'Surrender to an Age of Bravery and Honor'

Medieval Times!  Where you can experience a Medieval joust and dinner.  We went for the first time last night.  I went with an open mind ~ half expecting to be disappointed and half expecting to be wowed. 

I was wowed. Maybe not for the reasons you’d expect though. 

I wasn’t excited by the spectacle.  What really was so cool about the performance was the sheer athleticism and skill of the knights and the horses and the falcon.  The knight actually did what knights did all those years ago.  They were expert horsemen and they hooked tiny rings on the ends of their lances.  The swordfighting was choreographed, but it was vigorous and sparks flew from the metal swords.  So cool.  The jousting was real.  I’m sure there are lots of protections in place, but the lances shattered as the knights aimed for each other’s shields.  

And the animals. Oh my gosh.  The horses were amazing.  So well trained yet full of get up and go.  You could really tell the knights who had been at this for a while and those just starting out by the way they set in the saddle.  The falcon swooped over the crowd and took the lure.  She was amazing.  Every year people get gored by buffalo and stomped on by moose in Yellowstone Park. They think of these creatures as what you see on the screen.  But these are living breathing creatures with minds of their own.  It’s not like driving a car.  It’s more like training a dog.  They may or may not do what you want them to, and if you’re not careful, you will get injured. Horses are like very large and powerful toddlers who get very scared and uncontrollable very quickly.

I also think modern movies and cartoons have taken away the awe of physical feats.  We see these amazing things in cartoons or in computer animation and we think they’re real, and so when we see real people doing real things, we think they’re boring. Yet we know we couldn’t perform them.  We’re not as grounded.  Our imaginations have been fed so much that we lose touch with everyday miracles.

So it wasn’t the campy Medieval pageantry that moved me, though that was fun.  I liked the food, though some didn’t.  “Baby dragon, but it tastes like chicken,” our server Bryn told us.  He was great ~ the perfect blend of Southern and British accents.  No, it was the amazing physicality of it all.

My daughter, who’s sometimes too cool for school, said she wasn’t going to cheer, but she was swept away with it all, especially when she got a carnation thrown to her from our knight.  She loved it, as did my son.  But she said ~ and I agree with her ~ “If this had been real, it would be gruesome.”  Makes you think sometimes that we really aren’t so civilized, you know?

But our fabulous black and white knight won (just as the script told him to).  Here’s the character’s story:

Don Iofre Santa Creu is the defender of the ancient shrine at Santiago de Compostela. Adorned in Black & White, he is mightiest in skill among an order of warrior priests whose arrival upon the field brings despair to the impure of heart. In prayer, humble. In service, loyal. In battle, invincible!

The actor playing the black and white knight was so great, so athletic, so in character.  Fabulous. He was of Asian descent with long flowing black hair. Our charming and dynamic champion!!

 

What Lorde Has that Miley Doesn’t

Pop Star Lorde by Faerwin Wallpapers

People crave authenticity. What do I mean by authenticity?  I mean things that feel real, that feel like they mean something, you know?  In our wonderfully overabundant media existence, it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing but games and masks and people whose motives are sketchy. They’re only trying to sell something or to get ahead.  All that has its own charm, to be sure, but authenticity is what changes a run-of-the-mill wizard story into Harry Potter, an avid amateur singer into Adele.

I was struck by this as I watched Lorde’s “Royals” video.  It’s the quality of her voice and the way she stares into the camera, not playing to stereotypes.  It’s her beauty and the beauty of her voice.  It’s the young men just doing what they do.  It’s charming and heart-wrenching without being in your face, and it defies stereotypes.  It runs the gamut of emotions.  In a word, it is authentic. 

It’s interesting to contrast this video with Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball.”  She has a beautiful voice and she’s an amazing artist, but it feels inauthentic, you know?  She’s trying too hard.  She’s trying to fit conventions that came way before her and will continue on into the foreseeable future.  She’s trying to stretch herself to be a phenomenon.

Lorde is a phenomenon, while Miley is trying to be one. People sense authenticity, even if they can’t quite name it.

