“The world is violent and mercurial–it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love–love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

Interview with Tennessee Williams – Conducted by James Grissom, New Orleans,1982.

The love of a parent is really the only thing you have to offer when your child is hurt and changed by this mercurial world. Whether it will do any good is up for grabs. Right now our helplessness dominates, with the inability to douse the flames of pain and forced adjustment in this burning building, two weeks post accident, 10 days of ICU and four operations later, now in the general section of the Trauma hospital.

But love is what we have, we offer, we preserve through these foggy times. And I will try and post this week short reminders of the fact that trauma can befall us all and that many people have successfully overcome it, adjusting to new realities, honestly an effort to persuade myself. Or I will choose something that simply inspires, to lift the spirit. Photographs will be from my walks, the one constant in my life, depicting the beauty of nature that is harshly indifferent to grief, and yet nourishing in its own way.

I’ll start with a bird that I had never seen before and now encountered several times – a Lazuli Bunting – whose cheerful coloration and sweet song are the opposite of everything that’s going on right now, and therefor to be tucked away in a small corner of my soul.

“We are wired to flit.” This sentence anchored my attention for the microsecond that goes for my attention span these days. The sentence linked to an article about 5th century Saint John Cassian, who complained that the mind… “‘wanders around like it were drunk’,” an amusing and learned essay about medieval monks’ speculations, theories and practical advice to harness attention.

I had been spending an unexpected free hour last Friday sitting at the corner of a pond, observing dragon flies. Big blue ones that never sat still, and smaller red ones that lit on little sticks poking out of the water, frequently taking off and immediately returning again in no predictable pattern. I felt my mind was working in parallel with these creatures, constantly in motion, occasionally resting on a topic, soon off wandering again, flitting, indeed.

I jumped on the opportunity, then, when yesterday’s essay by John Dickerson on focus and good use of time caught my eye in The Atlanctic. It is a pensive piece on the restlessness associated with our current loss of daily structure, and the inability to ward off intrusions that result from our need to follow the news, feel connected through the electronic media and satisfy our craving for distraction. I was taken by the sentence I cited to open today’s blog.

So far so good, in fact I am often engaged by Dickerson’s approach to thinking and writing, as much as one can judge from irregular reading of his essays in cultural magazines. But then I dug a bit deeper into the tool kit he proposed to anchor our flitting ways. He was quite charmed by a method he had received from Marshall Goldsmith, leading executive coach to the nations’ and international big wigs in banking and industry.

Make a spread sheet, with questions on the left, daily answers on the right, weekly averages. Answers can be in binary form, 1=yes met the goal, 0=nope, or devise scales. Questions can be as simple as “Did I make time to weed the garden” or as general as “have I made myself or someone else happy…” The questions, according to Dickerson, are to be about behaviors, not necessarily outcomes. In theory reviewing these every night forms habits, let’s you see where you are strong or weak in spots, and as daily reminders on your desktop serve as rescue signal when you are once again drawn for too many minutes into Twitter….

Of course the mention of “America’s leading coach” had me look up his website, where you can find his version of the spread sheet for free. If you are interested in spending time on 32 questions everyday which delve, among others, into weight management and flossing, consumption of sweets and duration of TV time – outcome oriented, mind you – then this is the way to go for you. If you are capable of paying someone every day to call you and have you read the list to them to be held accountable (our willpower, after all, is lacking as the monks in the year 420 already knew), then this is your path to salvation. Well, that might be wishful thinking. Let’s say, it might be the path to answering all your emails and cleaning the kitchen. Who knows.

For me the whole exercise, perhaps with the exception of the “what have I done for others” bit, is way too focussed on Self. The craving for improvement. The desire for performance. The yearning for predictability. The return to what we once took for “normal.” It is also a token of our privilege. You think someone out of work, living at the edge, out in the streets protesting for BLM has the need, or even someone just devoted to helping defend those who are arrested, or someone buying the groceries for at-risk group neighbors after work has the time and energy to record and discuss 32 item of personal accomplishments each day?

