News Blog

Truth and/in the Narrative Age

Modern people, journalists and government people especially, like to talk about events in terms of “the narrative,” as if the real world events they’re describing are elements of fiction and not accumulations of fact.  For a while now, this has disturbed me.  Shouldn’t such people, possessors of the public trust and the duty of honestly informing the people, be telling the simple truth about things that verifiably happened and not “constructing a narrative” about them?  Because to my mind, constructing a narrative is not the same as providing a truthful account of something, nor is it consistent with the intention of fully informing one’s auditor.  It’s not that at all.  Rather, shaping the narrative is one systematic and insidious step removed from “spin.”  Meanwhile, spin is at least honest about its intentions which are to mislead, even to lie (almost).  A constructed narrative is not.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.  First, there is the factual telling of a real-world incident or situation.  This is what we expect from government officials and their journalists (naively, of course). 

Then there is the self-serving use of language to tell the same story in such a way that the listener gets the impression that the narrator wants them to get, even though that impression is not true. An honest government with honest motives would not need to construct narratives.  This should tell us something about the quality of information fed to us by spokespeople and media.  But maybe I’m still not making myself clear.

Example:  A country (let’s call them The Enemy) invades another country (The Proxy) after years of manipulation and tinkering on the part of a third nation which would like to take out The Enemy by having the proxy country fight them in a war.  This third country (let’s call them The Instigator) tells people that The Enemy has wantonly invaded the The Proxy without any provocation at all in order to fulfill its goal of world domination.  Many if not most people, hearing this narrative, believe it to be true, despite any stubborn facts to the contrary.  But in the current instance, the only part of the narrative that is strictly true is that The Enemy has invaded The Proxy.  The rest is spin: language employed to convey the false impression that The Enemy is solely at fault for a state of affairs that was largely set in motion, not by The Enemy but by The Instigator.

If we actually cared, we would have a problem with people in positions of public trust “shaping the narrative”–by so doing, the truth gets drowned in waves of false allegation, and we the people who listen uncritically to these narratives are misled, perhaps because we want to be, but misled all the same.  Like it or not, we accept lies and half-truths as truth.  

For a long time, this has gone on.  People love to tell stories; embellishing the truth is a time honored tradition of tall tale tellers from the fireside hearth to the halls of Congress.  But when we create names for this phenomenon which make it plain that we know the stories we’re telling ourselves are lies, and then use those lies to justify very dangerous and damaging real-world actions (such as wars and slander), yea, when we speak of constructed narratives as though they were true accounts of real events composed of indisputable facts, then we are miles past the use of fiction for entertainment (as in the art of creative writing) and well into the territory of self-serving mendacity.

Although no one really knows why this is so⁠1, we do know that lies are harmful and the truth is good.  It’s just that unless one’s actions are motivated by a desire to do good, telling the truth can be hard and painful. Hence we lie, or as we say today, spin.

In the case of government officials and so-called politicians, we do this as a matter of course—it’s what we do, our modus operandi, our standard operating procedure.  Constructing the narrative in this context has no other purpose than to mislead and consequently, to elicit a desired response from the people who believe us.  It’s consciously taking the facts as we know them and twisting them with other facts or convincingly-worded half-truths, and telling a different story—one that’s in line with our interests, not those of the people we purport to serve.  The established practice of spin is manipulative and frankly rotten, and we shouldn’t tolerate it, much less make up innocuous sounding labels for it like “shaping the narrative,” as though we were just rounding off a few rough edges, although, in fact, that’s just what we are doing—the omitting the inconvenient facts that tell the real story, the whole story, the truth and nothing but the truth.

But then, people don’t naturally tend to be truth-tellers.  Here in America, we need to be made to swear on a Bible (an obsolete sacred book) under penalty of law that we will tell the truth before we will do so reliably.  And even then, we might not, the Ten Commandments be damned. So when someone talks about the narrative, beware.  This is not an honest rendering of fact.  On the contrary–you are being lied to.

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1 So: a needle pulling thread… conjunction meaning (in this case) “the case” or (to translate, “why this is the case” or “why this is true.”