It’s a great reminder to “be yourself.”  It’s such a hard thing to do, to embrace who you are and where you’re from, even and especially those parts of yourself that are embarrassing and less attractive and less acceptable.  That’s actually where the artistic gold is.  Those places that make you cringe, that make you who you are. 

I remember as a teenager it was particularly hard.  I didn’t know who I was.  How can you be yourself when you don’t know who that self is.  But now I know part of it, at least, is owning where you come from, listening to yourself and noting those things you love and you hate, and “running screaming toward the fear” as Steve Almond says.

The art that we create deserves nothing less than our true, authentic,  flawed but glowing selves.

Now here’s Lorde.

 

PS It's the reason why this is so charming.

Martyred for Love

Today on the How to Be a Man Virtual Book Tour, I'm visiting Fang-tastic Books and talking about how writing and reading is one of the deepest forms of love because it's as close as you can get to another person's insides. (I can't say it enough: Roxanne rocks!) 

I was listening to NPR this morning and they interviewed Robin Wright, who plays Claire, and writer Beau Willimon from House of Cards.  Season 2 is released for binge viewing today.

It was fascinating!  I agree with a lot of what they said.  Love is in fact transactional, and Claire and Frank’s relationship is self-serving, sure, but one way to look at love is that that is what love is - a transaction to fulfill your emotional, sexual, and even lifestyle needs.  Anyone who denies this is either naïve or, well, in denial. 

We don’t like to look at love this way.  We also don’t like to look at the origins of the Valentine holiday.  Every time you have a saint, you have to have someone who was viciously murdered for their beliefs. There’s a bunch of different stories about St. Valentine, but generally he’s believed to have been killed for marrying Christians and generally helping them, which was a crime at the time. 

At its most basic, doesn’t this accord completely with our idea of Valentine's?  Someone died ~ was martyred ~ helping couples in love.  St. Valentine is in fact the embodiment of love, much like Jesus: a martyr, someone who gives of themselves and they are killed for it. That’s what we say: “I love you so much, I would die for you.”

I guess it’s just in my nature to recognize the yin and yang of everything.  Love has a dark side, but I would also be the first to acknowledge that it is the force that moves the world.  It’s the force of all good in the world.

May your life be filled with love.

Endings, or a Failure of Imagination

Happy Endings, by Terry Jackson (via)

I’ve been thinking about endings.  The endings of stories are the payoffs.  This is where the author says, “Hey, this is how it really is” or “This is how it should be.” 

You can see authors trying to find a new way for society to be, trying to imagine a world that is better.  Or you can see them failing, them seeing no way out. 

And it says something about me that I tend to write at least ambivalent endings, if not tragedies.  I have a hard time with happy endings.  They often seem contrived.  Is that a failure of imagination on my part?  Me, who has long considered herself an optimist?

One thing is for sure.  The author needs to push against her or his own proclivities and against received plot lines and against society’s expectations.  It all depends on the internal logic of the story, but I think authors have an imaginative duty to lead the way, to try to imagine a different ending. 

That’s the only way we as a society can change.

Creation Myths

(via)

Lately, my seven-year-old twins have been asking for us to tell them stories about themselves.  “Tell the one about how I danced before I even stood,” Elizabeth says. “Tell the one about when I was a kid and I checked that lady’s pants like they were diapers!” Eli says.  They especially love the funny ones.

It  reinforces for me the idea that we need stories.  It is a basic biological and psychological need and it’s how we make sense of the world and ourselves.  It’s how we form out identities. Creation myths.  “This is how I became a writer.” “This is how we met and got married.”  "This is what our family is all about.”  “This is what it means to be an American.”

So, without further ado, here are those stories.

“How Elizabeth Danced Before She Stood”

Elizabeth has always loved things that move.  She loved the baby swing and to be rocked, and she is a bit of an adrenalin-adventure type gal.  (I fear her teenage years.) She was a little baby and she couldn’t even stand yet.  Her Auntie Naomi was holding her standing up on her lap and singing “Boom chucka lucka lucka, boom chucka lucka lucka.” Elizabeth starting bouncing and bouncing.  She couldn’t keep her legs straight and support herself, but she could dance!

