What five books or writers have mattered to you?

Wendell Berry does this work of measuring various influences on his life in an essay entitled ‘The Long-legged house,’ in Recollected Essays. He describes a place he calls the Camp, a cabin built along the Kentucky River by an ancestor which he then repaired and rebuilt and used for  himself during his life. He writes about what the Camp has meant to him in the context of that place – the river, the woods, the animals. He is particular about many things.

Wendell Berry has attempted to recollect the material of his life in this, and in other writing he has done, and to make some sense out of it. And having done it very well and with thoughts that then resonated in my own mind, Mr. Berry goes to the top of my list of writers. And the links of the chain also work their way back as Mr. Berry also writes of reading Thoreau and other writers that have been important to him, as well.

I have a good collection of books that I have read by Mr. Berry over the years. It would take more time  than I intend to take here to try to understand how his words have shaped my life. But I have no doubt that they have considerably done so, as I find that I repeatedly go back to my bookshelf and read Mr. Berry’s words again, often finding them still potent.

The other book that has had a profound influence in shaping the course of my life is the Bible. I am no fundamentalist in how I interpret the Bible today, but many of its words form a foundation for who I have become. The Bible is a collection of writings, of course, and I have read or heard parts of it over and over again – most often during the time in my life when I was most impressionable.

Lines still come to mind years later: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.” I think that it is in words written down - the ideas that are distilled in ways that then lodge within our memory - that we are formed. We are not merely the dust of the earth.  I am a picker and a chooser with the Bible, to be sure. And over the years, I have returned to the scriptures to reinforce some words and not others. But many words remain a part of me whether or I want them to or not. And it’s not just some of the revealed truths that I still acknowledge, but characters and stories that have instructed me. In the beginning was the Word, says John.

With my first two choices, I think it becomes clear that my original question is not one I will actually answer very completely. I never assumed that I would be able to. Maybe I will manage to illuminate the question. If we give ourselves time, I do believe that we can learn some things from our words and experience. And if we can be somewhat thoughtful and articulate, we can learn from each other.

Books and writing – both in general and in particular- have mattered much to me in my living. I cannot easily tease out precisely where a mark has been made, but I have to recognize that my mind is a kind of village of the words of other writers.

But to dash off a somewhat completed list: there is a science fiction novel called ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula Leguin that I first read while sitting in a library for several days in Frisco, Colorado as a friend and I waited for our ride after backpacking in the Gore Range. I later bought myself a copy and underlined passages throughout. The descriptions of alternate ways of structuring society - of ways people might choose to organize themselves to live freely and yet still share with each other - became solid concepts to hold onto in my mind. I reread the book again recently and was pleased to discover that I remembered the characters and I still appreciated the dilemmas they faced and saw again the vision that still stirred my imagination.

A lot of science fiction that I mostly read in my youth – particularly the books that focused on human culture in some way – surely had some influence on me. I remember Isaac Asimov, and especially his sweeping Foundation trilogy. The details in the first book in that series had less punch upon partial rereading, but the overall sweep still interested me. They were perhaps the right books at the right time. I have mostly forgotten many other books in this genre – although I might still recognize a struck chord if I read them again.

C. S. Lewis straddles some of the areas that mattered to me as I was growing up. His science fiction trilogy and his Narnia stories began to open up a tight and mostly closed system of beliefs about God. There was wonder in his conception of faith, although who knows how he would feel about how far from fundamental Christianity his initial push carried me.

I realize that I will say little about many, many books and authors that changed my life in some significant way - if only I could find a way to identify and measure them. Edward Abbey, Ivan Illich, Annie Dillard. A book called ‘The Shantung Compound.’ A good translation of ‘The Brother’s Karamozov.’ I have loved John McPhee’s descriptions of the world. And books explaining quantum physics and evolution and other aspects of the natural world. And books that attempt to explain the human mind and why we think and do the things we do.

This quick recollection of books that matter to me is about these mentioned books and also ones that I’ve forgotten. And what about a number of bad books - books that I never bothered to finish? Even some of those should receive honorable mention in a role call of books and writers that have were important to me – some slightly useful piece of writing, long forgotten, that I happened upon in books I assumed were only a waste of my time.

Here’s a word from William Faulkner: ‘...how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it...’ And yet words become doing – or ‘flesh’ as it was written by King James - when they shape human beings. As it turns out, much of the shaping of what I think has been done by writers. I am, of course, most grateful for the good ones that I have read.

What I don't know

There’s an expression ‘to know’, as in Abraham knew his wife and she bore him a son, such that up until some point in history if I had said that I knew this or that particular woman violence might have ensued. Now we might think that we have moved beyond this kind of linguistic confusion, but we really haven’t.

Every idea that each of us holds is a mixture of faith and empirical reality. When we say we ‘know’ something, we are really saying that we believe something – albeit with the backing of varying degrees of information that we have attempted to empirically verify.

Reality appears to be hard. But every idea we have of reality is soft. Although, once again, some ideas seem softer than others.

My point is this: we can’t avoid religious disputes. Even when we think we are talking about solid things – science, for example - our direct access to empirical information is limited.

It might seem simple to say that we now know that the sun is an enormous nuclear reaction, a ridiculous number of hydrogen atoms too small to be seen individually fusing into slightly bigger helium atoms. Each of these particular atoms is still not visible to the naked eye, but in this process of fusion, stupendous amounts of energy are released - heat, light and other radiation and such. And, we might go on to say that all of this is happening at a location in space an amazing distance away and, of course, that the ball of blazing gas is also speeding along in the universe at an unbelievable rate of speed because of an initial large bang and gravity and such.  And so we go on to blithely speak of a host of other supposedly demonstrable facts mixed in with some imagined ideas and some concepts passed down from people who say that they know.

But if I come up to you and say that it is fine if you want to believe all that, but I believe that the sun is really simply a giant flaming ball of metallic gold that has been lit on fire by celestial beings with powers we can’t comprehend and is pulled across the sky by teams of reindeer too small to be seen by the naked eye - your science wouldn’t have a prayer.

In other words, if you think that if I truly believed my theory of flaming balls that I couldn’t then also come up with an answer to every objection you could raise to my theory, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to reality.

And by reality, I’m talking now primarily about the people in it. We are all, more or less, religious nuts. We throw around expressions like ‘I know you,’ and ‘you don’t know as much as you think,’ as if we are making sense.

People used to say that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But that was before digital. Still, even if only by accident, we can concede that some of us might be right about something.

But here is my point, again: belief and faith must always be considered in human discourse. And talking, that is, trying with words to bring hard reality to bear in our considerations without beating each other up seems to be smarter than the alternative.

But whatever you and I believe, however well we think our ideas are established, in the end each of us will do what we do.

Reality seems to be objective and vast in space and time – though some people will question this - and in all of this, we individual humans are barely visible to the naked eye and are here for a only a limited time, so it seems reasonable to me that each of us would go ahead and act on what we know, however incomplete our empirical knowledge. Some of us will be wrong. What we actually know, however, in any sense, biblical or otherwise, still relies heavily on faith, and for all of our tools and repositories of tested facts, what any of us really ‘know’ is still barely visible to the average individual human eye, so we can only anticipate many more stupid religious arguments.

But arguments about what we believe are still better than the alternative lethal altercations - so long as we can indeed limit ourselves to verbal battles over words and ideas. I think the sun is a flaming ball, and I’ll leave it at that, for now.

I think the changes mean something

I would say that I’m firmly in favor of incremental change. But the world in which we live is not like that.

