'll go mine."

Contempt isn’t “I hate you.” It’s something much worse. Something insidious and gross. Contempt is “I’m better than you.” If betrayal is a question of trust, contempt is a question of respect. Contempt says, “I don’t respect you. In fact, I’m going to actively disrespect you.”

And criticism, which causes a cycle of defensiveness, is a wish disguised.

Criticism is most often packaged in “you always” or “you never” statements. The implication is that the offending partner hasn’t simply offended, but is actually offensive. Criticism is aimed at a person’s character, not their behavior. Not surprisingly, this kind of attack often triggers defensiveness and leads to a cycle of conflict that is hard to escape. Gottman suggests replacing criticism with “I statements,” the most tried and true of marriage counseling cliches. I want to stress that this is more than a skill. It’s a state of mind. “You always” and “you never” defer responsibility to the partner. But you are responsible. You are.

Your criticism is a wish disguised. It’s a negative expression of a real need. What if you took responsibility for what you really desire for the relationship…what if you owned the wish and committed to articulating it as a positive hope? It could be as simple as starting your sentences with “I wish” instead of “you never.” But, as with contempt, it takes a good introspective look, in this case, at your own inclination toward violence.

Indifference vs. Curiosity

 

It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It's as simple as that.

Finnish author, novelist, painter and illustrator, Tove Jansson

Here's an article from "The Outdoor Swimming Society" about her work.

Billy Collins - My Hero

 My Hero

Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,
the tortoise has stopped once again
by the roadside,
this time to stick out his neck
and nibble a bit of sweet grass,
unlike the previous time
when he was distracted
by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.

I recently read "Aimless Love" by Billy Collins.  This poem is pretty emblematic of Collins' "deflationary" mode.  There are many poems that are like "I'm in Florida, walking on a beach, doing nothing.  And this is my poem about it."  This poem makes a virtue of the anti-norm.  

It reminds me that there's been a whole series of TV commercials during the Olympics that make a virtue of being a good sport, rather than training hard and winning.

Something Worth Sharing Every Day

 Adam Grant on Twitter recently:

People who say they're too busy to read are choosing not to make time to grow. Don't let the pressure to get things done stand in the way of discovering new things to learn. If you don't learn something worth sharing every day, you might not be spending enough time learning.

Another Rivet in the Machine of the Universe

 HDT, from "Conclusion" of Walden:

Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furrowing. Do not depend on the putty.  Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.  So will help you God, and so only.  Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.