At my house, the Mickey Mouse Episode has assumed iconic stature.
To understand, you need to know two things about me.
First, I am reluctant, quite reluctant, to part with T-shirts. I’d rather spend a week factoring polynomials than part with a T-shirt. I’d rather hand-tat lace while operating a jackhammer than part with a T-shirt. If it is in shreds, held together by little more than a molecule or two, I’ll begin to consider throwing it away. I have T-shirts that are 25 years old. I had one that was 32 years old, but this past spring the molecules finally gave way, and I consigned it, ruefully, to the dustbin of T-shirt history.
I do not suffer from T-shirt Hoarder Syndrome., though my wife Kathy is convinced that if such a diagnosis appeared in the DSM, the definition would consist solely of my photograph. My T-shirts are really tinseled backward glances. They recount for me the races I competed in during my running days, the cities my son D.J. and I visited on our annual post-Christmas trips, the athletic teams I played on or rooted for, the politicians and political causes I supported, and the one sentence witticisms that, at the time, I took for profound truth. Besides, T-shirts are like excuses for procrastination: you simply cannot have too many. So it was that I fished out of a basket of clothing which had lain, undisturbed and with yet undecided future, for 18 years under a table in the laundry room, a T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Mickey Mouse—wearing a red and black polo, with a three-fingered hand outstretched and palm up—encased in a red circle, across the bottom of which is written the proud declaration “Mickey Mouse Club.” It had belonged to my stepdaughter Alma. It was in mint condition, it fit, and it cataylzed a nostalgic remembrance of my own membership in Mickey’s jolly clan, the sole benefit of which, for me anyway, was any number of prepubescent fantasies about Annette Funicello.
Second, I have a temper. I get angry. Really angry. Normally, I am imperturbable, a meek-shall-inherit-the-earth kind of guy with a portfolio of self-discipline well into the six figures. But, at times, not often, but at times, normal dissolves in the solvent of anger, an anger that does not start out small and mount, that does not, like the overture of Don Giovanni, begin in a minor key, but explodes, with a choral uproar that, to paraphrase Keats, becomes my only music. It is an anger with kleig-light intensity; it is gale-force anger, tasered limbic circuit anger, a hard-booted and sharp-spurred anger riding a horse with a caffeine IV, a lava-like anger that could rebury Herculeneum, a mutinous anger that strips my frontal lobe region of command and sends it off in a lonely rowboat to some small, faraway deserted island, an anger that has bid a flippant adieu to anything but rant, a “tiger-footed rage,” to get all Shakespearean about it, an anger like a sequence of wrathful cannons that “spit forth their indignation.” And, therefore, the Mickey Mouse Episode.
On an afternoon when the heat index hovered at 110 degrees, wearing my newly-reclaimed Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I began the ritual that precedes my mowing the lawn: coiling the strung-out 50 foot garden hose into the window well under the spigot. Coiling the hose is a skill my father taught me and which I duly passed on to my son. I take it seriously, not just as a practical matter, but as an aesthetic one. There is, quite simply, a beauty in a well-coiled garden hose. However, the supposedly kink-free hose was, with bullying audacity, with adamant kinkitude, resisting my art. And its antics didn’t stop there, oh no. It knotted, too; intricate little gordian knots for which the solution of Alexander the Great would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, I was forced to unthread yards of hose, often to find the knot still stubbornly in place. And that’s when I went ballistic. Mark Twain counseled that “when angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.” I dispensed with the counting part. I flung every Anglo-Saxon derived profanity I knew against the indifferent sky and then, for full measure, repeated them. I stomped and waved my arms, steroidally kinetic, tempestuously adrenalized. I quivered with fury; I gesticulated ungovernably; I gyrated tumultuously. And all the while, I was being observed through the dining room window by Kathy and Alma, who were laughing uncontrollably at the dissonant sight of a grown and graying man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt given over completely to a ponderous, pulsating rage. Thus was born the Mickey Mouse Episode, which my ever-mindful wife never tires of recounting. It has become, in the space of a month, the light, loving mockery of that most delightful of narratives, the family story.
I am not puzzled by my angered outbursts. I know exactly what causes them. I am not even especially alarmed by it. It is never directed against other persons, or sentient beings in general. It is directed against things, the unfairness of things, the rampant refusal of things to do what they are supposed to do, to yield to our expectations and intentions. Prior to the Mickey Mouse Episode, the light-saber wattage of my wrath was leveled against a string trimmer whose string repeatedly broke and, despite my repeatedly tapping the spool on the ground, declined to advance so much as a millimeter. Before that, the unaccountable rupture of a supposedly impervious 9 mil, 13 gallon garbage bag, spilling a toxic distillation of coffee grounds and other kitchen waste on a floor I had just mop ‘n glo-ed. I believe we need to dust off existentialism and rename it resistentialsm, a philosophy of resistance against the stiffarming, ego-addling, tranquility-plundering nature of things. We need a resistential Satre or Camus under whose banner we can conscript ourselves and proudly march.
I know the Bible advises us to be “slow to anger” and warns us that “anger resides in the bosom of fools.” Yet, God often displays anger, as does Jesus at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart and at the moneychangers in the temple at Jerusalem. St. Paul openly and angrily rebukes St. Peter, the first pope, for goodness sake—literally, for, to Paul, Peter’s insistence that Jews and Gentile Christians cannot lawfully dine together unsutures the Galatian church Paul has sought so arduously to infuse with Christian unity. Righteous anger, I suppose, aroused in defense of faith’s principles, yet I would argue that my torrential anger is defensible and, in its own way, even righteous. It is a natural human emotion, a product of long-evolved brain processes serving perhaps to alert us to the wrongness of what should be right. It vents and dissipates pent-up stress, thereby promoting psychological hygiene. It is honest. Love can be feigned, friendship faked, caring counterfeited; anger, however, does not lend itself easily to affectation. Most significantly, I think, my anger is a refusal to accept the givenness of things. My anger makes demands: that things should be answerable to our expectations of them, that they should make sense, that they should make our lives easier, not strew them with obstacles. My rage is, at bottom, a rage for order, and packaged up tightly within that rage for order is a belief that purposeful change and improvement are possible.
