And when thou art weary I’ll find thee a bed Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head; – John Keats To Emma (ca. 1815)
I cherish this couplet, find the thought of a pillow of moss appealing (although currently you might want to bring a waterproof plane before you sit down…)
And since I want to start the week with making you less weary, the couplet is the perfect fit. (Which cannot be said for the rest of the poem, which closes with this: So smile acquiescence, and give me thy hand, With love-looking eyes, and with voice sweetly bland. No sweetly bland voice here, googly eyes and/or acquiescence…. but lots of intentions to get your spirits up.
Moss it shall be: for one, because it shines, glimmers, glows in abundance right now, greenest, most brilliant green in those watery woods (Tryon Creek). Secondly because it gives me the opportunity to cite Wikipedia’s color page where I found this gem: Green is common in nature, especially in plants.
I hope you spill your coffee laughing. I did. Or maybe you need to know German, where the equivalent of nature is green: Wir gehen ins Grüne…
Let’s proceed to name the biological greens:
We are subsequently told that:
Moss green is a tone of green that resembles moss. Who would have thought.
Tidbit: Moss is practical. It used to be the diaper of millennia of babies – Native Americans stuffed spagnum in bags with which they swaddled their children, the Inuit used moss inside sealskin covers, and Mongolians used fur sacks stuffed with moss to carry the young. Biodegradable, too. It was used as antiseptic bandages to treat the wounds of thousands of WWI soldiers, when the Allied forces ran out of cotton bandages. (Link is to a fascinating article in the Smithsonian.)
I have written a bit more seriously some time back on moss and lichen, with a focus on the latter. If memory serves me right, we talked about rootless Bryophyta, which is the botanical name for moss, attaching themselves to their environment via hairy protrusions called rhizoids, take water and air in to create their food through photo synthesis.
Today I am more interested in why moss appears so intensely luminous when you hike through the forests during these dark, rainy days.
It has to do with a process called the Purkinje effect, or Purkinje shift, named after the Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkyne, who proposed it at the beginning of the 19th century. It is the tendency for the peak luminance sensitivity of the human eye to shift toward the blue-green end of the spectrum at low illumination levels. Simply put, we have two main receptor types in the retina, the rods and the cones. The former are more light sensitive, but pretty much worthless for distinguishing color. They take over when it gets dark, because the cones, which are color-sensitive, fire best only when there is lots of light.
When light is scarce, at dawn and dusk, but also on these cloudy, rainy days in the woods, the reds, processed by cones now starved of stimulation, will appear duller and duller. The greens take on a contrasting brightness, because the rods take over. Voilà, iridescent green.
Before we all get too happy basking in that glow, here is the dark side of moss: half a billion years ago, when Bryophyta first appeared on land, they plunged earth into an ice-age and caused mass extinction of ocean life. Before you freak out, it took them 35 million years to do so, and they might just be the antidote to global warming if we could only wait that long.
Nonetheless, then it was a catastrophe – moss secretes a wide range of organic acids that can dissolve rock, and the altered rock can then suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Sharp reduction in carbon dioxide levels ensues – here comes the ice. (For a more detailed account, go here.)
Reminder to self: this was supposed to cheer, not make more weary. Music to the rescue:
Sometimes a piece of writing makes me drool. This, for example:
“The piece of music I have in mind lasts only forty-five seconds, which is shockingly brief measured against the inner world it evokes. In what I now know is a fragmentary motif, a few lowing bass notes rise like bubbles from the bottom of a pool, becoming increasingly ragged as they approach the surface. They get close enough to one another to imply melancholy harmony before they dissipate. The riff repeats only once, a little more achingly. Then the bass hands its figurative duties over to a dulcimer, whose jaunty fatalism carries the mood forward even as a more deliberate structure begins to eat away at the oceanic resonance of those bass notes. As the bass recedes into a supporting role, providing squiggly accents at odd intervals, a mental image slides back into inaccessibility too. In my memory, the soundtrack, by Henny Vrienten, to George Sluizer’s 1988 film The Vanishing, was an expanse of fretless bass only, mournful and spare, diaphanous and purplish, like neon light filtered through glass bricks. I feel a spasm of disappointment in realizing its magic is more contained than I recalled, that the film’s music on the whole is not remarkable enough to justify a soundtrack album in which I could wallow between viewings.”
Jaunty fatalism, oceanic resonance…. now wouldn’t you have liked to coin those terms? The short essay goes on to describe the actual affinity to The Vanishing beyond loving the introductory music: a longing for time spent without supervision, without fulfilling expectations of constant busyness, of “a reflexive drive to busyness defined my experience of free time as a terrifying void to be filled, a wish for blithe indifference to the internalized requirements of managerial bureaucracy,”(another winner!) (The film refers to a young French couple going on vacation before crisis erupts, evoking French cinematic history of all those aimless hours spent in Provençal town squares and at Mediterranean beaches.)
Loitering, in other words, seems to be a thing of the past. And even if you manage to take a bit or a lot of time off work, the space that opens is filled with: sound. Books on Tape at the elliptical. Music in your headphones while doing routine tasks like ironing or the dishes, or folding the laundry or cooking. Podcasts while taking a walk. I think the last one irks me the most – how are you going to hear yourself think, which is what walking allows you to do in the most effective ways possible? Never mind being connected to the soundtrack of nature that happens during walks in the woods, or connected to humanity which happen if you walk the city? From the New Yorker essay, linked above:
There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts.
Writing might organize the thoughts, but walking actually improves the content of them – there are numerous studies now that show that creativity and problem solving is enhanced because of free floating attention and spurious environmental stimulation during walks. That will not happen if your attention is focused on following Chris Hayes’ arguments.
