What makes sense to do?

I have a powerful and peculiar brain compared to a bug’s brain. But it is just like yours – except that it is unique. And so is yours. Even a bug is not precisely like every other bug in its thinking and actions - such as they are.

Where is the sense in this? you are asking. But it was only my brain talking earlier, and there seemed to have been something sensical at the time.

But here is one puzzle. What is worth doing? How is it not an entirely frivolous use of my time to write this apparent nonsense – and yet somehow it means something to me.

I could grow beans and rice with my time, carrots, bok choy, black-seeded Simpson lettuce. Or like my brother-in-law, I could buy and sell, sort and schlep, trundle stuff from storage lockers to Ebay to flea markets and still barely make enough to provide for his family the way he would like to do.

All the while I don’t get paid at all for writing poetry and other nonsense.

Consider all that unbelievable amount of wasted time before we were born, and then there will be all that unbearably long time after we are gone, and then in between there’s all of this. And yet we burn this brief candle as if everything matters – doing what? And why?

Why not just sit on a bench with a cardboard sign that reads, ‘will eat food for spare change – will sleep in the scrub woods on the edge of town for nothing.’

Some of those brains are damaged and skewed – in ways that are different from yours and mine.

And yet the time will pass no matter what we do.

What is the measure of worthiness when all will be consumed?

I never had the chance to meet the man who made the most exquisite baskets out of pine needles and bits of grasses and stuff that I saw at a friend’s house one evening. Put a match to them and all that time and effort put into those baskets would be ash in an instant. And who needs pine needle baskets, anyway? And anyway, the man, too, is gone.

We are filled from birth with drive and abilities, with desires and energy. And so each of us does what each of us finds to do, the apparent difference between necessity and frivolous so glaring, yet so insignificant.

I admire the tall, brown leather boots my wife bought – the animal cared for and killed for its hide, the skin worked, tanned, shaped and stitched. Then on the outside of each boot someone placed three brass-colored metal buckles, somewhat for function, mostly for style. There’s also an intricately fashioned zipper running down the inside, a long-toothed slide from the top to the arch so that the boot can slide over the heel, the foot coming to rest on a crafted bed. Hands were involved and hands made the machines that were also used.

These boots are no accident, but who really needs boots such as these? The bugs and the beasts of the fields? Consider the lily; they toil not, neither do they spin.

Why not just lay ourselves down and die?

And why do some write on corrugated scraps of cardboard and I – I write my printed and pretty-sounding words. And men and women, and sometimes little children, toil for their survival and for my survival while a contrived and accidental system provides easy opportunities for some and harsh gain – even loss – for others.

Oh Jesus! You left so many questions with only the hints of answers.

You said that God said, ‘You fool, this night your soul shall be required of you, then whose shall these things be, which you have prepared?’

But who or what made us this way in the first place?

And what else are we supposed to do with our time? Without food we will not eat. Without art, we’d rather starve.

What nonsense would you compare to my nonsense? Or flip it. What makes sense for you to do?

The next question to ask is ‘why not?’

The human species is a contrary species. When we enter a situation in which a decision must be made, we usually ask ‘why? And frankly, we will generally come up with the wrong answer at least half the time just out of general cussedness.

This is amply verified by a study I think I once read. Now although I am going to try to recount the details to you with general accuracy, you should be warned that when I considered whether or not to largely make up some of the statistics I asked myself, why not?

In this significant study which tried to understand why in some countries 80 % of the driving public were willing to declare themselves to be organ donors and in other countries only 20 % did so, the researchers came to a somewhat surprising conclusion. The conclusion was surprising mostly because they had failed to pay close attention to millennia of human behavior. It turned out that in countries in which more people went to church or more people drove pickup trucks or more people ate a proper sit down breakfast, those facts did not correlate at all with whether they were willing to donate their bodily organs when they no longer needed them. It came down to ‘opt in’ or ‘opt out.’

In other words, it mattered most if the question at the DMV, or whatever it’s called were these studies were conducted, was worded like this: If you wish to be an organ donor, check this box, OR instead like this: If you do not wish to be an organ donor, check this box. The same choice - but not the same question. Why or why not.  The results: 20 % versus 80 % - give or take.

Now I don’t wish to compare human beings to computers, but our brains have been programmed by millennia of prior generations passing along patterns to the next generation so that we remain largely unconscious of our decision making strategies. Unless somebody does a study.

Like the computers we created in our own image, much of our behavior is shaped by binary operations. At countless levels we can only choose yes or no. To be or not to be. But the universe is analogue. And yet our choices, even apparently multiple choices, often break down into do I or don’t I. And this after we’ve asked ‘why?’ or ‘why not?’

Consider my experience. And though it’s true that human beings aren’t all alike, human beings are all alike. Studies have shown this. And if anyone was paying attention, they would realize that opposing statements are often true or false.  Either/Or. GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out.)

So. I wake up in the morning and consciousness intrudes on blissful sleep. A mental picture of possible futures begins to form. I remember that I have nothing important to do before eleven.

I don’t have to go to the bathroom. I am as warm and comfortable as I can be. As long as I keep asking the question, why on earth should I get out of bed, I don’t move. As with our computers, my central processing unit repeatedly sends that query to my consciousness, why don’t you get out of bed? My answer is always the same. Why should I?

But then other information intrudes. The thought occurs to me that if I got up I could have oatmeal or bacon, and I think: why not? I’m up.

Now I’m not suggesting that we are automatons; that we have no choices. Free will apparently abounds. But if we ask ourselves the wrong question, we are likely to make the wrong decision.

To give ourselves at least a fifty-fifty chance we should ask ‘why not?’ as often as we ask ‘why?’

Now there are more forks in your daily path than you can shake a stick at - 457,382.6 decision points to be precise – on average. Now 92 % of those decision points are largely within the unconscious realm so never mind about them. Of the remaining 8 %, only about .67 % are at all significant. That still comes to more than 300 important choices every day, statistically speaking. Your own number might vary.

If you almost always ask ‘why?’ it will take you forever to get out of bed in the morning. If, when you’re faced with the choice of going for a walk around the block instead of scrolling down through more of that facebook a little longer and the question you pose for yourself is, ‘why?’ as in why go for a walk, two thirds of the time you’ll stay parked at the computer. If on the other hand you are asking yourself whether you should pick up a book and read awhile and you frame the choice with ‘why not?’ the odds jump into your favor that you will in fact read a book. This has been studied.

And if you’re considering trying anything new, like a restaurant, or music, or checking out that really interesting bit of sculpture on the corner across from the city building, ask yourself, ‘why not?’ for a change. Same decision to make, different question.

Of course, ‘why?’ should remain the default question when you’re asking yourself whether you should quit your job after you’ve been told to do something ridiculous for the 56^th time, or you’re considering whether to walk out your spouse because he or she just told you your butt looks fat in those jeans. ‘Why not?’ can sometimes be a risky question to ask.

So after all the studies have been considered, I’m not suggesting that anyone should give up their organs prematurely or do anything without thinking carefully about all sorts of things. I’m only asking you to think as much about the questions you pose as you do about the answers.

Why not?

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.