a blush of robins

There are at least 15 different collective nouns for robins, most of which seem to refer to actual European robins, not the thrushes Americans call robins. I like blush. I watched a group feast on leftover apples one morning, orange on orange, then discovered the robins across the street where they had gone to refresh themselves.

This occurred two months after we held my mother’s funeral. When not watching robins, I spent bittersweet time wallowing in the memories of my parents, my relationships with them, and growing up with my younger brother–in short, my familial life–while I sorted through the accumulations of two lifetimes. The word “wallow” serves better than “savor”: the latter implies a taking in, a controlled appreciation, a distinction between myself and the memories; the former captures my headlong dive into the totemic magic and power of objects which transports one involuntarily to other places in time and space. “Wallow” accurately conveys being in the memories, one with them as they washed over me, a miniscule little man leaping into a snifter filled with rare cognac, voluntarily giving up all control, at times wondering if he will drown. Nevertheless these memories, like the cognac, provided a warming experience within and without.

Each object could open a trapdoor in my emotions, sluicing me downward, backward in time to feelings and events held in thrall by the fallibility of my memory: the coaster my mother brought back from Spain when my father fulfilled her lifelong dream of going there…

…the footstool which sat in my maternal grandparents’ living room until it sat in my parents’ living room and now sits in my library…

…the pen and ink reproduction of Lake Quinault Lodge in Olympic National Park where my parents visited with the dearest friends of their later years…and where I introduced my wife to the magic of the Washington State temperate rainforest…and where we in turn visited with our dearest friends…

Lake Quinault Lodge, Olympic National Park, Washington State, USA

New doors opened, new memories were made: discovering via a piece of masking tape on the bottom of a teapot that a tea set which sat in our house for decades once belonged to my great-grandmother, who died over a half century ago…

…that my maternal grandmother had been a flapper, wearing this dress…

Flapper dress with handsewn beadwork, 1920s

…that my mother appeared to save every letter I wrote to her throughout my life…that my father was both more obsessed with record-keeping than I had suspected and less organized about it than I had thought…that my brother was very artistic in elementary school as evidenced by all of our school papers having been preserved by my mother.

When I acted in community theater, I read Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone. After the typical introduction and notes sections, Johnstone presented four sections, the final of which was entitled “Masks and Trance”. I likely do Johnstone an injustice here, but what I’ve taken away from the section is that objects can possess an actor if the actor permits it. Further, the same object will induce similar acting performances from two different actors. Masks in this sense do not need to be facial coverings, although much of Johnstone’s work was with traditional comic or character masks which cover the top half of the face. The Charlie Chaplin Tramp costume represents a mask. Chaplin is quoted from his autobiography as saying this about what happened after he chose baggy pants, a tight jacket, a false moustache, a cane, and big shoes: “…I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and make-up made me feel the kind of person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on the stage he was fully born…with the clothes on I felt he was a reality, a living person. In fact he ignited all sorts of crazy ideas that I would never have dreamt of until I was dressed and made-up as the Tramp…For me he was fixed, complete, the moment I looked in the mirror and saw him for the first time, yet even now I don’t know all the things that are to be known about him.”

Johnstone speaks intuitive truth, which I experienced as I sorted my parents’ possessions. Though I had little knowledge of the various tea cups and sets my mother collected, a simple reference to her own grandmother triggered the three-generational appreciation for fine china, pottery, and the allure of the Orient for them. I could feel it, not just appreciate it. Similarly, seeing the dress (suit) my mother wore on the first day of her honeymoon created in me the feeling of pride, joy, anticipation, and love for my father which she felt as he took the photograph of her I had seen so many times growing up. Perhaps I leapt to make connections where none existed. Perhaps I merely stitched together disparate memories when I looked at the diamond ring my father commissioned to repurpose his mother’s wedding ring. Perhaps it reflects only the deductive approach of a historian, not the inductive episodes I’ve described here. Perhaps…

