I mean, the analogy writes itself like the onion in a grand conceit though we really are like two slugs in a derelict mausoleum. Google “snails are…” Dangerous. Slow. Destroying my garden. Our jobs and our women.
You, who cannot speak snail, wouldn’t understand how the shell was the gift and curse of diaspora, how our songs and laments resound in our half-remembered houses that we carry to forget, to carry on.
This poem by Elmi, a young British-Somali poet, Ph.D. candidate and musician has been on my desk for a while. I wanted to pair it with photographs I shot some time ago, but it took me ages to find them. Thus is the curse of an unorganized archive. That way, though, I had occasion to read the poem repeatedly, always reacting with a mix of admiration of the poet’s craft and sadness, the way an immigrant’s life and burden so perfectly captured in his analogies. He won the 2021 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize with this work, the annual prize for the best poem published in The Poetry Review written by a poet who doesn’t yet have a full collection.
The snail analogy is of course the Black/Brown/Muslim/Latino immigrant who destroys gardens, jobs, women – ours‘ no less. Next we are redirected to the other’s perspective, in that abrupt break between stanzas, visually mirroring the distance between “us and them.” All this while analogy itself is made a subject in the first line, disorienting the reader in some fashion, trying to figure out if it really writes itself while we are grasping for understanding. It brings us right back to the fact that there is a schism between two worlds, being strangers to each other, with xenophobia so closely related to our disgust reaction to the slimy invaders known as snails.
The snail shell serves as an echo chamber, the repository of the cultural memories of a former belonging, now half remembered, and in need of forgetting to force integration. How could we understand, the loss it implies, and the demands that will never be met to Whites’ satisfaction, we who live here with our jobs, or women and our gardens?
It is all so sparse, so economical and yet so rich in meaning.
It’s dusk. My sons are tall. And one of them became a father this week, starting a new cycle of life. I feel like my heart is encapsulated in light, radiating awe and joy in view of natality, the miracle of birth and new beginnings.
I can’t help but think of how I have been influenced by Hannah Arendt’s writings in What is Freedom on the centrality of beginnings to human beings. In reference to Augustine’s City of God she conveys it is not just the beginning of that new life, but also the ability for each life to initiate something new.
“Man is free because he is a beginning. . . . ‘Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit.’ [So that beginnings would be, humans were created, before whom there was no one] In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world. . . . Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.“
In The Human Condition” she writes: “when we speak of birth, we speak not of the beginning of something, but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.” She later describes the possibility of action in this context, and the impact on community derived from plurality. But that has to wait for another day. Right now I can only marvel at birth itself and the existence of someone who has not been in this world but five days earlier. Let’s give that new human being some time to grow before she decides if she wants to participate in the lineage of activism.
I was listening to Arun Ghosh’s new album Seclused in Light when the news of the arrival of this child reached me. (Composed during lockdown, he invented the word as a mix between recluse and secluded.) So much in this music that I wish to be true for her life to come: a clear, melodious voice (his brilliant clarinet), often playful and surprising, sometimes insisting, never shrill. A steady, measured rhythm, never frenetic. An integration of traditions, both across continents and across time, making for a truly international fusion. A mix of spirituality, humor and joy, with an explicit embrace of nature and communal action, and an occasional stoic trait. And, importantly, all written in major keys, sad minor keys making but split second appearances. (Full album – hopefully – here. Two favorite tunes below.)
A life full of light.
A life filled with beauty, variability and resilience like the hellebores that bloom in my granddaughter’s month of birth (snow, cold, rain and all!)
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that did not exist before, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, expectations and impositions; and let us see to it that we learn to tackle all that without dropping too much of what it has to bestow…”
„Und nun wollen wir glauben an ein langes Jahr, das uns gegeben ist, neu, unberührt, voll nie gewesener Dinge, voll nie getaner Arbeit, voll Aufgabe, Anspruch und Zumutung; und wollen sehen, daß wirs nehmen lernen, ohne allzuviel fallen zu lassen von dem, was es zu vergeben hat […]” – Rainer Maria Rilke Letter to Clara Rilke 1907.
