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Julia's July 2004
30.August.04
Yesterday was Cabaret Night. I'd been practicing for three acts, one fiddling with The Piano Player (see right), one pennywhistling for a one-day-old pirate song, and one singing The Waldron Way (see below). End of summer practicing and socializing. School prep starts tomorrow. The Piano Player moves off-island.
It's not that I feel noticeably emotional about any of these changes; not reveling in emotions is part of being so analytical. But I've been wandering around the house, bumping into furniture. Folded a whole lot of laundry and matched Bk's socks, throwing out the holy ones. Scrubbed a couple of counters. Painted a third of a picture over again. Wander, wander, wander. BUMP, oops, that was a piece of furniture. Weeded the garden. Refenced the sheep. Brushed my teeth. Flossed. Umm... Emptied out some trash bags. Read Al Franken's
Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them,
a totally wonderful book. Cleaned the birdcage. Um. Made noddles with avocado.
Crispness of focus comes with routine, at least for me. I need a schedule and a history of having followed that schedule before. If you think this is kind of incompatible to what I was saying about ADD, yeah. Trying to figure out how to manage myself is a bit of a struggle. I never know whether it's my routine loving side that needs feeding, or my airy-fairy forget-me-own-head-if-it-weren't-attached-with-bones-and-muscles-and-things side that needs feeding. Luckily, it seems to be possible to blunder through an entire lifetime without actually ever doing anything, except bumping into furniture, which I have some proficiency at. So there's a default.
A couple days ago I had part of a tune going. Tillie, a former student who beat me horribly at Scrabble just two nights ago (dash it all anyway), gave it some scary chords, including a C6, whatever that is. I wrote it whilst watching some seagulls flood up from the eelgrass, and in the shadow of a pleasantly evocative book called Evening's Empire by David Herter.
He writes, among other things, about death, the Pacific coast, and music composition, currently pet subjects. Anyway, now that the tune is written, the architecture comes next. But what is it? Does one push at it, trying to wrest the inspiration from a blank? My theory is that that works; that without daily output, you don't have anything from which to work. But the ongoing temptation is to wait for inspiration. Because, once you've experienced inspiration, you don't really want to settle for anything less. Even though, when I look back on things I've done, inspiration seems to be extraneous. A piece is good or crappy regardless of how good or crappy I felt when I was working on it.
27.August.04
Today's blog is cannibalized from an ongoing discussion with Larry Bullis, a Gentleman Muse. Thanks, Larry.
I've never been diagnosed with ADD, but as I get older and learn more about gender differences, things sure looks suspicious. I'm usually the only passenger on the airplane in back, doing yoga or trying to rearrange the magazines or rushing from one window to another, hoping to see ice. I can't sit still for TV or most movies, and read five or six books at a time, seldom finishing any of them. People who can lie on the beach getting a tan baffle me. Whatever it is, I'd rather be doing it myself than watching someone else do it, even if my effort sucks.
I spent a very bland morning not yodeling (the yodeling grandma was sick), helped move an alder off the road (some chain sawing pictures are still in the camera), and came home to move 3 gigs of files from one Mac to another. Under the mostly benign influence of Vruba, we ended up with an intimidating technosetup (that's techno-setup, not tech-nose-tup): Starband (we're off the grid and need a satellite connection) will only accept PC's on its system, but we're a family of designers and programmers and therefore only use Macs. So, we got a cheap PC and hooked it up to Starband's modem through a 3-cable hub; our four Macs suck the Internet off it like kittens. We have discussed the need for a button on the computer that will sort all the cables into labeled orthogonal arrangements. We can also talk to each other through SubEthaEdit, which is jolly fun for a mom since neither of my boys use speech but will write. Geek city: we sit in the dark, or with a candle (to conserve battery power), facing each other, with headphones on as we simultaneously write blogs and music, program, watch movies, read the news, and talk to each other. Some even play games. Now that Vruba moved to Portland, it has to happen through a chat room he set up for homeschoolers. I'm allowed in if I use a cubicle off to the side. Oh, and the 3 gigs of files have funneled from the iMac through the PC to the iBook. So now you know.
As far as grades go, I find it quite difficult to overcome my belief (culturally ingrained? biologically set?) that you either have it or you don't. Grades come from God, not your own efforts. Everything in my experience tells me that's not true; that practice makes a big difference. But I guess it's some kind of conservation of energy; if it doesn't come easy then it's more efficient to drop it than it is to keep going. It's more than an excuse for laziness, I think, but a biological strategy. In my case, however, it turns out that I want to do stuff that I'm not automatically good at, like yoga or composing. Dang if it doesn't mean a committment to working my butt off.