Still, I have no doubt that, had she seen my exhibition of all-suffusing fury, the lovely Annette would have frowned, folded her arms, and turned her back on me. Cubby no doubt would have sought a restraining order. And parental figures Jimmy and Roy would no doubt have rescinded my “you’re as welcome as can be” status and banished me from the Mouseketeer tribe’s jamboree. Fortunately, Kathy still keeps me around, and that is a jamboree exquisitely, gratifyingly, all its own.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Battling Mom's Alzheimer's
My brother Dennis called to warn me.
Mom’s forgetfulness. I had noticed it while visiting the previous summer. He was calling to say that it was worse, that she had, in fact, been diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she called me by someone else’s name, that I shouldn’t be astonished at the disarray, the lack of cleanliness, of the place, that she was refusing to take any medication, that her personality had changed. He was calling to say, though he did not actually say it, that Mom was dying.
Still, despite his warning, I was surprised, astonished.
When I arrived, she kissed me on the cheek, as usual; asked after my wife Kathy, my son D.J., and the grandkids, as usual; asked how I’d been and how the school year went, as usual. Then the usual stopped. I watched a blankness steal into her eyes as she lost the thread of our conversation. I watched her stand uncomprehending, immobile, in front of the Mr. Coffee machine. I watched her take packages of chicken condon bleu from the freezer, unpackage them, put the entrees on plates, and serve them to my Dad and me, accompanied by a lettuce and tomato salad without dressing. I saw a shower that was an oversized culture dish of mold. I saw her normally generous, wholly hospitable personality transform, in an instant, into biting criticism of and paranoid accusations against Dad. He had forced her to give up the home she loved and move to a retirement village condo she hated. He wanted to steal her jewelry. I saw her hide her purse and her wedding ring. I saw that the carpet had not been vaccumed, the furniture had not been dusted, and the cupboard shelves had not been stocked. Dad told me she spent most of the day sleeping, no longer cleaned, and no longer shopped. Dad, a man of his generation, did not clean or cook or shop. Didn’t know how. Mom refused his suggestion that he hire a person to clean, that they apply for Meals on Wheels. He was losing weight.
Alzheimer’s is an insidious disease, lurking, lurking, lurking, like a thief in the attic, for as long as ten years, descending every so often, unobserved, to pilfer an item here and there, before swaggering through the front door, declaring that it now owns the place and everything in it, can’t do anything about it, resistance is futile. Alzheimer’s is a remorseless disease, the tangled clustered clog of amyloid plaques, and nerve cell fibers, and blasted nerve cells progressively, insistently evaporating the backward look of memory and beckoning beyondness of anticipation, systematically pillaging control of thought and emotion, ruthlessly decentering time and space itself, relentlessly dispossessing the located and continuous self and replacing it with a kind of mental white noise. If there is such a thing as the ghost in the neuro-machinery of the brain, Alzheimer’s is the ghost buster.
Over the winter Mom was placed in an assisted-living facility. Early in the summer she was placed in hospice care. When I visited in August, she did not recognize me at first. I prompted her, repeatedly: “I’m Jerry, your first-born son.” “Oh, yes,” she said, and a look of recognition faintly bloomed. I began an incessant monologue, talking nonstop, telling her about Dennis and Kathy and D.J. and the grandkids. I reminded her that I taught at Graceland University in Lamoni in southern Iowa and recounted for her the courses I taught and my colleagues in the Humanities Division and what the students were like, anything, anything that would anchor me in her awareness, and as I talked, her face became a polite mask, the kind I had seen her put on before in social situations where she encountered strangers. She became a shuttered window. I became a nameless voice.
Mom was being taken from me before she was taken from me. When I returned home, I decided that, like Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief who led an army of warriors that rolled back the encroaching frontier in mid-19th century Texas, I would arrest, even repel, the disease spreading across her mental landscape. Every Sunday morning I wrote her a letter. Each one began, “Hi Mom, this is Jerry, your first-born son,” and then I recounted an experience from the past we had shared. I reminded her of the time when, as a five-year-old, I had taken half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator and, standing on the front porch, tossed them against the side of our next-door neighbor’s house, just to hear the satisfying little explosion they made. I reminded her of the time I had to be physically restrained in Dr. Shaw’s office when he attempted to give me a shot. I reminded her of the dream she had when I told her I was getting married, how she walked into the living room only to see the lone inhabitant of the fishbowl had mysteriously disappeared. I reminded, I reminded—a desperate rhetoric of memory, an invocation of remembrance to call her back me to her. It was, I knew, a fool’s mission; the ravaging, ravening frontier of Alzheimer’s Disease cannot be deterred, cannot be rolled back. But it was my Mom. Attachment theory tells us that the mother’s presence provides children with the secure base from which to move outward into world, to explore and play, to venture, to adventure, and that that bond persists, in some form or another, as the child grows into adulthood. I was losing the woman who provided, who in many ways still provided, my secure base. I had to intervene.