Writing as Both Noun and Verb

Recently I’ve been trying to figure out ways to increase my writing — the amount I complete, publish, and otherwise bring to fruition; the amount of time I spend doing it.  For some time now, the answer to the first part has been “zilch,” while the second value has hovered just above “very little.”  I spend very little time doing almost no useful (publishable) writing.  So we have that out of the way.

Naturally, this is not the state of affairs I prefer. 

I enjoy writing and once I get started, I can write happily, sometimes for hours.  But the part I steadfastly avoid is getting started.  For some reason, I resist writing, or for that matter, any creative effort, whether it’s what I do naturally (write) or something I do because I need to exercise some different skills (arts and crafts, gardening, cooking).  Is it because I’m not required to be creative that I can’t engage?

Whatever the reason, I find I’m like the cat who can’t decide what to do next. Faced with too many options, the cat will groom.  In a similar position, I plan.

I can plan all day.  I love to plan.  I make lists like it’s nothing.  Think and plan—not do.  When it comes to action, I lose my resolve and fall into what DeLillo calls “drift and lethargy.”  Oh what a relief that even the great DeLillo has problems with procrastination.  But then he has this crazy thing called discipline.

Because it’s relevant and also fun to read, here are a few comments from brilliant and prolific author Don DeLillo on writing and work habits.  He writes:

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle—it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparent—you don’t know it’s passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettes—I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín. The face of Borges against a dark background—Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked—but the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.”

Don DeLillo, from an interview  the Paris Review, 1990s?

How wonderful. I find this statement almost as inspirational as DeLillo finds Borges’ photo.  It’s a “guide out of lethargy and drift.”

Inspired by this snippet of DeLillo, I have begun to read Borges finally, after years of wanting to but never being able to remember his name when I was in a bookstore.  Or pronounce it, for that matter.  His name, the name of this great author, thinker, and student of literature is Jorge Luis Borges.  He writes short pieces, often as short as 2-3 pages, with evocative titles and playfully misleading premises.  People like to talk about how he writes reviews of imaginary books, which he does, but playful as it seems, it’s so much more than just a game.  He’s such a genius at fantasy that after a very short while, the author himself starts to seem fictional too.  But returning to imaginary books—why?

(An answer—suppose a book needs to be written, but no one has written it.  Why go to the trouble of writing this book when you can just take its existence for granted and comment on it yourself? This is Borges.)

I’m reading Borges and like DeLillo, I find Borges’ face haunting, especially his upward gazing eyes on the Grove Press cover of Ficciones.  The silver nitrate-colored oblong that fills most of the front cover portrays Borges in a theater-like space, clearly looking, seeing.  But Borges is blind.  This black and white screen, this tesseract of potential vision, is a cinema of the mind, faceted beyond the limits of imagination.

I’m inspired by Borges, his writing (what little I’ve read), and the man himself, who emanates mystery and, again quoting DeLillo, opens the door “into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.” How can you not love this?  Eliot would have, T. S. that is, had he read him.  (The two were contemporaries.)  The reader enraptured, the writer enflamed.

Borges says anything is possible in writing, language, and literature. Anything can be created, interrogated, forced to give up secrets. In like manner, Borges sees writing as a tool to approaching life’s knotty questions, all of them really, from “why are people so messed up” to “life, the universe, and everything.”  Borges says that you don’t need thousands of words to do this.  From 5 to 5000, it might be enough.  The goal is simply to answer the questions.

Moving away from my inspirators, who are only peripheral to this narrative, I know there are a lot of things I’d like to sell, but not here babe.  (Every time I turn around, I find I’m shot.)

Why do I mention Malkmus?  What does Pavement have to do with my writing practice?  Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that Malkmus read DeLillo, not just the big sexy books like White Noise and Libra, but the quirky, early stuff like Americana, from

which I feel sure Malkmus plucked the line “there’s no coast of Nebraska” on his band’s own tour de force, Brighten the Corners.

Everything connects.

One day recently, after allowing all the fore-written to ramble through my brain for a sufficient amount of time for it to settle comfortably into my subconscious and simmer, I started to get useful directives.   Nothing deep, nothing heavy, man.  Just simple, easy things to do. Here’s one.