I am currently easily distracted. Yes, it’s hard to write long, thoughtful pieces these days. Pretending that it is a sign of personal messiness, of lack of will, surmountable with the right bag of tricks, ignores and defies our being in a world that itself is stretched thin. This world and I are linked, its and my brittleness needs acknowledging, rather than papering over with pretend improvement. When politics and pandemics defy our norms, my own cannot pretend to be untouched.

Besides, I hate to floss.

Photographs are of dragonflies from the Eastcoast last fall, and the red ones from here last week.

Music has to be Chopin’s Preludes Op. 28 – Nr. 11 is titled the Dragonfly – and the pianist’s dress might as well be borrowed from one, sized XXXL.

Over the weekend, I switched computers from old to new which brought me to the brink of a nervous breakdown. My old programs did no longer run, I had to order new ones in addition to the hardware, figure out changing configurations and face the fact that the forcibly purchased 2020 Photoshop – my toolbox for creating all of my art – did not look or act like the one I’ve been using for the last 8 years. Dropbox is still not working, even my computer whiz – husband is unable to change the ugly font of my mail program. You get the idea.

Neighborhood nature to the rescue, since my walks in state parks, in bird sanctuaries, all my usual haunts are now closed. I brought the camera and today’s photographs depict some scenes from the outing – my gratitude for my surroundings is boundless in these months. As is someone else’s.

*

Plenty of others had the same idea. But overall there was a quietude that was new, and plenty of occasions to watch little wrens, juncos, ravens, and song sparrows daring to be out in the open. First blossoms peeked out of the shrubbery, and the shows had lost their icy edge. The light was glorious, my soul got a good airing.

While I tried to capture some of the beauty, I thought back to a discussion we had last week at home (again). Is there a cost to taking all these pictures? What do we know about photography’s effects on memory? I mean millions of photos are taken everyday, posted on various sites, significant events in our lives recorded. Do we pay more attention to the scene we photograph (which would enhance memory) or less, because we are so preoccupied with getting the shot itself, or presenting a certain view of the world in our postings (which would hurt memory)?

Relatively recent research on this topic seems to indicate that memory suffers. If I have you go through a museum, for example, and ask you either to photograph (with the idea of posting the pictures later) or not, both groups enjoy the experience itself in similar ways. But a surprise memory test a week later reveals that the picture-taking group performs worse in how much and what they remember. People also lack parts of the experience that was non-visual – the sounds, things that were said around them – in their memory banks. This was true for both, controlled studies and those happening in a natural environment.

So, how do I think about that? If I have no recourse to my photos, and my memory is needed to answer questions (in the witness stand, for example,) yes, then it’s a problem. But the gain from sharing my view of the world is enormous, allowing others vicarious joy and experience, and deepen the post-event thoughts through talking about what I saw. In the usual case of being able to see my photos in my archives or an album, they bring back the experience as visual reminders, as faithfully if not more so than any spontaneous recall would. For longer, too, in many instances.

The memory issue, therefore, is not giving me sleepless nights. I am more concerned with what the ever-ready camera at hand does to the moment of the experience. Do you enjoy a walk in the woods if you snap pictures along the way? Are you open to the entirety of the experience, or distracted by a constant search for motive? Can stillness, provided or inspired by nature still happen when you are fiddling with gadgets? The answer, this Sunday, was a resounding YES! The picture taking was secondary, almost an afterthought, when I had delighted in some particular view. For many of the birds I didn’t even raise the camera so I would not frighten them away.

Peace prevailed, and trailed me home. Joy returned when uploading the photos, re-engaging with the forest views. Small blessings in difficult times.

Now if we were in Japan, we could stumble on our hike onto an almost half a mile-long construction, a xylophone that plays Bach’s Cantata 147 in the middle of the forest.