Mom died that October. After the funeral, Dennis and I bundled up her clothes for Goodwill, donated the television to the assisted-living facility, and moved her furniture back to the condo. There were only a few pieces: a dresser and mirror, a rocker recliner, and a nightstand. Removing the top drawer of the dresser, I noticed, tucked in a back corner, the dozen letters I had written. They were all unopened.
Mom’s forgetfulness. I had noticed it while visiting the previous summer. He was calling to say that it was worse, that she had, in fact, been diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she called me by someone else’s name, that I shouldn’t be astonished at the disarray, the lack of cleanliness, of the place, that she was refusing to take any medication, that her personality had changed. He was calling to say, though he did not actually say it, that Mom was dying.
Still, despite his warning, I was surprised, astonished.
When I arrived, she kissed me on the cheek, as usual; asked after my wife Kathy, my son D.J., and the grandkids, as usual; asked how I’d been and how the school year went, as usual. Then the usual stopped. I watched a blankness steal into her eyes as she lost the thread of our conversation. I watched her stand uncomprehending, immobile, in front of the Mr. Coffee machine. I watched her take packages of chicken condon bleu from the freezer, unpackage them, put the entrees on plates, and serve them to my Dad and me, accompanied by a lettuce and tomato salad without dressing. I saw a shower that was an oversized culture dish of mold. I saw her normally generous, wholly hospitable personality transform, in an instant, into biting criticism of and paranoid accusations against Dad. He had forced her to give up the home she loved and move to a retirement village condo she hated. He wanted to steal her jewelry. I saw her hide her purse and her wedding ring. I saw that the carpet had not been vaccumed, the furniture had not been dusted, and the cupboard shelves had not been stocked. Dad told me she spent most of the day sleeping, no longer cleaned, and no longer shopped. Dad, a man of his generation, did not clean or cook or shop. Didn’t know how. Mom refused his suggestion that he hire a person to clean, that they apply for Meals on Wheels. He was losing weight.
Alzheimer’s is an insidious disease, lurking, lurking, lurking, like a thief in the attic, for as long as ten years, descending every so often, unobserved, to pilfer an item here and there, before swaggering through the front door, declaring that it now owns the place and everything in it, can’t do anything about it, resistance is futile. Alzheimer’s is a remorseless disease, the tangled clustered clog of amyloid plaques, and nerve cell fibers, and blasted nerve cells progressively, insistently evaporating the backward look of memory and beckoning beyondness of anticipation, systematically pillaging control of thought and emotion, ruthlessly decentering time and space itself, relentlessly dispossessing the located and continuous self and replacing it with a kind of mental white noise. If there is such a thing as the ghost in the neuro-machinery of the brain, Alzheimer’s is the ghost buster.
Over the winter Mom was placed in an assisted-living facility. Early in the summer she was placed in hospice care. When I visited in August, she did not recognize me at first. I prompted her, repeatedly: “I’m Jerry, your first-born son.” “Oh, yes,” she said, and a look of recognition faintly bloomed. I began an incessant monologue, talking nonstop, telling her about Dennis and Kathy and D.J. and the grandkids. I reminded her that I taught at Graceland University in Lamoni in southern Iowa and recounted for her the courses I taught and my colleagues in the Humanities Division and what the students were like, anything, anything that would anchor me in her awareness, and as I talked, her face became a polite mask, the kind I had seen her put on before in social situations where she encountered strangers. She became a shuttered window. I became a nameless voice.
Mom was being taken from me before she was taken from me. When I returned home, I decided that, like Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief who led an army of warriors that rolled back the encroaching frontier in mid-19th century Texas, I would arrest, even repel, the disease spreading across her mental landscape. Every Sunday morning I wrote her a letter. Each one began, “Hi Mom, this is Jerry, your first-born son,” and then I recounted an experience from the past we had shared. I reminded her of the time when, as a five-year-old, I had taken half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator and, standing on the front porch, tossed them against the side of our next-door neighbor’s house, just to hear the satisfying little explosion they made. I reminded her of the time I had to be physically restrained in Dr. Shaw’s office when he attempted to give me a shot. I reminded her of the dream she had when I told her I was getting married, how she walked into the living room only to see the lone inhabitant of the fishbowl had mysteriously disappeared. I reminded, I reminded—a desperate rhetoric of memory, an invocation of remembrance to call her back me to her. It was, I knew, a fool’s mission; the ravaging, ravening frontier of Alzheimer’s Disease cannot be deterred, cannot be rolled back. But it was my Mom. Attachment theory tells us that the mother’s presence provides children with the secure base from which to move outward into world, to explore and play, to venture, to adventure, and that that bond persists, in some form or another, as the child grows into adulthood. I was losing the woman who provided, who in many ways still provided, my secure base. I had to intervene.
Mom died that October. After the funeral, Dennis and I bundled up her clothes for Goodwill, donated the television to the assisted-living facility, and moved her furniture back to the condo. There were only a few pieces: a dresser and mirror, a rocker recliner, and a nightstand. Removing the top drawer of the dresser, I noticed, tucked in a back corner, the dozen letters I had written. They were all unopened.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Mysteries
I have long been attracted to lonely roads, the ones “less travelled by,” but I have not ventured down any. The attraction is enough. I have long been enticed by abandoned farm houses, but I have not entered any. The enticement is enough. I have long been beguiled by the nooks and cubbies in old Victorian homes, but I trust I am not a “nook dweller,” that term of contempt Nietzsche applied to “colorblind utility men.” Besides, it’s the being beguiled that is so beguiling. I am fascinated with string theory and quantum physics. But I am not consumed with knowing whether or not eleven dimensions exist, or whether particles can, as was reported of Moby Dick, be in more than one place at a time, or exactly how electrons vast distances apart manage to synchronize their spin rates. That string theory and quantum physics fascinate me is enough. I really don’t need to know if the Voynich Manuscript, a 16th century text written in an unknown language, is a medieval version of Web MD, or what actually happened in the ancient Athenian town of Eleusis during the annual rituals in which initiates were inducted into the worship of the grain goddess Demeter. That they beckon me, intrigue me, captivate me is enough.