1.  Write every day even if only for 30 minutes.  Write every day.  Write for 30 minutes, or longer if you want.  Write for as long as you want but at least for 30 minutes, no matter what you think the outside world wants of you. Write every day.

Here’s another:

2. Publish this writing somewhere, most practically on a blog or other web site.  Your post can be short, very short, indeed.  All that’s necessary is that you say something.

And that’s that.  Do these two things every day.  Do them early and do them with enthusiasm, and you will not go wrong.

Postscript:

Another writer who has inspired me with his description of his work ethic is Ernest Hemingway; chiefly, the bits of avuncular advice  on writing that I’ve been able to glean from his early memoir A Moveable Feast.  There he writes that he likes to write every day, often in a cafe, out of doors, (the Closerie Des Lilas, most frequently).  What makes his approach uniquely useful is the transition from one day to the next.  Specifically, he likes to end his sessions with something juicy to get started with the next day⁠1—a sort of “writer’s cliffhanger,” if you will. And so to that end, the next essay in this series will be about the corruption of the narrative.  Only I know what I’ll say,  but it’ll be good.

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1 “I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” – Ernest Hemingway, “Une Generation Perdue” from A Moveable Feast, p. 26

Treading Water

Originally written Friday, February 6, 2015

When we first moved to Vermont, we met a young woman who could manifest things with her mind. She proved it by obtaining a seemingly miraculous array of good things that she genuinely needed but with such rapidity that it felt like magic. Never mind that she was cute, funny, and a veritable damsel in distress. She had mind power!

As much as I wanted to believe that such feats are possible, I knew in my heart that our friend hadn’t manifested with her mind so much as telegraphed her distress. Naturally people flocked to help her. Moreover, her needs weren’t actually that great.

Would that all needs were as simple as a car or an apartment. Those one-offs are easy to manifest. The hard ones are when what you really want is an upgrade of your life.

As it turns out, upgrading your life is a tough goal (although downgrades are easy). Major changes are hard to achieve by any means, including the old fashioned ones like mental effort, strategy, and hard work. You do all the right things, or at least as many of them as you can manage, and still you end up where you started. Is it possible the goal is unattainable? Or is it just that I’m using the wrong means? There are times when you doubt these things.

I’m one of these people who finds life unbearable without a purpose. I can’t do things that seem pointless. It just seems like a waste of time, and for me anyway, time is increasingly precious. But so is money, and that’s where it gets dicey. You find yourself sacrificing time and well-being for money, because (we suppose) money will buy us both. But it doesn’t. Money is a voracious beast. If you make it your goal, it will swallow you whole.

“To chase money or to try to live without it, that is the question.”

I’ve run across a few examples lately of people who have good jobs with high salaries, but who are miserable at work. Since they spend a lot of time working both in and out of the office, this misery follows them around. I’m jealous of their incomes, but what they go through to earn them doesn’t seem worth it. Then I remember that you can be just as miserable and also be broke, and so the argument continues — to chase money or to try to live without it, that is the question.

Obviously, you can’t “live without it” in 21st century America. That’s just silly. But you may have to live on less than you think you need, and that’s a drag. For the middle class, on whom downward trends are acting, the struggle is to stay middle class — to have enough money coming in to keep living more or less as we have been. This is a negative struggle — we are striving not to fall. Unfortunately, trying not to fall is a never-ending battle. It’s hard to gauge success and you’re never sure if it’s safe to stop doing it.

So we tread water in a veritable sea of uncertainty and wait to be rescued, by a change of times or a change of circumstance or even a magical intervention — we aren’t picky. Meanwhile, the need for meaning and purpose becomes subverted when that purpose becomes “staying afloat.” If nothing else, it sucks energy from the better things we could be “manifesting” if only we had our time and well-being back.

A Baltic Sea Whodunnit

This week, some “state actor” still unknown but widely suspected to be backed by the United States, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines from Russia to Germany, both Nord Stream 1, which had been in service until this summer, and Nord Stream 2, which the US blocked Germany from using prior to the start of the Ukraine war this winter. 