Walk with me. On one of the last days of the old year, as it happened, a stroll through downtown that was a deserted place on a grey Friday morning, the quiet ruptured only by loud screams of a houseless person, the wailing echoing in the canyons between the high-rises. The few pedestrians cautiously crossed the street away from the misery, avoiding eye contact with the tent that looked wet, cold, forlorn.
Photographs today are all from a downtown PDX walk between the Portland Art Museum and Pioneer Square, going north on 10th Ave and coming back South in the park blocks.
And now 2023 already here. No New Year’s resolutions for me, since I know from long experience I won’t keep them in the first place. Although IF I would claim some, they would be echoing this British advice:
Get slightly older each day – Eat more cheese – Discard old socks – Drink the same amount of tea (ok, coffee for me) – Never run out of biscuits – Say “getting there” a lot – Muddle through.
Yet I do have a wish: to have the courage to witness (and report on) what is happening in the world, no matter how deep the darkness goes.
I want to continue to fight against the gentrification of the soul, the self, that comes with aging and privilege. It is so easy to narrow your focus when you become overwhelmed by the suffering in the world, to declare that turning away from the darkness is an act of self protection, when it is an act of choosing comfort instead.
Comfort that is not available, much less granted, to the people exposed to war, oppression, subjugation, or exploitation, by mad men in power, governments, institutions or their neighbors. If the people of Ukraine have incomparable courage to live through bombardments and invasion, the people of Iran facing gallows for desiring liberation, as do their Afghan brothers and sisters, if the Kurds have no allies in the world, nor the Palestinians any protectors, if they all summon this courage daily to live, I might at least have the courage to look. To witness, fully knowing my solidarity amounts to nothing other than emotional discomfort over the experienced helplessness.
Empty squares, with the houseless crouched in corners, and a lone city worker blowing fallen pine needles that moved in small waves and eddies.
We don’t just have to look abroad. There are plenty of discomforting sights close to home. So easy to narrow your eyes and blink the “blight” away, turning to more uplifting views. Don’t get me wrong – I embrace the powerful offerings of nature and art, literature and science as happily as anyone to make me feel better or console me, perhaps even to bestow some hope for a more just world, as my regular readers know full well. But not at the expense of the minimal tribute I can pay by witnessing what else is going on in a nation filled with racism, inequality, culture wars and drifts towards authoritarianism, even or particularly when I have reached an age where active participation in a fight for change has become harder. Maybe my reporting can encourage others who still have energy to get engaged.
Age imposes a narrowing of our lives through the declining powers of our bodies or the restrictions of disease, all multiplied to the nth degree by living in a pandemic era. It is understandable that that narrows the heart as well, the capacity for compassion when preoccupied with your own making it through the day.
It need not narrow the mind though, as long as we are mindful of how and where we apply attention and if we make sure we stretch towards learning. American-Serb poet Charles Simic once said: “The attentive eye makes the world mysterious.” I never understood that, still don’t. For me the attentive eye is all about learning about the world, de-mystifying what we are told to believe. The Jewish tradition with its intense focus on learning has always struck me as something that provided more than just tools for professional advancement, or, more importantly, understanding. It is such a thrill when you realize there is an infinite potential for growth, both of knowledge and as a person, every day, even when the potential for your body is decidedly limited.
For 2023 that means my steady diet of junk novels and movies will continue to be supplemented with stuff that is hard to read and topics that require intense familiarization.
It is somehow fittingly ironic that the question about liberty and justice for all is raised at the Louis Vuitton store. The brand’s trade tag is “Truth. Live and love truth.” No clue why a manufacturer of luxury goods comes up with that, but I don’t exactly think they’d like to hear the truth about the effects of capitalism where the consumption of luxury items plays a large role, if only as marker of the class that can afford the luggage.
***
What I learned on the first day of 2023 came about because I wondered why the sound of human misery is so deeply afflicting when you walk by, half scared, half upset. My search found, instead, a splendid analysis on a related topic: Why do Rich People love Quiet. The Brooklyn-based author of Puerto Rican descent, Xochitl Gonzales, was just made a staff writer at The Atlantic. She describes how she and her cohort of students of color experienced their lives at an Ivy League Institution and then again when White young professionals’ arrivals started to gentrify the traditionally non-White boroughs of NYC.