All these things—the “less travelled by” roads, the derelict structures, the odd crannies and theories and manuscripts and ceremonies—are mysteries for which I do not wish a solution. It is enough for me simply to be a receptive subject of the experience of them as mysteries. Originally, the word “mystery, from the Greek mystes, described a person initiated into secret rites or doctrines. Its meaning was theological. Only in the 14th century did it take on the non-theological meaning of a hidden or secret thing. I like things whose origin or use is hidden or secreted. I do not wish to be an initiate; I do not wish to encounter the truth of these things; I do not wish to be, as Thomas Carlyle says, “one who goes through a wonderful world unwondering.” Initiation arrests conjecture, and, for me, conjecturing is the best kind of encountering.
I know most people who enjoy mysteries anticipate their resolution. There is pleasure in tension released, expectation fulfilled, vicissitudes overcome. Cognitive psychologists can no doubt demystify the mystery of this pleasure, in much the same way they would explain the mystery of my periodic jones for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Certain neural circuitry in certain functionally specialized modules firing in certain sequences releasing certain opioids seeking certain receptor cells, a holdover naturally selected to solve problems that tasked our hunting and gathering Pleistocene forebears But the problem with mysteries solved, with wonder satisfied, is that we move on. We enjoy the break from the humdrum substrate of reality upon which our lives are built, but, then, you know, time to get back to work, to face facts, to deal with what is in front of us, to solve real problems, to get real. I prefer the state of wonder, the condition of mystery, to the satisfaction of it. I wonder about wonder. I’m out for, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “the renaissance of wonder.” I’m out for the awe of it, the reverence of it, the humility of it. I’m out for the imagination in motion of it, the adventurous flight of fancy of it. That Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not more satisfying for my knowing the biology of it.
Those abandoned farm houses—who lived there, and where did they come from? Were they a happy family, was there rampant affection, or are the walls pitted with the acid spray of angry words? Are they collapsing inward from the resentments they harbored? That lonely road—who made it and for what purpose? Did some young boy walk that road, thinking about dinner or a best friend’s betrayal or the girl who sits behind him in school or a father’s hand tenderly resting on his shoulder or his mother’s small smile and brightening eyes every time he enters the house? Those nooks and cubbies—do they impugn our right-angledness, our geometrization? String theory and quantum physics—do they speak to our need to transcend three dimensionality? Is there a lesson in sociology to be learned from those recalcitrant particles that blithely stray beyond the jurisdiction of what the laws of physics say they can do, or a lesson in metaphysics in the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle theorized to be the source of mass for all other particles? That Voynich Manuscript—could it be a guide to perfecting ourselves, to more fully experiencing our being? Those Eleusinian ceremonies—did the initiates confront a vertiginous realm of reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy beyond which thinking itself cannot go? Is it simply the case that they shared a psychedelic drink? I hope the latter is not the case. I want no Oedipus to arrive in the Theban precincts of these mysteries and solve their riddles. And we all know what happened to Oedipus.
I make a covenant with all things whose mystery summons me to them. If they give themselves to me, if they consent to enter me, I will use but not consume them, will not steal way the tonal core of their otherness, but will accommodate myself to their tenor and texture. I will embody them, but only for a while, carry them away, but only for a short distance, and, then, leave them as they are, unchanged, though they have caused great change in me. I like to believe it is a covenant that fosters an ecology of imagination.
Philosophers have debated, and, I suspect, always will debate, what is true. One favored theory of truth, the correspondence theory, tells us that what we see is what is really there. A direct correspondence exists between the seer and the seen, what Thomas Aquinas called “the equation of things and intellect.” If things conform to objective reality, they are true. Work in cognitive linguists and pyschology, however, tells us that the seen is always distilled through interpretation, shaped by specific historical, social, and cultural processes. We see not the thing itself, in itself, but a representation of it—not the what is but what we construct it to be. The thing itself, in itself, has always already stolen beyond our perceptual boundary. If that is indeed the case, I am heartened, for it means that everything is, finally, deliciously, a mystery.
All these things—the “less travelled by” roads, the derelict structures, the odd crannies and theories and manuscripts and ceremonies—are mysteries for which I do not wish a solution. It is enough for me simply to be a receptive subject of the experience of them as mysteries. Originally, the word “mystery, from the Greek mystes, described a person initiated into secret rites or doctrines. Its meaning was theological. Only in the 14th century did it take on the non-theological meaning of a hidden or secret thing. I like things whose origin or use is hidden or secreted. I do not wish to be an initiate; I do not wish to encounter the truth of these things; I do not wish to be, as Thomas Carlyle says, “one who goes through a wonderful world unwondering.” Initiation arrests conjecture, and, for me, conjecturing is the best kind of encountering.