The United States has long opposed the very existence of these pipelines and has made it quite clear that it doesn’t want anyone, especially not European countries, buying oil and gas from Russia.  

Oddly enough, America’s spokespeople are staying mum on the matter now that the much hated pipelines are out of commission.  They haven’t even blamed Russia for it, although this is probably because they’d be laughed off the world stage if they did.  

Poland’s former foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorsky was a bit more forthcoming.  “Thank you, USA,” he tweeted the next day,  posting a link to a video clip from back in February in which President Joe Biden all but threatened to destroy Nord Stream 2.  The clip is quite extraordinary actually.  Biden said then, “If Russia invades… then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”  When the reporter asked how he would do that considering that the pipelines are “in Germany’s control,” Biden doubled down as he so often does and concluded, “I promise you, we can do it.”  

So the United States promised to destroy the pipeline (“there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2”), and then it happened, and yet we are expected to believe that it wasn’t the United States who did it?  Surely the world is not so gullible as all that.  Except in the EU where it’s apparently in their interest to be gullible, at least when the US is doing the talking. According to the logic of one German politician quoted in the Guardian, a NATO ally would not have carried out the attack for fear of “political backlash,” hence it had to be the Russians.  Such a brilliant surmise–and evidence free, too!

We will probably never be allowed to know for sure whodunnit, for the obvious reason that were the truth known, there might be some “political backlash” on both sides of the Atlantic, and naturally, we can’t have that.  But the fact is, if the US did do it, then they’re responsible for a huge act of sabotage against their own ally, without apparent notice or any kind of compensation.  And that is almost certainly a crime under someone’s rule of law, even if the United States doesn’t feel compelled to abide by it.

Pondering Global Chaos

I’m trying to figure out how to be happy and content in a world intent on self destruction.  I could just ignore it as many people do, but that’s not me.  I have to worry about things, know about them, think about them, and try to make sense of it all.  But of course I can’t because it’s my own country engaged in these self-destructive acts, and that bothers me.  So while George Clinton might be right when he says, “We do this—this is what we do,” I still find it hard to accept.

What I find even more disturbing is that it seems as though our own country, America, is very much behind the world’s lemming-like race toward the cliff’s edge.  Although our leaders seem thoroughly open in their power-mongering and prevarication, the rest of the world, or at least that white-skinned portion residing in Europe and the Anglosphere, have opted to believe our propaganda, falling into line no matter how absurd the justification.  What does America have on these people anyway?  do they really believe this nonsense, or are they just hypnotized by our swaggering self-confidence? If so, that’s a bit dispiriting too.

In any event, no matter how you slice it, it looks like global chaos out there with more on the way. The facts on the ground all point in that direction, and strangely enough, there’s no dispute whatsoever about that part of the story–all the world’s governments seem to agree that things are bad and getting worse.  The only difference between them and me is that I would like to do something to stop it, whilst they, the world leaders, seem hell-bent on blaming someone (usually Russia) and keeping the destruction going.  Although they would tell you that they do this out of principle, I draw the line at principles whose end result is to bring the greatest harm to the greatest number.

It’s all quite disturbing, and while I fret about it almost every day, stilll I get up, drink tea, meditate, read, work, plan meals, worry, contemplate my vague future, buy seeds, grow flowers, fret about the neighbors, shop online, eat cake, wash clothes, light candles, and yes, ponder the end of the world.  But really, what other choice do I have? The world will go its own way, regardless of common sense or my own personal views to the contrary. It’s nothing less than the way of things, always and evermore…

 

Photo credit – Wikipedia Commons, public domain

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

Hiroshima Atomic Bombing Aftermath

There’s a funny skit on the Don’t Crush That Dwarf album by Firesign Theatre in which two tv news anchors banter about the apocalypse.  “Last year, Patty, you and the viewers will be interested in noting that the world ended.”  To which his partner replies, “As we know it, Hugh!”

This is kind of what’s happened to us.  The world, as we knew it, has ended and now we’re in a new world, feeling less than brave, and facing all four Horseman of the Apocalypse at the same time.  For people who’ve been living in the virtual world for most of the last two decades, waking up and discovering that the real world that we were counting on is going, going, gone, the whole flaming mess we’re in must seem like a bridge too far.  How could we have gotten to this?