“How Eli Checked a Woman’s Pants”

I went to daycare to pick up the twins.  They were toddlers less than two.  They were out in the big room where parents were coming in and picking up their kids.  One mom was crouched down reaching for her child, and Eli came up and pulled out the back waistband of her pants.  As any parent knows, that’s what you do to check and see if a child’s diaper is dirty.  He was very kindly checking her pants for her.  She jumped up and went, “Wooo!” and then looked and laughed.

Both the kids find these stories hilarious, and they have me tell them over and over.  They must have reached some stage in their development where they’re becoming more conscious of themselves in relation to others and forming their identities more firmly.

But it makes me think of our writer creation stories.  “I’ve been writing my whole life.”  “I was destined to be a writer because my grandfather was a writer.”  “I suffered abuse as a child so of course I’m a writer.”  These creation myths are important to us, but because they become so pat and everything begins to seem like destiny, they can be disconcerting to others who hear them.  By that I mean, another possibly younger writer hearing a creation myth might think, “That didn’t happen to me. Maybe I’m not destined to be a writer.”  But the thing is, they’re stories like everything else, put together to give us meaning and justification and purpose. 

Maybe the best thing to do is to immediately go and put together a creation myth for yourself, if you haven’t already. Especially in this, the beginning of a new year.

Agreements

Not actually my son ;) (via)

My son’s been giving me a bad time lately.  He’ll say, “Mommy, it’s all your fault.”  He’ll drop his bread on the floor or make a mess or nothing at all will happen, and he’ll say, “It’s your fault, Mommy.”  He’s joking, I know he’s joking, and he knows that I know he’s joking. All in good fun, and we laugh. 

But I was thinking about the social agreements we make, the way we agree on what’s “normal” and what’s acceptable ~ which amounts to the assumptions we make. You know how a couple will have a certain way they do things.  She stays at home with the kids and does all the housework and he goes out to his job but doesn’t have to do any housework or “help” with the kids.  Or he does the cooking and she does the laundry and they share taking care of the kids.  Or he’s the primary caregiver to the kids because she can’t handle it for long. You get the picture.

We personally have these agreements between us, but then society, too, has agreements.  The idealized nuclear family is an agreement: wife keeps the home and kids while husband goes to a job outside the home.  All this is, however, is an agreement, and these things change over time.

What’s interesting about all this is that we often take those agreements we’ve been handed by our parents and never question them.  The nuclear family is how it “should” be.  Two people of the same sex having a loving relationship and getting married? Inconceivable.  It’s inconceivable because that’s the agreement we’ve inherited and we take the status quo as “normal” and “acceptable,” and anything outside that is “unnatural” or the other.

I was particularly struck yesterday by a number of articles I read that illustrated this.  One was from the Guardian ~ and I can’t seem to find it now ~ about a man who raped and killed his wife.  The point of the opinion piece was that we blame the rape victim and tell her (or him) that they should have done something different, that it was their fault.  By saying that, we’re setting normal that way, rather than saying the rapist is the one who is responsible for his own actions.  He (and it is most often a “he”) should be held accountable rather than the victim.  Another was about the practice of gaslighting, named from the iconic 1944 MGM film, where you call a person crazy and discount their feelings and thoughts so much that they question their own impulses.  A third one was about a woman who witnessed a man undermining another young woman and her writing, and how the woman took the chance and pointed out the gaslighting. A lot in the news about this type lately.

It takes a lot to change these givens.  First you’ve got to understand what’s going on and then you’ve got to call people out on it.  You’ve got to make boundaries and change normal to something that takes your reality into account.  It’s really hard to do ~ on a personal level and on a societal level.

That’s a little of what my son is doing ~ gaslighting.  We all do it to varying degrees.  It’s all in good fun, but it’s also a way to control your world, to try to get your way.  It’s a way to nudge the agreement.