My dad was born into a world in which shouting was long distance communication. A horse and buggy was fast. Now we’ve ripped through so many changes that it hardly pays to mention them. It’s enough to say that I can talk to an image of your face in an instant even though your body is half-way around the world. I could actually reach out and touch your warm cheek in less than a day, flying at 30,000 ft. All these changes in space and time mean something, I’m quite sure of that. But here I sit, the pace of my own life from birth to now proceeding just as evolution decreed, and I think that my own life is moving along too fast all by itself.

So all I can do is try to make some sense of it. And where I usually start is with what, in all of these changes, is the same. The rest I’ll have to sort out as best I can – a little bit at a time.

But let’s say that some of this stuff means something. Perhaps I could tell you a story.

That’s something people have been doing from the beginning. Computers, the movies, even books – all are ways that we tell others what we have to tell. There’s considerable flash in the way we tell stories today, but it’s still fundamentally the story we crave.

So…

I met a girl. This happened long enough ago that the details don’t much matter. Maybe she was six when my wife and I moved into our house on New Hampshire Street. This girl was one of the neighbor girls. I watched her play and grow up. I talked to and teased her now and then. She moved away.

But my wife and I kept in touch with her parents, so we kept up a little with her and her sister. Surely there is so much more to tell about her life, but here’s just this: just recently she got married. It was too far for us to go – not really the distance, but the time and money. And then we saw the photos on Facebook.

She has gone from being the girl I met to a bride and considerably more. I got to see the photos – so much more than nothing – so much less than being there.

In my grandfather’s day, the girl that you met became the young woman that you saw married - and also so many of the moments in between. Significant aspects of space and time where different then.

I have some thinking to do to make more sense out of this. I met a girl. Today I know more of her than I might. And less.

Let’s do something right

I look at everything in our society twice. The first picture shows what media, industrial farming, big corporations, and on and on, are doing to our culture. And then I look at where people are doing good things and living with respect and satisfaction.

I can try to avoid adding my support to the former, but like they say, whaddya gonna do?

Way back in college days, we talked of the kernel growing in the husk of the old seed, new wine in old wineskins, the resurrection and the life.

A lot of talk has flowed down the river, but people are doing good and doing it well all along the way if you look at what is near at hand. Not solutions for the entire culture, perhaps, but people growing their own food, selling produce in local markets, people making solid things and working together for small progress for ourselves and a few others – that counts for something.

As far as I can tell, it has always been thus. Cottin’s Farmers Market was strong this year. That’s one picture I keep my eyes on. And others like it.

These things close to home are good sources for writing that encourages me, and, I hope, a few others. I’ve abandoned the talk of making everything better. Let’s do some things right – for now.

Life is real. Stories are made up.

I am not trying to recreate reality with my stories so that readers can vicariously relive the experience. Instead I think of much of the writing I do as art. Compared to painting – these stories fall in between representational and abstract works. Impressionistic, perhaps.

I start with observations of real people in real places doing real things. But then I select and shape with words, trying to express what interested me in the experience in the first place, highlighting certain elements, looking for hints about what it might mean.

I could break individual stories down for you – point out where the words describe fairly closely what happened, where I added thoughts and then bits of other experiences later. I should really reveal what I left out, which from the perspective of actual reality is almost everything. As the writer of the story, I know better than anyone how closely I have told what I experienced. Truth is another question entirely.

But to some degree, what happened is lost to me, too. The passing of time and the act of writing plays with my mind and my memories. So a story is really a new experience – one that the writer and the reader are having. The sense that you are looking in on something of life is part of it. A movie or historical novel based on true events is like that, but so are many stories that are imagined solely on the basis of fragments of the experiences of the writer or of others that are then shaped through the writer’s understanding of reality. Imagination can take humans far, but we tend to bring our selves and life as we know it along.

That’s what’s going on in my stories. You might ask what is fact and what is fiction, but don’t let those questions get in the way of wondering if the world is in some way like what I am writing and just what does that mean. Without a time machine, this book is the best way I know how to reveal to you something – whatever it was – that interested me enough to want to share it with you. If our minds connect that would be something.

For the record. Not only did I make up the family and the exchange over plugging parking meters, I believe I never told anyone not to plug the meter on a Saturday, thinking that it was Sunday. I might have done it. I might have, but I’m not sure. Does it matter very much?

I really drink egg creams at Aimee’s all the time. I could give you a thousand factual words about egg creams with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. Or I could buy you one. Words aren’t everything.

Art books: In the eye of the beholder

I consider myself a street writer. With the modern technology of self-publishing, all I ask is that you to put about $4 in my guitar case – that is, you pay for the printing costs and a few incidentals so that I neither make money nor lose money while I get to do what I want to do – which is write. My time and creativity I’m happy to give away to anyone who will listen.

If I really wanted to get wider exposure and a paycheck to begin to cover my time, I would need an established publisher. But even talented musicians who go on tour and have their albums widely distributed often need real jobs or they finally go back to the real world when they ‘grow up.’ And for many published writers, they usually require day jobs in academia or something. The J. K. Rowlings and the Rolling Stones are the rare exceptions, although there are ways that some writers do make an ordinary living just writing. Think volume.

Doing the math, if I could sell my books at a reasonable market value, I might net about $10 each. That would mean I’d have to sell a book an hour for than 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year just to make about half the median income in the United States. And I’d better be married to get health insurance. As a writer moves into the publishing world, publishers and booksellers need to make their living, too, and the writer’s royalty per book drops drastically. Of course, I could sell a million books a year. Some do.

So as it goes financially, street writers basically work for nothing – tips. And even the bulk of writers work primarily for supplemental income – pin money.

So it is with great satisfaction that I spend my time and creativity writing and not selling books. Writing is a primary way that I express appreciation for what matters to me in life. It is work that I do with pleasure for no pay and, yes, it helps when readers pay most of the dollar costs. But since I can print one at a time, there’s no real financial risk. And it is also important to mention that self-publishing makes it possible for some few people to be able read my writing  –  for me to be read - at all. And the only real hitch is that my reach as a street writer is so limited. I would indeed love to have lots of people a year reading what I have to say. It would indicate to some degree that what I express is worth something to someone else.

But for now I’m a street writer. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t already think that it was worth doing for myself.

And I still keep looking for ways to make my writing available to people who might be interested.  I’m pretty sure some people will enjoy reading some of the stories in my next book titled, ‘Little Bird: Small tales and poetry.’ So if you don’t want to stand in a long line outside my house waiting for midnight to roll around when that book will be released to the public with unimagined fanfare, I suggest you pre-order. I’m considering asking $7 bucks. I’ve added some extra costs, especially with the cover, and I’ve been drinking more egg crèmes lately – expenses, you know.

***

If you really want to add you your ‘Haverkate-Ens’ collection, there’s:

            Sidney Core’s Secret $4 (in stock)

            The Sky is Reflected in the River $4

            Cairns $4 (in stock)

            Bowersock $7

            Kaw River Bridge $15

            Little Bird $7

If you just want to borrow them and read them and look at the pictures, just ask. And remember, there’s a post on my blog every Thursday. But the reality is that however good my writing is, not that many people I know are as interested in reading what I want to write about as they are in reading the work of other writers. I have books on my shelf that I would recommend to you before recommending my own. But on any given day, something I wrote might mean something to you.

Sidney Core’s Secret is the one book at this point that I would like to see legitimately published, but no nibbles. You should see the so-so stuff in kid’s lit that has gotten published. Still, I haven’t tried very hard.

One of my biggest real difficulties as a writer is a lack of criticism. Because you know me, it’s hard for you to talk objectively about my writing without feeling like you are directing criticism at me. And, being human, it’s also tricky for me to separate out those things. That’s one reason published writers have gone through places like the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. It takes a village to raise a writer (apart from a few solitary geniuses). If you read something of mine and have a useful word to give, I would like to try to go from ‘pretty good’ to ‘better’ in my writing. So far I’m mostly guessing about how good my writing is.