Another way of looking at it:
On my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village…What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something other than the woods? Henry David Thoreau, 1862, in an essay entitled “Walking”
Let’s start this week on a quiet note. Like really quiet, preparing for silence in space – quiet. Not a random choice of metaphor, either, since I learned that astronauts are sent by NASA to an anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota where they practice being in environments where sound does not reverberate.
“An anechoic chamber is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from waves entering from their surroundings.” It turns out that you cannot stand being in one of those chambers for very long – 45 minute has been the longest someone endured before fearing they would go insane. When you hear nothing else, you start hearing the noises that your own body makes, “you become the sound.”
All this came up when, as so often, I randomly ran across a poem that caught my attention.
Anechoic
George Foy stayed in the anechoic chamber for 45 minutes and nearly went mad. He could hear the blood rushing in his veins and began to wonder if he was hallucinating. He had been to a monastery, an American Indian sweat lodge, and a nickel mine two kilometers underground. In the anechoic chamber, the floor’s design eliminates the sound of footsteps. NASA trains astronauts in anechoic chambers to cope with the silence of space. Without echo, in the quietest place on earth, what else can we hold onto? What replaces sound in concert with what you see? The human voice, the timber when a person says kamsahamnida or yes, please, or fuerte, is 25 to 35 decibels. Hearing damage can start around 115 decibels. Metallica, front row, possible damage albeit possible love. The Who, 126 decibels. A Boeing jet, 165 decibels. The whale, low rumble frequency and all, 188 decibels, can be heard for hundreds of miles underwater. I once walked around inside a whale heart, which is the size of a small car. The sound was like Brian Doyle’s heart that gave out at 60 after he wrote my favorite essay about the joyas voladoras and the humming bird heart, the whale heart, and the human heart. Glass can break at 163 decibels. Hearing is the last sense to leave us. Some say that upon death, our vision, our taste, our touch, and our smell might leave us, but some have been pronounced dead and by all indication are, but they can hear. In this moment, when the doctor pronounces the time or when the handgun pumps once more, what light arrives? What sounds, the angels? The Ultrasonic Weapon is used for crowd control or to combat riots—as too many humans gathered in one place for a unified purpose can threaten the state. The state permits gatherings if the flag waves. Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound. It is a navigation device and can help determine if the woman has a second heart inside of her now, the beating heart of a baby on the ultrasound, a boy or a girl, making a new music in the body of another body, a chorus, a concert, a hush.
by Lee Herrick from Scar and Flower, Word Poetry, 2019.
To tell the truth, I was not particularly taken by this poem as a whole. Little things, the list -like quality of researched facts (I mean who knows all those decibel numbers….) or the discussion of hearing being the last sense to go (after he cued in on hearing all along,) and then wondering “which light will arrive,” they irritate me. Or the tale of walking inside a whale’s heart and affixing the sound to the memory of a favorite author’s writing – I was in one of those last summer (they have them as plastic reproductions in all kinds of science museums, and all you hear is the delightful screaming of young visitors around you. Nitpicky, I know. Not granting generous artistic license. Guilty as charged. Perhaps it would help to know more of his work, apparently often preoccupied with hearing, but also quite political. Herrick, of Korean descent, was the poet laureate of Fresno, 4 years ago, teaches at college there. Here is a review.
But one line stuck, and made it worth slogging through all those facts he lines up: Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound.
Think of how sound was used to manipulate you when you were a child. Ok, when I was a child, sent off, sickly still, to boarding school. Being yelled at loudly was pretty upsetting. Worse, though, was when punitive words came out really quietly, almost whispered, ominous as can be.
Sounds could be frightening, the pillow-muffled homesick sobs, my own included, of the new arrivals. Sounds could be disturbing, the penetrating school bell that cut time into slices. Sounds could be shaming – the snickering of the girls behind your back. The tsk tsk of a revered teacher, handing back insufficient work, not even worth a verbal assessment, just those devaluing sounds. The screeching of the coach on the sports field, egging you on to run even faster, until your lungs hurt so badly that you were ready to collapse. Sounds that were missing hurt as well: my childhood background chorus of lowing cows and songbirds, the farmer’s peacock.
Sounds could be healing. A hummed melody of a (forbidden) pop song as a reminder that there was still a world out there beyond the dormitory walls. The clinking of the silverware when 120 places were laid for breakfast, the only edible meal, really, of the day. The sounds of the gentle river waves of the Neckar, when you were allowed twice weekly to leave the walled estate, for an hour’s walk. Or being assigned an empty quiet classroom to practice your cello or piano, day after day escaping the noises of overcrowded, restless adolescent girls. Add the music, however incompetently, scratchily executed, with a blueprint in mind of the beauty of the real thing, and you were ready to tackle the next day. Healing, indeed. (My most played piece during those horrid years was this, (Khatchaturian’s Toccata ) allowing rage to flow into the fingers as well. It’s not as hard as it sounds, particularly if you play it slower like the older Russian recordings.)
What counts as healing, though, is in the ear of the beholder. Just a few centuries back the Church accepted only a limited number of intervals assume to please G-d, and that is why Gregorian chants are as they are. And the Church expressly forbade some intervals, including the tri-tone, composed of three adjacent whole tones, because they were thought to be the devil’s interval. Don’t ask me why. Times have, of course, changed.
Wagner used the tri-tone in Tristan and Isolde, to convey forbidden love and longing.
So did Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story.
Beautiful. Unsettling. I guess it won’t be a quiet Monday morning after all. But one where I made you forget about sham trials and deadly viruses for at least 10 minutes!