Al Jazeera America

I loved watching the new news station Al Jazeera America last night.  I think it’s so cool that we have this option, and I hope the channel makes it. Somewhat because we have entrenched political debate in this country, and this might stir things up, but moreso because I love the chance to get away from “The Danger of a Single Story.”

You know Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fabulous TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” don’t you?  (If not, I’ve put it below.)  She talks about how America has a narrative of what Africa is and isn’t and how her work is not only a reaction to that but a claiming of her own story.  This happens throughout history.  People yearn for a single line of meaning for the world, preferably that involved their kin in the main storyline.  Unfortunately and fortunately, that’s not the way the world works.  Everybody is the hero of their own story, but if they have the power (hegemony) they get to impose their story, their version of the truth, on the multitude of other narratives out there. 

Creating meaning for a group isn’t a bad thing.  It’s human nature, how we make our lives have worth.  But we have to acknowledge the many narratives that there are.  Like the Harper’s piece by William T. Vollman about being suspected of being the Unibomber.  In an interview on NPR, he talks explicity about his America and what it means.  (Mikhail Bakhtin has some interesting things to say about the centripetal and centrifugal forces in national dialog.)

Some of the things I love about the new Al Jazeera America channel.  The fact that most of the anchors are nonwhite (by that I mean not of European American descent).  That it has an international focus yet still covers the U.S.  That it tells positive and negative stories.  That there is dialog and disagreement and vehement discussion.  That The Nation advertises on it, and you can go online on Facebook and participate in the discussion.  Most of all, there is pushback against the dominant lines of discussion. 

Very cool.  And here’s the wonderful Adichie for your moment of zen.
 

The Power of a Well-Told Story

From Two American Families (via the New Yorker)

If you screened Two American Families for Charles Murray and other social critics who believe that the decline of America’s working class comes from a collapse of moral values, social capital, personal responsibility, and traditional authority, they would probably be able to find the evidence they’d need to insulate themselves against the sorrow at the heart of the film.

…

But the intellectually honest response to this film is much less comforting, for the overwhelming impression in Two American Families is not of mistakes but of fierce persistence: how hard the Stanleys and Neumanns work, how much they believe in playing by the rules, how remarkable the cohesion of the Stanley family is, how tough Terry Neumann has to become. Both families devoutly attend church. Government assistance is alien and hateful to them. Keith Stanley says, “I don't know what drugs or even alcohol looks like.” In the words of Tammy Thomas, whose similar story is told in my new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, these people do what they’re supposed to do. They have to navigate this heartless economy by themselves. And they keep sinking and sinking.

This is George Packer in the New Yorker talking about a new PBS Frontline documentary Two American Families about the declining prosperity of two families in Milwaukee.  I would like to see it, though I know it’ll be heart-wrenching.

But what I love is Packer’s point about stereotyping vs. the power of detail.  It’s easy to insulate ourselves from pain and social responsibility through the power of reducing someone ~ or a whole class of people ~ to an idea.  We can dismiss it handily without feeling any remorse.  It’s the same way hunters can bear to kill living breathing animals and soldiers can murder other people.  The other is reduced to an object, a target, an idea.  Hunters and soldiers have to, or they couldn’t provide for or protect their families and their homelands.  It would tear them up and often does anyway.  But in a social context, it’s a choice, an easy out.

But I’m not here to soapbox you.  My point is the power of detail.  The way you reach people is through the immense empathy created by a well-told story.  Le mot juste, the exact right word, or words. That’s Packer’s point.  This documentary has the power, if you give it “an intellectually honest response,” to push you past your comfortable notions of who deserves and who is to blame and to see on an individual level the effects of forces beyond their control.

As a fiction writer and as someone who does marketing for my job, I am constantly reminded of the power of details, of a narrative, to move people.  Writing can be used for infinite good, for empathy, for love. That’s why I strive every day to get better at it.

Happy vs. Meaningful

 A Young Boy from Belsen Concentration Camp, Eric Taylor (via)

A great article in The Atlantic by Emily Esfahani Smith about happiness. 