“The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. … In those moments, I felt hot with shame and anger, yet unable to articulate why. It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy. And in acquiescing, I accepted that.
For generations, immigrants and racial minorities were relegated to the outer boroughs and city fringes. Far, but free. No one else much cared about what happened there. When I went to college, it was clear to me that I was a visitor in a foreign land, and I did my best to respect its customs. But now the foreigners had come to my shores, with no intention of leaving. And they were demanding that the rest of us change to make them more comfortable.”
The essay then explores the regulation of noise from above, the various administrations, mayoral office and NYPD, through laws and by moving noisy venues like nightclubs out of gentrifying neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Lower East Side and into Brooklyn. That borough, now thoroughly gentrified itself, racked up the most noise complaints of 2019 to the city hotline, the majority of them grievances about lifestyle choices: music and parties and people talking loudly. One culture’s preferences demanding acquiescence from another.
The Apple Store is barricaded behind steel net fences, with only one entrance ramp controlled by police. Moats next? Tiffany, on the other hand, let’s you peek into the window under the watchful eyes of no fewer than three security guards for the one storefront.
Gonzales’ recent novel Olga Dies Dreaming was named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR. On my ever expanding list to read. The title is taken from a stirring poem by Pedro Pietri (1944-2004), Puerto Rican Obituary, linked here because it is too long to post. Don’t want to go overboard with the first blog of the year. Read it, though, if you have the time, it expanded my narrowing view of the world, offering glimpses into a culture so close and yet so far from my experience.
The park blocks offer a strange assortment of sculpture. The museum declared itself “indigenized” – whatever that means – during an exhibition by a Native American artist, Jeffrey Gibson, who produced timelines recording important events for indigenous and non indigenous Americans alike. How will 2023 be added? Since I still do not go inside museums and galleries I cannot report on the show.
Music today offers some classic Puerto Rican Salsa by Héctor Lavoe and, if you want to stretch yourself, the song Titi me preguntó, by Black Bunny, Billboard’s Artist of the Year. “Titi” is Time Magazine’s best song of 2022 pick, the voice of someone who acknowledges and tries to break with his toxic masculinity. The rapper’s music is ubiquitous in NYC right now.
No Black Bunny, but a bronze sculpture of an English bulldog, ridiculously dressed like the doormen of the Heathman Hotel where she resides outside, flagging the pet friendly policies of the establishment.
Capturing once more the beauty that surrounds us and respond with loosely (if at all) related musings? Let’s try.
If you are lucky enough to be present when a flock of snow geese gets spooked and you look at them through the very circumscribed lens of your camera, you sometimes experience something strange. Some of the geese are still ascending while others are descending already. If you loose track of who is who – easy to do from far away in the chaos – you perceive a strange undulation – as if the same thing is obliquely going up and down simultaneously, the laws of physics abandoned. For a split second you question the reality that surrounds you, fooled by a perceptual illusion.
A related question has been debated since times immemorial: what is reality and how can we be certain we perceive it correctly? It is on my mind because of the current glut of suggestions in both the cultural scene and computer science, that maybe we are mistaken about the reality we experience. Maybe, just maybe, we all live in a simulation, a computer game if you will, in which we are just puppets playing within the structures set by code, installed by some advanced beings somewhere in the universe. Frown all you want (as I do) but there are some serious, smart philosophers out there thinking through this possibility.
Honestly, watch Netflix, and there is the simulation hypothesis, if you click on 1899, a German series that is even darker and less comprehensible than its predecessor, Dark. (Actually, don’t, not worth it.) Or turn to the bestseller lists. The NYT raved about “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel, the simulation hypothesis was the basis of the plot. (Again, don’t, I thought it infuriatingly superficial, never getting to the interesting question, much less providing answers about the concept of living in a simulation. An alternative would be a book on the same topic, The Anomaly, that I found more clever by far earlier this year.)
More seriously you find even respectable thinkers and philosophers captivated by the idea, frequently debated in academia and tech/computer science circles. (Link below gives a graspable overview.)