That objects carry weight and meaning seems unavoidably true. To dismiss them, to clear them away from one’s life because they represent “clutter”, to periodically get rid of things simply because “I ought to”, to focus only on life experiences–certainly this has a minimalist, zen allure to it, but it ultimately represents a negation of the physical. When the important aspects of one’s reality exist only in the mind, then another may question, “Why are you here then?” This attitude and that question sum up for me the problem with certain Christian scriptures which seem to advise us to dismiss the world as secondary. Likewise the Buddhist notion that life is but illusion avoids the simple fact that we must walk through this illusion until death. To repeat: why are we here then?

Most of those objects I sorted through have moved on to others’ hands. Like a death from one thousand cuts, I could not transport the contents of a 2600 square foot house to mine. Ignoring marital discord, it simply defied the laws of physics, and it represented a serious challenge to my fiscal state to transport them across the United States. Except for select items, photos must stand in to stimulate my memories now. But I still haven’t captured the magic, the hold these things have on me. Where are the words to describe what I feel when hold a small little lockbox made from metal, fashioned to look like a suitcase from the 1940s, and scarcely large enough to hold a pack of cards? I can tell you how I held this in my hands over the course of my childhood and listened to the coins inside slide around. I can tell you my father threw a few coins in it from time to time, coins which represented singular things to him. I don’t even know why some of the coins were there. What made a particular nickel so important? I even can attempt a description of my young feelings as I looked at a representational suitcase and saw things that suitcases did not have to the best of my young knowledge: straps to tie it up and hold it together; images of stickers from all the major cities and countries where the suitcase theoretically had been; a putty gray-green color accentuated by tan for the faux leather at the edges and on the belts securing it together. I can describe how I would take a little odd-shaped key to unlock the box to view those coins, but how can I convey to you how I still can feel what I felt then at the age of ten simply by holding the case in my hands? How I can see my father at 40 instead of 80? I can picture where it was tucked in the top drawer of his chest of drawers, underneath the white handkerchiefs he always carried in his suits–until he didn’t. I see the arrangement of the furniture in my parents’ bedroom in 1965. I feel the lumpiness of the awful-colored shag carpet rug alongside the bed. It never really stops. I can continue to describe the bedroom, the events which happened there, which trigger other events, other items–because I am at that moment living there-then not here-now.

Am I too old to envision a different way to relate to objects? In 75 years, 100 years will someone like me fondly recall the cumbersome approach to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) his grandparents had, and how he still cherishes them in the virtual vault where he stores them? I think not. Just as archeologists delicately brush dust from clay tablets and vases, so too do we mentally brush the cobwebs of time aside to relive those times we held these objects. In just the same way that we gaze on those ancients artifacts in museums, so too do we mentally consider the displays we’ve built in our mind of all those objects we couldn’t hang onto–and we’ll experience true joy to have a small little museum ourselves, maybe just a part of a shelf, maybe one room of our house, where we can look at the salient objects which invoke these magical feelings in us, feelings we cannot articulate fully, memories we can only share with others who hold them too.

Memories can bring a cascade of others until we are possessed. Sometimes it only takes a blush of robins to trigger them.

Wokeness versus objective reality

You should use your one or two free articles per month from the New York Times to read Bret Stephens’s column “Why Wokeness Will Fail” (published Nov 9, 2021). Although Stephens dwells overmuch on matters associated with racism and the Black Lives Matter movement in particular—opening himself up to charges of “another white guy doing the defensive thing”—his points are well made, accurate, and most importantly, based in reality.

Stephens notes a particularly chilling example from the American Medical Association which apparently has urged redefining terms for patients such that they reflect the inherent racism that created their situation. As he notes, it is Orwellian. I am reminded of the clients I continually met who believed that they could change corporate culture if they just wrote better SOP’s. This is the ‘hall monitor’ approach: give me more rules and I will be empowered. One cannot redefine the world by redefining language. We cannot introduce matters of opinion into descriptive terms of objective reality. A person with little money is ‘poor’ not ‘the victim of economic inequality’. Terms which carry hateful, opinionated connotations do indeed need to be replaced. But projecting a theory onto every situation and redefining the terms? Ridiculous, inaccurate, group-think, the beginning of totalitarianism.