Pull up a chair, dear reader, join us at the breakfast table. (I cannot begin to tell you how much it gives me pleasure to think that there are several of you reading this with coffee cup in hand as a morning routine while I write the next installment. Community!)
“It’s a complicated issues.” “I know.” “We should make a list of all the questions.” “Well, there is only one interesting one.” “No, there are at least two!” “Persuade me.” “Let’s look at the list:”
There are people who enjoy things because they own them, and the ownership does something for them: signal status, boost self-esteem, soften the mid-life crisis. In fact, if I put you in a situation where (false) feedback on your performance lowers your self esteem, your appreciation for the things you own goes up, as if they enhance the value that was just threatened. Same for the choice you make in buying something after I threatened your fragile ego: you go for luxury goods over garden variety objects in this situation. —-We agree, not particularly interesting, our grandmas could have told us that, right? Or any wife of the convertible-buying 50-year old….(This is, by the way, true for Westerners in these psychological experiments, not for others from collectivist societies, like Asians – threat to a sense of self seems to be of less concern there.)
People are attached to objects because they connect them to the past, remind them of the past, allow them to show respect for the past. Much of it is linked to a sense of continuity, across your own life time and between generations, that many cherish. —-True, we agree, and not especially interesting, since it makes perfect sense given how memory works, attachments are formed, and group (tribal) membership is beneficial for the individual. (Never mind that the Jewish grandmas cited above also preach the value of letting something be verfallen (by-gone).
People react to historical or rare objects with awe – framing the letter Buzz Aldrin sent them, or getting shivers when touching Charlemagne’s throne. It is almost like the physical connection provides a worm hole into the past, and some essence is connected to us. Now, that IS interesting, we both agree. Why is that? How does it make you feel connected to history and why does that matter to you?
People vary in how much they attach to objects as possessions, or as links to personal history, or how much they have emotional responses to historic objects, or all of the above. Where do these individual differences come from? I find that highly interesting, my breakfast partner not at all – too many variables under consideration, therefor hard to test scientifically. Note to self: scour the research literature and see if someone has come up with a plausible answer….
For us this is a continuation of a conversation we had while visiting the strangest little museum in Los Angeles, two weeks ago, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Like the aristocratic collections and cabinets of curiosities assembled in early modern Europe, which were shared by their owners to reflect their status as powerful individuals of knowledge and prestige, it offers a seemingly random mix of exhibits acquired by chance. In fact, it offers – sufficiently dimly lit that you can’t be sure of anything – a hodgepodge of serious scientific objects and description of processes, and whole rooms full of things that are completely made up, nonetheless so perfectly imitating scientific explanations that they are frankly more amazing than the real thing. For someone like me, who is not partial to authenticity to begin with, it was a wondrous time. The creativity and wit and knowledge about museum culture was mind boggling. (They also have live birds wandering around in the museum – my kind of place…) If you can’t make it there in person, the next best thing is to read this: Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Written more than 20 years ago, every word holds.
Less of a mystery novel, and harder reading, is Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It explains, better than I can, the psychological effects of the “aura” of a historically significant object and how it relates to our cravings for authenticity. Just the thing, over the holidays!
Photographs today are my homage to thorny issues and sticky topics.
Music today is by special request: the thing that literally reminds us, the souvenir, captured by Samuel Barber.
He made me do it. I actually listened to a podcast, an activity I usually avoid like, well, whatever. I felt compelled to follow his suggestion because the dilemma described in the radiolab program is a familiar one in our household: the night-and-day different reactions and connections you have to things, both those with historical and those with sentimental value.
To be clear at the outset, I don’t consider there to be a any right way to relate to objects, or, for that matter, to the past relative to the future. I happen to be not very attached to things from the past, or dwell on or cherish events from the past. I appreciate, though, the pleasure it can give other people, who find continuity in their memories, or great-grandma’s lamp with the shepherdess and sheep holding up the lampshade (YES – it does live in our household, mostly because the guilt to give it to good will would be unbearable for someone who shall remain nameless.) I almost envy the joy some of my friends get out of their attachment to certain objects, and I commiserate with those who are burdened by their loss, but the closest I come to those ways of feeling is perhaps with regard to place. Walking across sites of historic importance can induce awe – having no longer access to places I loved can make me cross. And, of course, I am attached, intensely, to people. But not things, even when I appreciate their meaning and beauty.
How does our relationship to objects shape up – and how do we account for individual differences which have some in awe when holding a historic artifact – a piece of the moon, or the Berlin wall, or the Shroud of Turin – while others couldn’t care less, exhibiting only some scientific curiosity, but no emotional reaction? Differences that become quite apparent in how some surround themselves with items collected across a life time while others purge anything that isn’t currently functional or clutters up the house, no matter how much they accidentally acquired meaning? Spoiler alert: I don’t have clear answers nor does, so it seems, anyone else.
I can, however, point to a few things we do know about people and things.
The idea that things don’t just disappear into thin air (object permanence) can be measured in the youngest babies, even though they “define” things a bit differently than you and I would: not necessarily by shape, but by numerosity and direction of movement. By the age of two, kids exhibit a sense of ownership, and by six they show the “endowment” effect – something that lasts into adulthood and can best be described as that we value something that we possess more than if the same thing was on a store shelf or in someone else’s hands.
Kids often have attachment objects – the proverbial blankie – but do so more in societies where they sleep alone early on instead of sharing their parents’ bed. These objects help them to transition to independence, but interestingly it has to be the one and only object – an exact copy won’t do. Same is true, by the way, for many adults: if I offered you the choice between an authentic Picasso and a copy that is indistinguishable, but not painted by him, you’d reject the latter. I, as it turns out, wouldn’t – I couldn’t care less about the execution by the famous hand, I care about the idea captured in the painting.
