Winter Arrives

We got 5 inches of snow last Saturday, but that was just the preview for today’s beneficence of 12+ inches. Photos from both days follow.

Welcome, winter!

Gifts, Glamour and Longing

Insightful words from Virginia Postrel today in an interesting essay on gift-giving and glamour:

 

“Gifts carry a dangerous glamour. They encourage us to dream of being lavished with the things we wish for but can’t have (or are too practical to indulge in) and—the emotionally fraught part—to dream of having those who love us discern our longings without our having to confess them.”

 

I’m almost always disappointed by the gifts I receive, so either my longings seem to have regularly gone unnoticed or unacknowledged, or what I long for just can’t be satisfied with most (any?) gift. That is the nature of most longing, that once it’s satisfied, it just longs again.

 

What I long for, right now, is to be free of worries: money worries, dog health worries, house maintenance worries, etc. No gift of diamonds, linens, clothing, housewares, electronics, books, knitted or needlepointed items, calendars, soaps, candles, gardening tools, or art is going to help me there, and some of those things just add to the worries because they are another thing to maintain or to have to make decisions about.

 

Even my old stand-bys — flowers, food, and donations to charity — can only go so far, but at least they don’t add to the anxiety (except for orchids and bonsai!).

 

Looks like I will have to gift myself — with meditation time.

Thanks Giving

Philip Greenspun’s thoughts are pretty much mine. Among the things he’s thankful for, with my comments:

• “family members who remain alive and healthy” >> Me, too, including those who aren’t so healthy and those who aren’t alive.

• “close friendships with people whom I met as far back as the 1970s” >> Definitely. Old friends are great. Also thankful for good friends I’ve met over the past 6 or 7 years who are still in my life.

• “the friendship of dogs, especially Samoyeds, over the years” >> Yes. For me, it’s “especially bulldogs,” but really all dogs. They so enhance my life.

• “the hard work of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians since the Enlightenment who have made our comfortable modern lifestyle possible” >> I agree. I do like the modern conveniences (some are listed below in my further #thankful notes) even as I recognise their darker sides. And I appreciate the vision, intellect, discipline, instinct, capacity for delight and wonder, open-mindedness and curiosity that are elements of scientific inquiry.

• “to have seen my peculiar passion, the Internet, grow from a research curiosity when I started using it in 1976 to a worldwide utility” >> I started using Nexis/Lexis databases online for work in the mid-1980s and have loved online information access from the start.

• “to have lived in the age of photography, which has enabled almost everyone to capture and record the world around us” >> Photo images — whether from Ansel Adams’ time or contemporary — are those that capture my heart and mind most strongly. They enhance glamour, squalor, architectural lines, natural beauty, what’s unspoken and unseen among people. I love to frame and edit my own shots, and I love to view what other people view.

Other things I’m thankful for, which I posted to Twitter during the month, are:

• neighbourhoods to walk in, dogs to greet, other walkers out enjoying the world on Thanksgiving
• friendly, compassionate, open-hearted strangers and acquaintances
• quiet, solitude, warm laughter and giggling, purring, gentle dog snoring, bird song, waves lapping, crackling fire, a breeze
• my dad, for being who he is, and also for offering to help us with my mom’s precarious situation now
• my digital camera, computer speakers, pens, dimmer switches, Cuisinart, woodstove, reading glasses, online search/maps
• spirit of curiosity, discovery, exploration, happy expectancy, abiding interest in so many things people, places, ideas
• a warm water-tight house, indoor plumbing, soft towels to dry the dog, nowhere I have to go
• b&w photos, muted colours of dried hydrangeas, glamour, Art Deco, modern style, silver & white, shimmer, transcendence
• jasmine black tea, dried pears, all olives, all citrus, asparagus, artichokes, garlic, popovers, fruitcake, mac&cheese
• sunlight, warmth, tropical breezes, snowfall, summer rain, spring green, meadow grasses, berries, sandy beaches, pine scent
• my sisters
• good food, good wine & beer, good friends to share meals w/, good places to walk, and people who care about the common good
• R and Ch, college friends, and for their wonderful (grown) kids
• friends who are practical, fun, interesting, good listeners, supportive, willing to share their lives w/ me & let me share mine
• Rothko, Wolf Kahn, Gauguin, Johns, O’Keeffe, Motherwell, Matisse, Rauschenberg, Arthur Dove, Frankenthaler, Klee, et al
• dogs, rhinos, elephants, hedgehogs, toads, songbirds & tropical birds (LOVE-ly plumage), pigs, stoats, & other assorted beasts
• that my spouse finally got a drivers license in our new state!

