Oh, the silence

In the aftermath of massacres in America, when journalists talk to neighbors about the man – it’s always a man, a white man – responsible for the killings, the answers are almost always the same.  “He was quiet and kept to himself.”  No wonder characterizing someone as an introvert is casting doubt on a person’s mental health.  But I am an introvert and I know that there is nothing pathological about being one.  What’s more, I like people.  I like people a lot.  In groups I am quiet, mostly because I am so busy listening to what they have to say.  I am quiet because conversations in groups usually involve talking over one another.  I detest being interrupted, which I have in the past taken as an indicator that the interrupter has no interest in hearing what I have to say.  After being interrupted three times, I go silent, partly I am in a snit and partly because I know that the world will go on just fine without me having my say.  People I love and trust have told me that frequent and persistent interruption does not mean that the other person doesn’t care what I have to say – I’m not convinced yet – but thinking so conceals from me the interest the other person does have in what I say and I miss out on some intimacy and the pleasure of repartee with smart people.  It’s simply a conversational style and that I shouldn’t take interruptions personally.  Perhaps.

I relish time alone.  Aside from the pleasure I take in the company of people I love, most of what I do that I enjoy and find the greatest significance I do alone: reading, writing, reflecting, meditating, and photographing.  One of my fondest memories of my childhood was of being alone.  In front of the big house I lived in when I was little was a stand of trees we called the Pine Grove.  Memory tells me that the stems of the trees were two feet in diameter.  The branches, round and smooth, were the perfect size for climbing and started near enough to the ground for a child to jump up and catch the lowest one.  Pine needles didn’t form close to the stem so there were no prickly obstructions to climbing.  Sap was the worst problem.  One tree in particular I loved to climb.  At a height of thirty feet, I could survey several acres and the fewness of branches above me allowed me to see the blue sky.  The movement of clouds made me dizzy, as did the swaying of the tree in the breeze.  A firm grip on the trunk of the tree however calmed me.  The smell of pine, the coolness of the air in my face, the warmth of sunshine, the silence but for the birds, and the safety of being alone, invisible even.  What more could a boy desire?

 I’m with Pascal when he said, “All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.”

Are You Brothers?

One of the easiest ways to resist the rise of barbarism is to talk to people you don’t know. Usually I am rewarded for conversing with strangers in unexpected ways. This morning, for example, in the locker room at Club Williston two young men were suiting up for a workout. One of them labored under some kind of mental disability manifested by making grunts, squeaks, and barks. The other man was caring for him, guiding him through preparation for the gym. They looked like each other, so I assumed they were brothers. I asked the one giving the care if they were, intending to praise or thank him for being generous and loving. He said they weren’t and that this was his job. I told him I liked and respected what he was doing even if he was being paid for his services. Then – and here’s the sweet moment – he looked me straight in the eye from no more than eighteen inches away and said with deep authenticity, “And I absolutely love my work.” In the course of five seconds the care-giver and I had moved from being two nearly naked men unknown to one another, unwilling to make eye contact, and standing way too close in awkward silence as the third of us made weird noises to two men who, for the duration of several seconds, were a community of two people experiencing recognition, appreciation, and maybe even affection between us. The strength of the connection I felt and the light I saw in his face affords me the sense that the feelings were mutual. The warmth of those moments will strengthen me whenever I return to them. All from the simple question, “Are you brothers?”

Look for what you cannot see

While in a restaurant one day waiting for a friend, I idly explored different settings on my camera for taking pictures of one of my favorite photo subjects: interior spaces.  I took pictures and checked the results on the small screen on the back of my camera.  I noticed in one that a dark streak, possibly a shadow, traversed a red wall.  When I looked at the wall itself, I couldn’t see the streak.  But there it was in my photograph.  I set aside my camera and studied the wall.  After perhaps two minutes, which is a long time to stare at a blank wall, the streak emerged.  Now I could see it and it wasn’t one of those cases where I couldn’t not see it thereafter.  Distracted for a moment, I returned to the wall and the streak was gone.  I had to earn it back by waiting again.

 That encounter taught me that an important function of vision processing is suppressing distracting information.  For 540 million years Timothy O’Leary organisms that were distracted by all the pretty colors had fewer offspring than Joe Friday organisms who gathered “Just the facts, ma’am.”  I am not, however, being chased by a saber-toothed tiger or solving a crime.  I want to rid myself of the filters on my eyes that leave me with nothing but the prosaic “facts.”  My camera helps me do that.

 Therefore, one of the guiding principles I have as a photographer is look for what I can’t see.

Fun on the Sabbath

One of my favorite toys when I was young was the Carbide Cannon, every parent's nightmare toy. With it, my brothers and I could create really load bangs, louder than firecrackers, over and over, to our little furry heart's content. There is no way in the world a toy this fun could be produced today. If it were, the cannon would come with instructions on how to use it on page one and how to file a reckless endangerment lawsuit on page two. What a great toy.

I was playing with it on the screen porch of my childhood home when I was interrupted by my father’s heartless mother. My brothers and I heap blame on her desiccated old soul - unfairly I grudgingly admit - for how emotionally disabled our father was. Anyway, she hobbled out onto the porch and snatched away my toy, mumbling something about the sabbath. What a horrible old witch, I thought. What could possibly be wrong with issuing a loud boom once every five seconds on and on during a quiet, early sunny Sunday morning?

A letter to a friend

I am reminded again lately of how much Paul Fjelstad was the teacher who made the deepest impact on me, even though he led me personally in very few studies.  He was my teacher in the freshman seminar in the fall of 1969.