Ideas, it always comes down to ideas with me. (Then again, I would reject any version, real or fake, of Picasso, since I can’t stand him.) I’ll talk about our appraisal in the context of museum art authenticity tomorrow.That kind of magical thinking about the essence of a piece of art, or your teddybear, or Lincoln’s pajamas is by all reports existing across the life-span for many.
Adolescents, particularly in the mid teens, become the most materialistic of them all: things matter! Clothes, brands of shoes, bikes, types of phones all matter as a way to declare independence from parents and tribal membership with their age mates. What about adults? We get to them tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Photographs today are from a Wednesday walk before the storm came in, at the Jackson Nature Preserve. The rosehips will not survive this weekend intact – it’s amazing (and part of the unusual dry weather pattern) that they lasted this long.
Music is about a thing that is a person or is it a person that is a thing? So easy to get confused. Coppélia, by Delibes, a ballet about a mechanical doll and her human imitator. Unfortunately the concert, a wonderfully tight performance, is often interrupted by advertisements – don’t know how to fix that.
“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”
Guess who? No, not that one. One of his predecessors, dangerously underestimated in these early words written by Dorothy Thompson, one of America’s most urgent, eloquent voices against Nazism. Her description of Hitler, as cited above, and her later flaming resistance against all things fascist led her to be thrown out of Germany in 1934, after having been one of the first successful female correspondents for the American media in Europe.
The woman was a marvel. Self-made, in many respects, suffragists, radio journalist, book author, political activist, she was a public speaker, on air for 15 nights and days straight after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. She became a source of facts and opinions for millions of American women who now had an alternative to what they were regaled with by their husband.
Her 1941 essay in Harpers, Who Goes Nazi?, is one of the most astute psychological assessments from a non-psychologist that I have read. Ever. She basically invents (or describes?) an upper-middle class dinner party with various and diverse guests (notably absent, alas, any person of color, which is probably historically an accurate scenario) and predicts for each person how likely they would join the Nazi movement if arriving on our shores. (It is no co-incidence that one of her three husbands, Nobel prize – winner Sinclair Lewis, wrote one of his famous novels, It can’t happen here, during their short marriage.)
If you took that essay and simply replaced the historically fixed term Nazi with a contemporary equivalent of immoral, unethical politician, you might have a perfect fit between the types of people she describes and those threatening an end to democracy who we are currently observing here and many European countries. Think impeachment and removal. Or the absence thereof, as the case may be….
December color!
Just as I worried in yesterday’s blog, I worry here: why don’t we learn from history? When it is all laid out for us in perfectly witty, insightful, premonitory writing?
“It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities. Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis. Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.”
One more remarkable item of courage and honesty associated with this path breaker: the woman who was on the cover of Time, declared together with Eleanor Roosevelt as undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S., played by Kathrin Hepburn in Woman of the Year, and an early ardent supporter of Zionism, changed her views after visiting Palestine in 1945. Subsequently,
“She ran into difficulties, including accusations of anti-Semitism, which she strongly rebuffed, after being warned that hostility toward Israel was, in the American press world, “almost a definition of professional suicide”.[10][11] She eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war.[12]“
She was silenced indeed, as are so many contemporary journalists in this country, who follow suit. Here is a 4 minute trailer to a documentary about her, laying out what happened to her career and livelihood, with lectures canceled, newspaper assignments withdrawn and a general shunning initiated by those who could not tolerate any criticism at all of the state of Israel. And the official accusation was, of all things, being too soft on Germany…. something taken out of thin air, to persuade a public open to that villain schema at that time. Sounds familiar?
Photographs today are from my Oaks Bottom Tuesday walk taken last week.
Music is in honor of Beethoven’s birthday yesterday, a brilliant, pure, fear-acknowledging and fear-conquering piece that seems in line with Thompson’s character, the Streichquartett #14.
Now why do you immediately assume I refer to a certain politician who shall remain nameless? Am I that predictable?
No, I want to discuss today yet another effect language can have on our interactions with the world. Over the last days I described how language can direct our attention to certain things, shaping our experiences with our environment.
I also described how language can establish certain frames which will influence how we all make our decisions (beast/virus), often through the use of metaphors. And last but not least I reported on how specific use of language can affect our emotions which in turn will lead to different actions we are willing to take (verb/noun form.)
Today I thought we’ll look at how language triggers beliefs which in turn lead you to (mis)perceive what’s out in the real world despite the facts in front of your very eyes.
Here is a straightforward example: I tell you that you will observe someone in a conversation and, by the way, we know this person to be a liar. After you have watched him or her, I ask you to estimate how often that person behaved in ways assumed typical of liars. Turns out you will tell me that that person quite frequently averted their gaze (a habit associated with liars in our belief system.) Problem #1: that belief is actually mistaken! Liars do not avert their gaze more often than non-liars….) Problem #2: the person who you watched converse with someone else did in no way avert their gaze as often as you swear you saw them do. (We have the videotape: we can count….)
The language suggested a concept – liar! – which in turn triggered a false belief – gaze aversion alert! – and you end up “observing” what you expected to see. Except the observation is in no way supported by what actually took place. No shifty eyes anywhere! (You can read a scholarly piece on many of our misconceptions about liars here.)
Here is a similar example, except this time language affects memory rather than perception. If you see a videotaped car accident and I probe your memory for it weeks later, asking how fast the cars were going when they bumped into each other (or, alternatively, when they crashed into each other) your estimate of the speed you observed will systematically vary. More striking, though, people in the “crashed” condition also remember vividly seeing broken glass, when there was none in the original tape. Just think about the implications for eyewitness reports in response to police questioning.
