Queenjulia's Blog & Photos

Thursday 31.March.05:

COASST walk in the morning. Saw a golden eagle, oystercatchers, and the usual (living) birds at the point. Spring and fall churn up the bird world, as everyone is either mating, nesting, fledging, molting, or migrating.

Then went to Orcas in a howling wind. The idea was to use the Internet and call Starband. But did either of those happen? No, they did not. But I did get to see a washing machine sea, and barely miss seeing a dolphin, and generally act coastal.

Arrived home in wind and rain, ready to hang out somewhere that wasn't moving. The Spink was off at horseback riding. Perfect! Time to bring out the clarinet.

But no. A very tired neighbor, who'd walked several miles and needed food showed up. Then the parents of the kid who's been staying with us came by to explain that nobody was sure what he was going to do. Somehow, we all ended up sucking down a couple pots of darjeeling tea and playing Scrabble.

Saturday 26.March.05:

We concluded yesterday by praying that God is teachable.

Personally, I think he is. The evidence is everywhere. But first, a little idiosyncratic theology.

Henry (or was it William?) James said that to a baby the world must be a booming, buzzing confusion. He was wrong for a couple of reasons. First of all, babies' nervous systems aren't developed enough to notice everything (neither are ours, for that matter). Secondly, all conscious beings have evolved to notice patterns in their environment. We tend to ignore things that fall outside of the patterns we've deduced, or are predisposed to notice through instinct.

People, as we love to remind ourselves, have developed intelligence to supplement instinct. A male robin, for example, might peck himself to death if he sees his own reflection in a mirror, but if he were more intelligent, he might eventually stop. A brilliant robin might eventually deduce that this potentially deadly weapon, the mirror, could be deployed as a beneficial aid to courtship. Newly natty studrobins could preen in front of it and test out smooth moves.

In the same way, many people have modified their instinctive responses over the course of history. It was instinctive, for example, that when the World Trade Center was bombed, everyone would feel rage. Rage is one of the standard grief instincts. An intelligent next step was examination of the circumstances. What were the root causes of the bombing? Can we do something to avert another terrorist act, something other than joining the terrorist camp and acting just like them? Although our president stayed stuck in his instinct, many people in our culture were able to tap into their intelligence. Intelligence isn't as emotionally powerful as instinct, and individual insights are not as politically effective as leadership, so the intelligent second response was overwhelmed. But I think it is very significant that it was so widespread.

I think so many people were able to move on because our culture has become more compassionate. Fewer children die from neglect, fewer adults are routinely bashed up by their husbands or co-workers. Because we don't have to watch our backs all of the time, we can move forward some of the time.

Faithful readers will know that I think God inhabits the unconscious, a much more power-charged realm than our day-to-day consciousness. As a pattern-maker, God organizes everything. Because his raw material is our unconscious, what lies in the unconscious is part of what decides whether God is crazy or not. Back in the days when fathers ruled the family and could legally destroy anyone in it, that's what God was like, too. In modern cultures such as Norway or Germany, where people have cradle-to-grave security and education is universal, God is a gentle, merciful being, whose symbol is more often cupped hands than the writhing son on the cross.

The trouble is that we're in constant competition. Being a kind, gentle nation with a kind, gentle god isn't good enough. Nutzo subcultures who mutilate their girls, bag up their women, or chop the hands off of their sinners will have more raw instintive power, and will be able to draw people of weak character from any culture in to their maelstrom. The missing ingredients are alertness, intelligence, and character.

I think that the Holocaust could have been prevented outside of war. A kind, gentle culture that was also actively intelligent and compassionate could have done it; a culture that walked its talk.

A decent Treaty of Versailles would have done it. The aftermath of World War I in Germany included massive unemployment, privation, and fighting in the streets. That's instinctively satsifying to the victors, but even a little intelligence can tell you that it will lead to no good. (We did learn from our mistake � the rehabilitation of Japan and Germany after WWII was clearly effective.)

