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.