Photographs today show words I picked up on the street, often triggering certain concepts. From suggestions to commands…
Music was chosen for the fit with the concept, but also to stretch ourselves a little bit into the more contemporary realm. Stick with it!
Yesterday I tried to spell out that language does influence thought, although not in the direct, unchangeable way that anthropologists like Sapir and Whorf suggested. Language can guide attention and what you attend to ultimately shapes your thinking.
People who want to influence what you are thinking are perfectly aware of these mechanisms. I can frame something as a positive outcome – this experimental medication has a 50% success rate! – or as a negative one – this experimental medication shows a 50% failure rate… – and lo and behold, people choose the treatment in scenario one and decide to forgo it in scenario two, even though there is no objective difference in the information – the medication works half of the time in both scenarios. The language use of failure vs. success makes all the difference.
Politicians know how to grab your attention – incessant repetitive messages, for example, that constantly force you to attend to a claim, have an impact. (This is one of the reasons why you should avoid repeating your adversaries’ claims with your added criticism – it increases people’s exposure to those claims.)
Politicians also know that the values of their constituencies and those of the other side often vary. In our own polarized environment, Republicans overwhelmingly value in-group loyalty, respect for authority and purity, while Democrats pay attention to fairness, harm-avoidance and reciprocity in social interaction. You can trigger these values and consequently increase the support for your political programs by using language that is associated with those concepts. If you want Republicans to support environmental measures, for example, you will be more successful pointing to the purity of our water and forests, than to how pollution will harm those most likely exposed to it. (Long versions of this argument can be found in a book by linguist George Lakoff, Don’t think of an Elephant!which should be on the nightstand of every Democratic presidential campaign advisor…)
In more insidious ways, metaphors do the work for you just fine, when you try to manipulate people into a certain direction. Scientists at USC, for example, asked people for solving a typical social problem like crime. Half of the group learned about a city wrecked by crime that preyed like a beast on the people. The other half learned that crime was a virus infecting the city. Independent of political affiliation, people increased their support for punitive measures when exposed to the beast metaphor, and opted for supportive measures when thinking about a virus. (A current textbook example of this can be found in the British press after the London Bridge stabbing. Look at the language used for the perpetrator and the proposed counter measures by Tories vs. Labour….)
It’s not just apt metaphors, though, that trigger reactions. In a fascinating recent study, a team of Israeli scientists found that how we use language will influence our emotions, particularly anger, which in turn will shape policy preferences. The researchers explain:
One of the most central and prevalent emotions in the Israeli-Palestinian inter-group conflict context is anger. Anger stems from the perception that other people are carrying out an action that is unjust, unfair, or contrary to acceptable societal norms and is associated with the goal of actively challenging the injustice and confronting the agents responsible, both at the interpersonal level and intergroup level. Importantly, in the context of intergroup conflict, anger has largely been found to decrease support for concessions and increase support for aggressive policies toward adversaries
In the most subtle manipulation, using the same word as either a noun or a verb, the researchers were able to manipulate the degree to which anger was felt. Presenting a policy as “the division of Jerusalem” vs. “dividing Jerusalem,” for example, affected participants’ subsequent evaluation of the policies. “Phrasing support for concessions as well as retaliatory policies toward the out-group in noun form (vs. verb form) reduced levels of anger. Subsequently willingness to compromise went up, and support for retaliation was diminished.
Put simply: the less angry you are the more willing you are to compromise. Verbs pull your attention towards the agency of the adversaries (e.g., dividing Jerusalem) which incites anger since you deem them responsible for the crisis. They are also more vivid in our minds, since we can imagine the activity. Nouns, on the other hand, are more abstract, creating a larger psychological distance, not triggering as much anger.
Let’s use nouns then: Conflict Resolution! Anger Reduction! Concession! Compromise! Peace. (And no, I am not naive to suggest it’s this simple. I just firmly believe that every bit that might help is worth a try.)
Here are peaceful winter landscapes – first snow on the mountains – from last week.
Haydn‘s Missa in tempore belli (Mass at a Time of War) describes alternatives.
… a shimmering mass of cornelian leaves, dripping and moist with the rain. — Agnes Newton Keith, The Land Below the Wind, 1939
If you are like me you’ve never heard of these two color names before. Never, that is, unless you work in fashion design, own a cherry orchard, are a jeweler or a mineralogist.
Or, for that matter, peruse the Merraim-Webster dictionary, again the source for today’s words.
Carnelian refers to a reddish-orange or brownish-red color, like the colors often found in the quartz by that name. It is a variation of cornelian that is based on Latin carn-, meaning “flesh,” in reference to the flesh-red color that some perceive in the mineral. Cornelian itself is believed to derive from French cornele, the name for the cornel cherry, and so named because of its resemblance in color to the fruit. Both words often get used interchangeably to describe leaves in autumn.
I was thinking about all the weird color names that sound appealing and mysterious when applied to fall coloration. That, in turn, led to re-visit one of the more famous assumptions in the psychology of language, the Sapir – Whorfian Hypothesis.
More than a half-century ago, Whorf argued for a strong claim—that the language people speak has a lifelong impact, determining what people can or cannot think, what ideas they can or cannot consider. So, for example, if your language did not contain separate terms for green and blue, you could not tell the difference. There is an element of truth here, because language can and does shape cognition. But the strong form of the claim has long been debunked: the effects are NOT permanent, and it is not language per se, but your experience (mediated by language) that shapes thought.