I know most people who enjoy mysteries anticipate their resolution. There is pleasure in tension released, expectation fulfilled, vicissitudes overcome. Cognitive psychologists can no doubt demystify the mystery of this pleasure, in much the same way they would explain the mystery of my periodic jones for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Certain neural circuitry in certain functionally specialized modules firing in certain sequences releasing certain opioids seeking certain receptor cells, a holdover naturally selected to solve problems that tasked our hunting and gathering Pleistocene forebears But the problem with mysteries solved, with wonder satisfied, is that we move on. We enjoy the break from the humdrum substrate of reality upon which our lives are built, but, then, you know, time to get back to work, to face facts, to deal with what is in front of us, to solve real problems, to get real. I prefer the state of wonder, the condition of mystery, to the satisfaction of it. I wonder about wonder. I’m out for, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “the renaissance of wonder.” I’m out for the awe of it, the reverence of it, the humility of it. I’m out for the imagination in motion of it, the adventurous flight of fancy of it. That Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not more satisfying for my knowing the biology of it.
Those abandoned farm houses—who lived there, and where did they come from? Were they a happy family, was there rampant affection, or are the walls pitted with the acid spray of angry words? Are they collapsing inward from the resentments they harbored? That lonely road—who made it and for what purpose? Did some young boy walk that road, thinking about dinner or a best friend’s betrayal or the girl who sits behind him in school or a father’s hand tenderly resting on his shoulder or his mother’s small smile and brightening eyes every time he enters the house? Those nooks and cubbies—do they impugn our right-angledness, our geometrization? String theory and quantum physics—do they speak to our need to transcend three dimensionality? Is there a lesson in sociology to be learned from those recalcitrant particles that blithely stray beyond the jurisdiction of what the laws of physics say they can do, or a lesson in metaphysics in the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle theorized to be the source of mass for all other particles? That Voynich Manuscript—could it be a guide to perfecting ourselves, to more fully experiencing our being? Those Eleusinian ceremonies—did the initiates confront a vertiginous realm of reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy beyond which thinking itself cannot go? Is it simply the case that they shared a psychedelic drink? I hope the latter is not the case. I want no Oedipus to arrive in the Theban precincts of these mysteries and solve their riddles. And we all know what happened to Oedipus.
I make a covenant with all things whose mystery summons me to them. If they give themselves to me, if they consent to enter me, I will use but not consume them, will not steal way the tonal core of their otherness, but will accommodate myself to their tenor and texture. I will embody them, but only for a while, carry them away, but only for a short distance, and, then, leave them as they are, unchanged, though they have caused great change in me. I like to believe it is a covenant that fosters an ecology of imagination.
Philosophers have debated, and, I suspect, always will debate, what is true. One favored theory of truth, the correspondence theory, tells us that what we see is what is really there. A direct correspondence exists between the seer and the seen, what Thomas Aquinas called “the equation of things and intellect.” If things conform to objective reality, they are true. Work in cognitive linguists and pyschology, however, tells us that the seen is always distilled through interpretation, shaped by specific historical, social, and cultural processes. We see not the thing itself, in itself, but a representation of it—not the what is but what we construct it to be. The thing itself, in itself, has always already stolen beyond our perceptual boundary. If that is indeed the case, I am heartened, for it means that everything is, finally, deliciously, a mystery.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Tracked and Profiled
My small southern Iowa hometown boasts a recreational train that stretches 2.2 miles from the east side of town to the freeway and, on the west side, 2.5 miles to Liberty Hall, a restored Victorian home and museum. The east trail follows the long-abandoned CB&Q railroad track. To enter it is to enter a tunnel of mature forest of oak, white ash, basswood, and maple. In the spring, the blossoming wild plum trees conjure a confederation of angles. Yellow and purple coneflowers, thistles, Queen Anne’s lace, and wild rose line the trail. Gooseberries, currants, and serviceberries, those clever blueberry imposters, provide a savory diversion for those out for exercise. The west trail, though dotted here and there with pale blue cornflowers and purple prairie clover, is mostly untreed, unflowered, and unberried. It winds through gently rolling open fields and past small tucked-away, reed-surrounded ponds. Around one bend, off to the south, a small, solitary stand of hickory shelter huge bundled wheels of hay that appear to have been forgotten by their owner. In contrast to the shadowed and canopied east trail, where the sound of your motion echoes among the branches and makes you feel large, the west trail offers pure vista, the fields and hills running off as far as the eye can see, making you feel small, a humble point of movement in an expansive landscape. Two trails, two personalities, made one by the recent addition of a connecting segment that runs through town.
The recreational trail was constructed entirely by some 65 volunteers, the core group of which was known as “The Heart Attack Brigade,” retirees who had suffered, in one form or another, cardiac problems ranging from mild to serious. Through the shy green smile of May, the confident laugh of June, the golden shouts of July, and the humming, hazy heat of August, the Brigade and the other volunteers laid down, cubic foot by cubic foot, a 10-foot wide slab of concrete. Thoreau noted that “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The walkers, runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers, and cross-country skiers who use the Recreational Trail are ever mindful that they walk, run, roll, and glide upon the three-year labor of their fellow townsmen and townswomen. It was a labor of civic pride and a labor of love, of hearts, some of which, though wounded by disease, perhaps grew stronger in the process.
Strangely enough, I found myself remembering the creation of the Recreational Trail after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new, ever-more impinging, ever-more infringing technologies web sites use to track consumers. According to the article, the top 50 websites use, on average, 64 tracking files, the information from which is transmitted, often keystroke by keystroke, to “a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers” which “analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections.” This aggregation of data-gatherers builds “personal files” that, while excluding identification by name, “could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.” Our privacy and our friends are the currency we pay for access to free content, and that free content justifies, according to a spokesman for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, providers’ involvement “`in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.’”
Undoubtedly, journalists, features writers, and bloggers will, once again, inveigh against our privacy colonized, traduced, systematically pillaged, Cuisinarted. Yet another instance, an upgrade, as it were, of the surveilling Panopticon that locks us in its indifferent gaze. Congress will investigate. The FCC will propose rules and guidelines. Progressives will decry the predations of capitalism. The gears of the lobbying machines will clank into motion and soon be running at frictionless velocity. For me, however, the article’s revelations of high-tech tracking and profiling induce not anger at what they reveal, but sadness at what they conceal.