But I’m having a pretty good time working at it.

Little big day for one writer

Little big day: I ‘click off’ on this year’s book. A tough click to make. The files will be locked in at CreateSpace; no more editing or proofing allowed; this is now what the book will be. Even though I expect distribution to be in the low tens, with actual readership well below that, my slightly anguished response to saying ‘it’s done’ is pretty irrational. Except for me, this is a virtual non-event.

The book is ‘Little Bird: Small tales and poems.’ I think more people might read more of these writings than I have produced in previous books. That is I think people are more inclined to read stories than poems. Don’t expect your copies right away, although turn around from order to print to doorstep is little more than a week.

I’m also one of four readers today at an assisted living facility reading from our individual ‘memoir writings,’ essays selected and essentially self-published. I was only briefly an active member of this local writing group and I have a piece in their second collection. Other members are quite active in trying to promote the book. I still have barely cracked my copy and it’s been out for a month. I see some chatter on the list serve. Still I am in print on some public bookshelves.

CreateSpace informed me that I have sold my third copy of the kid’s book, ‘Sidney Core’s

Secret,’ in October on Amazon. I also got my first official rejection from a literary agent last week on the same book. So far this is the only book that I think has a real chance for regular publication, although I’m not pushing very hard. Although I see kid’s books that are surely worse than mine when I look, the market remains flooded with good writing.

So I continue to I anticipate that I am years away from writing a book that someone else will want to publish, if then. One writer, a KU alum speaking here, who wrote ‘Winter’s Bone,’ which later became a significant movie, said that he wrote consistently for ten years before he got noticed, and he had come through the ‘writing program’ (MFA, and so on). My odds are long.

But I like ‘Little Bird.’ I’ve done some good work here. The end of the process is a real grind. But much of the writing is very satisfying. Putting fixed words to floating thoughts is a way of seeing the world. In a sense, I’m creating meaning for myself, but that’s what I’ve come to believe is a significant part of the human condition.

Now if anyone else will find worth in my words, that would be gravy.

Solipsism: Are we alone?

Solipsism, as an extreme philosophy, might not be true. In its simple characterizations, only I exist, and everyone else and everything else is a figment of my imagination.

But as a way of understanding life - the human condition in particular - solipsism isn’t entirely wrong. I don’t really feel your pain and you don’t feel mine. Joy works that way too. We as humans share many things. We are connected to each other in many ways. But it is a deep mystery that we each remain ourselves to a very significant degree.

And it seems to get weirder. The pain I feel might indeed exceed yours (if we could find a way to fully measure such things). A parent might feel a kind of pain I can’t begin to understand, watching a child struggling to breathe, wondering if I, in the middle of a major asthma attack might not make it till morning, for example. I was only the one mostly struggling to breathe. I did not feel what my parents felt.

Where all these feelings and sensations come from and where they all go has led a lot of people into religious realms I don’t care to tread. But new neurological and psychological understandings of the mind don’t erase – and in some ways they enhance - the mystery of my existence and yours.

Here’s a simpler way to start: I am apart. And I am together.

One doesn’t need the words to all fit precisely. They - the words - don’t really exist. At least, not in the same way that I do. Words are more correctly a figment of our imagination. But nevertheless, words are a primary way we express our thoughts and feelings, and so in part, they’ll have to do.

But distinctions should be noted and remembered, if only so that we can then momentarily forget that we don’t know everything and thus we can still imagine that we know something.

Faith is a word. But the act of believing something you can’t fully know – that is something more.

Again you shouldn’t get mired too deeply in the many constructed religious ideas that go along with words like faith and belief. The act of walking across the street takes a little faith. The light turns green and I don’t know if you will turn right, driving in your car, striking my body as it steps off the curb. I look quickly over my shoulder and I imagine your hesitation as a sign - and I walk.

Is that act of faith as big as it can get? As small? Nevertheless if you ask me if I have some faith, well, the answer is ‘yes.’ Descartes famously said, ‘I exist, therefore I am.’ I not so famously reply, I imagine, therefore I have faith.

These are all just words, I must remind you.

Here’s the thing: I am here. You are there. We could have something to eat and drink together. We could laugh at something that will be forgotten tomorrow. We could consider what it all means. And I suppose we will do all those things.

We should try to keep our words as close to our experience as we can manage. I don’t know as much as I would like to, but I think I know a few things. I imagine other things.

That bread we will eat came from wheat that grew from a seed that came from a plant that grew from another seed - and you can keep going farther back than any of us were born. You and I can imagine whatever we want about where and how it all came from. But today let’s give thanks for our daily bread. Would you like some butter on that bread? Or apricot jam?

When my parents had company, my mom would sometimes take the jam out of the jar and put it into a glass dish with a spoon in it. Can you believe that? And I can imagine my parents would be glad to see me still breathing if only they themselves were still here with us. Life moves on.

Would you like some beer or wine? Or would you prefer water? I don’t know that my dad ever even tried much besides water. He enjoyed knocking coffee as often as he could. I imagine he got some pleasure from his stale jokes because I, his progeny, also like to make a thing out of the joys of drinking ice water myself. But at this point, I believe more about my dad than I can know, I think.

I’m not only playing with words, here. And ‘playing’ is not quite the right word - and not quite the wrong word for what I am doing with this bit of writing. I am looking for ways that you and I can be together and not feel as apart as we sometimes feel.

It’s only a metaphor, but we can only imagine what will happen when we step off the curb.

So would you like something to eat or drink? I’ll tell you what I can remember. You tell me what you remember. Maybe we’ll share a laugh or a tear.

It’ll take some faith to imagine that some of what we think doesn’t matter as much as we think.

At least for now, we’re here - together.

Forget about Big ‘E’ Evolution for a Change

I’d like to somehow get past the primordial soup and monkeys for uncles and all those unimaginable millions of years and say something practical about evolution. I do think that science in the last few hundred years has come up with some explanations that can really help us understand who we are as a species. But how to get people to pay attention?

I realize that even that word, ‘species,’ seems to get some people’s hackles up, but I really would like to get outside of the mere controversy about people’s ultimate beliefs about ultimate things. Let me set aside, if I can, for a moment, all that vast expanse of time and space that came before or since ‘In the beginning …’ and state for the record that humans are astonishing beings. Our conscious awareness, our ability to calculate pi, all the beautiful and profound words and music we’ve produced, not to mention splitting atoms – we are indeed special. To say that we are created in the image of God might be one way of expressing that, I suppose.

And certainly God has been around for a long, long time. But whether God is the foundation of everything that now exists or a concept that has evolved alongside humanity is not my concern. And further, I don’t believe that resolving - or fighting over – which God is which is very useful. And I don’t see any good reason why my discussion of evolution needs to threaten anyone’s cherished metaphysical or theological ideas.

But there is a new worldview around that has something useful to say, some explanations that might help our self-understanding. I say ‘new’ in the sense that in all the thousands of years humans have written down our thoughts and ideas, these last few hundred years are something different. In a simplistic sense, humanity has gone from thinking about the world as a kerplunk! kind of place to a world that is in process. Kerplunk! may not be your first choice of words to describe the older view, but I think it is apt. And now the new view is one that says that with rigorous investigation we are now able to discover not just that something is what it is, but how it has become what it is. A ‘how’ worldview, if you will.

For me, it seems obvious that the material world operates according to natural laws over time. Whatever ideas about creation might mean to various people, I seriously doubt that God spread those layers upon layers of rock as if they were one flavor of icing on top of another with a cosmic spatula until they hardened – or that God simply blinked those rocks into existence just that way like I Dream of Jeanie. If nothing else – why would he?