Gandhi-style resistance would have done it. Most Nazi officials were not monsters. They could have been softened if they knew that people they cared for were watching. If clear thinkers had challenged Nazi propaganda with facts, and had held ostentatiously nice demonstrations, with candles and prayers and those lovely German winged angels, and old ladies with cookies for the police, perhaps there would have been massacres but nothing on the scale of what actually happened.

When my father's family decided to flee, there was almost nowhere to go. Their choices were Bolivia or Shanghai. What about other, more Western-civilizationy countries? They'd closed their borders to Jews. If they hadn't, millions of lives would have been spared. If they'd actively encouraged Jewish immigrants, not only might there have been benefits to the host countries, but Germany might have reconsidered. Things always look more valuable when somebody else wants them too.

Is there an area in your own life where you could be more alert and kind? Help God learn a better way.

Friday 25.March.05:

Made ice cream at school.

Today is Purim, a party holiday celebrating Esther's rescue of Persian Jews from the evil machinations of Haman. One of the side effects of the Holocaust was to put such holidays in an ironic light. If we celebrate that a massacre was avoiced, what do we do about one that wasn't?

Holocaust remembrance doesn't yet have a set form, except for two minutes of silence in Israel. There are a lot of reasons, including that with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, there aren't any Jewish priests. One response to the Holocaust was a Jewish revival: if they think they can kill us off, they're wrong, and we'll be twice as Jewish as our ancestors to prove it! More darkly, some people thought that maybe it could be a punishment for all those congregations not being Jewish enough. While that's certainly a Bibilical idea, I don't think it's very interesting to most Jewish theologians.

Another was my father's response, which was complete assimilation. In his case, I don't think that was as much self-protection as it was an honest personal continuation of a long-standing trend. By the 20th Century, being an urban Jew in Central Europe was often no longer a religious affiliation, but a sign of membership in a humanistic, intellectually active community.

Okay, so you could renew your faith or lose interest in it.

I find a third response to be the most interesting. If you retain your Jewishness as before, but look at the Holocaust, you have to conclude that God is crazy. He has a dark psychological twist that has shown up over and over in the Bible (expelling Adam and Eve for wanting fruit from the tree of knowledge. Asking Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn, even as a teaching tool. Sending the Flood. Demanding that his armies commit genocide when they conquer Canaan.) And, he doesn't seem to understand the first principles of psychology, or to learn from his mistakes. Why on earth would he think that giving the Ten Commandments to Moses on a mountaintop would make people try to follow them? And when it didn't work the first time, he just did it again.

Luckily, in Jewish theology there is room for humans. It is understood that we are co-creating with God. If you see that he's about to make a mistake, you argue with him. Noah was faulted by the Medievals because he did not argue God out of his genocidal Flood. Noah should have tried harder, because, you know, he was right and God was wrong.

Today, the best way to argue against the Holocaust is to set a good example. Live the way you want the world to be. Set a good example, not just for other people, but for God. And then pray that he's teachable.

Wednesday 23.March.05:

When I came home from work, David was lurking at the sheep. I went inside to put my backpack down, and heard David yell. He'd jumped the fence and landed on the ram (the one on the far right), who has eluded capture for just about a year. He wound it up with ropes and things and I sheared the two-year growth of wool. There were maybe 50 ticks snugged up to its flesh. When a sheep's on its back, it plays dead, but still, David's shirt is ripped, his forehead's got a cut, and my shin is bruised. As I sheared, we made intricate plans. I'd worked faster than David had planned, so he had time before his next boat run to take it up to the neighbor's. He drove to the dock and switched trucks to one with a tailgate that lowers, while I stuffed fleece into a storage bag and put the shears away. When David came back, I hoisted the fence up over a couple of the posts and the ram charged out, pulling David along behind him. The thing to do when you've got an animal that's not used to a lead line, is to resist when it's going in the wrong direction, and give it its head when it's going in the correct direction. We finally had it at the road and convinced it to jump into the truck. We cross-tied it, drove it up the hill, and tied it off to one of the neighbor's many derelict trucks, parked in a grassy meadow. He wants to use the ram as a lawnmower for a few months, then eat him.