Should the 65 volunteers who worked on the Recreational Trail visit any of the 50 most popular websites, or any of the many others that accumulate customer data, the tracking files would duly register that they purchased cement, in quantities large enough to indicate a major project, along with trowels, floats, darbys, tampers, edgers, and jointers to work the cement and 2x4s to frame it. The tracking files would duly register that the volunteers were mostly male, mostly married, mostly white, between 40 and 68 years of age, inclined toward local volunteerism, lived in a small, rural, southern Iowa town, and that a subset of that group had experienced heart problems requiring medication and, in some instances, hospitalization. All 65 neatly and dispassionately quantified, abstracted, and readied for delivery to some business or organization. All 65 retailed, transacted. All 65 algebraized and algorithmed, pieces in the cogwork of market share, bottom lines, and online advertising. All 65 reduced to online habits. None of the 65 really known.
What the tracking files cannot duly register is the volunteers’ experience of creating the Recreational Trail, their embodiment and feel of it, the rhythm of it, the tenor and texture of it—what it was like. Was the labor enjoyable or mind-numbingly, bruisingly monotonous? Did the summer sun draw them upwards or hammer them dizzy? Did they discover that the space between work and prayer is but a small step or a gaping abyss? Did they experience the experience or simply document its onset and passing? Did they banter, philosophize, make small talk, make large talk? Did they display character traits that marked them as accepting or indentured to a single way of being? Were new friendships made, established intimacies strengthened, enmities formed? What contexts and commitments summoned them? Were they companionable, glib on the uptake and confidently assertive or reflective and slow to respond? Did they listen, really listen, engaged and with understanding? Did they recognize and respond to joys and sadnesses, naivetes and hardnesses, in themselves and others? When their minds strayed, where did they stray to? What thoughts, heeled to their right side, dogged them through the forest and field? If they were married, were they able to wholly imagine their spouses? If they were white, were they able to wholly imagine racial others? If they were older, were they able to wholly imagine the younger generations? For that matter, how wholly were they able to imagine themselves? Do they see imagination as a threat or a thrill? What meaning, finally, did working on the Recreational Trail have for them? When they reached the end of that 5 mile journey, did they meet themselves or someone different?
No tracking file yet concocted can duly register these things, things that precisely gesture to our humanness, our being human. They cannot be captured by the algorithmic gravity of a tracking file, cannot spin within its computational orbit. We are always more, so much more, than our purchases and demographics. We are always a bundle, often a messy bundle, of qualities and intentions and purposes, and every so often, if we’re fortunate, a moment of transcendent spirit, a chain lightning flash of imagination, a stiletto-sharp intensity of enlightenment, possesses us. We are always the heirs of contingency and inheritance, chance and will. The world enters us and we attend to some of it consciously, most of it unconsciously. We are always in control and out of control, always rational and visceral, analytic and intuitive; we always delay gratification and succumb to it, always strategize and go by gut feeling. We are always more verbs than we are nouns, and the deep grammar of our being always will exceed the impertinence of a data-generated profile. We are, finally and always, untrackable.
The recreational trail was constructed entirely by some 65 volunteers, the core group of which was known as “The Heart Attack Brigade,” retirees who had suffered, in one form or another, cardiac problems ranging from mild to serious. Through the shy green smile of May, the confident laugh of June, the golden shouts of July, and the humming, hazy heat of August, the Brigade and the other volunteers laid down, cubic foot by cubic foot, a 10-foot wide slab of concrete. Thoreau noted that “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The walkers, runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers, and cross-country skiers who use the Recreational Trail are ever mindful that they walk, run, roll, and glide upon the three-year labor of their fellow townsmen and townswomen. It was a labor of civic pride and a labor of love, of hearts, some of which, though wounded by disease, perhaps grew stronger in the process.
Strangely enough, I found myself remembering the creation of the Recreational Trail after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new, ever-more impinging, ever-more infringing technologies web sites use to track consumers. According to the article, the top 50 websites use, on average, 64 tracking files, the information from which is transmitted, often keystroke by keystroke, to “a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers” which “analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections.” This aggregation of data-gatherers builds “personal files” that, while excluding identification by name, “could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.” Our privacy and our friends are the currency we pay for access to free content, and that free content justifies, according to a spokesman for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, providers’ involvement “`in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.’”
Undoubtedly, journalists, features writers, and bloggers will, once again, inveigh against our privacy colonized, traduced, systematically pillaged, Cuisinarted. Yet another instance, an upgrade, as it were, of the surveilling Panopticon that locks us in its indifferent gaze. Congress will investigate. The FCC will propose rules and guidelines. Progressives will decry the predations of capitalism. The gears of the lobbying machines will clank into motion and soon be running at frictionless velocity. For me, however, the article’s revelations of high-tech tracking and profiling induce not anger at what they reveal, but sadness at what they conceal.
Should the 65 volunteers who worked on the Recreational Trail visit any of the 50 most popular websites, or any of the many others that accumulate customer data, the tracking files would duly register that they purchased cement, in quantities large enough to indicate a major project, along with trowels, floats, darbys, tampers, edgers, and jointers to work the cement and 2x4s to frame it. The tracking files would duly register that the volunteers were mostly male, mostly married, mostly white, between 40 and 68 years of age, inclined toward local volunteerism, lived in a small, rural, southern Iowa town, and that a subset of that group had experienced heart problems requiring medication and, in some instances, hospitalization. All 65 neatly and dispassionately quantified, abstracted, and readied for delivery to some business or organization. All 65 retailed, transacted. All 65 algebraized and algorithmed, pieces in the cogwork of market share, bottom lines, and online advertising. All 65 reduced to online habits. None of the 65 really known.