When I was in college especially, there was this myth of the genius; everyone in my dorm knew who had perfect 800 SAT's by the second day. My advisor told me, "While you will never be a great mathematician, you could do some quite adequate workhorse mathematics in your career." What an asshole! Not the blow to my ego, exactly, but the completely ingrained assumption that ya either got the nuts or ya don't ... A friend recently told me that she was never as good as writing as me, because she has to spend hours on a piece. She has to think about it, then she writes something and then tears it up, then writes another something, and completely turns it around, and then when she's done she only has a page. "You idiot," I told her (but in a nice way), "that IS how you write. That's how you do it. That's writing. It isn't magic. It's work. People who seem to write effortlessly do so either because they put the time in when they were younger, or they spend a lot of time editing mentally." I did and do both (except here, where I am subtly illustrating ADD by roaming all over the map). If I did that with math, I'd be a genius, because not many people do and so anything anyone does is probably unique. Vruba does that with programming. He used to spend hours in bed, weeks, years, staring at the ceiling and programming his room, his life, and his emotions. Now, it seems as though he programs as though he's writing in English.
26.August.04
The Piano Player is back. Will he stay on island another year? His decision is between here, where the high school population will be two, or the mainland, where he has been forcibly invited by his stepfather to consider home as boot camp.
In my experience, it seems that responsibility comes in finite packages, unless you are dealing with mature minds. If somebody takes complete charge in a situation, then nobody else does.
For example, when my boys were very little, I tried to stay out of their way unless they wanted me to be with them. They made much better decisions about their physical world when they knew that nobody would bail them out (actually, I would have, but they didn't know about peripheral vision or reflections). I made a policy decision not to toddler-proof the house; I just told them or demonstrated to them where the danger spots were. I can only remember two times that they got into trouble. Vruba once ran after our herd of 20 dairy goats when he was
about 18 months, and slid down a very steep slope. The goats and I slid down after him. If I hadn't snatched him up to nurse, he may never have figured out that he had just done something scary. The other time was when Bk and Vruba were chasing each other around our swimming pool, wearing plastic buckets over their heads; one red, one blue. Vruba's bucket (the red one) came down over his shoulders, but Bk was very, very small, and only his feet showed. After about ten laps around the pool, Bk ran straight in. He sank like a stone. The next thing I remember is both of us soaking wet, nursing by the side of the pool, while our voyeur neighbor cackled from the other side of the fence, and Vruba collected the floating bucket.
I've heard far more horror stories from kids who had "conscientious" parents. It's my belief, tested for 20 years, that because I made clear to the kids that they themselves were ultimately in charge of their physical and mental development, they took that responsibility. When adults do it for kids, then the kids sit back and assume they're not in charge.
The Piano Player's stepfather, in my opinion, doesn't know this. His assumption seems to be that, since his is dealing with a teenager, rules have to be laid down. The more rules the better, since teenagers are notoriously unruly. In my opinion, the opposite effect will happen. If he takes away the responsibility that The Piano Player has had during his years on the island (for responsibility, substitute freedom, or license), then the wrong person will be in charge of The Piano Player.
Of course, people behave differently at home than they do with others. But, judging from the gentlemanly behavior of the Piano Player during his frequent visits to my place, where the main rule is that you have to enjoy constant and frequently lame witticisms, he doesn't need a heavy hand. And, judging from what I've seen with other teens, heavyhanded parents or teachers are in themselves a major reason that teens get into trouble.
This is not to say that every decision he makes will be a good one. But if he trusts that his decisions have meaning, then he will accept their consequences. I'd far better live on the same planet with a person who accepts responsibility than with one who always does the right thing, but only because he's been told to.
24.August.04
We're back. Visiting Portland has been intense. We don't go to the mainland that often, so there's a flurry of shopping. Uwajimaya, Costco, Goodwill, yard sales. My two sisters and my mom keep separate but nearby households. Their personalities are utterly different, except that we all four share the family intensity. None of us knows how to make light chit-chat. We dive straight into the hard stuff.
And then, Vruba moved out. Like the rest of us, he's an intense presence. And, of course, he's my first-born. I got used to him over the past 20 years, even learned to love him, in my own crabbed way. It will take some time to absorb the intense emotion of seeing him set up housekeeping in another state.
Lost my neice, too. She was only with us for a month but fit in like fingers in a glove. The kind of glove that fits. Good conversation, insightful remarks, helpful around the house, and fun to play duets with (her on flute, me on fiddle). I hope she has a good year as a sophomore. Maybe she'll be able to spend the year here as a junior.
Fortunately, we managed to keep ahold of The Spink. She will have to expand into all kinds of nooks and crannies that her brothers have kept cobweb free for so many years. Hope she doesn't get too lonely.
Bk? Oh, yeah. He's in limbo. High School is over, all the summer guests are gone, his elder brother is gone, and college is in a few weeks. He held the house and animals down while we were gone. Said he had a good time because we were gone. I can see that. I really can. But now we are back, and both The Spink and I intend to wallow in his personality until he leaves.
You don't get to see any pictures until tomorrow, when I get Photoshop7 back up and running.
19.August.04
Seven of us wedged ourselves into the soccermomcar and motored across Orcas. A dear friend of mine works at the ferry line, her furze of grey hair lending authority to that unfashionable orange vest. I leaned against her booth as she plied her trade.
Cars slowed. "Good morning," my d.f. would say. "Where are you headed?"
"Anacortes," they'd say.
"Lane three. Park close up, and be back in your car by nine o'clock," she'd say, and off they'd go.