This recognition that Wokeness is a step toward totalitarianism is refreshing. Stephens’s assertion that it is doomed to fail because of the structure of American government and society? I’m not so sure. I would like it to be true, but I have lived too long through the simple—ketchup is a vegetable—and the complex—there were fine persons on both sides—to believe this constant assault on reality will diminish and ultimately fail. Our would-be emperors are often naked, and we must constantly point this out to the gullible.

True Facts and Crazy Facts

Idiocy is different than rational insanity. Maybe it’s just a continuum of wrongheadedness. Idiocy requires an emotional need to believe, a desire to believe, and an acquiescence to trust the veracity of something because it reinforces your True Beliefs. (True Beliefs. Core Beliefs. “People are almost always out to get me.” “There is a higher power.” “The Other is always bad.”)

The danger with idiocy lies in how it leads someone to believe their beliefs are no longer Beliefs but Facts. The most dangerous form of this idiocy happens when a person leaps from a perfectly acceptable Fact to a crazy-assed assertion loosely connected to it, and our susceptible Idiot links the True Fact to this New “Fact” (what we will now call a Crazy Fact) and from thence travels a circular path back to the Core Belief which made them susceptible to believe the Crazy Fact in the first place.

I taught in junior high with a woman who worked as a teacher’s aide for a special education teacher dealing with learning disability students. This teacher’s classroom included students who have ‘legit’ disabilities like dyslexia, but it more commonly included kids with problems of self-perception that they were not good at math, reading, writing, or whatever. This woman and I shared a prep period wherein she actually prepped while I usually farted around with the nascent network system in the school, trying to make it work. (We were too cheap to actually have a true tech person on the staff of the entire district, let alone our little school.) The aide and I had a good conversational time. She was quite personable. She and her husband had moved to our rural location after he retired from being an urban cop in a large American city. A lot of them did that because selling a very modest house in that market could land a lovely home in our depressed market, cash on the barrelhead, and everything you worked at thereafter was financial gravy. Her gig paid a whopping $7/hr, but this was in the mid to late 80’s, when $250 a week was significant. (For comparison purposes, the $250/week equaled about $1000/month. A beginning teacher in our district earned between $1100 and $1200/month. An average teacher with a good combination of extra training and 5-8 years’ experience earned $2000-2500. The biggest difference was the teacher got paid regardless of holidays, and got paid during the summer months, whereas the aide only got paid when she worked.)

One day we’re talking about something, likely conservative politics, because one thing that drew police and firemen from urban cities to our area was that we were deeply conservative, borderline reactionary. The state we were located in–to be kept a bit anonymous unless you dig through this website–was NOT in the Deep South, far from it. And for the purpose of the big reveal coming up, it also wasn’t Montana or Colorado. But back to the conversation we were having. Somehow it led to a discussion of state governments, and I made a comment about Montana being relatively independent because although conservative overall, it often elected Democrats to Congress. (Look it up.) And this perfectly normal-looking, normal acting woman said:

“Well, but the state of Montana is governed by Colorado.” (And I guess everyone KNEW that Colorado was more liberal being that they have Denver and Boulder there and all.)

I was poleaxed, a battering ram of crazy delivered to me right between the eyes when I was totally relaxed and unsuspecting. I would recount the next few lines, but it’s a blur. All I remember is that I basically, politely said, “Uh, no it’s not,” and all I got was a strongly-convicted woman determined to let me in on the truth of which apparently very few people were aware. She firmly believed that, while the State of Montana had a legislature, it had to run all of its decisions past the government of Colorado.