It begins with the story of Viktor Frankl, who was a Jewish psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp.  While in the camp, he counseled young men who were suicidal, even as he lost his parents and his pregnant wife.  There is so much to unpack in that, so much irony and paradox.

But the article is about why he lived, what made him go on?  His assertion in Man’s Search for Meaning, Smith says, is that those who went on had meaning in their lives.  They had a purpose. 

Smith goes on to make the distinction between happiness and meaning. 

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.

…

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.

…

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.

This is a brilliant distinction, I think.  If we are “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” it is critical to think about the definition of happiness.  If you consider Smith’s definition ~ the satisfaction of basic needs ~ rather than today’s definition ~ an ecstatically positive emotion ~ you get something very different.  Maybe what the Declaration of Independence meant was not that we all have the right to satisfy our most outrageious desires but rather that we have the right to have our basic needs fulfilled. 

And then, as Smith says, true happiness comes from having meaning, of having this greater thing outside ourselves that gives us purpose and focuses outward and puts us on a journey.

 

Remaking our Selves

(via)

We moved my mom this weekend. (Is my husband not a saint?) It was only from one apartment to another within the same building, and there was an elevator.  But, man oh man, was I tired.  I worked about 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days, give or take.  I’m not nearly as sore today, though, as I expected to be.

Mom is happy with her new surroundings.  She moved from the third floor to the first floor.  There’s more traffic noise, and it’s in a north/shaded part of the building, but she has a bigger bathroom and hallway and nicer floor coverings.  She’s excited for the change.

Got me thinking about how moves allow us to reframe our lives.  We get in ruts, doing things the same way, feeling like everything is same-old same-old.  Most humans, I think, like a little variety.  It helps you appreciate what you have and enlivens you.

And a move.  It allows you to rethink your whole life, even if not much really has changed.  You step outside yourself and think, I like this, I think I’ll keep it, or I don’t like this, I think I’ll change it.

It would be great if we had regular times in our lives that we could do this on a regular basis ~ say the third Thursday of every month.  A time to step back and say, you know what? This isn’t working, let’s redo this.  Call it a Redo Remake Holiday or something.

I imagine there are people who do do this, who aren’t as much security freaks as my husband and I.  Some people make it a point of moving every two or three years or going on lots of vacations.  They seem to want to deliberately disrupt all the community they’ve built and start things new, but then they might also be the type of people who are able to hold onto that old community or come back to it. (Or maybe they don’t want that old community.)

And as I think about it, it allows you not just to reimagine your life but yourself within your life.  It’s like when you go away to college.  A lot of people change their names and adopt slightly ~ or not so slightly ~ new identities.  They separate who they were from who they want to become, and this break from family is a the perfect opportunity.

It’s hard to do because the whole world generally doesn’t want you to change (if they are attached enough to care).  They know who you are and what to expect and that’s what they want from you.

As I said, wouldn’t it be great to have a time that we all try out new selves and new places in the world?  Halloween once a month!

89 Years of Change

Dad and Mom in the 60s

My mom had her 89th birthday on Sunday. 89! That’s quite an accomplishment.

At the party, I asked her, “How do you get to be 89? Any secrets?”

“Wake up every morning,” she said.

What a hoot.

Can you imagine? In 1924, automobiles are just becoming common. The first performance of Rhapsody in Blue. Loeb and Leopold murder Bobby Franks in Chicago. George Mallory dies on Everest. This is the year of the first round-the-world flight by U.S. Army pilots John Harding and Erik Nelson. First Macy’s Day Parade.

People who died include Lenin, Franz Kafka, Calvin Coolidge, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Puccini. Also born that year are Earl Scruggs, Lee Marvin, Henry Mancini, Buddy Hackett, Joan Aiken, Daniel Inouye, Truman Capote, Jimmy Carter, William Rehnquist, and Rod Sterling.

Think of every person who has lived since 1924 and all their life stories and worlds of experience that have passed by in that 89 years!

We’ve gone from radio to television to digital internet entertainment, from telegraph to telephone to cell phone, from horse and buggy to automobile to commercial flight to the first private flight to the world’s International Space Station.