Field Trip: Blackwater Dam, Webster NH

The first in what I hope will be a series of field trip photo-reports of beautiful, quirky, weird, and/or interesting places.

On Saturday, we stumbled upon Blackwater Dam on the Blackwater River in Webster, NH, while doing a loop of exploration that included Wilmot, Andover, Salisbury, Webster and Warner, NH.

It was surprising to see it in the middle of a rural area that probably has more cows and horses than people and after driving state roads that were little more than paved lanes.

The dam, which is one of five flood control dams in the Merrimack River Basin, is an Army Corps of Engineers project that was completed in 1941 for $1.32 million.

According to the brochure, the dam has “already prevented $15.3 million in damages” to the towns of Concord,  Manchester and Nashua NH and Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill, MA, among others.

Although on the day we visited the water level in the river seemed quite low (despite a wet spring and summer) and no water was falling over the dam, the high water mark hit 564 feet in 1987, filling the reservoir to 93% of its capacity.

The brochure notes that the Blackwater Dam area “offers visitors approximately 3,600 acres of land and water for recreational opportunities,” including hiking, horseback riding, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, hunting (gun and bow), fishing (brown and rainbow trout, perch, sunfish, pickerel), canoeing, and snowmobiling. We saw one other car parked during the 20 minutes or more that we were there — a woman was walking her two small dogs on a path behind the dam.

Since it’s the height of  hunting season and we were not wearing orange, we decided not to walk except on the berm atop the dam building (below).

The ravine in front was dotted with wild autumn weeds and pines:

There were some places we weren’t supposed to go:

But we got as close as we could!

We’ll be back, maybe next time with snowshoes and skis.

We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want To Die

And because we don’t want to die, we like limitless, endless things, which lists are, more so than definitions. At the same time that lists can be infinite and always added onto, they can also be ordered and thereby create a kind of protection from anarchy, by making infinity comprehensible.

So says Umberto Eco in an interview with Spiegel.

Eco’s current exhibition at the Louvre is about “the essential nature of lists, poets who list things in their works and painters who accumulate things in their paintings”:

“What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order – not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. … And the list is certainly prevalent in the postmodern age. It has an irresistible magic.

“We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die. … The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.”

How We Die

Or, how living people think about what’s happened to  dead people, based on a study of the Richmond Times-Dispatch obituaries in October and November 2009:

died

died peacefully

passed away quietly

entered into rest

entered into eternal rest

departed this life

passed away

passed from this life

lost her battle with cancer

went to be with the Lord

went home to be with the Lord

went to be with her heavenly Father

went to be with our Savior

died and is now with his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ

went to rest with her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ

was taken by our Lord and Savior from his life on earth

went to be with the Lord and join her husband

was reunited with his family in Heaven

went to be with her Higher Power

was taken away from us suddenly

died unexpectedly

departed this life suddenly (accompanying photo shows a man, whose nickname is “Fate,”  looking extremely startled)

advanced on to his next great life

realized there was a better place waiting for her

went to the big fishing hole in the sky, reeling in the big one

Bathing

 

“He told her everything was fine. He said that he was, in fact, looking forward to bathing.

“His mother was reassured by that, if not entirely satisfied. While the desire for a bath did not necessarily indicate a desire to continue living, it at least declared a willingness to muddle forward for a while.”

 

– Elizabeth George, Careless in Red (2008), in the Lynley/Havers crime fiction series set in England (in this case, Cornwall).

 

Adiaphora

Adiaphora is a Greek word that refers to things to which we’re indifferent, issues or choices about which we don’t much care and which don’t give rise to conflict. Richard Beck writes about adiaphora as it applies to successful marriages and churches in his post today at Experimental Theology.

Adiaphora reminds me of the helpful Buddhist ideas of detachment, letting go, having a ‘friendly’ attitude towards things.  Being relaxed about it.

On the surface, adiaphora may seem like it could be expressed as Meh, Whatever,  I couldn’t care less.  But those words carry a sense more-or-less of disdainful dismissal, and disdain implies that one does care, that one does have a preference — and this ain’t it. I think adiaphora expresses something more like Sure, why not? and implies a willingness to be as content with one option as with another.