So why this sudden preoccupation with it, decades after The Matrix offered the proposal that we are all dreaming our existence while stuffed into electronic boxes, our bodies mined for whatever the advanced evil civilization that is holding all of humanity captive, needs for their purposes? Why this emergence of Longtermism, whose prominent adherents often subscribe to the simulation hypothesis?
Why seriously engage with a hypothesis when it cannot be tested and so far there has been zero evidence to support it? If we live in a perfect simulation there is no way to get outside of the game (that is one of the problems that all these movies and books simply ignore.) Only from the outside could you judge if something is real or not. This is already the trap Descartes, wondering about our perception of reality, was caught in. His way out was to postulate that innate feelings and thoughts are pre-determined by God, and as a result, an individual’s perception of reality is in fact defined by God. Therefore, it cannot be the wrong one.
Instead of (a) God/ess who preordained everything, now we have some advanced civilization taking that place? Calvinism 2.0? Why would such a civilization waste computational superpowers on creating a simulation? What would the simulation be for? Why does it simulate consciousness, why stay within certain parameters, like the laws of evolution? Why create a place of misery and harm? And how do you deal with the problem of infinite regression, where every simulated world has potentially one above it, equally simulated into perpetuity – where is the endpoint? Back to a God/ess?
What does it buy us to engage with such a concept? Escapist fantasy? The hope that future life-forms are interested in us, some form of ancestor worship? Release from moral imperatives – if I have no free will, just like a character in Grand Theft Auto the umpteenth or Minecraft, why not engage in immoral, unethical or violent behavior without pangs of conscience? Giving in to ennui and lack of initiative because nothing can be changed, unless the puppeteers permit? Being so bored with your life that you do everything to find a glitch in the matrix as evidence that your life is not “real”? Having lost or given up on one religion, turning to the next one in disguise?
Let me know if you have the answers. Clearly the question of reality perception has been around for a long time.
Wishing you all a healthy 2023 with a grip on reality and dreams that are not turning into nightmares.
We were iced in for a bit last week, although thankfully not for long or as intensely as much of the rest of the country. Photography was restricted to what was available out of the windows, ample traffic given the cold. All those birds made me think of my unhealthy preoccupation with the demise of the bird app: TWITTER.
Nuthatches galore (Kleiber)
Scold me all you want (you know who you are), my time spent on that medium was not preoccupied with “doom scrolling.” It has been a source of information about politics I care about that would have been – is – otherwise unavailable. A lot of the European news are behind paywalls, and some not published in the main media at all, as for example a lot of the discussions among young, progressive Jewish voices in Germany. A lot of Black voices opened new horizons not easily accessible otherwise.
Twitter has been indeed a platform that allowed marginalized voices to communicate and to be heard, internationally it was the choice for many movements that were able to organize this way and get the news out. With the arrival of Emperor Musk, as many call him, although I prefer Elmo, the safety of those voices is endangered. Next to the monopolized print press in large parts of the world, a platform that allowed new collectives to form has now become the plaything of yet another oligarch, his whims defining the rules.
Plaything is too harmless a word – the site is now a weaponized tool that can wield large influence, not least over the upcoming 2024 election in this country. But it can also wreak havoc abroad. Major investors in Musk’s take-over of the company are Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Quatar Investment Company and Binance, the massive crypto finance company founded in China. They have been given special access to confidential company information. (Ref.) There is a huge worry that so far anonymous voices of dissidents will be outed, leading to their persecution. In Saudi-Arabia alone, 40% of all citizens are on twitter, anonymously.
As owner and CEO, Musk has removed the entire human rights team, as well as the team dedicated to disabled users, and the old content curation team which dealt with fighting disinformation. His next move was to ban the accounts of people publicly critical of him, journalists included. The re-admission of previously banned, extremist sites en masse has of course led to explosions of lies, racist and anti-Semitic tropes and disinformation, much to the satisfaction of the owner who encouraged voters to choose far right candidates during the mid-term elections. Just yesterday he tweeted, once again, a word that squarely panders to the extremist belief system that nefarious Jewish powers plan to replace the white US population with Brown people.