I realize that it’s true that ‘process’ is something humans have recognized for a very long time, but we have in the last few hundred years only really begun putting the pieces more substantially together. I use the word ‘recently’ advisedly.

This scientific worldview has expanded thinking about many of the processes back millions of years – even billions. The only alternative I see to this massive time-frame shift is either to stay with a kerplunk! way of looking at things or to try to accept what the rocks and things are trying to tell us. If we stay with ‘blink’ as our answer, that pretty much means we now have to throw law and order out of the universe. Why should even gravity be a constant we can count on or water freeze solid enough to walk on at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit if we can constantly toss ‘blink’ in whenever we prefer?

To me, there seems to be no way around the ‘very long time’ idea. If we’re going to even say something as simple as that limestone is made out of the settled bodies of dead creatures with calcium in their skeletons who lived in very old seas that were then compressed into stone that’s as hard as rock it’s going to take calculable - but a lot - of time. Every physical thing in the universe becomes a willy-nilly proposition if we can’t even look at the Grand Canyon as a huge, complex example of the gradual small erosion that happens in a  bare field of soil after a series of thunderstorms.

I really think that it was a big mistake for some people to tie God’s hands to instants of time. But who or whatever God is, the linking of God to specific amounts of time is an idea that needs to be undone however unsettling that might be for some.

But I also think that with these newer ideas of evolution these shifts in thinking about time are not only unsettling for a few very religious folk. Although we are in a transition period in human thinking - and yes, some individuals have blithely stepped from one side to the other - we are, as a species, well entangled in kerplunk! kinds of thinking. Our individual lives are measured in decades. A million is not in anyone’s direct experience. The processes we actually see are not the same thing as all of that inexorable change over time. They’re only hints. It takes careful observation and inference before any human can imagine a coherent explanation for the present snapshot in front of us now. The universe exists in an almost unimaginable time-frame  for any of us – but that time is an essential concept if what we see around us to make sense.

Consider this: if evolution tells us nothing else, it’s that even scientists who don’t bat an eye at light-years and nanoseconds also share the same kind of mind with all of the rest of us. Whether it’s a creationist or an evolutionist walking alone on a dark night, when they hear a rustling in the bushes their brain will tell their heart to pick up its pace - the hackles on the back of their neck might stiffen.

The story of evolution is indeed that humans are directly related to all of the other species. We – for all of our rationality  –  we all are likely to act as if something might be there in the darkness -  something about to eat us. Even if it’s simply a dark night on a city street in which we are rationally likely to encounter a creature no more threatening than a wandering house cat and not a mountain lion – or even if you take a story, which some believe, in which they imagine it might be a spirit from a supernatural dimension in those bushes, I think that it makes sense that there is a reason that our human brain is the way that it is.

A process of becoming simply makes who we are now as this special species fit with our experiences. The simplest of common experiences shows that even in this modern millennium, our brain prepares our body to run for its life – for a reason. Unless, you’re determined to resorting to different kinds of supernatural magic that fill the world with false appearances of process – of processes that never actually were - it’s not that hard to trace that instinctive reaction to run back to something that is more complicated than kerplunk! thinking. But let’s let that one go, for a moment.

It is perhaps a little unsettling, if any of us thought hard about it,  for us to learn that it might be more than mere coincidence that we share DNA - chemical coding you can’t see with your naked eye, which determines so many of your physical characteristics - with a cat or an amoeba. That we might indeed be related to each other through long processes of change and long periods of time is not easily fathomable. Evolution is not a simple story although some parts can be told quite simply. And although I don’t think that religion needs to be entangled with these more basic scientific explanations, the human mind – as it has evolved, or as it was created to be, take your pick for now – our brain in fact tangles these kinds of things together quite naturally.

We are born, each of us, with a brain that has the instincts we see in other animals all around us. That should be unmistakable and it was to many people long before Darwin came along.

And we are each of us also born into a human culture that has come to imagine all sorts of ideas about how and why things are as they are. Some of those stories are simply wrong. But it takes conscious effort to sort through it all. Our brain is not a smooth crystal sphere the size of peach, nor is it a cube of metal and silicon that a kerplunk! creator could just as easily have decided upon. This folded, complicated, fleshy organism, with parts that do appear to come from here and there – that brain generally prefers taking things easy. Who has time for all that rational thought? Life goes on at the inexorable pace of time; we have a mate to find; children to beget; maybe we’d just like to go out for pizza and a movie; and now just look: human beings haven’t yet sorted everything out. But the problem becomes acute when I don’t like the way your tribe looks or thinks.

If we look around us, we will see that it is quite natural that human beings hold on to enough blurry or simply bad thinking that we miss out on some really interesting new stories - if only because we’ve been told that the new stories will undo some stories that we hold so dear.

And yes, science will in fact undo some stories – religious and otherwise – that have been around for a long time – because the new stories will turn out to be better stories – better explanations. I’m quite sure that many God stories will still stick around. And it’s also quite certain that religious stories and scientific stories will, on occasion, conflict.

But I’m pretty sure that reality won’t be undone by the different stories we humans tell. But however we got here, humans are prone to take their own tribe’s ideas much too seriously – even if they are right (although a definitive ruling eludes us). Furthermore, for being the most rational species on the planet, we frequently don’t use what reason we possess and instead simply call each other stupid – and then it gets worse.

Where does all this discord come from?

The God side broadly says our confusion comes from original sin. Evolution suggests that it’s something we inherited from our mother’s and our father’s side – from way, way, way back. There are some nuanced differences in the accounting, of course.

It’s not that I am simply saying that you should just listen to all sides. Some stories make more sense than others. Some tellers of stories have worked harder and more carefully at looking at life and the material world in the working out of their stories. That should count for something.  But at least you should be careful about excluding a story or parts of a story because of the way that it has gotten bundled in with certain other stories – that leave you naturally unsettled.

Whoever or whatever God turns out to be, the I Dream of Jeanie version – blink, kerplunk! - however you dress it up - when it comes to the natural universe, that part will turn out to be no more than a fairy tale.

And whatever else you think about that scientific hit, The Theory of Evolution, you’re going to want to pay attention to stories about long periods of time and processes that led to intricate relationships between a vast array of creatures through the many generations of life on the Earth.

There are some fascinating stories.  Whoever or whatever wrote the whole book of life and however far back it goes to marks the beginning, not everything can be rationally believed. That cuts several ways. Argue about ultimate origins if you want to, but look carefully at stories about processes and change over time. That’s the core of what evolution means. Start there, honestly, and see what you think.

History staring you in the face

You can’t blame the machines, the woman said, talking about one-ways and listers – plows - at Nerdy Dirty Thirties Night at Pachemamas. It was the practices.

Nerd Nite was packed with people, most of them perhaps around their thirties, talking back and forth, getting something to drink - and to hear presentations on the Dust Bowl. The startling photographs of clouds of roiling farmland about to engulf farmhouses and towns were on the screen. Equally startling was the fact, the woman said, that in fifteen short years, men walking behind horse-drawn, one bottom plows would be replaced by fossil fuel-powered multi-gang plows, although she pointed mostly to the gangs of plowshares on machines on the screen. And she was right, of course: thirty years into a new century, a wet period had turned to drought almost overnight – but, as she pointed out, anyone with an eye to history could have seen that cycle coming around, if the timing could not be not predicted precisely to coincide with the exposure of the land to the weather.

But If the plow wasn’t to blame, well then, what could they have been thinking? Another woman passed around a jar full of Dust Bowl dust, collected from buildings torn down from that long ago era. She mentioned water erosion in her talk about the art that followed those dirty thirties – and she had paintings and photographs to show. But none of them were scenes – not apparently startling or historical enough yet - of farmland flowing under the Kaw River bridge every minute, day after day, a few blocks from where we all coolly sat. She informed us that in Arabic there’s a word for dust storm, ‘haboob,’ and everybody laughed. What else can you do? The Dust Bowl is, after all, like water under the bridge.