Sixty-four cars, by the counter, came by while I was there. With that level of repetition, it became like the kind of information funnel you get in scientific experiments. Extraneous data's lopped off, and what's left is that one crucial exchange. Within that, however, people varied wildly. They'd drive up businesslike, or droopy, or perky. It seemed as though you could tell exactly who they were, how they'd done in school (that's me, the compulsive teacher talking), whether they enjoyed being married, what kind of refrigerator magnets they had.
"How do you stand the stimulation?" I asked.
"Everyone brings a whole world with them," my d.f. agreed. "When I get home, I don't want to see anybody."
15.August.04
David took The Spink, my niece, and me to Roche Harbor today. We sat on the bow and sang sea chanties until we got sore throats. The spray smacked us full face. I realized that I have only one desire in the world, and that is to sit in bows of boats and have spray smack me in the face.
13.August.04
The household count has gone up by one; another former student. Seven of them are snuggled or perched on the futon, watching Cowboy Bebop, others are reading New Yorker or hunching over their computers. At 11, Vruba and I dug wrist-deep in the garden for potatoes and he's making french fries. I saw a shooting star.
Over crackers, pesto, and crab at a beach party, we discussed the slogan, "Nobody can be free if even one person is oppressed." I think Oscar Wilde wrote a short story about that; a perfect city in which everyone was totally happy, at the expense of one miserable person in the municipal dungeons. Occasionally, people would leave town, never to come back.
Sara said that, according to the Gaia concept, the planet and all of us are a single organism, and what affects one cell affects the whole. That seemed to sit well with everybody.
Her son wondered why he felt irritated by the slogan. "Because," I said, "It's trying to lay a guilt trip on you."
Bk said, "What about a person who could either rescue a drowning man and lose the money in his pocket, or go over to the Disaster Relief agency and spend it to save ten people in Sudan." Logic doesn't enter into that, we agreed. "We're hard-wired to help people who are close to us and can usually ignore those who are far away."
But still.
"Okay," I said. "What if everyone was a crab, just barely sentient? Could you honestly say, "No crab can be free if even one crab is oppressed?" Not really. Crabs don't have the mental or emotional equipment to be responsible for each other. They do their thing, and that's sufficient. "We don't start out omniscient or omnipotent. We gradually accept more responsibility for how we live. But we're never going to be gods."
"And," I said, (ever notice how people can recount their part in a conversation but everyone else's contribution is kind of wavy and dim?) "When my kids were small, I realized with a kind of finality that I hadn't expected, that in the end, nobody can be responsible for anyone else. I couldn't keep up with their messes, let alone with their need for unconditional love, careful and steady reflective listening, food that they weren't allergic to, and at the same time keep my prior commitments. At a certain point, it was out of my hands. I was a better mother when I didn't take on everything I was capable of doing. In the same way, I think it's more useful to choose where to focus your energies when you're trying to make the world a better place."
That's not to say that you just give up. There are things that have just swum into consciousness in our culture: we've just noticed African-Americans and women as individual humans with not only rights, but legitimate differences. Once that kind of knowledge becomes conscious, we can no longer ignore it. We are morally obligated nowadays to consider African-Americans and women as fully human. In the same way, once we become aware of injustices and of ways that we can mitigate those injustices, we can no longer ignore them. Our behavior must change.
12.August.04
It's midnight. Vruba and his three homeschooled friends are clustered around the Internet hub, David is snoring, The Spink is writing in her journal, and Bk, my niece, and two of my former students are watching The Matrix downstairs. In case you aren't keeping track, that makes eleven people, only one of whom is asleep.
A number of articles and books I've read in the past few years indicate that, in the nature vs. nurture debate, nature is beginning to look far more important than it once did. What was once called free will no longer captures the attention.
It could be that more of my decisions are controlled by my genetrics and physiology than it seems. Certainly, the scaffolding of my personality comes recognizably from my parents and ancestors; I'm prone to depression, to intellectualizing, to ADD, and so on. And certainly, I'm the product of my times; I speak modern English, remember Kennedy's assassination, have a Costco membership, and so on.
My character, however, seems to me to be of my own shaping. I make daily decisions about how to spend my time and energy. Each decision to do one thing shuts off another thing that I could have done instead. Everything has shades of value, as well. Some of my choices honor my True Self and others ignore or violate it. Over time, the habit of making certain choices forms my character.
A few years ago, I spent a year with a woman who was in danger of dying of cancer (she didn't). Together, we explored ways to tap into the Unconscious. One particularly effective route was through Tarot cards. I'm not oriented towards using them as an oracle, but as a way to access my own stance in the world at a particular time. I'm particularly fascinated by the idea of reversed cards. As you deal out a spread, cards can be either right side up or reversed. The meaning of a reversed card is often thought of as its "negativly expressed" aspect. For example, a forthright card would become tactless; a balanced card would become stagnant. A more encouraging interpretation is to think of a reversed card as representing unexpressed energy.
In the same way, identical twins might have identical personalities as measured by the usual personality tests. The flavor of their personalities, however, might be entirely different according to whether they expressed their character tendencies gracefully or poorly.