Flicker (Goldspecht)
Wren (Zaunkönig)
Importantly, and that is why I think I am so preoccupied with it all, there are no mechanisms that could curb the whims of an emperor. Maybe the financial chaos, with advertisers leaving as well as the important content providers, will lead to bankruptcy. But given that there is a network of unimaginably rich individual and state entities across the world that support his political ambitions, I don’t believe lack of money will be the downfall. Unfathomable riches of a few allow manipulation of public opinion and elimination of critics, quite literally.
Likely a hermit thrush, I learned, an unusual bird here at this time of year (Drossel)
Here is one of my favorite political reviews of the year that speaks to the choices the powerful have, reminding us of and analyzing a biting poem by Browning in this context, no less. Greg Olear’s column Prevailhas been a recent discovery for me and a source of pleasure. So are the birds, to which I will now return, hidden behind the window frame, camera in hand.
“What are the chances…” was the beginning of a sentence that cropped up with astonishing frequency this week.
“What are the chances, seriously, that more people voted for Walker than the Rev. Warnock?” was me fretting half-way through the evening when election statistics had the former ahead of the latter for a short amount of time. Still in disbelief after all these years in this country that it could even come close. The good guy won, eventually, but the margins were too close for comfort.
***
“What are the chances that Sinema leaves the Democratic Party before Manchin?” High, it turns out. Her voting behavior cost us higher minimum wage, extended child tax credits, and voting rights protections. Seems there is little variability in her moral compass – it’s stuck on amoral.
***
“What are the chances, that I would find myself in any way connected to one of the right wing extremists arrested in Germany during a nationwide raid this week?” Low, really an outlier. 25 people (with more assumed to be associated) are accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the state with armed attacks, former members of congress and military and ex-military para-trooper members among them. Many are now in pre-trial detention, suspected of forming a terrorist organization. The defendants are closely linked with the Reichsbürger movement, who believe that the 1871 borders of the German empire are still in effect, tend to be far-right extremist, do not accept the legality of the Federal Republic of Germany, and, according to the prosecutor, “followed a conglomerate of conspiracy myths consisting of narratives of the so-called ‘Reichsbürger’ as well as QAnon ideology.”
New “head of state” was supposed to be Heinrich VIII Prince Reuss, a 71 year-old of aristocratic lineage, and one of the purported ring leaders. Here’s where six degrees of separation makes an appearance, however: as an 18-year old I was invited to visit a branch of the Reuss family for Easter. For the life of me, I can’t remember why I scored the invitation or why I accepted it (certainly no romantic involvement) from Heinrich IX Prince Reuss (must have been a cousin), they all get the same name, just numbered in succession…
We drove south in a car from Hamburg to his parents’ castle (literally) near Frankfurt. Arriving too late for dinner, we were led to our rooms. I appeared, starving, the next morning, Good Friday, in the breakfast hall. The horror! I was not dressed head-to-toe in black, mourning garb required for this Holy Day, apparently, in arch-conservative households. Back to your room, have the maid rummage for a fitting outfit! Well, it was off to a train station for me.
***
“What are the chances“, I thought, when following the complicated Supreme Court hearings about the Independent State Legislative (ISL) theory on Wednesday, “that I’ll be able to write about that in ways that get the legal details and importance of the Moore vs Harper case across?” Slim, as it turns out, even with the example of an iceberg….
In a nutshell, the case is about extreme gerrymandering, the possibilities (or not) of stopping excesses, and, more generally, the power of state courts and/or legislative bodies to shape aspects of federal elections. SCOTUS heard plaintiffs’ arguments that under the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures retain exclusive power over federal redistricting and election rules, while state constitutions, state courts, governors, or voter-approved ballot measures have no power to check, balance or even review those laws. Yup. -. It is, as legal observer and author Elie Mystal pointed out, all about trying to take power away from non-partisan state actors and putting it solely into the hands of partisan state actors.
That’s as far as I can go – the rest of the arguments, delivered in detail, clarity and with focus on the implications to what remains of our democracy, can be found in VOX, the Atlantic, Mother Jones, the NYT, and the National Review. Take your pick – any one but the last helped my understanding of the matter.
And since we’ve landed on the topic of relative probabilities, we might as well end the week with my favorite poem about Statistics. Chances are, you’ll like it, on average.
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
Unsure of every step: almost all the rest.