But if John Deere gets the credit for innovating the moldboard plow – adding metal to the share so that it could cut deep into prairie soils - who does get the blame for the dust bowl? It was a relief to finally step into an unseasonably hot September night. The air-conditioning in Pachemamas had been set way too high. If there’s a Nerd Nite next century, will there be a woman showing photos of Carrier air-conditioners saying you couldn’t blame the machines, it was the practices. What could they have been thinking?

I walked home. I use best practices on my AC – 78 degrees, sometimes turned down to 76. What else am I going to do – sleep in a tent made from buffalo skins? I dreamt that there was a haboob on the horizon.

Wendell Berry's Agrarianism

I don’t know if I can convince anyone to respond to my question, but I can ask it anyway.

The first thing for you to do would be to read the essay, ‘Money Versus Goods,’ by Wendell Berry because I think that my question involves the apparent impracticality of Mr. Berry’s writing. In this essay he expounds an ideal that has never existed since Capitalism and Industrialism became the dominant ideals of our society except, of course, in undeveloped regions of the world. Mr. Berry advocates a kind of Agrarianism.

And yet to me although many of his ideas as I read them seem intrinsically sound, they often seem to float free above the real world our society has become. This is the way of philosophy, I suppose. We attempt to describe ideals and then with our reason we connect them to our lives. I think Mr. Berry begins a good effort in the first part of this Agrarian program, although at a level of abstraction that will leave many readers who have not applied their own thinking to these very fundamental questions somewhat adrift.

But if I think Mr. Berry is correct on several key points, a more specific way to connect his critique to our real circumstances must be found.

In ‘Money Versus Goods’ Mr. Berry makes the argument that sustainability is essential and that to achieve sustainability our economy must be ‘real,’ not primarily numbers and abstractions. The land and people are real and with those two elements we should be able to produce food and fiber in ways that are healthy and humane. This is hard to imagine in the present context in which normal production results in yearly losses of topsoil and repeated applications of poisons which end up in our water supply. I won’t repeat all of Mr. Berry’s points, but his criticism of the very common practice of ‘usury’ also points to our difficulty in getting from here to there even if some people see the merit in what he is saying.

I cannot see myself abandoning some of the achievements of Capitalism and Industrialism. I don’t want to live in a skyscraper and I’m glad not to rely on a subway system on a regular basis but I find much to admire in the concentration of wealth that makes cities a potential way of making buildings and institutions that are much more complex than an Amish barn. And some complex technologies, each advance built on earlier advances, might well be worth preserving. Not every application of a computer necessarily has cultural merit, but how do we mesh what does make sense with Agrarian ideals?

Mr. Berry concludes his essay with possible, if unlikely, changes in agriculture - a likely place to begin to try to be more practical in bringing the ideals of Agrarianism to bear within our society.

And so here begins my question. I have thought for some time now that the best solutions to what ails us as a society is to try to live some better way within the husk of a failing culture. The apparent increase of people farming on small scales and selling their produce at local farmer’s markets matters more to me than the perennial hope of electing better representatives to government.

But if ever growing numbers of people are going to see and embrace Agrarian ideals - that is better, sustainable ways of living – it will require a cultural shift that eventually involves many different facets of our society. So the question I now am wrestling with is how do I learn to think new ways of thinking and begin to live in ways that don’t lend my support to systems I abhor but give more of my efforts to better ways of being human? Inevitably the question I now pose is too big. So my real question is what are the questions that have answers that are within my reach?

Still too big? That’s why I would like to hear some responses. In dialogue and over time I think we have a better chance to bring ideals into connection with the real.

I planted potatoes on Friday. Some spinach, lettuce and arugula, as well. I won’t feed myself for very many meals, but I think at least that I’m keeping the faith. If something will get better, it won’t all be up to me, but my goal is to do less in the old world and more in the new with each year I have to live.

Any other ideas?

Mike’s Prairie Numbers

I am mostly interested in these questions of plant germination because they’re interesting – a tautology if there ever was one. I have great respect for the scientific method – call it basically a careful recording of occurrences of things over time. But where science hasn’t gotten around to looking - and examples are numerous – some people have still more loosely employed this method, possibly then noticing some things that a more rigorous study would overlook. Consider Edward Abbey’s descriptions of the desert.

Given the slipperiness of human memory and our easily biased perceptions, there’s a lot to be said for rigor, particularly when we really want to understand how things work. But it seems today, except where money is to be made (think Monsanto), it isn’t much applied. And neither is a more simply observant approach, I fear.

I think of the new generations of organic farmers, with seemingly less attention to collecting hard (quantified) data that they might use and also without the intricate details about beneficial practices that careful farmers used to pass down from old farmer to young farmer. The new breed has books, I guess. I electrified part of my house using one. No fires yet. But nature is far, far more complex than house wiring. Perhaps I’m well off the mark - after all, I have not done a careful survey of farmers’ practices. But there seems to be an awful lot of sloppy thinking in the world of growing and eating food that is more natural or organic.

The Land Institute is a notable exception to this trend, in my opinion.

Where you could benefit as you study your prairie, I suspect, is getting more connected to other people who are interested in prairies and these plants and who are also applying some rigor. But this is also important: although you have some practical objectives, they haven’t submerged your fundamental desire to understand and respect the natural world for what it is.

Where have you gone, Donald Rumsfeld, when we finally get to an area where you begin to make sense?

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. 

There is little that I enjoy more than catching a glimpse of something that I didn’t even realize I knew nothing about. A good question in the hand is worth a thousand answers in the bush. Except, of course, for actually getting something done now.

And here’s Wendell Berry in ‘Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front.’

Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers.

On the other hand, you can show no greater respect to Nature than observing her ways carefully and recording what she is doing. If that practice leads us reverently into the unknown, so be it.

Except for first securing my fundamental respect, rarely, I find, is there only one right way to look at things. But how is it that so many people have lost even their interest in Nature?

Distracted by what we tell ourselves

What if instead of distilling a philosophy of life based on what people say their ideals and values are, we looked at what people actually do – the way people live and actually spend their time and energy? What if we looked at the greatest society in the history of the world?

We say that we all have a right to pursue happiness but we don’t give everyone a job, or merely the opportunity to work somehow for themselves so that they could earn with their time and effort the money needed to purchase, not just happiness, but their very survival. We insist that the market must be free. That freedom, we imply, is sacred, not human lives.

Yet some easily find exceptions to the idea that people should work for their living. Many are willing to say that anyone has the right to inherit and spend money they never worked a day in their life for.

Clearly the rights of accumulated property overrule the rights of people to earn even their daily bread. But even if it weren’t ordained, our economic system must be the best, the winners say. Look at what wonders we have produced with our accumulated wealth and your labor – when we could benefit from your labor and minimize its costs, that is.

Of course I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t be entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labor, their property protected, and even shared with their children. Everyone should be granted that opportunity. Everyone. But many of our stated rights are clearly not inalienable when you realize how much of people’s opportunities depend on to which family they are born and how wealth actually accumulates.

There need be no class warfare if we would make better attempts to structure our society fairly. But if, at some point, the rich will have taken too much and the poor will realize they have not be allowed their share, or even the opportunity to earn something close to their share, there will be strife.

So far our society’s repeated talk about freedom and opportunity has kept most of us from noticing that it’s not just life that isn’t fair. We continue to accept somehow that it must be mostly their own fault if people are poor. Or we’ve accepted the idea that we don’t have the power to make our society more fair. But in history, we can see that sometimes rights are claimed and won.

Some people died along the way to give Barack Obama his chance, for one example.