Well past midnight. Tomorrow looks good. I'll sleep for the first seven hours of it, possibly waking for a look at the meteor showers.
11.August.04
A couple years ago I was involved with a person whose dysfunctional behavior went beyond neurosis. She had extreme behavioral shifts, and didn't admit responsibility for anything she'd done or said while in a different mode than the one she currently was in. I did a bunch of reading on multiple personalities, which turned out to be only marginally helpful in that situation, but it was interesting in itself.
A person, usually a child, might learn how to insulate a part of themselves if they are subjected to trauma. The multiples I read about tended to be women who were frequently raped as girls (although the multiple I personally talked with is male). There might be only one alternate personality, or the psyche might fragment into several bits. Some might be fully realized people, others might be paper-thin caricatures of ordinary people.
Roughly speaking, Emergent Behavior is when simple
ingredients yield complicated, unexpected results. Vortices in water, the game of chess, and
human consciousness are examples.
I've been examining my own consciousness, watching it do things that I don't take responsibility for. Read yesterday's entry, for example, when I spent a half-hour in bed reading a book I didn't want to be reading. Even the semantics of that doesn't really work.
So, what's going on? It could be that there are different neural pathway groups in the brain which are linked to each other but separate. So, I can operate in my efficient bookkeeper mode, or I can operate in my PMS Bitch mode, but they don't share much brain space. I can't even completely access one while remaining in the other one. Not being a multiple, I remember, and not being completely nuts, I usually take responsibility. I suppose I'd be a fully integrated soul when there's no behavior I don't notice and agree to at all levels of my personality. Would that show up on a fMRI brain scan? Could you monitor progress towards enlightenment that way?
Who is me, anyway? My character as viewed from the outside is how I act, and, less crisply, the vibes I give off. But who is it that is evaluating me from the inside? I've been watching the process of accepting the ego role, and it seems that there is a kind of clarity of feeling when I'm doing stuff I embrace as myself, and a muddiness of feeling when I'm doing stuff that I don't like to admit to. When I was reading that Ridley Pearson book (August 10), I had a fuzzy feeling. I think of that as moving from fully conscious towards the unconscious. Maybe my consciousness is just emergent behavior, arising from all those memories and behaviors that zing through my neural pathways. It shifts around, according to which neural pathway group is most active. Ones that aren't connected to very many other groups feel fuzzy because they're isolated.
10.August.04
Here's the promised shot of my niece catching her frozen fish off the Caleb Haley. We slow cooked it and had it with salad and fresh bread from the solar cooker.
The heat changes my physiology. I feel bloated, lethargic, stupid. I lay in bed reading a Ridley Pearson mystery for half an hour before I noticed that first of all, I don't enjoy thrillers, and second of all, there were half a dozen things I not only was obligated to do, but also would have preferred to do. This ridiculous behavior seldom happens in cooler weather.
When I begin a new job, or see that my kids have entered a new phase, or the garden changes season, or any noticeable change happens, I pay close attention and find a logical, efficient way to handle the new stuff. After some fumbling around and cursing, things usually fall into a reasonable pattern. I can shamble through days at a time on automatic pilot.
Obviously, that may conserve calories, but it isn't spiritually sound.
I'm alive today. It's my belief (though I don't trust "beliefs" much) that this life is the only one I get. I'd prefer to be around for it. The Zen Buddhist way is mindfulness. Personally, I find mindfulness hard to keep up unless I'm doing a simple task like chopping wood or washing dishes. When I'm teaching, or trying to cook when the expected ingredients aren't available, or doing anything that involves multitasking, mindfulness is impossible to keep up. I guess that's why monks are celibate and sit a lot. But, I still would like to do something similar to mindfulness. For me, learning new stuff keeps me aware of the desirability of being alert (even though I can't keep it up).
This heat is a chance to learn new stuff. My behavior is altered by the heat ... how? I've become accustomed to how my mind works (on a certain level) when things are like they usually are. Heat adds a new factor. Kind of like fasting, which is more than simply not eating, or physical pain, which has a greater effect than just localized discomfort. It's kind of cool that there are all these untapped behaviors lurking in the genome, waiting to manifest if conditions change.
9.August.04
We all went to the dock to wait for David this evening. Everyone ended up damp. My niece caught a fish. Frozen.
My camera is at the end of its life, I think. It won't turn off, so I have to take the batteries out. This I did, but now, where are they? I'll download yesterday and today's pictures tomorrow, when I either find the batteries or recharge the other ones. For today, you may gaze at Vruba in the hot tub.
8.August.04
Today, somebody, let's call him "Smugola," told me that I am needy because I need so much time alone. I'd never thought of it like that. I guess I think of time alone as so basic that it doesn't count; like needing to breathe doesn't make you needy in the usual sense of the word.
Naturally, I needed time alone to think about that. There are two nasty large trash bags full of sheep wool lying around on the floor. I can't tuck them away in boxes, because there are too many people here for "away" to have any meaning. So, as we hang out together, I spin endless skeins of yarn from the bag under the table. A couple years ago I warped a little table loom and wove David a scarf, which he thanked me for and then fed to the wool moths. There's still about six feet of warp on the loom, and this August I've been going out there and pensively throwing shuttles back and forth. About six inches of weave represents a fully formed thought.