This woman firmly believed (Core Belief) that We Are Being Lied To On A Regular Basis By EVERYONE (Media, Education Leaders, Politicians). A True Fact–I’m not doing any more Google searches on this, but I’ll accept that maybe somehow, someway in the past, Montana was part of a large territory run from Denver–plus a Core Belief left her open to accepting someone’s assertion that Montana was run by Colorado (a Crazy Fact).

This interchange from decades ago has been playing across my mind in 2021 when we in the United States of America have been living in a Kafkaesque landscape of two political realities. It’s as if two parallel realities suddenly found themselves cohabiting the same physical reality, as if the coordinates of space-time were suddenly coincident. Maybe it’s not as Kafkaesque as I think it is, but the ascendence of conspiracy crazies to positions of prominence in government, influential political groups, and voting blocs has left the rest of us going “what the fuck…?” in our spare moments of privacy spent reading about the latest news while taking a morning crap.

Contrast this woman’s opinion with that a friend of mine expressed in August 2020. He made a cogent argument for the Covid-19 disease accidentally escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This person is a former member of our volunteer military (as opposed to the Army), who later worked with me in pharmaceutical manufacturing. He is world-traveled also, and he’s well-read. What he said, though I didn’t want to believe it, must be at least accepted for examination and consideration. His argument was:

No one outside of China is certain what is studied at the lab, but its focus on bat-sourced viruses was well-established. I’ve since read several pieces about its famous (or infamous) bat cave searcher for new viruses, Shi Zhengli. This assertion of his is a True Fact.
The lab had been cited frequently for deficient safety practices, many of them dealing with containment of pathogens and the environmental controls which assure safety to the world at large. This too is a True Fact. It’s a matter of public record by the Chinese government, which I have many doubts about, but when they say the lab had difficulties in this area, I’m a believer in it being true. I think the FDA also did so, but I am not sure it ever got access. Overall, this is not a True Fact, but quite likely it is a presumably True Fact.
And unfortunately I’ve forgotten a little bit of the detail of his next point. Basically it had to do with some of the lab workers becoming sick with very similar symptoms to the Covid-19 disease in November 2019 just before it was acknowledged to be a problem. I don’t know if this is true, but I think I’ve read about that elsewhere. It’s at least rationale unlike our fine teaching companion’s belief that Montana is in thrall to Colorado.

The “accepted” view in August 2020 was that his position was a crazy one, and dangerous: we had a sitting president with an itchy nuclear-launch button finger to retaliate against a rogue country who infected the world with a plague that ‘ruined’ his presidency. (And whaddaya know, there I go, imputing my beliefs in a way to make them sound true!) Yet we currently have quite a few questions as to where this disease’s viral vectors come from. I personally like Occam’s Razor: the most likely answer is the one which, in the presence of available facts, is the simplest. It is easier to believe that a region of the globe which routinely infects the rest of the world with diseases caused by this region’s combination of culinary predilections, health standards, graft, and preponderance of disease-carrying bats and several other incubators of pestilence, had once again allowed a virus to leap species and infect us to bad effect.

We–those of us who believe in True Facts and presumed to be True Facts–need to accept and meet people like my second friend. We need to argue Occam’s Razor-style with them. We need to accept the plausibility of their arguments, but we need to keep in mind the implications of accepting their points of view. (Accepting in August of 2020 that China’s lab let the disease out, and that China did a haphazard job in figuring that out, just would have fed a whole lot of crazy to no good effect.)

And short of considering deprogramming, we need to ignore and isolate the true crazies, the idiots from the rest of us. Give them short shrift. See extinction theory. They believe in Crazy Facts and those have no place in determining the course of action for any communal group of humans. This topic and thread will be continued.

reader beware

Yep.

Of course any English major knows that writers, perhaps because of their beleaguered early years, have nothing up on car salesmen, realtors, or grain dealers in terms of ethical behavior.

Harrison, Jim. The English Major (p. 156).