Ready to help, if it doesn’t take long: forty-nine.
Always good, because they cannot be otherwise: four — well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy: eighteen.
Led to error by youth (which passes): sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with: four-and-forty.
Living in constant fear of someone or something: seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness: twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone, turning savage in crowds: more than half, for sure.
Cruel when forced by circumstances: it’s better not to know, not even approximately.
Wise in hindsight: not many more than wise in foresight.
Getting nothing out of life except things: thirty (though I would like to be wrong).
Balled up in pain and without a flashlight in the dark: eighty-three, sooner or later.
Those who are just: quite a few, thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand: three.
Worthy of empathy: ninety-nine.
Mortal: one hundred out of one hundred — a figure that has never varied yet.
Photos today from Frankfurt and environs, in honor of another weird episode in the life of Heuer, filed under Frequency Distribution.
Statistics? No Problem. (Sorry for the annoying ads interrupting today’s music, could not find an alternative.)
Chances that this photograph relates to today’s text? Nil. I just love it, the matching colors, the symmetry and patterns of vertical lines, the contrast of work boots and fur jacket, this stranger’s strutting towards the center of the gate posts in completely empty space. It happened to be shot near Frankfurt.
The sonnet below was written 135 years ago, and none, none of the beauty that it describes has changed – a kestrel on a fall day, surrounded by the blues and golds of a blazing landscape.
The kestrel I photographed had his soaring and striding already behind him – I had been standing under trees dropping leaves and watching, when s/he came to rest. I don’t share Hopkin’s religious fervor – he was a Jesuit priest and actually dedicated this poem to “Christ our Lord” – but feel in complete agreement when it comes to embracing the beauty of fall.
I leave it with you for the days to come – I’ll take a break for Thanksgiving week and hope to return with more images of blue and gold-vermillion.
The Windhover
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple – dawn – drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, –the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
This is probably one of the poems I love most, for so many reasons. The way it shifts between description and evaluation, the former showing an outsider’s perspective, the latter a relationship to another human being as well as a yearning for some form of grace. The tenderness with which a seemingly “crazy” act is put into perspective, disambiguated as a form of loving, is striking. We so often, scared to death by the perceived reality of losing our minds, rather distance ourselves from crazy behavior, instead of finding some remaining value in it. Oliver also acknowledges that we cannot count on (or control) a particular way of aging, but might be blessed – either avoiding dementia or finding a light within. A frightful admission and her unswerving insistence on finding hope, as in so much of her work.
There is a German saying that age brings out either the cow or the goat in women. The former is supposed to be a hefty, placid, friendly, not particularly flexible form of being. The latter has more the qualities of what English speakers would call “catty” a nervous, snippy, mean and often stubborn crone. Folk wisdom like this is wrong as often as it is right, or contains at least partial kernel of truths, as all stereotypes do. Fact is, despite an explosion of research into aging across the last decades we, as scientists as well, know very few things for sure.
We do know that the brain parts that regulate inhibition of behaviors are affected early on. The subsequent disinhibition might be relevant for becoming “a goat,” bitterness and anger now more expressed.
There seems to be overall agreement, that although personality traits remain relatively stable across the life span (UNLESS dementia occurs, which can completely change your personality without your fault) some traits seem to get a bit stronger age, and others diminish. Of the “Big Five” personality traits, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability seem to be getting a lift with maturation. Two other traits do decline with age – a general openness to experiences, and both facets of extraversion, social vitality and social dominance. (Ref.) Personality and aging interacts – some of us have an easier go accepting the hardship of aging than others. Personality resources such as self-esteem, perceived control, self-efficacy and resilience shape the person’s response to adversity in later life, not surprisingly.
What else do we know? Some of our long-held beliefs – for example that older people display a positivity bias and are better at emotional regulation compared to younger ones – are now questioned. New insights have found that contemporary old people are cognitively much better off than their peers who were born 20 years earlier, when tested at the same age. This is not because we somehow managed to delay the onset of age-dependent decline or because we decline more slowly across the years. Rather, we have been overall, across our lifespan, cognitively strengthened with better education, technological use, wider access to information, and that overall improved performance is giving us some slack to cover up the early signs of decline with age.