I’ll leave you to puzzle that out on your own while we move on to the more existential discussion of what should be doing with ourselves while the world finishes collapsing. If this really is the end of the world, how do we justify continuing to waste our time on business as usual?  Don’t we want to do something better with our lives, both individually and collectively, than what we’re doing now?  This assumes that you don’t love what we’re doing now.  If you do, you’re fine — carry on.

This thought came to me while I was preparing to switch gears once again to taxes and I thought, here they’re talking about nuclear war on NPR, and I’m about to spend an hour or more finding out why the PayPal account is out $28.  Does that $28 even matter given the enormity of the problems that face us “out there,” and what our lives are likely to be like in the coming days, weeks, months?

Assuming we get through this geothermal nuclear war scare, and I certainly hope we do, the fact still remains that we live on a planet amongst people, ourselves included, who still see war — the murder and destruction of people and cities for political reasons — as a viable and even desirable option, depending on how much we hate (or fear) our enemy.

Why do we even believe in war anymore?  Haven’t we gotten beyond that with our AI and our Internet and our supreme intellectual superiority over all things?  How can intellectually superior people still think that blowing things up and killing people is a worthy endeavor that we have to keep doing?

War is one horseman we could do without and we have the ability and the means to do so.  If we could put personal gain and our emotions aside (which we can), we could let go of things that aren’t helping anyone, and embrace other views that serve us better.  For instance, people could negotiate fair terms with each other and avoid war.  We could do that.  But we’d need to let go of our hatred first, which will be difficult not because we can’t but because we don’t want to.  For whatever reason.  But all said and done, it is within our power to end war.

Ending war would give us more money to do other things, and this would enable us to work to solve other pressing issues, such as disease (the pandemic which is not really over even though we say it is), famine (our farming methods are killing us and the planet but we don’t care), climate change (whose effects are already proving disastrous), and poverty (which negatively affects not only the sufferers but society at large).

We could survive the 21st century with some form of ecosystem and culture intact, but we won’t be able to do it with the values we have now or the tools we’re using.  We need to stop choosing and following leaders who have these old, outworn, and completely counterproductive values.  We need to define for ourselves what the new values will be, and be honest with ourselves that if they don’t include peace, love, compassion, mutual aid, joy, fairness, and equality, then we can forget about it.  We’ll still be in the old world of war, hatred, selfishness, greed, anger, unhappiness, unfairness, and inequality.  And we all know where that leads — straight to where we are now, or to reiterate my opening salvo, “the end of the world.”

Do we want that?  I don’t.  And yet everything we do continues to support this bankrupt “dominant paradigm.” There has to be a better way, but until we find it, we’ll all keep marching on — to work, to war, off into the sunset.

We’re led by by our leaders to believe that we, people of Earth, are powerless to solve our problems.   We’re not.  We just don’t want to yet.  We’re not prepared to sacrifice any aspect of the present for a better future, even if the present sucks!  Maybe it’s just a matter of the devil you know, but if we don’t get over it, we’re going to run into a new devil and this one will be merciless.

In closing, I will prove my point about the present state of human values.  You will know where yours are by just how crazy my next sentence sounds to you: The old world may be ending but we can make a better world for all of us by adopting values that serve the entire planet and working toward goals that benefit us all.  See how easy it is?  Let’s just hope that we come to this realization before there’s nothing left to save but piles of ashes, corpses, and debris.

Autumnal Rites – September 24, 2021

We got the predicted rain last night.  Sometime after midnight, in the darkest hours of the night, the rain began to pour.  It was hard not to notice.  Even the cat was intrigued, opening the curtains to look out despite the fact that it was several hours before dawn.

Dark as it was then, it is now as bright.  The sun came out after noon and the sky cleared to a pale, well-washed blue.  A light breeze ruffles the ever more golden leaves.  Autumn is here.

And why wouldn’t it be?  In the last five days, we’ve had the harvest moon, the Autumnal Equinox, Mabon, and the first day of fall.  There’s nothing left now but the harvest feast, which we will celebrate on Saturday in accordance with our own traditions.