Gamboge, can be used to describe the vivid yellows of autumn. The name of the color refers to a gum resin from southeast Asian trees that is used as a yellow pigment in art and as a purgative in medicine.
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Experience is accumulated by what you pay attention to, and here language is one of the guides directing your attention, but only one. In other words, rather than uniquely and directly shaping thought in ways that can never be reversed, language indirectly pulls your attention towards things. If I manage to manipulate your attention in other ways, the outcome can and will be different.
Scarlet was not originally a word for a color but a name for a high-quality cloth, which is believed to have originated in Persia where it was called saqalāt. The word entered English via Anglo-French escarlet—a derivative of the Latin word for the cloth, scarlata—and became associated with bright red colors because the cloth was commonly dyed red
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Color is often used as an example. Papua New Guineans who speak Berinmo make no distinction between “green” and “blue,”and so are never attending to them as separate categories. If you’re an English speaker, your language does make this distinction, and this can draw your attention to what all green objects have in common and what all blue objects have in common. If your attention is drawn to this point again and again, you’ll gain familiarity with the distinction and eventually become better at making the distinction in contrast to Berinmo speakers.
Crimson and carmine, words for deep reds, are doublets from the same Arabic source. The color crimson is a deep purplish red that is found in a dye made from pulverized kermes, or the dried bodies of insects. The name of the color and of the insect has been traced back to qirmiz, the Arabic name for the insect. The word crimson entered English in the 15th century via Old Spanish cremesín.
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If you test both groups in a way that excludes direct language, though, they are much alike in their perception of the central distinctions between green and blue. We English speakers are only better at picking out small differences and remember them, given out years of experiences with grouping them into separate categories. If I inundated you from now on with carnelian, cornelian, crimson and carmine, auburn, maroon, russet, amber, scarlet, sepia and gamboge, guess what? You’ll get better at distinguishing them.
Will it shape you assessment of the beauty of fall? You tell me!
Maroon, as the name for a dark red color, derives from French marron, which is the Spanish name for a chestnut. The earliest examples in English of the word refer to the reddish-brown nut, with the color sense dating from the late-18th century. Before becoming a color name, maroon referred to a loud firework. Supposedly, people associated the noise of a chestnut bursting in a fire to an exploding firework. Most notably, maroons were used during World War I as a warning to take cover because of an approaching air raid.
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PS: You’ve heard the claim that the native peoples of the far north (including the Inuit) have an enormous number of terms for various forms of snow and are correspondingly skilled in discriminating types of snow. It turns out, though, that the initial claim (the number of terms for snow) is wrong; the Inuit have roughly the same number of snow terms as do people living further south. In addition, if the Inuit people are more skilled in discriminating snow types, is this because of the language that they speak? Or is it because their day-to-day lives require that they stay alert to the differences among snow types? (After Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000)
Amber can describe the dark orange-yellow color of a floating leaf or a substance found floating in the sea. It is derived from Arabic, anbar, which refers to ambergris, a waxy secretion (there’s that word again) of the sperm whale that is used as a spice and in perfumery. In English, amber was originally used as the name for this substance, with the name ambergris developing later in French from ambre and gris (“gray”) to differentiate it from the fossilized tree resin type of amber, which is also found around the shore (of the Baltic Sea, largely).
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PPS: for those interested, here is a fascinating summary of the effects of types of language (strongly gendered or gender-neutral) on creating more or less gendered societies and what that implies for legislation around language use. In German, for example every noun has one of three gender terms attached to it and things are judged correspondingly male, female or neutral. For example the word “key” is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. The respective speakers attend to very different attributes, correspondingly. Strong and hard comes to mind first for Germans, small and pretty for Spanish speakers.
Music today is a golden brown according to Rimsky-Korsakov who described the key of D major as that color.
Or shall it be purplish-red as Scriabin described the key of E flat major?
The ghastly history of lurid makes it a fitting adjective for dying pale-yellow leaves. It is from luridus, the Latin word for such a color, and in the 17th century, it was used to describe the pale yellowish color of diseased or bruised skin.
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” Mark Twain – (Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events. Edited with an introduction by Bernard DeVoto. 1940)
IF YOU ARE CURIOUS about the world, have the privilege of meeting a lot of different artists, and risk tackling things that are not exactly central to your own expertise, you’ll expand your horizon. When I set out to portray people with my camera and my writing, the encounters are as varied as the artists who I meet. Some evolve into friendships, others are puzzling, some demand hard thinking, many provide nothing but pleasure. The last year alone introduced me to classically trained musicians turned Ukrainian girl-band, puppeteers from Chile, wheelchair-bound choreographers, Mexican political theatre activists, female conductors of sacred music, and numerous printmakers from around the nation. All offered glimpses into worlds different from my own, and in one way or another challenged the way how I view art or the process of creating art.
This has never been more true than for my most recent conversation with a man who has lived in worlds so distant from mine that they might as well exist in a different universe. I met him by chance in a museum cafe. He had come to Maryhill Museum to pick up paintings that had been on display in a group exhibition of, among others, student work of the Seattle-based Gage Academy of Art, his included. I was there because of my interest in the Exquisite Gorge Project that was in progress across the summer months. We started to talk and agreed to a studio visit, something I finally managed to set up last week.
Charles Burt, artist
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PLATOON SERGEANT FIRST CLASS Charles Burt joined the army when he was 18 years old. He spent more than half of his life there, with a distinguished career in the tank division, multiple deployments to war zones and eventually operating as a drill sergeant and recruiter. The duties of an SFC typically include managing soldiers and tanks in a combat arms role, with responsibilities such as tactical logistics, tactical casualty evacuations, and serving as the senior tactical adviser to the platoon leader.