This, however, is a five-inch thought. I think of needy people as those who need to be around other people, those who need steady reassurance, those who can't take criticism, those who have personal needs but have neither learned how to take care of them themselves nor how to ask someone else to help them. As a matter of fact, when I list the attributes that a hypothetical needy person would exhibit, they sure look like aspects of my own Shadow. Whoops. Not particularly repulsive or conspicuous aspects; I save my rage for the truly rejected parts of myself and actually feel a bit motherly towards what I call needy people.
So, after realizing that I load the word "needy" with my own Shadow, I wonder about whether Smugola has a part of himself that needs to be alone, but he isn't happy about admitting it.
And secondly, I wonder whether people would seem needy at all, if their needs were met. Such a concept! I first came across it in the context of childrearing. Jean Liedloff's The Continuum Concept was influential in how I raised my kids. Briefly, she says that if you meet an infant's needs, then it will grow up balanced. If you watch most parents, they're so exhausted and misinformed that they spend all their time trying to figure out how to make the baby meet their needs. How to make it sleep through the night, for example? Believing Liedloff, I didn't really try to get mine to sleep through the night. It took a few exhausting years, but none of them are afraid of the dark, and none of them seem uncertain or clingy the way a lot of their peers are. Also, if you stop thinking about sleeping through the night as a right, you start to be able to do it in chunks. The Medievals, in fact, recognized that many people get up in the middle of the night; it was a time to walk around town, or to pray, or whatever. I've learned to cherish those wakeful times at around three a.m.
Further discussion, it seems to me, would lead us into the nature vs nurture realm. Are neurotics people whose childhood needs weren't met? Or are they simply victims of an unfortunate physiology? I don't want to go there today. But I do think that, whether or not your nature may predispose you to neurosis, if you learn how to recognize and honor your needs (and even fulfill them, if your morals allow), you're far less likely to be neurotic.
And as for me, I try to spend a good chunk of each day alone.
7.August.04
I just read part of an extremely annoying book, by some guy named Marcus Bachs, Strange Sects and Curious Cults, published in 1961. I am SOOOO glad we're not in the 60's anymore. First of all, the guy kept talking about how early man trembled as he saw lightening and how he scratched caves into the cliffs to avoid his predators, and this is why he developed religion. Okay, I'm taking his comments out of context. But still.
First of all, I don't care if, technically, the word "he" includes "she" and the word "man" includes "women and children." When I read a chapter in which the life of early man is explained, I don't see women, I see men. Sorry, that's how it is. A good many of the problems of past centuries arose, I think, because people forgot about women and children when conceptualizing their histories, governments, and philosophies.
Second of all, how the hell does he know about trembling and scratching caves in cliffs? Just because people lived long ago, doesn't mean they were unable to deal with their daily world. They evolved to deal with it. Some modern indigenous peoples are hounded by fears, others are not; depends on the vagaries of culture and the memes therein.
Third of all, I don't think that religions came about to explain natural phenomena. That's the explanation I read in books about Greek and Egyptian mythology when I was a kid, but it always sounded off base to me. I think that religions came about because people have trouble distinguishing internal metaphors for external events. That is, our brains are hard-wired to generate metaphor, and most of us project them outwards.
Just as one example; a lot of religions, specifically the Judaeo-Christian ones, are apocalyptic. The Bible is full of predictions about Armageddon, and if you read the New Testament with that in mind, you see that Jesus and his followers believed the End Times were only a few years away. They made a lot of converts. But, your brain is hard-wired for metaphor. You get dreams of the Apocalypse whenever you undergo a major reorganization in your psyche. Towers burn, the plague strikes, the Horsemen ride; each have their own metaphorical subtext, with the major message being destruction of the current paradigm. Judaea had been Hellenized, the Romans conquered it, and everything was in turmoil. Same as nowadays, when our national Shadow is being integrated in the metaphorical form of the Civil Rights movement, and women are being recognized as human, and the natural environment is at once being lost and embraced; all these things lead to metaphors of Armageddon. It is no wonder that fundamentalism is on the rise.
What will prevent actual nuclear holocaust or anthrax plagues, will be if we can distinguish between our internal metaphors and the external expression of them.
6.August.04
I found these lilies in a neighbors' window.
5.August.04
It's raining, and Lucky, the outdoor cat, is sitting like a child on my lap, her hind feet on my legs, her front feet on my collarbone, and her half mad, half wise crossed eyes looking intently at my neck. She is drooling. Vruba and Bk used to do that too.
The sermon (Latin for "conversation") for today is artistic angst, again.
I'm working on two pieces, both beyond the limits of my abilities. What I'm able to do is completely uninteresting, like hanging laundry or sweeping the floor (as I sifted through the short list of stuff I don't enjoy doing, I realized how idiosyncratic it is. Lots of people love the detergent smell of laundry as it goes on the line, or the satisfaction of sweeping dirt out and leaving a clean floor. But I don't). Anyway, it's the stuff that I'm unable to do that captures my imagination. That feeling isn't forced, either, as some puzzled bystanders have suggested. Something about mysteries and borders.