For city people, harvest is an idea, but in the country, people still actually do harvest.  It’s real and necessary.  Many people who aren’t even farmers do it — put things up, use them up, or put them by.  Outside, the animals and insects harvest — the squirrels unleashing random bomblets of nuts out of the walnut tree, the bees and butterflies grazing the last of the summer flowers.

Harvest comes early in the fall, and it’s easy to feel celebratory as the season begins.  But Autumn as a whole is another matter, stretching on as it does into late December. For many in the European tradition, Autumn is regarded as a melancholy time, a time of death and mourning, as well as rejuvenating rest.  It isn’t too surprising that people of the northern hemisphere would think that, since our cold season is long. For us, the pretty colors are the carrot to get us to go along with what comes next — the bare trees and grey skies.

Looking for an alternate view, I stumbled on the poets of China.  Chinese poetry about autumn is refreshing because there’s so much more emphasis on the beauty of the season and less on its implications. Poets gaze and dream and appreciate the mellow afternoons, the sharp blue skies, and even the autumn rains.  They get drunk under the harvest moon.  Sometimes they write poetry.

Outside my room, across a road, and down a steep bank is a river.  Even if I hadn’t been aware of last night’s rain, I would have known it from the rush of water racing past me on its way to the sea.

Autumn’s element is water. Its secret power is change. Our choice is whether or not to jump in and enjoy the ride.

 

 

 

Saving the Seas – Time to Rethink Our Attitude Toward the Oceans

Dead Dolphins on Faroe Island

For a while now, we’ve been getting depressing reports about mass beachings of sea animals, especially mammals such as dolphins and whales.  These sad stories come and go, and each time there’s a sense of futility — how can we, as individuals, do anything to solve the problems of the whales and the oceans.  Sure, we could donate to another charity, but how is that really going to solve the problem?  Probably it isn’t.  

A more immediate remedy would be to find out what we’re doing to cause these animals to commit suicide in the first place, and then stop doing it.  

To that end, I decided to watch a Netflix documentary about the state of the world’s oceans, controversially entitled “Seaspiracy.”  This documentary filled me in on some cold hard reality about fishing practices, pollution, destruction of habitat, and the out and out brutality of fishermen “harvesting” and culling fish, even warm blooded creatures like dolphins and porpoises. Yes, you will see Flipper being hacked to death with large knives. (Ok, not Flipper but creatures much like her.  Just a warning that this film shows a lot of blood, and is not for children or sensitive adults.) 

So I watched this film and it was depressing, as you might imagine.  And no, it did not give you the warm fuzzies about the fishing industry.  In fact, the first thought I had after watching this film was: I can’t continue to eat fish.  It just seemed abundantly clear that it’s morally wrong for me to eat seafood right now, much as I love it.  And it isn’t just an ethical issue.  Since the oceans are polluted, so are the fish.  We’re eating a scary assortment of unhealthy minerals including mercury and arsenic in larger fish like salmon and tuna.  Farmed fish tend to be unhealthy as well, but for different, more gruesome reasons.  

There are an array of facts associated with this film (see https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts).  Put together, they comprise an argument that is hard to argue with.  It’s not about future risk — it’s about horrible things happening now.  There are Catch-22s all over the place.  We could just ignore the problem, but since a healthy functioning ocean is necessary to climate balance, and our climate is already dangerously unbalanced, we would be quite foolish to continue the status quo.  

Here’s just one example of a dangerous imbalance (recently reported but not in the film) and it has to do with an ocean current that’s near and dear to us — the Gulf Stream.  As the salinity of the Gulf Stream decreases due to glacial melting, it becomes more and more disorganized and unstable.  It’s already unstable now and could, if we continue down the path we’re on, cease to operate altogether, leaving some regions in the cold and others in permanent drought.  To top it off, there is an excellent chance of drastic coastal flooding throughout much of this area.

We could stop the march to catastrophe by radically reducing fossil fuel use, and that might keep the Atlantic coastlines livable… As for seafood, mitigating global warming won’t address the overfished, overexploited oceans. To do that, you need to shrink the fishing industry, which is protected in many places with subsidies. Since I care about ocean and wildlife, I’m choosing not to eat fish.  If enough of us did this, it might give the so-called “fisheries” a chance to recover from decades of gluttony. 