Some of us get much more than we deserve and some of us get less. Look who gets to make the rules, and look who gets to decide what’s fair. Ask yourself who decides whose time and energy is worth more and whose is worth less. If you think the market of opportunities for pursuing happiness is free, look again.

The middle class, moderately comfortable, mostly passive, separates the rich from the poor. If they disappear, or begin to realize that their interests are more in line with the poor, watch out.

Humans will live with a lot of hardship, but when they think someone else is taking their rightful share, there will be strife.

Martin Luther King may rise up again. This time his parents might be from Mexico. Everything but the details and the dates are already written in the history books. More of us should have talked less and looked more closely at how we actually live – and how people have come to decide when they’d finally had enough of all the talk in the face of obvious human unfairness, and they struck back.

Too high, I tell you: A fable

A friend was telling me how when he was back visiting people in our home town, everyone kept telling him that taxes in Kansas were just too high. Several factoids had been offered in favor of arguments to cut whatever spending could possibly be cut. I tried to explain that while a more liberal person could try to do some research to try to counter the conservative’s arguments, it would be futile. I wrote this fable instead. Based on two true groceries stores that once existed, one a little to the left of Main and one a little to the right, nothing is true about the main character except her name.

A fable:

How Kansans know that their taxes are just too high

Bert Haverkate-Ens

Georgina told me that she won’t shop at Paul & Ray’s anymore because their prices are too high. She always goes to Vogt’s. Georgina told me that she once went to Paul & Ray’s to buy a gallon of milk and then the next week she went into Vogt’s and saw that their milk was much cheaper.

Why, Georgina said, she had saved nearly 10 cents at Vogt’s – a dime – and then – and then, Georgina said,  I know that a dime doesn’t sound like much, but if you add up those nickels and dimes, pretty soon you’re talking real money. And that was just one gallon of milk. Imagine the bread and the carrots and – and the meat. Why, meat is expensive to begin with. Well, Paul & Ray’s is simply way too expensive, Georgina said.

I asked her whether she had checked the price of broccoli.

Well, what would that have to do with anything? Georgina said. Even if they undercut Vogt’s by a penny on some kind of sale - you know that’s just their way to get you into their store to buy milk and all their other high-priced items – what does the price of all the broccoli in China have to do with anything? I could have bought a half-a-dozen bunches of broccoli and then when you add in that there milk and I would still have walked out of Paul & Rays paying way too much. Do I have to show you my receipt? I mean, do you think I am lying to you? I personally experienced this incident I am telling you about not less than six months ago.

I had tried to calm Georgina down by suggesting that perhaps a more comprehensive survey by some unbiased shoppers, say a group of people from Peabody - or maybe Wichita - over time and such - might give a person a more accurate comparison.

Oh no, Georgina said, I saw those numbers with my own eyes. I paid eight cents more for a single gallon of milk at Paul & Rays than I paid at Vogt’s. And besides, I don’t need no snooty over-educated, under-common sensed Wichita people to tell me what is as plain as the nose on my face. You can fool some of the people some of the time, and maybe you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool me by waving a bunch of statistics under my nose. Everybody knows that you can prove anything you want to prove with statistics. Why I just read in an old Reader’s Digest that 47% of Americans pay too much for their groceries, and they don’t even realize it. Well, not me, no sirree. Even if those Wichita shoppers used real numbers - and I wouldn’t put it past them to round up or round down to serve their preconceived big city notions - they are still likely to keep just twisting those numbers until those numbers say just whatever they want those numbers to say.

Georgina went on explaining to me more than I thought possible about statistics, finally concluding: as if I don’t know that 2 plus 2 doesn’t equal 5. Georgina harrumphed. And then Georgina looked me hard in the eye saying, you’re not trying to tell me I’m, stupid, are you? It’s really quite simple, really, you’ll pay more for groceries if you go to Paul and Ray’s. I don’t know any one – at least not one good, decent, hard-working person, that is, - that doesn’t shop at Vogt’s. Are you trying to tell me that we’re all fools? Is that really what you’re running me around the bushes about?

Why, you listen to me, my mother told me never to listen to people who are just a little too big for their britches. She told me when I was just a little girl not to shop at Paul & Rays. She told me she once bought a gallon of milk there and when she got home it smelled just a little like it might be about to go sour in another day or two. Why we might all have died of food poisoning in our sleep if she hadn’t dumped that milk down the sink. She told me to let that be a lesson to me, and, well, I am a little embarrassed to admit that when I was in a hurry a few months ago, and I went in and bought that gallon of milk at Paul & Ray’s, and well, now just you lookie here now: My mama’s advice to always go to Vogt’s turned out to be as right as rain. I’m not saying their food is all bad at Paul & Ray’s, but it definitely costs too much. Everybody knows that, Georgina said.

***

The moral of the story: Always vote for the name behind the ‘R’ on the ballot. You will certainly be able to come up with a reason that makes sense to you later, no matter what anybody else tries to tell you.

If only there actually was more to Kansas politics than that, but I fear that there is simply is no arguing with logic like this.

Harrumph!

Stories: Summaries and links

The writings that follows are of a piece in that they are a response to letters from a friend.

Suppose that you begin with : http://eggcreme.blogspot.com/2013/06/telling-stories.html

bouncing off Jonathon Gottschall.

Then to: http://eggcreme.blogspot.com/2013/07/making-up-stories-as-we-go.html in which I end up telling a story about losing a bet and going for ice cream.

Then perhaps the crown jewel: http://eggcreme.blogspot.com/2013/07/sequitur-explanations-and-stories.html. Perhaps things are starting to really come together.

And finally: http://eggcreme.blogspot.com/2013/07/is-clarity-next-to-godlinessis-it.html.

A venture into the meaning of clarity.

Two pieces for illustration purposes follow:

A poem describing my Fourth of July: http://www.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=9103117969126881594&blogID=7844783554281651084

The photos add meaning.(The link expires in August. Contact bhe to refresh the link to the unlisted blog.) Only the poem itself is posted at: http://walktokawap.blogspot.com/2013/07/uncle-ray.html This poem is a little interesting to me, since it was written for people who were there, yet might it make sense to readers who were not? I suspect the answer is 'yes' in spite of missing details and contexts.

And these two pieces, one text and one photo-essay: http://walktokawap.blogspot.com/2013/07/hunger-for-honor-and-renown.html and http://walktokawap.blogspot.com/2013/07/tennis-latkes_2234.html in which the photos are perhaps worth a thousand words.

My bottom line is that if you fail to understand what I have meant, there is a good chance I could have told the story better. But the chance is not vanishingly small that a reader has failed to pay close enough attention, or simply lacked some necessary context for following a story that doesn’t proceed they way they’d prefer. That’s a risk I am prepared to take. I intend to be understood. But I don’t need to write for the least common denominator. If I'm not going to be widely read, I will at least have some fun.

These are my stories: must I spell them out for you? If you think I am losing an essential screw somewhere, ask me. I’d be more than happy to give you a clue. Most of my readers - well, you know where to find me.

Descartes walked into a bar.

The bartender asked: Can I make you a whiskey sour?

Descartes replied: I think not –

an therefore he promptly vanished.

Excuse me, Are we losing respect?

How can we have a common understanding unless we respect each other? And how can we respect each other unless we share a common understanding with each other?

Another apparent bootstraps and skyhooks question.

One of the primary points I made in ‘God? talk’ is that sometimes we have to go back to the soup. Most of us are not really in shape to closely follow NPR or FOX News let alone the Supreme Court. All that lack of understanding is mostly just fodder for fighting and disrespecting each other. Instead, we need to  go way back to the fundamentals – we need to begin by creating circumstances where people – our fellows by proximity - just are together, without complicated expectations, were self-evidence abounds. People who come to listen to music in a park or watch fireworks on the Fourth of July, for example.