What the tracking files cannot duly register is the volunteers’ experience of creating the Recreational Trail, their embodiment and feel of it, the rhythm of it, the tenor and texture of it—what it was like. Was the labor enjoyable or mind-numbingly, bruisingly monotonous? Did the summer sun draw them upwards or hammer them dizzy? Did they discover that the space between work and prayer is but a small step or a gaping abyss? Did they experience the experience or simply document its onset and passing? Did they banter, philosophize, make small talk, make large talk? Did they display character traits that marked them as accepting or indentured to a single way of being? Were new friendships made, established intimacies strengthened, enmities formed? What contexts and commitments summoned them? Were they companionable, glib on the uptake and confidently assertive or reflective and slow to respond? Did they listen, really listen, engaged and with understanding? Did they recognize and respond to joys and sadnesses, naivetes and hardnesses, in themselves and others? When their minds strayed, where did they stray to? What thoughts, heeled to their right side, dogged them through the forest and field? If they were married, were they able to wholly imagine their spouses? If they were white, were they able to wholly imagine racial others? If they were older, were they able to wholly imagine the younger generations? For that matter, how wholly were they able to imagine themselves? Do they see imagination as a threat or a thrill? What meaning, finally, did working on the Recreational Trail have for them? When they reached the end of that 5 mile journey, did they meet themselves or someone different?
No tracking file yet concocted can duly register these things, things that precisely gesture to our humanness, our being human. They cannot be captured by the algorithmic gravity of a tracking file, cannot spin within its computational orbit. We are always more, so much more, than our purchases and demographics. We are always a bundle, often a messy bundle, of qualities and intentions and purposes, and every so often, if we’re fortunate, a moment of transcendent spirit, a chain lightning flash of imagination, a stiletto-sharp intensity of enlightenment, possesses us. We are always the heirs of contingency and inheritance, chance and will. The world enters us and we attend to some of it consciously, most of it unconsciously. We are always in control and out of control, always rational and visceral, analytic and intuitive; we always delay gratification and succumb to it, always strategize and go by gut feeling. We are always more verbs than we are nouns, and the deep grammar of our being always will exceed the impertinence of a data-generated profile. We are, finally and always, untrackable.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Palimpsests
Until quite recently, I did not know what I was, exactly. I knew I was something, and I was assured that that something was special. The culture told me, insistently, relentlessly, that I was unique, an irreducible genre of one. Advertising proclaimed that it is Me O’Clock or Me Time, that I deserved or was worth whatever product or service was being promoted, that I could customize my credit card to suit my personality, that I could demand a hamburger made just for me, that a taco was my taco, that I could buy a car that adjusts to me, that I could an app for my every heart’s desire.. Self-help gurus admonished me to cultivate myself, reach in and touch myself into being, and that now, now, now is my time. Popularized history endlessly recounted to me the storied story of rugged individualism, of the westering impulse, the restless journeying of men and women to possess the bright flame of self-actualization, each embarked on their individual manifest destiny. I was bludgeoned with the discourse of self-esteem, told I was a majority of one, an autonomous, self-referential being of unequaled exceptionality. Reality TV showed me makeovers of every sort, where I saw a genuine self can break free into the golden summer splendor of its exclusive July. I was assured from every cultural corner that I was unprecedented, one-of-a-kind. And yet, I did not know what that means. I certainly did not feel unique. I didn’t even know what feeling unique would feel like.
I suppose I could have said I am a human being, a Homo Sapiens, though, I confess, most days I felt more like Homer Simpson. I could have said I am a teacher, a husband, a father and a grandfather. I could have said I was organized, disciplined, sometimes obsessive, always driven. I could have said I am empathetic, caring, sometimes skeptical, and easily exasperated. I could have said I am a vegetarian, have a jones for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and mainline coffee. But those are all qualities shared by millions of others. They are not essences; at least, I do not experience them as such. They merely qualify “I am,” the fact that I exist; they merely domesticate my existence by circumscribing it with an adjective or a noun. They describe me, but do not seem to name the substance, the radical, fundamental something that I was told makes me unique.
I have my father’s toolbox. It is a slapdash affair, really, banged together from a couple of boards and painted beige. Yet, if I were offered the priciest Craftsman toolbox in exchange for it, if I were offered an exact duplicate of it, right down to the rusted heads of the tenpenny nails holding it together, I would refuse the offer. The toolbox has an essence, it is unique. It is sui generis. I know that with a knowing deeper than a dream, even though, struggle as I might, I cannot find the language to name, in a propositional way, what it is, cannot find the words to literalize what that essence is. In such cases, when words fail to provide a perch upon which to land, it is best to rely on metaphor. Perhaps that is the way to make sayable this uniqueness I supposedly possess.
Not too long ago, I ran across an article about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a volume consisting of 714 parchment pages from which the original writing had been scraped away and reused to create a Byzantine prayer book. The palimpsest is so named because among other texts contained in the original, were seven treatises written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. It sometimes happens that, due to the simple passage of time, the “underwriting” reappears beneath the “overwriting” superimposed upon it, resulting in a text with a discernable layer beneath the surface. The trace has left a trace for the fullness of time to birth.