There is a whole enterprise exploring the biology of aging to help with prevention, progression and prognosis of disease and disability. It is a two way street – aging is a risk factor for developing chronic disease, but diseases also hasten aging.
There is a body of work dedicated to better understand the effects of personal, interpersonal, and societal factors on aging, including the mechanisms through which these factors exert their effects. Research is looking into the interaction between behavior (lifestyle)social, psychological and economic factors, as well as the timing of intervention during critical periods in a person’s life span where the course is set, and the effect of place (there are geographic aspects that impact aging.)
Researchers are interested in looking a population differences, to see where disparities need to be tackled, and also how we can improve our understanding of the consequences of an aging society to inform intervention development and policy decisions.
They got their work cut out for them. Whether potential answers enable us to improve our empathic responses to people living with dementia, or help us to prepare better for our own decline, I cannot tell.
Two weeks ago I spent an afternoon at a gray, empty beach. Associations to the metaphoric bleakness of the world at large were hard to avoid. Nor was the thought about how perceptually the world seems increasingly gray, compared to what it once was.
Just look at cars. So many more are white and gray now. (Understandably, given that white cars are cheaper than the rest, since they don’t charge for that coat of laquer otherwise added.)
Or look at interior design. Neutral colors, shades of beige and gray, dominate the domain, with gray carpets being preferred over every other hue. 2023 color of the year for walls prediction, for example, is something called Blank Canvas, to be combined with the shades below.
It is the successor to the 2022 winner Evergreen Fog, a subtle greenish-gray hue which was supposed to be paired with this:
And before you worry, “Oh no, another lament coming up,” rest easy – it’s going to end on a positive note! Hah!
Some of the most soothing houses I know have a gray-scale palette and look smashing. Today is not about judging color taste, it’s about documenting change across time – and wondering why we don’t select strong saturated colors to combat am increasingly bleak world, instead of nesting in neutrals, as calming as they are supposed to be.
(As a basis for comparison I added the template below.)
7000 photographs of objects across 21 categories were computer analyzed for shapes, color and texture. The most common color found? Dark charcoal gray. Here is a graph of how colors have changed over time. The most notable trend is the rise in gray over time (just look at the upper right corner.)
Part of that has to do with the materials used. Wood, early on, obviously provided reds, browns and beiges. Metal and plastic, now prevalent, tend toward black and grey. Earlier materials also had a tendency to decay, and attempts to prevent that led to interesting colors. Gold pocket watches, for example, had screws that tended to rust. A procedure called “blueing screws”, basically heating them up, stopped the decay and added a blue tinge to the screws/watches.
There is hope, though. Fashion’s darlings black or charcoal gray and white are predicted to be replaced this fall by this:
Of course, there is always a fall-back option for the less daring….
And then there is this – I guess we can delight in platypus-type boots replacing high heels. The short videoclip is strangely amusing.
Let’s return to my beach perceptions, though. Before giving in to the desolate notion of a washed out world, I reminded myself of Jack Gilbert’s call (bolded by me in the relevant stanza below.) We must risk delight. Can’t go on with just wailing. So I directed the camera at every speck of color found or provided, grateful to nature (and my sneakers) that they came through for me, once again.
A Brief for the Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.
I begin to contemplate what I have done and left undone, but this year not so much rebuilding
of my perennially damaged psyche, shoring up eroding friendships, digging out stumps of old resentments that refuse to rot on their own.
No, this year I want to call myself to task for what I have done and not done for peace. How much have I dared in opposition?
How much have I put on the line for freedom? For mine and others? As these freedoms are pared, sliced and diced, where
have I spoken out? Who have I tried to move? In this holy season, I stand self-convicted of sloth in a time when lies choke the mind and rhetoric bends reason to slithering choking pythons. Here I stand before the gates opening, the fire dazzling
my eyes, and as I approach what judges me, I judge myself. Give me weapons of minute destruction. Let my words turn into sparks.
Marge Piercy, “The Birthday of the World” from The Crooked Inheritance.
***
Sparks they shall be, my words as well. May 5783 bring more justice and peace, and more acceptance of scientific data regulating pandemics…rationality, in other words. A Happy New Year to all who celebrate.