Oh, the misbehaving brat over there, you say. The jerks on the next blanket drinking too much and talking too loudly, you point out. And so what?

If a community of mutual respect will ever be able to form, these closer encounters are the places where it must start one way or another - with people simply being together, people practicing extremely small amounts of respect for one another. Frankly, we first must manage the small stuff before we can tackle the tough stuff. And so I say, forego the national arena, and turn to the sidewalks of downtown, or places like parks or malls or sporting events.

Now it’s true that we have come to live in an age where our elbows don’t naturally bump very often. We’re less often out on the front porch or just walking by on the sidewalk. Driving on the streets, we usually pass each other with tinted windows rolled up. If it weren’t for the grocery store, some people might never have to say ‘excuse me’ again.

Our advanced society has so progressed to the point where humans don’t touch or make eye contact except in proscribed settings. When do we get the chance to ask for help or to give it - to need each other directly? When is a just a little respect even called for? Of course, we see many large examples of disrespect. We’re so out of practice, for one thing. Self-service may in fact represent the death of our culture. And maybe it’s time to simply hold doors for each other once again.

I suggest that first we stand closer together. Then – if we are willing to try – we can begin to notice what we admire in the strangers whose elbows are nearby. And if we are lucky, a Frisbee will go astray and we will smile and toss it back.

It’s never been true that human beings start with strong mutual respect and common complex understandings – although we do have a cooperative nature to match our competitive side. But as with anything worthwhile, cooperation needs to be exercised. Good behavior must be practiced and acknowledged. We won’t be able to start with working out gay marriage or tax breaks – although we’ll have to settle for some stopgap solutions until we are mature enough to talk about those kinds of issues. We have apparently painted been traveling the wrong directions for some time.

To me it is clear: I think we’re going to have to go back to basics and work with Frisbees and  passing the soy sauce to the next table. You start with the soup and build community from there.

Clarity matters less in stained glass

Is clarity next to godliness? Is it really the best policy in writing?

I am now prepared to state that comprehension is the end for most communication, but that clarity is merely one of the means to that end.

So rarely do we even achieve clarity - and, yes, confusion is rampant - that we rarely consciously recall that our intent is to understand each other. Clarity is one simple solution.

Poetry is one way we might find how we have lost sight of our intentions. It would be simple, and clear enough, to say that Mr. Eliot’s ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is primarily about growing old. And clearly, many people are not interested in following phrases that leave them scratching their thinning hair. Measuring out our life with coffee spoons; rolling or not rolling our trousers; do I dare to each a peach? Really?

I think Mr. Eliot has marked his impressions on the page not unlike Mr. Monet. Realism and accurate representation have their places, but our minds are not mere mechanisms. If we are willing, we are capable of taking experiences and ideas - in fragments, out of context - and shape them or let them come together into something unexpected and meaningful in our minds.

Of course, we often want to share these things with each other and language is our means to this end. But, and I cannot over state this, the world and our minds are analog – not digital.

Now I am doing my best to measure out my words so that the idea that is in my mind will match the thought that comes into your head, but I am also likely a fool on several counts. Only on the page are these words fixed. Aspects of the thoughts themselves remain fluid in my own mind. I have some hints as to what I am thinking, to be sure, but several of the primary notions we all have about our own thinking processes themselves are, at least in significant part, illusion.

Rationality and irrationality are inseparable in reality. As are consciousness and unconsciousness and many other word pairs. Even this particular moment, as I have tried to pin it down, no longer exists as I reach the period at the end of the sentence. I don’t mean to pull us too far into waters whose depths are beyond fathoming, but I can’t let this discussion entirely remain on the surface. Some murk will always lurk, although we attempt to generalize and categorize.

But to return to what I think Mr. Eliot is trying to do, which is to draw us out of simple, shallow ideas and give us a glimpse of some of the mysteries of our existence, he paints with words as his colors and his brushstrokes, dashing them in ways that are not always immediately clear. And indeed these metaphors themselves are embedded in our language.

There is much chaos and confusion in our speech and our writing and that kind of misunderstanding is not the direction to which I am pointing. What we need for what we are trying to express at different times calls for various approaches, but muddle and carelessness will almost never serve us well.

But particularly when we are writing about things that we truly do not fully comprehend ourselves, and with the realization that we are still processing thoughts that people have thought about long before we ourselves began and will continue well after we have ended - a more open approach with our words may yield more understanding.

In a sense, my objection really is to a kind of precision – let us call it clarity – which does not and possibly cannot exist. Words will not contain the reality Mr. Eliot is exploring. His expression has reached my mind, likely in ways he never intended, and the words are printed there on the page, to be reviewed and discovered. And it is only his words have solidified. Many have found that in a real sense those words live, I suspect, that because of some ambiguity, perhaps misdirection, certainly some absences of obvious meaning that he left there in his poem and that we bring along with our own minds into the search for meaning. At some pause in the process of reading ‘Love song…’ - it appears that we somehow might share with Mr. Eliot and other at least a resonant meaning.

Poetry is a special case within language. That is poets give themselves permission not to be entirely clear as it suits their purpose. Some results seem unnecessarily muddled, to me. But poetry is also a quality. Perhaps you could say that poetry is the other part of clarity, the music to the lyric, if you will.

So even in more prosaic speech, there might be more than one best way to arrange our words to convey meaning. Conventional, clear writing will never go out of style – I hope. It often serves us well. But clarity is not my ultimate intent.

I want you to know and recall just how beautifully words can express the longing and delight in my mind.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky …

Sequitur: Explanations and Stories

I would like to offer this explanation. I believe everything is connected. And if only in my own mind, everything follows not unlike summer following two dips of ice cream in one bowl. It would not have been necessary to mention these preliminary thoughts, perhaps, but there they are anyway. Whether some had been left out would have hardly have been of any consequence, but what, on the other hand, should I have omitted or forgotten?

And what if my wife and I hadn’t gone to the lake, on the second perfect day – an evening in which the sailboats heeled over, came about, and then headed back? Or the next evening, if I hadn’t run into a young man - who had once been with the women he’s no longer with – those two who are no longer the couple I met by chance on a much earlier perfect evening way back in the spring? Does it matter that the burger I ordered was called Smoke and the one he ordered called Fire – or that he had a corn dog on the side? And how about earlier, in the morning - now I’m speaking mostly of the day hard at hand - I had typed some words about stories. Or was that the day before?

Nevertheless, having said all of that, I looked out my window overlooking my fish pond where I had a few hours before explained to a woman - with whom I had pruned rose bushes at the church earlier while that very day was still quite cool - about how I folded the rubber liner into the deep hole I had dug in the ground so that it would all hold water. Sometimes you need to get up pretty early in the morning, but, I must confess, I probably didn’t need to mention that either. Still all of this happened, and, at least in my mind,  it connects to what I am trying to explain to you now.

A good friend, you see, has this theory about explanations and I just finished reading a book about stories. And after I’ve finished the one I will tell you the other. If you look carefully, I think that you will see that I’m really talking about the same thing, although there are always significant differences if you look carefully.

So if I have a point, you may have to find it for yourself. It’s not as if art imitates life - at least in the beginning - although later the two become quite entangled. I have gone in this bit of writing and put the cart before the horse to tell you quite bluntly that words can be dropped and pulled to express what we think and feel, and that if any of this makes any sense, it won’t be entirely up to me. It’s all a game we play – writer and reader, (I’m telling you this straight out), and before I finish this explanation, I’d like to thank Mr. Frost and Mr. Eliot, without whom none of this might not have happened, but it did. And Don’t Stop Please, a band of young musicians, whom I first heard playing and singing on the sidewalk in front of Weaver’s on a perfect fall afternoon some years ago. And, of course, my wife – there was a chance meeting if there ever was one. And while I’m running along, thank you to my parents, without whose love I wouldn’t even be here, he smiled.