I need to practice this, expanding the space of adiaphora.

 

 

Almost Contextless Links from Summer 2009

So many links saved up in bookmarks, so little time to synthesis them. So without further ado, these are some articles and essays and such that I found interesting during the summer of 2009.

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Even Now, There’s Risk in ‘Driving While Black’, by Brent Staples, June 14, 2009, NYT:

“Being black in America today,” Ms. Pager writes, “is just about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding a job.’”

Stunning.

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Would you pledge your soul as loan collateral?, Jul 3, 2009, Reuters:  The Kontora loan company in Latvia is offering loans with borrowers’ immortal souls as collateral, promising they will not sent debt collectors or use violence to retrieve unpaid loans.

“If they don’t give it back, what can you do? They won’t have a soul, that’s all.”

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Most of us think we’re “less susceptible to cognitive biases than the average person.” at Mind Hacks, 14 July 2009.”

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61 essential postmodern reads: an annotated list, LA Times, 16 July 2009. Annotated as to whether the book blurs reality and fiction, whether the author is a character, whether it has a self-contradicting plot, how ponderously long or snippetly short it is, etc.

I’ve read almost none of the books: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Laurence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse (one of my favourite books ever).

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Seeking (and Wanting and Liking):

“It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking.”

Seeking is ” the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. “

“The mammalian brain has separate systems for …wanting and liking. Wanting is Berridge’s equivalent for Panksepp’s seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain’s reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. … Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. …

“But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. … Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore.”

This and more about addiction, novelty, satiety, ADD, etc., from Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous, by Emily Yoffe, in Slate, Aug. 12, 2009.

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Hating the faceless other as a paranoid projection:

“There is something more dangerous about hating the government. The government is so distant, powerful and bureaucratically faceless that it can seem malevolent. Which pulls the paranoia out of us like a poison. All our wounds, failures, and frustrations are poured, in great buckets of bile, into our feelings about “the government.” And like with our sports teams, our anger and paranoia can personalize, turning political leaders into enemies and demons.

“In short, I think the poison of political discourse is due to this displaced anger and paranoia. When you see someone ranting about a political figure like the President what you are witnessing is an angry paranoid projection. A mind turned inside out by its own fears, frustrations and failures.”  Experimental Theology, 17 Aug. 2009

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Two pieces on the intersection of Rene Girard and  Mimetic Theory with  pop culture:

The Mimetic Theory: Listening to Madonna with Girard at Bread and Circuits, 18 Aug. 2009, and

3 Article Reviews at the Media, Film, Music, Religion course blog for an Australian university class called Studies in Religion and Spirituality, in the first review, of U2 is their Religion, Bono is their God, 23 Aug 2009.

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Holding heavy objects makes us see things as more important, at Not Exactly Rocket Science, 25 Aug. 2009. Four experiments show the link between physical and metaphorical weight.

The theory is that

“the link between weight and importance is rooted in our early childhood experiences, when we rapidly learn that heavy objects require more effort to deal with, not just in terms of strength but planning too. Our brain relies on these concrete physical experiences when it represents more abstract concepts, like importance.”

Also at Mind Hacks. where the sub-field of ‘embodied cognition‘ is invoked as a body of research demonstrating “that altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors.”

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Next week, I hope to post almost contextless links for September and October.

November

Lots of things in my ‘blog fodder’ list but either too busy or too tired to do it right now.

 

Meanwhile, it’s November, the perfect time for poetry and images.

 

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“November’s sky is chill and drear,
November’s leaf is red and sear.”
-   Sir Walter Scott

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“November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.

With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.

The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.”
-  Clyde Watson

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“So dull and dark are the November days.
The lazy mist high up the evening curled,
And now the morn quite hides in smoke and haze;
The place we occupy seems all the world.”
-   John Clare, November

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“It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,
So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say
On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.
It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated
On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.”
-   Wallace Stevens, The Region November

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“It was Autumn, and incessant
Piped the quails from shocks and sheaves
And, like living coals, the apples
Burned among the withering leaves.”
-   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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“When shrieked
The bleak November winds, and smote the woods,
And the brown fields were herbless, and the shades
That met above the merry rivulet
Were spoiled, I sought, I loved them still; they seemed
Like old companions in adversity.”
-   William Cullen Bryant, A Winter Piece

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