Socially, we are worlds different. In that time, we’ve gone from being about a 50/50 urban to rural population to 80 percent urban and 20 percent rural. Many groups who were previously unrecognized are achieving large measures of recognition and equality ~ minorities (who won’t always be the minority of the population), women, LGBT people, and others. I was struck, as everyone was, that President Obama yesterday refered to “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” all in the same sentence.

I can’t imagine where we’ll be when I’m 89. And when my kids are 89? Oh my gosh! We’ll have “augmentation” ~ computers installed in our bodies. We’ll all be connected with our bodies through that future iteration of today’s internet. We’ll have eradicated many diseases but others will crop up. Socially, where will we be? World’s away.

And as I’m an optimist, I think most of the changes will be for the better.

Happy birthday, Mom!

‘Culture’

(via)

I’m in the third grade, and the teacher has just introduced the concept of “culture.”  I am at a loss.

Our elementary school was built in the 60s, and so it introduced the open color-coded pod system ~ four classrooms in a block without walls, each with its own color.  Second and third grades were in the blue pod, I think.  Or was it yellow?

You know what I’m going to say next ~ a thoroughly impractical scheme by  architect who must have been childless, as nothing distracts a gang of third-graders more than another gang of third graders.  So in desperation the teachers immediately rummaged every chalkboard and divider they could find to create WALLS, for God’s sake.

I was sitting at my desk facing north (don’t ask me why I always know which cardinal direction I’m facing, even in my dreams, but that’s a story for another day). Young neatly bearded Mr. Harris had just had us open our books to a page with a colorful illustration of a Mexican fiesta at the top.

“Culture is the art and language and practices of a group of people,” Mr. Harris said.

I searched the picture and the words in the paragraphs below for some grasp of the concept, while Mr. Harris went on. Culture? Was it the colorful blankets?  Was it the hats?  Was it Spanish?  How could it be both a thing like a hat but also a non-thing like language?

I was mystified.  I raised my hand, and Mr. Harris called on me.  “I don’t understand,” I tell him.

So he tried again.  “It’s everything that makes a group of people unique.  Mexican people have their fiestas and their Day of the Dead, while Europeans have liver dumpling soup or pasta.”

I’m paraphrasing here for affect.  I have no memory of the actual conversation, but I do remember sitting at my desk and staring at that page with the Mexican fiesta.

I didn’t get it.  In fact, I don’t think I got it for years.

I was reminded of this this morning as I heard NPR’s report on culture references and how they’ve become splintered.  Back in the bad old days of the monopoly of network TV, everyone watched pretty much the same things, and so everyone had similar pop culture references (never mind that if you were a black person you hardly ever saw yourself on TV).  If you were a comedian and made a joke about Don Johnson and Miami Vice, you could count on people getting it because they probably had watched that episode too.  Now, with streaming and the internet, you can watch whatever the heck you want ~ the democratization and individuation of content ~ and so there isn’t the commonality there once was. 

I’m of a mixed mind on this.  My first reaction is, Yay!  We get to follow our inclinations and see ourselves mirrored back to us in so many ways ~ something I didn’t feel I got as a child.  Democracy at its finest! The acceptance of difference and diversity and everyone is exposed to all sorts of things and so hopefully more accepting.

But then I mourn the loss of common ground. For some, these differences cause nothing but more fear and so they want to clamp down even more.  Difference doesn’t make them celebrate; it makes them want to bring out the guns.

What I get now, though, that I didn’t get all those years ago is that culture is to life what a dictionary is to language.  It’s a common agreed upon meaning of sign and signal and artifact and speech.  It’s all of us trying to agree on meaning and signifier.  It’s us trying to define our identity.  And it is and should be hard to define ~ because everyone is trying to pull it this way or that way and to pin it down.  One person’s gang sign is another person’s handkerchief.

That’s what makes the world so wondrous.

Yes! But ...

Yes, I am ecstatic! Yes, I am elated!  Because my guy won, and everything I believe has been affirmed.