I could go even further, I suppose, and thank the stars winking overhead in the night sky as they are rushing fast away - and yet things come together.

Now I’m afraid my explanation is not as clear and complete as it might have been, but I promised you a story. It happened like this:

It was on the fifth perfect summer day in a row, and I’m mostly talking about the weather. But I believe that all things are connected – somehow - so a little spillover into other subjects should be expected. I was walking to the river a little later in the afternoon than usual. Up in the Gazebo in South Park three boys were kicking a hacky sack. As I passed, I watched a younger boy clambering up from the outside. I heard one of the older boys ask him if he wanted to join them. “It will help your skateboarding, ‘cause you have to use your toes,” he said.

I smiled at how he tied things together and I thought about turning and climbing the steps to see if I could join in, too. I probably doubled each of those kid’s weight, and tripled, maybe quadrupled, their ages.

Then one boy kicked a little too high and the hacky sack sailed over the railing and down off the far side of the Gazebo. I heard a mingling of exclamations and I turned. And in a few steps - I suppose close to a dozen - I reached the hacky sack in the grass, picked it up, and tossed it up and over to one of the taller boys.

“Thanks, man,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I returned, already walking away into a nearly perfect day. I was grateful enough that they had let an older man join in their play.

And so then, farther along, only a few blocks, I suppose, two men my age that I recognized were sitting on a concrete planter box in the late afternoon sun. They expressed only a very few handwritten words on cardboard. When I stopped and mentioned something about the perfect weather, one told me that the radio had just said that there was a 20% chance of rain later that night.

Not much, but it would be welcome, I thought to myself several minutes later as I looked over the railing. The river down there and extending out to the horizon was lower than the day before. And tomorrow will be Wednesday.

Not much of a story, but thanks, anyway.

Making up stories as we go

Some time ago I wrote a piece called ‘Repetition.’ http://walktokaw.blogspot.com/2012/06/repetition.html

I acknowledged that more or less everything had already been said and written. And, in a general sense, I still think that is true. It is in the particularity of each life that most newness occurs. If you haven’t heard the one about … well, you might find what I am about to tell you funny.

One question, then, is what does bear repeating? Are there truths that we want to hear again and again? I don’t necessarily mean the big truths that might be true for our whole species for all time. Though when I suggest that there are individual truths that mostly resonate within each person according to their own history, I don’t mean to merely point toward some disconnected relativism.

But the Truth and the truths are all over the place. Uncertainty is in abundance. And so I come back to ‘Story.’

Stories are the collections of words we tell ourselves and each other to try to connect the dots, to make some sense, to know what we mean - what everything means. And now, I have gone too far.

That ‘everything story’ is beyond our grasp, however much we sometimes seem to want to hear it and finally ease our uncertain minds.

Fortunately for our sanity – what we call being healthy and generally satisfied with our lives – we live much of the time in the particular, content with the truths close at hand. Stories of love and hate, success and failure – my family, my work, my friends – well, you know the tales that we tell. We weave in some strands of bigger truth and then we get the fabric of our life.

But even one life, by the time you try to tie it to all of each person’s context is a story too big to tell. And so we simplify and generalize some more. In short, story is mostly a kind of fiction, an abridgment of the empirical world. It is the collection of words our storytelling self tells and writes to connect some of the dots so that we can see a pattern, so that something – even a little something - makes sense.

Our other self – the material animal, traveling through time and space, this container of awareness, of consciousness, of our being - steps and stumbles through the particular world. This too, as I am saying it, is a story we tell and we pinch our flesh now and then and conclude that we are not dreaming. And then we savor a bite and a drink and - I do believe she just smiled at me.

This is as real as it usually gets, it seems.

I’m not making this up. That is, someone, many some ones, have already beaten me to describing this idea. I’m only telling it again with my particular spin.

Here’s a piece of the whole as I see it:

My wife lost her library book several days ago. In our household, my role is to find things. I generally have a knack for seeing things – that is their images – tucked into a corner of my mind – call them synaptic clefts or neurotransmitters if you prefer. I recalled Dawn holding a book in her hand and saying something about taking it along with her to an estate sale in case her friend took too much time looking everything over.

A day later the book was nowhere to be found in the house. Dawn was certain she didn’t actually take the book into the estate sale, and her friend, who is particular about stuff, had insisted over the phone that she hadn’t picked it up by mistake and taken it into her house. I was pretty sure I saw the book in Dawn’s hand the morning before. Dawn said she had looked in the car.

So after several turns around the house myself, I employed my brilliant powers of deduction, my repeated recollections of my wife not managing to see what is in front of her nose, and I determined that there could be only one answer. So sure was I that I had crossed all the ‘T’s’ and dotted all the ‘I’s’ of this story that as we walked toward the car, I bet my wife an ice cream that I would find the book in the car.

I reached my hand under the driver’s seat, looked under the passenger’s seat, checked under the sunshade in the back seat – and Voila – we were off to Silas and Maddy’s for ice cream: A double dip waffle cone in a dish with two spoons – pralines and cream and triple fudge. We walked to the park next to the Watkins Museum and sat on the bench under the bamboo shelter. The evening was perfect for June.

As we dipped our spoons into the melting ice cream – I used the cone for an occasional spoon – a bunny you could have cupped in two hands nibbled green grass several arms lengths away and the sky was not cloudy all day.

Sometimes I prefer life to stories. Sometimes stories connect the dots. Give me a double dip cone in a dish with a waffle cone spoon. Playing with uncertainty can be sweet.

Telling stories

I just finished reading ‘The storytelling animal,’ by Jonathan Gottschall. A good enough book. It covered mostly familiar territory for me, but I assume many parts would be revealing for some people. ‘Story’ is a very good lens to use and by the end of the book I was convinced of what I already believed, and yet still these issues remain beyond the grasp I want. Of course, I want the impossible – which in this case is to understand the human mind. I suppose it doesn’t help that the primary tool I have to do that with is a single human mind. And I barely understand myself.

So let’s start with an illuminating quote from Gottschall:

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can't.

And then back in Jeremiah it says: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Allrighty then.

So I am in good company when I say:

We want our illusions. We don't want to be fools, but we really do want to be fooled - again and again. And many times, we would prefer not to know that we are being fooled. There is real magic in our illusions, magic that is often stronger than empirical reality.

Once again, the pronouncements remind us of a general intuition, but our reach for understanding exceeds our grasp. Assuming Gottschall is generally correct, human beings want stories – in most cases, stories with setting and characters and actions particularly defined. And yet we will (even want to) be fooled.

Rationality is one illusion that must be faced. As we argue with each other personally, or in society, we want to believe that we are not lying to each other – at least, that we are not lying to ourselves. But going all the way back in recorded time we have been fooling ourselves. Why should now be different?

Of course, we also manage the truth now and then. So how do we tell which is which, knowing our penchant for deceit? Ay, there’s the rub. Shakespeare had his own revealing tales to tell.

The proof remains where it always has been – in a pudding, or rather, a reality outside our own minds. My mind will always be the lens through which I perceive the empirical world, but if I am paying attention, rocks and river water and sky are not easily manipulated by my mind.

I am indeed spinning a story when I begin: The sky is reflected in the river … but I think I have a pretty good grasp of the solid and liquid and gaseous matter I see and that the objective nature of reality remains somewhat separated from my subjective awareness. But I will prefer magic - again and again and again.

And so we go forth, with glimpses that astonish or terrify us - I could tell you stories. It’s what people do.