Born in Michigan, he moved to Texas at age nine, shunned in his middle school years as a “Yankee” in an environment where the Civil War had seemingly never ended. His love of drawing and art in general sustained him throughout his childhood. His mother, struggling after a hostile divorce, found a spiritual home in a fundamentally Christian, evangelical church which became to dominate Burt’s belief system during his formative years.
Charles Burt RespectPreparation of the correct blue for the American Flag
One of the hallmarks of his religious eduction was the demand for literal interpretation of the bible. If the world was created from scratch but some 10.000 years ago, then any science telling us otherwise was a work of the devil, meant to distract us. Dinosaurs did not exist. The concept of evolution was a satanic mirage. Heaven and hell were real places, and anyone not born into or converted to Christianity condemned to fry in the latter for all eternity.
Fast forward to Operation Desert Storm in reaction to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait threatening US oil demands in 1991, with Burt deployed, now in his early twenties. The GulfWar casualties were enormous. Assumed numbers vary, with Les Aspin, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, estimating at the time that “at least 65,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed,” and later sources reporting one to two hundred thousand casualties. MEDACT reports on civilian casualties estimate the number of Iraqi deaths caused directly and indirectly by the Gulf War to be between 142,500 and 206,000.
Charles Burt Tank
Burt could not wrap his mind around the fact that all of these people, many innocently caught between the warring parties, would be condemned to eternal life in flames. It seemed amoral to decide that the element of chance – where you were born or what information you had access to – would determine your fate. Cracks appeared in his armor of evangelical convictions, leading to extensive reading and listening to other views offered by the varied mix of people he met in the army and his exposure to a foreign world. Being religious turned to being interested in religions, with faith eventually discarded and the emerging hole filled with learning about science and philosophy. A turn-around requiring enormous amounts of moral courage – matching his physical one – since it meant to leave behind everything that had been a constant in his life, everything that had been his ethical yardstick. Everything, that is, except his interest in art.
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“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” Hannah Arendt The Human Condition (1958)
WE TALK A LOT that morning we meet at the Atelier where Burt currently finishes his 4th year of art education, after retiring from the army in 2013. At times I find myself holding my breath at the intensity of what he experienced, how every sensory detail is etched into his memory.
“One of the toughest things I had to deal with while in the Army was a Bosnia rotation in 1997. We had to do patrols around towns and weapons inspections as well as patrol the mass grave sites so the UN soldiers could remove the bodies without getting harassed by those who did not want us doing that. I was the gunner on a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) and so I rode in the turret on top, and on our way to one of the mass grave sites I can smell that we were getting close. We had to go through an abandoned demolished village and our interpreter would talk to us about how this was one of the towns where the Serbian army went through and committed their mass genocide. They would drive-through with tanks blasting through houses and she showed us the large holes that were blown through different houses. In the middle of the town is the largest building which was the school and she explained to us how children were brought outside of the school and the Serbian soldiers would pull them out one at a time and she showed us a large indention in one of the walls outside where the children would get executed. The parents would try to come down and then they would shoot the parents that were trying to save the kids. It was a tough thing to hear about and be at this place. We had passed that town so many times and never gave it one thought until our interpreter told us about it. I never looked at the abandoned buildings around the country the same way again. It’s something that still haunts my dreams I am really glad that I did get to experience that and be a part of that. I met some wonderful people while I was there and learned a lot.”
Charles Burt Self Portrait (Reflection in the window of his tank, looking out)
I hear about how it felt to be under mortar attack while stationed in Ramadi Iraq in 2006 during the Sunni Awakening, the Iraqi revolt against al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in which Sunni Arabs partnered with U.S. forces to fight a common enemy. It was a bad place at a bad time. Burt’s small Forward Operating Base (FOB or camp) was under constant sniper and mortar attacks, often so close that the building would rattle and the noise could be heard by his wife with whom he was on the phone; he tells her white lies to protect her, about the generator blowing up or the gas tank rumbling, while his own men sit with pale faces pinned against the shaking walls.
A subsequent PTSD diagnosis captures the horrors of what was lived. His loving, remarkably kind and supportive wife, eases the re-entry.
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GAGE ACADEMY OF ART is a non-profit, extended-learning and contemporary art center, that has provided community-based art instruction for some 30 years in Seattle. It offers public art events, lectures, youth programming and exhibitions, but central to its educational mission is the Atelier program. It promises a path to mastery in drawing, painting or sculpture in a deeply immersive environment under the tutelage of internationally renowned teaching artists.
Live Drawing Class before the lecture begins
The first year of instruction is entirely devoted to drawing, mostly with charcoal. The second year introduces but two colors in oil, and in the third year painting with the full palette is encouraged. The fourth year is dedicated to developing your own portfolio, which will be critiqued at the end of the year by the entire faculty, not just the specific Atelier head who guided you through the years.
Burt did his research well and chose wisely: he joined Juliette Aristide‘s Atelier which offers fundamental drawing and painting skills with a strong emphasis on observation from life in the tradition of American Classical Realism. Her own description:
“Like the great studios of the past, working from the human figure in life drawing and painting forms a pillar of our program. With that in mind we spend every morning throughout the year in the life room. The afternoons are spent in your studio working through the atelier’s curriculum of cast drawing, master-copy work and still life painting in a step-by-step progression. As you acquire each skill, new and more challenging projects are assigned. Aristides Atelier students are also provided additional classes in perspective, anatomy, composition, painting techniques and color theory.”