As fates go, it's not enviable, but compared to most, it's okay. The ram's first mistake was being born male without a particularly good bloodline. The ewes accept their lot as domestic animals bred for our convenience, but, even castrated, the ram is always pushing the envelope. He's stripped the bark from all the hardwoods in their pen and pastures, repeatedly rammed his lady friends, jumped the fence when he got bored, and refused to get caught to get sheared or his hooves trimmed. In a wild animal, that would make sense, but in a domestic animal, such behavior translates into mutton.

Saturday 20.March.05:

One of the things I like about a small community is that most of us consider membership to be a sufficient introduction. This evening, a person who used to live in a nearby cabin came by with her fiddle, bringing with her a woman from another island at whose house I stayed once to attend a writing workshop (who turned out to be a very good spoons player, although she said that our spoons aren't very flippy). I'd seen these ladies maybe twice apiece before last night. With the piano player from down the road, we spent some hours on New England and Norwegian dance tunes. It was great!

At the book exchange at the Post Office, I discovered three Kinky Friedman novels. They're very funny, if erratic. Quote of the evening, from Greenwich Killing Time: "...I glanced around, thinking maybe to straighten up the place a little bit. It didn't really need much straightening up or else it needed a lot ... I set the time right on my cuckoo clock from Leningrad that my friend Boris had given me. It didn't keep the time and the cuckoo part didn't work but it came from Leningrad."

Thursday 17.March.05:

At school we wrote the following:

Habia una vez el Dios de Pinguinos. Alfredo Jorge Roberto era muy peque�o. Era una problema. No tenia pies. �Pobrecito! No podia andar de pinguino. Buscaba hielo y una palma.

Once upon a time, there was the Penguin God. Alfred George Robert was very small. There was a problem. He didn't have feet. Poor thing! He couldn't waddle. He looked for ice and a palm tree.

��Donde esta hielo? preguntaba.

"Where's ice?" he asked.

�En la palma, dijo Borrachio la Ballena.

"In the palm tree," said Drunkie the Whale.

El pinguino (A.J.R.) no podia ir a la palma porque no tenia pies. �Pobrecito! Un dia siete mil bailerenas con zapatillos rositos nadaban hacia las palmas. Todas las bailerenas ya tenian dos pies.

The penguin couldn't go to the palm because he had no feet. Poor thing! One day, 7,000 ballerinas with pink slippers swam towards the palms. All the ballerinas still had two feet.

Todas las bailerenas se pusieron a estornudar. Mientras estaban estornudando, se perdieron todos los pies izquierdos. �Pobrecitas! Habia siete mil pies en el agua. A.J.R. agarraba dos pies, y les pegaba en su cuerpo. Se pusieron a bailar con los dos pies izquierdos. �Que barbaridad!

All of the ballerinas started to sneeze. While they were sneezing, the lost all their left feet. Poor things! There were 7,000 feet in the water. AJR grabbed two feet, and glued them on his body. He began to dance with the two left feet. How barbaric!

Wednesday 16.March.05:

Spent the morning on the plans for the addition to the house. I have a bunch of catalogues for window types. I keep being reminded about how different my thinking is from that of the salesmen who write advertisements and put together brochures. The window catalogues showed high-end, noveau-riche tacky houses with no clutter in them that had windows. BFD, is my response. Nothing to do with me. If I wanted examples, I'd want them to show how a person with poor housekeeping could mask her lack of effort by buying that brand of window. But I don't. I want a chart that shows me window shapes, dimensions, R-values, and price. Couldn't find such an animal.

I started by using the principle that we want a visual melding of inside and outside. So I drew in a big window across the room from each door and stair end. Then, if there was a big gap between windows, I stuck in a smaller one. I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with that, or maybe instead put very small windows on either side of each big window.

The next step will be to make sketches of what that means the room would look like and discuss it with David.