Choices.  That’s what people always say.  It means, “You caused this problem yourself, so make better choices and you’ll stop having the problem.”  I think we’re at one of those annoying crossroads now with regard to our oceans and the aquatic life they support.  The distress level in the seas is high, and we owe it to ourselves to find out why and do what we can to rectify it.

Photo credit: Erik Christensen, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

On Futility: The Story of a Moth

Moth on Window

I was sitting in the window the other day looking out into yet another summer shower when I noticed a moth flapping around between the inner pane and the outer storm window.  As is typical for moths trapped in such situations, this one had flown all the way to the top of the window casing where it was beating itself against every surface trying to get out.  I felt for it but couldn’t figure out a way to get at it to effect a bug rescue.  As I pondered its dilemma, it occurred to me that the general tendency of most flying insects when trapped between window panes is exactly the wrong one for escaping that situation.  They always fly up where there is no way for me to open the window and let them out.

So after telling the moth “Go down… go down…..” to no avail, I turned the incident into a self-teaching moment, to wit:  if you find yourself beating your head against a wall without success, it might be good to try another approach — even the opposite approach — since the one you’re using clearly isn’t working and may never work.

Just as I thought that, the moth suddenly dropped from the top of the window frame to the bottom where the inner window was open wide enough for it to fly in.  It immediately flew into my chest and then bounced off where it settled onto the wall by my side as if to say, “Ok, I came down — now what?”  Despite my amazement, I quickly opened the screen at the bottom and in the twinkling of an eye, the moth flew out and vanished into the early evening sky.  

Although unexpected, in that moths don’t usually heed my instructions no matter how fervently I issue them, I took the incident to be confirmation of my earlier conclusion.  If at first and for a long while after you don’t succeed, try something different.  It might be just what’s needed to break the impasse and allow you to escape the confinement of your problem.

So, thank you, moth, for your instructive predicament.  I’m glad it worked out for both of us!

 

Photo credit: Holger Casselmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Why We Still Need Hemingway

You ask, why would a “girl” be interested in reading Ernest Hemingway, sexist bastard that he is.  Don’t patronize us girls.  We know who he is.  We know that there are others like him, just as sexist, right here in 2021.  It does not hurt for us to be reminded.  And anyway, we don’t need to like everything about a guy to like some things about him.

Hemingway is as much the subject of his fiction as he is of his life.  He portrays the manly man, the tough, craggy guy who can get through the worst life can throw at you and come out the other side, not as a hero but as a survivor.

In our politically correct, namby-pamby world, we’re all supposed to speak jargony newspeak or pablum.  But life isn’t like the modern studies department at your university.  Life is rougher than that, a lot rougher.

Sometimes even us girls need examples of people who can get through it without crumbling, who can take our hits and still get up the next morning, aching and cold but alive!  Do you get it?  Alive.  Not pretty, wounded even, full of piss and vinegar and gallows humor, but still kicking, breathing, and willing to try again.

Hemingway is the guy who won’t give up, who can’t give up, until of course, he does.  And on that day, he goes by his own hand on his own terms.

We postmoderns thinks we’re above life, the shitty side of life, the impossible side, the side where quite literally things are blowing up around us.  We think we can live our clean, perfect lives and think clean, perfect thoughts and do nothing but good in this sanitized and sterile world.  

Wrong! Wait til the flood hits you, the war, the disease, the catastrophic job loss, what have you, and then check your thoughts and language and see how perfect you are then.  Ever think how good it feels, not all the time but on very awful, special occasions, to say fuck it and NOT be polite?

Hemingway shows that even if you are a fallible human being in ways that might offend others, you can still survive, and in fact, the very things that make you offensive may also be the factors that enable you to stay on your feet.  Survival takes more than using the right pronouns or pronouncing “Latino” correctly.  Once you reach a certain point, survival is primal, rules be damned.

As students of life, not just literature, we need Hemingway, and most of us are grown-up enough to know how to use him.  

That’s all I got to say.  And I’m a girl.  

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