 On the first registration we did that fall I arrived in the big gymnasium and found the Paracollege table.  Snootiness has always been easy for me and it was on that day too.  I am embarrassed to remember that the first thing I said when I arrived at the table and saw papers all over it was, "Is there no order here?"  Paul, the only teacher there, said, "Well, I guess there is none that you can see."  Here I am now fifty years later still learning from that ten-word lesson he gave me that day.  I still aspire to his creativity and alertness.

 I am reminded of him when I read the paper yesterday.  In it, a public safety officer was warning people to stay home if they could during the blizzard.  His exact words were: "If you have to go out, then I would try to stay home."  Now most people with no exposure to Paul would have glided right by that sentence.  Most people go with their best guess at what someone else says.  Not me.  I spent way too much time near Paul to ignore that sentence.

 Now I am not the kind of crank that seizes on opportunity like this one to bemoan the state of the language or how careless people are.  (Internally I flinch, but I have long ago learned that no one likes or learns from being corrected.  I don't do it.  Anymore.)  Instead, I am usually amused.  I try to imagine what the person meant if he said exactly what he meant, exactly and correctly.

 Anyway, I am reminded of Paul.

Professor Fjelstad

I buy used stuff sometimes

I have always fancied acquiring a piece of the Berlin Wall.  People younger than fifty rarely have a grasp of how shocking it was to see crowds of young people bashing that horrible thing to pieces.  For virtually my entire life prior to 11/09/89, world power politics revolved around that evil monstrosity. I hate to fly, but I seriously entertained driving to the airport on that day and flying to Berlin just to be part of the festivities around hammering it to dust.  I was ready to arrive in Berlin and sleep under a bush - not the first time I would do that in Germany - just to strike one blow against it.  Not often does a person get to engage in unalloyed justice.  Well, on a whim this morning I checked to see what a bit of the wall would cost me on Amazon.  (On Amazon the cost is $200, but on EBay they can be had for as little at $10.)  What deeply amused me and why I am bothering to put this note up on Face Book: Amazon says I can get a better deal if I am willing to buy a used fragment of the wall instead of a new one.  What in the world is the difference between a new and a used bit of concrete?  Curious, I sought other items on Amazon that I could buy at a reduced price if I was willing to go with used rather than new.  So far, I have found three: batteries, fireworks, and condoms.  Any takers?  I know: I need to get out more.

A piece of the evil wall

Get the information and join one group or the other

I hate election years because I hate division among people.  Unfortunately, progress requires that tension.  Every election forces you to choose between one of two American traditions.  One tradition sought to abolish slavery; the other sought to expand it.  One tradition worked to abolish child labor; the other worked to preserve it.  One worked to create the forty-hour work week, safe working conditions, and a living wage; the other opposed all attempts to give work dignity and security.  One tradition fought for civil rights for all; the other would reserve them for only some.  One tradition fought for equality before the law; the other wasn’t even willing to outlaw lynching.  One tradition seeks equal pay for equal work; the other doesn’t.  One tradition knows how racist and ineffective executing criminals is; the other would keep us in the company of Iran, Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia for the most executions.  One tradition welcomes all to first class citizenship, including the right to marry the one we love; the other reserves that honor for some and not others.  One tradition imagines a world at peace; the other insists that war is normal.  One tradition sought to outlaw deploying children as soldiers; the other, believe it or not, prevented the US from signing the Conventions of the Rights of the Child, meaning only the US and Somalia favor that obscene practice.  One tradition rejects torture as either effective or acceptable; the other doesn’t.  One tradition would teach science in biology classrooms; the other religion.  One tradition accepts the fact of global warming and seeks to mitigate its effects; the other seeks to preserve the profits of the oil companies.  The theology of one tradition focuses on love and justice; the other insists that people are essentially evil.  One tradition says we must prevent deranged people from acquiring guns; the other would do nothing about the parade of killers in our schools and theaters.  The list goes on and on.  Elections force you to choose a tradition.  Doing nothing about evil, as Martin Luther King said, makes you an accomplice to it.  Saying that all politicians and parties are the same is intellectually lazy.  In 2020, find the facts and choose a tradition.

Hope

Just as I am despairing that the terminal downward spiraling of humanity has gained enough momentum to be unstoppable - Trump, ISIS, reality TV, the Kardashians, the NRA, etc. - I discover that one of the competitions to gain entrance into the book Guinness World Records is the total number of t-shirts one person can wear at one time. The record is 257. And did you see the story about the impact of a stray chihuahua on the Bay Bridge? Rather than abandoning it to its fate, police on motorcycles got involved. Traffic was disrupted. It made national and international news. Over a dog! Yeah. Yeah. It'd be nice if the media paid more attention to real stories like the number of American children who have never been seen by a dentist, but still. I gather hope for our extraordinary species from t-shirt wearing contests and police on motorcycles going way out of their way to protect a little dog and that both of those are global news.

Continuously bewildered

Here's another news story that is clearly incomplete: The headline in the Thursday Star Tribune was "Man shot in the face while stuck in a ditch." The article says, "A man told sheriff's deputies that his vehicle was in a ditch when he heard yelling and what he believed to be gunfire from a shotgun, then realized that he had been shot in the face. The victim declined medical treatment at the scene. Two people in vehicle with him were not harmed." The deputies identified the shooter and arrested him. Wait, what? I have so many questions. How did the victim get in the ditch? Was he actually in his car when he was shot? Who called the sheriff's deputies? Did the deputies do anything other than offer medical assistance? Who was yelling? Who were the other people in the car? How do you not know that you have been shot in the face? Was there a relationship between being in the ditch and being shot in the face? The article says that the deputies surrounded the shooter's house. How many deputies are needed to surround a house? How did the deputies learn so quickly who the shooter was? I will be watching the papers for more information. Jeminy Crickets. I feel like I spend most of my life having no clue how or why stuff happens.