The term Classical Realism was coined by Minneapolis painter Richard Lack who founded the first studio patterned after the 19th-century French ateliers in 1967. By the 1980s a significant number of young artists emerged from this educational setting, continuing to spread the tradition. No-one seemed to mind the contradiction in terms: Classicism, after all, is devoted to subject matters, highly idealized, from ancient Greece and Rome. Realism, on the other hand, is devoted to common objects and themes, beautification be damned. No-one cared about the many voices in the art world either, who heaped scorn on what they perceived to be a reactionary movement.
Study objects at the Atelier
Classical Realism has become a living tradition. It finds its roots in both the techniques and the training approaches of the past: deep immersion in technical skill, draftsmanship and composition. A focus on honing perceptual sensitivities, representational devices and creation of harmonious beauty.
Charles Burt, Drawing of Moses Sculpture
Whatever one’s ultimate judgment of the Classical Realism movement, there surely could not be a better fit for Burt than it. For one who’s life has been a continual experience within structure, be it the stark religious corset of the evangelical movement, or the rank and file hierarchy and code of the military, a highly structured teaching of means and methods, now in a nurturing environment, provides some continuity.
Charles Burt Deployment
More significantly, a life once pressed into the scaffold of literal interpretation of imaginary worlds is now devoted to the literal observation of the real one, the here and now in front of our eyes. Burt’s choice of subjects for his portfolio concern two topics, both helping to externalize the internal struggles: objects associated with military and with religious service. While observing him at work in the studio I was reminded of Monet’s phrase linked to Impressionism: “To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.” An inversion seems apt here: To look allows the painter to forget (for a few hours) the things he has seen.
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THE US DEPARTMENT OF VETERAN AFFAIRS has a category of injury sustained in war related to, but distinct from PTSD: Moral injury.
Like psychological trauma, moral injury is a construct that describes extreme and unprecedented life experience including the harmful aftermath of exposure to such events. Events are considered morally injurious if they “transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations”. Thus, the key precondition for moral injury is an act of transgression, which shatters moral and ethical expectations that are rooted in religious or spiritual beliefs, or culture-based, organizational, and group-based rules about fairness, the value of life, and so forth. In the context of war, moral injuries may stem from direct participation in acts of combat, such as killing or harming others, or indirect acts, such as witnessing death or dying, failing to prevent immoral acts of others, or giving or receiving orders that are perceived as gross moral violations. The act may have been carried out by an individual or a group, through a decision made individually or as a response to orders given by leaders.
I could not, of course, ascertain if or to what degree moral injury was sustained above and beyond PTSD. But I saw moral courage in Burt’s creation of paintings that confront his experiences directly and simultaneously slow us down and force us to contemplate parts of someone’s experience with war and the shattering of faith.
The paintings do tell a story, many stories. One series, for example is constructed within a light box with light shining onto the tableaux from different angles. I forget the exact order, but a grouping of Judaic objects is centrally lit, objects related to Christian worship will be lit from a left angle, and those associated with Islam correspondingly from the right. A shared source of light for these Abrahamic religions, tilted into different perspectives.
Life Tableau in the Studio
Military boots serve as a reminder of deployment, now wiped from all traces of foreign contaminated soil, brushed to full shine. Working boots, by tradition put outside the door of the many wives and families waiting for their soldier to come home, alive and limbs intact.
Charles Burt Tanker BootsCharles Burt WorkBoots
Whether these stories will help to bear the sorrow is a question I cannot answer.
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“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.” Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. I (1776)
CHARLES BURT HAS BEEN DIAGNOSED with early-onset Parkinson Disease (PD). Many of the early symptoms of this disease overlap with those of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Tremors, difficulty sleeping and poor emotional regulation, including anger and/or depression, can be evidence of either PD or PTSD. Parkinson Disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects predominately dopamine-producing (“dopaminergic”) neurons in a specific area of the brain called substantia nigra. Eventually the limbs will be rigid, the gait changes, there will be sensory loss, and cognitive impairment.
Charles Burt’s hands, steadying each other
Parkinson Disease cannot be cured, although science has produced an arsenal of interventions, from dopaminergic medications to surgical treatment providing deep brain stimulation. These treatment options provide symptom relief, but do not cure or halt the progression of the disease. They also need to be carefully timed across an expected life span, since they loose efficacy over time. Science has been dangling alternative approaches – gene therapy, immunotherapy, and cell transplantation, but so far they have not moved beyond the infancy stages of experimentation.
Recent studies point to the possibility that people diagnosed with PTSD have an increased risk of developing not only neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers, but also Parkinson Disease. The exact causal mechanisms are not yet known. The VA, for lack of causal documentation during his service years, has not acknowledged responsibility for Burt’s condition. There will never be proof that exposure to multiple IED explosions hurt neuronic pathways. There will never be a way to determine if the poisonous air inhaled from the oil fires in Kuwait acted as a precursor to nerve degeneration. Burt certainly remembers how they would be finally served a hot meal out in the open after a sortie and the plate would be covered with black soot particles before they reached the tables, the food inedible.
Charles Burt in front of Easel
Imagine what it means for someone in the early years of their painting career to face this affliction. To wonder when the ability to draw realistically will be impaired by uncontrollably shaking hands, when it will be impossible to paint for lack of coherent, fluid motion. How it will affect growing into a mature artist with a developed style.
Burt lives in the moment. His urge to build a body of work is unstoppable. His passion for the beauty of the world undiminished. “Science is my new religion,” he says, with a gentle smile full of optimism, “something will come along.” Thomas Paine’s words float in my brain, about gathering strength from distress and growing brave from reflection. No reflection needed: this man is a paragon of bravery. Sustained by art.