It's the borderlands of my mind that seem the most fruitful to me, like the intertidal zone, or Bach-influenced African music. Where things are not fully fleshed out and they have to be informed by the unconscious to live.
That's all very well and good, but I get the uncomfortable feeling that I skate too close to the edge to be able to come up with anything worthwhile. As though, bushwhacking through undiscovered country, I spend weeks trying to get to places I don't yet know about, when I could just take the paved road to a known delight.
One of the pieces is that beaded rams' skull painting, which proceeds at a few square inches a day. It's a new venture for me, and continues to dance on the edge between tacky and sophisticated. With no previous experience at that kind of thing, I don't know how to nudge it beyond tacky. Or even if I care. The idea I have of where I want it to go obscures where it actually is going ...
The other piece is some music that's congealing from a feeling I have and a reel I wrote on the beach during a Northeaster last winter. I want to convey ... well, if I could say it, then the music would be superfluous, right? But something about the ongoing conversation between order and chaos, about how things develop without you noticing their beginnings but then there they are almost full grown and maybe you missed enough so that they seem without purpose, or maybe you are aware enough to be able to look back and see yes, they were growing all along from roots you recognize. Okay, that's more or less the theme of it. But the execution has nothing to do with it. It's not that I would expect my audience to come up with the same feeling that I put into the piece; for one thing I'm not interested in cliches (or, truth be told, skillfull enough with them); and for another thing, we are each so different that evoking particular emotions in another person seems quixotic. But, I do believe that if I have a purpose in writing the music, then if I succeed, you will sense that purpose, be able to trust the music, and get out of it whatever there is in it for you.
That is not happening. If past experience holds true, I'll write another fifty of these things until I get to the point where it works as intended, and just a few pieces before that point, I'll be crashingly bored with it all.
That's an issue of discipline. In art and music, there's never a point at which you can say, "Now I get it. There's nothing more to say." Of course not. My creative impulses think that I've gotten to that point because I run out of skill. I don't see any way to move forward, given what I know how to do. In the latter half of my adult life, that's what I'll be working on. The discipline to recognize boredom for lack of skill, and to remedy it at its source rather than to rush off to something different. Although, if I were immortal, rushing off would work just fine. As I cycle through various artistic ventures, each one informs the others. If I were allowed infinite cycles, I wouldn't be so critical. As it is, Death is an active player in my artistic path.
4.August.04
Vruba responded to a blog by Alethia about the kids in school that we used to call "nerds" with heartwarming advice. I would like to add to it. My qualifications include being the daughter and parent of nerds, as well as being one myself. Also, I've taught them, both as homeschooling parent and as public school teacher.
Things are as they are. People, too. A lot of the pain that we go through is because we believe that things should be a certain way, but they're not. Nerds are often insulated against undue social pain because they simply don't notice, or don't care about social ostracism. I was like that. I genuinely didn't recognize my classmates as my peers, usually. I wasn't particularly miserable in school because it never occurred to me that school should be filled with fun classmates that I could be friends with (although I did end up with a couple of fast friends). It was puzzling to watch my classmates sometimes; they missed obvious stuff about the world and about academics, and they were delighted and excited by stuff that didn't even appear on my radar screen, like sports and Neil Diamond. Bullies occasionally tried their tricks on me, but I was so clueless about the world view they were operating under that they lost interest almost at once. I remember a trio of girls making fun of my German accent in kindergarten. I tried to explain that my accent was because I'd learned to talk from immigrant parents. It wasn't until many years later that I figured out that the reason they didn't understand my explanation was because their goal was bullying, and not understanding. That kind of social cluelessness on my part was usually sufficient insulation against misery in school. (In case you're feeling pangs of sympathy, I went to an academic high school and had a wonderful time.)
Sometimes, though, nerds are sensitive to social ostracism. It hurts. In that case, I think there's stuff that parents and teachers can do. First of all, I believe that anything can be taught. If there's a will to learn, then it's probably attainable. People with limited social skills can be taught to get better if they want to learn how. The trick is to notice just what's wrong with their approach. For example, there seem to be at least two kinds of socially inept kids: there are those who don't seem to understand that their actions are visible to others, and there are those who seem to think that everyone is always evaluating them. The first kind of kid can be helped by being taught simple rules like "don't pick your nose in public," along with an explanation that there is a fairly narrow range of inconspicuous behaviors; everything else should be done in private unless it is cleared with a sympathetic adult. The second kind of kid can be reassured with the explanation that most people are pretty self-involved and usually only notice other people when they are doing something unusual. Sometimes the best way for a shy person to be inconspicuous is to take a similar level of social risks as the kids around them. So, rather than refusing to speak in class, it would be much less conspicuous and memorable to occasionally volunteer something.
Shy or strange children are often very alone. They may not have the social skills to notice that there are others like them, perhaps in the same classroom, but certainly in the same town, county, or state. Maybe they don't have to be friends with them, but it's reassuring to know that they exist. A sympathetic teacher could turn them on to a website, club, or mentor.