David and I have opposite personalities in nearly every respect. In the case of house design, I want it to be logical and completed. He wants it to be ingenious and to keep every possibility open. When I show him the plan I'm working on now, I expect us to end up re-visiting the need for an addition, our choice of carpenter, the dimensions of the addition, the placement of the doors and stairs, and we'll never get to the windows. At the beginning of projects, I end up feeling derailed by his style and he feels trapped by my style. Worst case, we bicker so much it never gets off the ground. Best case, we end up with something better than either of us could have come up with on our own. After over 30 years of living together, you would think it would be easier.

Monday 14.March.05:

At school, they're studying the Great Depression, so we sang Woody Guthrie's "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You." Nice and easy to learn. I tried to teach a Spanish lesson using TPRS, but it was like trying to teach a sackful of chickens. Nobody had the least intention of paying attention, or even sitting down. I kind of think that once they get the quick call-and-response pattern I'm aiming for, the pace will carry everyone along and they'll end up with a lot of Spanish under their feathers. But the question is if we can get there. Squack!

Came home to a parent meeting about next year's staffing. I'm rather dubious about the notion of local control over teacher hiring. There's too much room for not only nutcase thinking, but also for whims to drive decision making. To make changes because we're bored, sort of a thing. On the opposite hand, I am indeed committed to democracy at this level. What kind of a country would this be, if we couldn't decide who teaches our kids?

It's at meetings like this one that I'm made aware again of how little I understand political thinking. You don't go by theory, you go by what you can get. If you're doing it well, you have an overall goal in mind (in our case, it was the best interests of our children as scholars), and you maximize the chances of getting there. But you're never sure of your data. And, it seems to me that there's something I can't put my finger on about the consensus process that gives greater weight to certain kinds of input. We had one "outrider" opinion who ended up moving the final decision in that direction. Was that good or bad? Everyone else was more or less okay with a more moderate solution. There's the suspicion, however, that being satisfied is settling for mediocrity. An interesting or passionate position is given more weight, I think. Maybe correctly so. I don't know.

Saturday 12.March.05:

I'll start teaching Monday afternoon. There's an architecture of how I teach, the joists and beams that are how my personality, philosophy, experience, and training mix. I've kind of given up on daily lesson plans, since how the kids are is always so much larger than what I can plan for.

But I'm not sure which kids will be there nor exactly what the tone of the place is this spring, nor is there a subject matter beyond "Spanish" and "newspaper." I can't fill twenty afternoons in an elementary school with that.

I thought "marionettes" but when I looked up how to make them, it seemed a little too hard to do. Instant gratification is not necessary, but if you're going to do something that takes work, either you have to lead up to it or you have to actually know something about it. I do know how to make hand puppets, so that could still be in the works. But puppets seem to me to be more an adult than a child thing. Kids want real actors, not symbolic ones, usually.

With the weather so sunny and fresh, maybe we'll go on lots of walks (that's P.E.) and write in journals (that would be Language Arts or Art, and possibly even Science). I made a few trial journals by cutting the pages out of old hardbound books and replacing them with blank pages. I turned "Propaganda for the New Man" into a Spanish word book. The trick will be to find enough hardbacks that are better eviscerated than not (that would be Book Mutilation.)

Saturday 5.March.05:

Spent the whole day painting an amaryllis and fussing with the pictures I already have. Edges and things. Storage is an issue. The cabin is damp, the house is too small.

Mom and her sister used to be quite good artists. When their children got too pushy about trying to make them start painting again, Mom reported that she and Suzanne agreed that there was no point because everyone's walls are already full. Like, a neighbor once asked me what I wanted to go and buy another book for because I already have a lot of them.

In Mom and Auntie Suzie's case, though, I think it's part of the ageing process. I'm middle-aged, still engaged. But I've seen a lot of people age, and there's a steady letting go that happens. Things just don't seem all that important any more. Eventually, one grandkid is pretty much like the next. World events look pretty much like they always have. The long view is the same as it was before the distractions of power got in the way: the worth of family, the need for compassion, and having dry diapers.

Friday 4.March.05:

Our Internet connection is down. One option is to get a different system which has 17 satellites to choose from instead of 1. But as is common with making a big investment, we don't want to switch since we've put so much pain and suffering into what we've got.