But has it?  This country is split, and I remember how I felt in 2004, and so I mourn too for a little less than half the country, even as I don't understand why.  How can they possibly believe some of the things I find so repugnant? Something I'll be investigating for a long time.

Was it a crushing victory? Did the voters give an overwhelming mandate? Yes we won, but are we any closer to working together for the good of everyone?

I'm not nearly as confident as everyone else seems to be.  But I'm hopeful.

Shrug Off Your Old Self

My daughter the Spider Princess and my son the Zombie went to Safe Treat at the University of Wyoming Student Union last night.  It was so fun.  I’m so glad all the groups across campus put this on.  Every year, the whole building is packed with ghouls and goblins small and large, and the grown-up kids seem to have just as much fun as the small ones.

My daughter looks forward every year to having her face painted.  Even if there’s a long line, she insists, and she agonizes over which design to select.  The line was short this year, so my son got his painted as well.

It’s fascinating to me, this assumption of another character.  One of the main reasons I’m a writer is because I’m always fascinated with people’s motivations, and so it’s doubly fascinating about why certain people choose certain costumes.  Someone withdrawn and demure goes all out for Halloween and puts on a costume of a true psychopath.  Someone who you’d think would be wild and go all out refuses or chooses something very conservative and traditional.  Very interesting stuff.

This fits well with other things I’ve been thinking about.  Self-improvement, for example.  That’s another way in which we envision a character and then we try to assume that character.  We imagine this ideal person ~ more beautiful, stronger, more effective, smarter, funnier, whatever.  Then we try to find ways to assume this ideal. 

We have these goals in life, and we try to achieve them.  Sometimes it’s something small like not eating that donut in the office break room, and sometimes it’s huge like moving to another continent or effecting world peace. 

And if you’re like me, when you’re in a mood of self-improvement, you try to do it all at once ~ lose weight AND eat healthy AND write the next great American novel AND be a better mother AND be a better wife AND exercise every day AND be more effective at work.  You know how it is ~ I want it all and I want it now.

But I think it’s a worthy endeavor in general, this assuming of alternative identities.  It allows us freedom to imagine ourselves as something different, to break out of our ruts and expand imaginings.  And we have these built-in times in our lives when we can do this ~ Halloween certainly, but also when we move or go away to college, when we make a new friendship or date a new person. 

Heck, when we get a haircut.  You know the saying: change your hair, change your life.

Omens, Portents, and Metaphors

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As I mentioned, I’ve been reading George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings.

Night before last, I got to the part where Jon Snow, a brave knight of the Night’s Watch, and his knight brothers are camped on the Fist, a hill that rises like a fist that is a ringfort.  It is singularly creepy.  One brother “smells” the cold, and Jon’s direwolf Ghost refuses to go to the top of the Fist.  Ghost is known for sensing a lot more than everyone and helping Jon out of many scrapes.  The landscape is describes as dark and foreboding ~ standing on the top of the hill, the ancient dark forest goes on and on, and it’s wet and rainy.  What we know from before that here past the Wall are the Others, an army of zombie-like people who haven’t really surfaced in the narrative but who loom over it like dread from the very first page.

I don’t do it justice in my description.  But I tell you what, it creeped me out like any good horror novel.  I’d just been reading that part when I had to go downstairs for something, and I kept looking around thinking, “We have far too many windows in this house.  Far too many.”  I turned on a lot of lights as I did my errand, I can tell you, which is silly because then anything outside can see in.

Then, last night, I was reading along, a lot about weirwoods and the old gods and the magic returning because of dragons, about omens and portents and what the future brought.  Again, I had to go downstairs for something, but I didn’t turn on the lights. Our back door is glass to let in the light, and through it I saw moonlight bouncing off the tin roof of our garage and the black outline of our cottonwood tree.  I walked over and looked out.  There was a perfect halfmoon shining brightly and illuminating the small and narrow groups of cirrocumulus clouds that crowded around it.  The lights and faint noise of trucks whizzed by on the interstate next to our house ~ never wall to wall, but persistent, enough to remind you how busy we are as a species.  And then as I watched the blinking lights of a small plane popped out from the clouds, disappeared into the moon, and then popped back out the other side.