Vruba talked about the dangers of feeling superior. It's hard for a child to avoid that feeling, if they've found nobody around them who can understand their interest. Even if there's somebody similar, a lot of interests seem to come with built-in competitiveness. I am naturally competitive but deeply suspicious of the way indulging in it makes me feel. For that reason, I've avoided chess or competitive athletics (I was on the Swim Team but managed to be sick for almost all our meets.) If a sensitive child is drawn to such an interest, adults need to be deft and skillful about it. It's possible to have a Chess Club whose members encourage and teach each other. Often, the teacher responsible for that kind of thing is not a sensitive soul (think of the stereotype of a football coach) and they have to be taught, too.
Which brings me to the point which is going to be my last, because I just looked at the clock (12:47 tomorrow morning! Yeeesh!). People are different. They have different levels of sensitivity. What is agony to a shy person is fun to an extravert. What I remember as bullying may have been curiosity. One person may be blessed or seized with an obsession, while another may be happiest drifting vaguely through certain times of their lives. While we can't expect everyone to understand everyone else, we can accept that people are as they are. An insensitive parent may be insensitive because ... well, because they really are insensitive. That's how some people are. If they want to become less insensitive, they're teachable. Bitterness is a waste of time. Accept your neighbors as fallible, while at the same time trying to learn as much as you can about being a whole person yourself.
3.August.04
As I understand it, the Universe is expanding at at least the speed of light in all directions. The speed of light is fast. It takes light eight minutes to get from the Sun to here. The volume of space added every eight minutes is a little daunting to think about. You could mislay dozens of car keys in a space that big. And time, which began about 15 billion years ago, continues on at the rate of one second per second, which is pretty relentlessly quick.
The thing is, that my house fills up with people every day. Six of them sleep here, okay. But right now, for example, it is 10:38 in the evening and, in addition to David snoring erratically in the bed and Marmalade clawing at me because he wants my company but can't bring himself to actually sit on my lap, there is Vruba across from me at his laptop, and four poker players downstairs. Yesterday, two other people, not here today (actually, one of them did show up earlier today, but he isn't here now, as far as I know), were playing the piano at one in the morning. And the zebra finches managed to hatch another batch of babies this morning. The other two cats and the three bellowing sheep have lives which they live in parallel to ours; seldom intersecting, but present.
In the increasing volume of space-time available to us, how did we all manage to end up here in my house?
2.August.04
I've been thinking about how we perceive each other and the world for some time. Here are some random thoughts. Someday they may become a coherent essay. Remember, you saw it when it was still incomprehensible. And, just to make this experience memorable, I have put pictures of my garden here and there within today's entry.
The earth's atmosphere blocks out a lot of energy rays that come in from space. There's a window at visible light, and another one at radio waves. The reason that we see at the wavelengths that we do, is because those are the wavelengths that the atmosphere allows in. If we had evolved on a planet with a wider window of transparancy, maybe we could see the colors of x-rays, or gamma rays, or microwaves.
All of what we perceive is like that, I think. We have a particular physiology and a particular way that our neurons are arranged. Because we're successful products of evolution, our perceptions are detailed and useful. Because we live on Earth under the Sun and not somewhere else, our perceptions leave more out than they include.
Not only are we limited by our senses, but by our brain structure. The human brain evolved from a particular strain of beasts. We have a heartbeat, and breathe, and get uptight as every animal descended from fish also does. We cuddle our babies because we're mammals, we gather in cities because we're tribal primates. If we were descended from whales, we'd have more choirs and fewer knitters. As it is, we're like this and not like that.
A useful trait in humans is the ability to put ourselves in another person's place. Without that ability, we would be unteachable and sociopathic. We can watch others to see how stuff is done, we can guess fairly well whether something we do will be harmful or not. I think that this ability is universal to humans and goes past what is useful for basic functioning. In our always multifaceted social situations, it translates into projection. In fact, I would bet that every thing we do is based on projection in some way.
I'm not sure what the technical meaning of "projection" is, but we've all seen it. It's your mom saying, "Put on a jacket, dear. I'm cold." It's looking at a ratty car and being certain that the driver has bad teeth and uses double negatives. It's bombing Iraq with depleted uranium shells because they have weapons of mass destruction.
Living on Waldron is like living in a projection magnet. We fit into the pastoral archetype that's been around since Hesiod. People already know what "country living" is like, even if (and especially if) they have never done it themselves.
When I was teaching full time before my kids were born, my father asked me when I was planning to find a job. It wasn't that he scorns teaching as a profession, but that he forgot. The major archetype of living on the side of a mountain with horses, dairy goats, and a huge garden trumped the minor archetype of a day job.
In the same way, over the years my brother-in-law has made several comments about "moving to Waldron and putting my head in the sand," and "well of course, you wouldn't have any experience with things like that." The fact that I live where he would go if he wanted to get away from it all, means that I always am away from it all. It's true that we subscribe to various snooty journals like The Economist and Science News to keep current, and that we do some major hanging out with summer folk of various professions, but he means something more than just being aware of news and culture I think. It's that, because of the "pristine" natural surroundings, everyday urban concerns don't seem important here. The fact that we might also have concerns, different ones maybe, does not come up.