The article swept me back to a time when, in the middle of a conversation with my brother, I suddenly realized that he used the same hand gestures as our father, used the same grimace before responding to a question, had the same manner of speaking from the side of his mouth when intending irony, laughed the same wheezy laugh. And I realized I did those things, too. And I remembered my mother telling me my handwriting was exactly like my father’s, and that, on the telephone, my voice was indistinguishable from his. In my brother and I are the underwritten trace of our paternity appearing in the selves we have written and are still in the process of writing. We are palimpsests.
The problem with most assertions of individual uniqueness, at least as that quality is commonly conceived, is the assumption that human beings exists in a gated enclave of the self, walled off from circumstances and influences, imbued with an unrepeated, unreplicable core that, like some fairy-tale gift, like some wave of a Hogwarts wand, simply appears out of thin air. It seems to me, though, that we are anticipated, prepared for, mediated, but not determined, not passively absorbent. My brother and I are not copies of my father, not duplicates or facsimiles. The three of us are layered texts, separate in time, each telling its own story while sharing the same page, the overwriting and underwriting overlapping at some points, indistinguishable, the same perhaps, but, finally, different. We are palimpsests.
We are carried forward, like an integer in a math problem, by our legacy, but into the ethos of our own historical moment, the habitus of our own time and place. We are actively courted by our moment, and we actively collaborate in that courtship. We affiliate ourselves with others; we gain information, knowledge, perspectives, attitudes, and values; we form perceptual boundaries; we pursue enterprises; we use our natural gifts and acquire others. We are what we already have, what we find, and what we do. We are legacies, but the song of that legacy arrives in the present and is overwritten in a different key. A new song, but not quite, for under its emergence is the trace, the unerasable residue with which it started out.
That, I think, is how we are unique, the intrinsic character of what we are. Palimpsests. The gesture of the self to and beyond itself. Anything less makes the self less complete, smaller, limited. Anything less is to invoke the oven bird’s question at the end of Robert Frost’s sonnet: “What to make of a diminished thing.”
I suppose I could have said I am a human being, a Homo Sapiens, though, I confess, most days I felt more like Homer Simpson. I could have said I am a teacher, a husband, a father and a grandfather. I could have said I was organized, disciplined, sometimes obsessive, always driven. I could have said I am empathetic, caring, sometimes skeptical, and easily exasperated. I could have said I am a vegetarian, have a jones for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and mainline coffee. But those are all qualities shared by millions of others. They are not essences; at least, I do not experience them as such. They merely qualify “I am,” the fact that I exist; they merely domesticate my existence by circumscribing it with an adjective or a noun. They describe me, but do not seem to name the substance, the radical, fundamental something that I was told makes me unique.
I have my father’s toolbox. It is a slapdash affair, really, banged together from a couple of boards and painted beige. Yet, if I were offered the priciest Craftsman toolbox in exchange for it, if I were offered an exact duplicate of it, right down to the rusted heads of the tenpenny nails holding it together, I would refuse the offer. The toolbox has an essence, it is unique. It is sui generis. I know that with a knowing deeper than a dream, even though, struggle as I might, I cannot find the language to name, in a propositional way, what it is, cannot find the words to literalize what that essence is. In such cases, when words fail to provide a perch upon which to land, it is best to rely on metaphor. Perhaps that is the way to make sayable this uniqueness I supposedly possess.
Not too long ago, I ran across an article about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a volume consisting of 714 parchment pages from which the original writing had been scraped away and reused to create a Byzantine prayer book. The palimpsest is so named because among other texts contained in the original, were seven treatises written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. It sometimes happens that, due to the simple passage of time, the “underwriting” reappears beneath the “overwriting” superimposed upon it, resulting in a text with a discernable layer beneath the surface. The trace has left a trace for the fullness of time to birth.
The article swept me back to a time when, in the middle of a conversation with my brother, I suddenly realized that he used the same hand gestures as our father, used the same grimace before responding to a question, had the same manner of speaking from the side of his mouth when intending irony, laughed the same wheezy laugh. And I realized I did those things, too. And I remembered my mother telling me my handwriting was exactly like my father’s, and that, on the telephone, my voice was indistinguishable from his. In my brother and I are the underwritten trace of our paternity appearing in the selves we have written and are still in the process of writing. We are palimpsests.
The problem with most assertions of individual uniqueness, at least as that quality is commonly conceived, is the assumption that human beings exists in a gated enclave of the self, walled off from circumstances and influences, imbued with an unrepeated, unreplicable core that, like some fairy-tale gift, like some wave of a Hogwarts wand, simply appears out of thin air. It seems to me, though, that we are anticipated, prepared for, mediated, but not determined, not passively absorbent. My brother and I are not copies of my father, not duplicates or facsimiles. The three of us are layered texts, separate in time, each telling its own story while sharing the same page, the overwriting and underwriting overlapping at some points, indistinguishable, the same perhaps, but, finally, different. We are palimpsests.
We are carried forward, like an integer in a math problem, by our legacy, but into the ethos of our own historical moment, the habitus of our own time and place. We are actively courted by our moment, and we actively collaborate in that courtship. We affiliate ourselves with others; we gain information, knowledge, perspectives, attitudes, and values; we form perceptual boundaries; we pursue enterprises; we use our natural gifts and acquire others. We are what we already have, what we find, and what we do. We are legacies, but the song of that legacy arrives in the present and is overwritten in a different key. A new song, but not quite, for under its emergence is the trace, the unerasable residue with which it started out.
That, I think, is how we are unique, the intrinsic character of what we are. Palimpsests. The gesture of the self to and beyond itself. Anything less makes the self less complete, smaller, limited. Anything less is to invoke the oven bird’s question at the end of Robert Frost’s sonnet: “What to make of a diminished thing.”
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