Closer to home, we can just hang out on the porch and listen to this, one of my repeats, I know, but I like to hear it often, for the slavic mix of joy and mourning.

It is an interesting challenge for the photographer to make do with what we can find in our suddenly severely limited environments. What can I depict, without resorting to my archives, something that is of interest, contains some beauty or has informational value?

How can I find newness when everyday I see the same things, retrace the same steps in my neighborhood? How can I be open to discoveries when my mind is churning with thoughts about the fate of this nation, the suffering of people across the world, the friends who are sick and irritation at my own body that is taking way too long to get back up to full speed?

And how will you, the reader, react to things taken out of context, things seemingly banal when stacked up against your own worries?

Well, as photographer, I simply do the best I can. Today’s pictures for example, were captured by iPhone just along the street where I live, seen simply because I was looking down, open to small patches of color and hiding my red eyes.

You, the viewer, have the thing to do that you always do when seeing something within a limited context: you try to to make sense of it. That should be easy when I tell you the topic is “found by the wayside.” It becomes more interesting, when the viewing stimulus is more complicated and I can manipulate what I’ll tell you about the context.

And just like that we are at the interesting part of today’s musings: a brand- new study about how people interpret “objective” video evidence, when I give them deliberately manipulated contextual information. What you “see” combined with what you “hear” leads to different reactions.

Simple design: I show you a video that depicts the exertion of force, (or not) enacted (or not) by a police officer who you can’t see clearly since the events were documented via a typical dash- camera (the ones now in use to help us discern whether applied force was excessive or not.) These videos are of real events, grainy, bad quality, no sound – exactly as they are when brought as evidence to court. In our experiment, depending on what group you are in, I tell you that the officer who acted was male or female, White or Black.

What are the results, when I ask you about what you saw and how you would evaluate that evidence? When officers used force, people trusted officers less and perceived them to be less effective relative to when they did not. Despite all participants viewing the same interaction, people who thought they saw a male (vs. female) officer perceived his use-of-force to be driven more by internal traits, such as being aggressive and emotionally reactive, and less by the external situation, a behavior pattern which was associated with decreased trust and perceived effectiveness. In contrast, people perceived female (vs. male) officers’ force to be driven more by external aspects of the dangerous situation, which was associated with increased trust and perceived effectiveness. For what it’s worth, there was no observed interaction with the presumed race of the officer.

I find this interesting – and hasten to add that this is a new finding, not yet replicated, and who knows if it will stand. For one, cops who use force are seen less positively than those who don’t. Female officers, however, were more respected than males, when they exerted force. Usually it is women who are seen as emotionally reactive and driven by internal motives, even when thought to be less aggressive than men. Their counter-stereotypical behavior here is interpreted in their favor – for once. If they acted out, it must have been in reaction to external factors, threatened violence against them or some such.

Independent of those findings, though, the interesting aspect is of course that seeing something with your own eyes can lead to strikingly different evaluations, depending on the contextual information provided by others that shapes your perception as a whole.

So what do you make of this?

In the absence of any further information?

While you think, I’ll provide music sent to me by a friend that made my day – I’ll give you context: Mozart. Magic Flute. Papageno…. followed by the conventional version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMXD4h5w8D8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87UE2GC5db0

Or was it Charmin? Cotonelle? One of these names starting with a C.

Why let a good crisis go to waste? We might as well learn something psychologically interesting. I will not be able to do anything other than speculate about the hoarding of toilet paper – and speculate I shall. But I do have something to say about the psychology of disgust, which, as it turns out, comes often into play when people are facing epidemics.

(As an anti-dote, photographs today are the most enticing things you can imagine, Trilliums, the harbingers of spring, although, they, too, are white…)

We are actually not seeing hoarding of those toilet paper rolls in any clinical sense of the disorder. Hoarding (as a psychiatric condition) is defined by a persistent need to save things, serious distress when you have to get rid of them that interferes with your daily life, and clutter in your house to the point where your living space is no longer functional.