In truth, we have poverty, mental illness, alcoholism, and despair too. Probably more than in other places because of our permanently depressed economy. After three years of teaching on the mainland, for example, I moved up three years on the pay scale. After fifteen years of part-time teaching here, I have another 3.2 years to my credit and am paid accordingly. I was a substitute teacher here one entire year, which doesn't count, and an aide working as a teacher another year, which doesn't count, and various combinations of volunteer and paid teacher other years. Last year, I taught one class at the elementary school and ran the Alternative High School, which included teaching Shakespeare, astronomy, Middle East, Northwest History, and art; for that I moved up .3 on the pay scale. That is a seriously depressed economy.
The cost of living is not lower here. It's higher in many ways. I actually pay my dentist bills since I don't have insurance, same with medical. Food is up to triple the price, if you allow Costco to figure into your calculations. Gas is half a dollar higher than on the mainland, and then there's the cost of getting it here. What makes it possible to live with a low income and high expenses is to scale down consumption. We don't go to the doctor unless an actual limb is going to fall off. I wait for yard sale season when I visit Mom in Portland rather than buying clothes, furniture, or household supplies new. David and I go out to eat once a month, and share an entree. At home, almost all cooking is from scratch; during summer we use a solar oven to help eke out the propane. Heating is from wood I've split and stacked. And so on. This is hard work. Takes a lot of daily time. A lot of avenues for relaxation and renewal are simply not available at that level of frugality. Luckily, I really do find renewal in the natural beauty around here.
A couple of days ago a visitor noticed how gruelling David's summer schedule is. He's got a water taxi business, and in July and August he's on the water from dawn to dusk. The fat days of summer make up for one-passenger runs in winter, when often the only reason for running the boat is to keep the business alive. "Oh," she said, "I was going to go across tomorrow but he needs a break. Maybe I'll find some other way to go across."
I heard comments like that when I was selling stuff at crafts fairs too. "I don't want to buy your last item," people would say. Good heavens! It's as though, if you live on a lovely island, or you sell lovely crafts, then somehow you are above the need for cash. You live on beauty.
The opposite can be true, too. I've listened to people tell me about all the drug use that must be going on around here because the sheriff can't get here easily (there is drug use, as in any other American town, but it's most definitely not universal). One sheriff's deputy is convinced that unsolved crimes in the county emanate from here. A chance acquaintance on a nearby island said that his neighborhood had been systematically burgled; since the thieves must have come by water, it was clear that "Waldron" was responsible. There was a magnanimous article in the paper about how some people who live here are actually human, when you get to know them. The LA Times ran an article about us, which generated vitriolic letters about our evilness, based on nothing in the article.
Everyone has different personas and conflicting attitudes. Some of them are conscious, and some inhabit the shadowy regions of the psyche, rejected and denied. I think that, because it is remote and difficult to get to, Waldron serves as a kind of metaphorical unconscious, at least for people who don't live here and don't keep getting reality checks. It has enough mystery to it that people can project the denied part of themselves onto it. My father, a workaholic, projected lotus-eating onto Waldron. People with authority problems, or people who unconsciously feel they need to steal what they can't figure out how to get honestly, would project those dark thoughts onto Waldron.
1.August.04
Seals have nudged their way into my life lately. I took four of my students on a three-day vision quest to Patos Island a few months ago. Being earnest and responsible, I stayed in the here-and-now with my cell phone ready. The main thing that happened was that I heard a lot of seals go FWHHHOOOOSH! as they exhaled. Fish breath.
It's the season for seal babies. The mothers cache their pups on a beach and go off, sometimes for the whole day, to fuel up. When they come back, their pups nurse on almost pure butterfat. How do they know where to come back? Memory, of course. It would be a poor species that mislaid its babies. But, once the babies are mobile, they bob around inshore, their great swimmy blue eyes looking vaguely out to sea. When they get hungry, they moan with a carrying, mournful call. Evenings, you can hear MWHOOOOOOOOOO from all the little islands nearby.
Most of the interesting sea life populations are in free fall or have already crashed in my area. No more sea otters. Abalones almost gone (most people remember the commercial boats responsible for that loss). The times my elderly neighbors talk about when you could sit in your boat surrounded by fish backs surging and rippling around you are gone. Indians used to fish by whooshing nail-studded boards through the shoals of fish. Fishermen around here blame the crash on seals. This is so, so obvious. They have been eating fish around here since the ice age and before, so naturally, it would be exactly now that they are finishing off their job. Bad seals!
I suppose there's lots of reasons that seals die, but around here the dead adults I've found have bullet holes in them. The two most recent adult deaths were closely followed by pup deaths.
Anyway, there was a seven-kid card game going on at my place, as well as a few drop-ins for things like writing a tune for Cabaret Night, working on the woodshed, delivering groceries, and consulting Vrbua about a hardware problem. Finally, I escaped to the beach and wrote something about seal pups.
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