In my frame of mind, I couldn’t help but think of portents and omens, of metaphors and signs.  I’d just been reading about the red comet in the sky and everyone interpreting it for good or ill ~ mostly ill ~ and what it meant that the wargs and direwolves were much more plenty and so much more.  So as I watched the moon and the plane I immediately thought of omens and portents and metaphors.  The small blinking lights of the plane merging with the overweening light of the moon.  How small we are and how above ourselves.  We think we have these mighty machines yet the comparably weak light of a halfmoon has such power as to obliterate our evidence.  And the scurrying along the interstate ~ all this busyness to mask our baser natures, and our higher ones.  And the black outline of the tree, usually ignored and taken for granted, yet there it is, it always is, patient as death, as plants always are.

Usually I’m a good rationalist, scientific method and all that, but then I thought, what are portents and omens but just another form of metaphor.  What are metaphors?  One thing that stands in for another, so that by comparison its characteristics are illuminated.  They may be small and clever in literature, but I have long thought that science and religion too are nothing more than a huge structure of interconnecting metaphors.  Useful ones to be sure, but they are simply structures to help us understand the world around us.

So why can’t omens and portents be thought of as the metaphors of people much closer to nature?  They would not simply be based on guesses, but instead be based on long study like science.  Sure, they weren’t backed by the scientific method, but our instincts and our guts tell us many things that our heads won’t, and we express those in metaphors.  They show ourselves to ourselves.

Not only that, but omens are a grasping at trying to predict the future in a thoroughly unpredictable world for people who had much less control over it and much more dire consequences for the lack of it.  It gave an illusion of control, which we all need. 

It was not an altogether unpleasant feeling, this reminder of the ineffable.

Free!

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We love free things, don’t we?  We love the sale, we go for the half-off, we want the free gift included.

Have you heard how Cabela’s got started?

Cabela's, the World's Foremost Outfitter of hunting, fishing and outdoor gear, was born somewhat inadvertently in 1961 when Dick Cabela came up with a plan to sell fishing flies he purchased while at a furniture show in Chicago. Upon returning home to Chappell, Nebraska, Dick ran a classified ad in the Casper, Wyoming, newspaper reading: "12 hand-tied flies for $1." It generated one response.

Undaunted, Dick formulated a new plan, rewriting the ad to read "FREE Introductory offer! 5 hand tied Flies....25c Postage....Handling" and placing it in national outdoor magazines. It didn't take long for the orders to begin arriving from sportsmen and women around the country.

It stems from an arms race in bargains.  One company offered it, and so the consumer expects it from the other companies too.  And then other industries.

It's not only become part of the American Dream, it's now taken for granted.  We expect things to be free.  We expect to have free samples, free movies, free wifi, free music, free art. Low-priced oil, food, and other basics.

But wait.  Let me think out loud.

So we're not paying for that thing and we don't think we should have to.  Expectation is it's free.  Or at least at a low price, and we often expect the government to subsidize these low prices.  It's a service we now expect of our legislatures and Congress.

But ~ and this is a huge but ~ the person or company providing the thing is not getting paid.  Nada.  For a large company, it's a loss leader to get you in the store and hopefully have you buy other stuff.  But what about the artist or the small business person?  They don't do the volume, and when they don't get paid for something, they can't make it up somewhere else.  The farmer ~ we expect food prices to be low, but then we complain about at farm subsidies (not to mention making up for the unpredictability of farming).  Food has to come from somewhere (and apparently this year we're dangerously close to a corn crisis).

But, for the artist or writer, this means people expect you to provide what you create for free.  They don't believe that they should have to pay for the aesthetics in their lives.  This means, perhaps even more so, that you cannot make a living on your art.

Let me say that I do believe in creative commons, that sharing what you create leads to a creative ferment that is wonderful. But I think it's a matter of degree. 

American Exceptionalism once again ~ we should be the exception to the price and we shouldn't have to pay a fair price, which translates to a fair wage, which translates to everyone helping everyone.

I'm not so sure it's a free lunch.