All across the world, independent of culture, people are panic-buying the stuff. Not dried meals, canned food, or other staples of the pantry, for the most part. Toilet paper! (And, as it turns out, pot in all of its variations, but that is a story for another day.)

How did we get there? Here are some suggestions: You are worried about safety and in need to feel in control, so you turn toward wanting to be prepared. Buying something big that is relatively inexpensive, doesn’t have an expiration date, so you’ll use it eventually, regardless of what happens, is an attractive option when you think of how you can prepare for potential lock down (people go, in other words, for the zero risk bias.) Once people start buying more than usual, the shelves get emptier. That signals to others that there is competition for something of value, so they pounce, too.

Add social media, that now cajole others to share their toilet paper, or post sometimes truly funny jokes about it, or show their cellphone videos of people physical fighting over it, and the signal gets amplified to the point where there isn’t a person around who doesn’t wonder if they have enough and pack their shopping carts should they be the first at Freddy’s after restocking. The repeat visual messaging clearly inflates a sense of danger and urgency.

It’s not the the actual threat of a dearth of the familiar hygienic wipes, but the fear of unavailability, which then triggers the mass purchases which in turn result in unavailability. The generalized fear of the early buyer leads to object specific panic in those later in the game who then overreact.

It is no coincidence, though, that when we are worried about infection, disease, failing bodily functions etc. we turn to things associated with cleanliness. Threat of illness heightens our aversion to the things that many feel are disgusting, and so we try to control that aspect of our lives.

Research by Paul Rozin at Penn and David Pizarro at Cornell University has provided important insights into the psychology of disgust. Disgust is a universal mechanism to prevent us from contagion. A sense of revulsion makes us shy away from biologically harmful things like vomit, feces, rotting meat and, to a certain extent, insects. (Details can be found here.) With growing populations on this planet, disgust reactions also lead us to shun people who violate the social conventions linked to disgust, or those we think, rightly or wrongly, are carriers of disease.

In fact, disgust however subtly instilled and not even consciously experienced, can change your value judgments. If I show you pictures of disease pathogens and then assess how you view foreign people, Africans or Asians, say, you rate them more negatively than those do who were previously shown non-disgusting stimuli. If I put you in a room that I prepped to smell like a horrible public toilet, you feel more animosity towards groups not your own, homosexuals in particular. Disgust, in other words, is encouraging or aggravating xenophobia and homophobia. (In some experiments people found a correlation between the degree of conservatism and the ease of being disgusted, leading to harsher judgements – the more conservative the greater the disgust, but that seems to work more for homophobia then everything else. I’ll check at some later point if it has been replicated.)

Disgust, once elicited in jurors hearing about vile details of a crime, makes it difficult for them to take into account mitigating factors important in the process of law, such as the intentions of the people involved in a case. Disgust also clouds a juror’s judgement more than feelings of anger.

And disgust, elicited by external forces (I have you watch a really yucky film clip) can make you sell totally unrelated stuff you own – a mug or pens I gifted you earlier – at knockdown prices. The Disgust Disposal Effect makes you want to get rid of stuff somehow associated with your current state, regardless of how little it is related to the source of the disgust.

Here is the 1987 landmark paper by Rozin and Fallon who first explored the emotion and how it might possibly be acquired. Looks like it is culturally transmitted, and young children have to be taught to experience disgust and how to behave towards its objects. Feces are central to the early education, and so it might be not surprising that we see something that is intrinsically associated with the control of feces to emerge as a focus when we are threatened with contamination. Just as we sell cheap when disgust was independently induced, we might buy high and wide when it feels like the purchase might counteract the disgust that is latently plaguing us.

Charmin, here we come!

And here is one of my favorite musicians of all time, with a nicely disgusting portrayal of a common condition…..
Here is more of the album, which I will play today all day.