Spent the morning making the bookplates printer friendly and half the afternoon delivering it and discussing it. That's the part of a job that I really dislike, where the creative work is done and what's left is making it interface with the actual real world. Framing, pricing, finding a venue, yuck. I've sold stuff to galleries that take 50%. My instinct is to value the artistic side of it more, since my art would be different if I'd spent my life differently, and the ability to run a decent business is much more cut and dried. But that 50% pays those guys to hang and sell the thing, which I am not set up or eager to do. If I could find someone to do the framing and matting and suchlike, I'd be willing to pay them the other 50%.

No! I didn't say that.

Wednesday 2.March.05:

The topic for today is accountability.

From the Feb 20 2005 NY Times article on Bush's remarks during the campaign: He refused to answer reporters' questions about his past behavior, he said, even though it might cost him the election. Defending his approach, Mr. Bush said: "I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried." He mocked Vice President Al Gore for acknowledging marijuana use. "Baby boomers have got to grow up and say, yeah, I may have done drugs, but instead of admitting it, say to kids, don't do them," he said.

If you grow up in a world where the people around you tell you the truth as best they can, you're far more likely to have a reasonably accurate map of what the world is like. If the people around you are accustomed to facing their problems and are public about their strageties to deal with them, you're far more likely to grow up in possession of a full toolbox.

Conversely, if authority figures evade difficult questions, how will you know not to have the same difficulties they did? If authority figures equate hypocrisy with growing up, how will you grow up? If authority figures don't take responsibility for ... never mind. He's our president now.

Went to Friday Harbor today to upload the blog; the Starband connection doesn't work at home anymore. Had horrible diner food for breakfast. Back home, dug in the garden for a really long time because some guy came over to talk about Bible-based decision making and I figured I might as well turn over a few beds while talking about corporal punishment. He said, "Let's face it. 94% of Americans believe in a Christian god. We are a Christian nation and that's a good thing." (Yes, he did vote for Bush). After he left, David said he probably just wanted to watch my boobs jiggle as I was digging.

Ended the evening with a rousing session of klezmer music.

Tuesday 1.March.05:

The article on Rubens in The New Yorker is illustrated with his drawing of an ox. I stared at it for some time. It stared back, a placid, intelligent gaze, full of wisdom and acceptance. Then I read the article, which described the ox's gaze as stupid.

So, that's the subject for the day. Gender differences as projected onto dumb animals.

Back in LA, we had a herd of 10 to 20 dairy goats for several years. I would take them out to browse morning and evening, and, in rotation with my housemates, milked them morning and evening. I learned a lot about the world as I interacted with them. Native California browse species. Veterinary tit-bits. Milk and cheese biology. Inter- and intra-species communication.

After moving to the Northwest, we built up a herd of 20 sheep for wool, meat and meadow maintenance. In my observation, sheep are very much like goats in intelligence and habits. There are crucial diffferences, of course; goats like to browse and sheep to graze, goats are visual and sheep are auditory learners, goats are mischeivous and sheep are self-contained, goats test limits and sheep accept them. But they learn feeding schedules in the same way, they can find last year's pasture equally well, they evade capture by humans or evisceration by dogs with about the same lack of success.

So why do goats have a reputation for intelligence and sheep for stupidity? I think it's the testosterone-soaked thinking of our culture. Goats get into trouble, therefore they're smart. Sheep go limp if they're under attack, therefore they're stupid.

Think about cattle. Cows, who raise the calves, are stupid. Bulls, who try to kill intruders, are noble. You should hear The Spink on the subject of lions! Lionesses, who hunt cooperatively and who raise the young, are not that interesting. Lions, who roar, are noble.

Think about humans. Inonge Mbikusita-Lewanika, the Zambian ambassador to the US, says that in Zambia, men typically spend 10% of their money on their families, while women spend 90% of their money on them. The gender difference in paying back bank loans is the same. The struggle there is to "grant" women the same rights as men (the ERA failed in the USA, too).

I'm not saying there isn't a place for male energy. Just that it's not the only successful or admirable way to live.