This week we had marching, hiking, flying, switching lanes and finally: throwing. As in throwing obfuscation out there, sowing confusion.

Despairing mermaid?

Meet Robert Proctor, a science historian at Stanford, who studies how people deliberately obfuscate evidence that undermines their claims and, more importantly, their bottom line. He coined the wonderful term agnotology, the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance. Now why would we, at this point in time, be so interested in willful acts of spreading confusion or deceit, to sell a product or win a favor? You tell me 🙂

Wooden statues at base of crane

The link below is a wonderful article about Proctor’s work – starting with an investigation of the actions of the cigarette industry, continuing with a look into climate change denial and a focus on the current administration’s skills in deliberately keeping people ignorant or worse, convincing them of things that are not true to fact.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance

Stained glass windows in a derelict building

Photographs are of some of the more confusing vistas I encountered over the last months and a face that mirrors confusion pretty accurately, in my opinion.

Now what?

If you google Wilfrid Voynich, Wikipedia lists his professions as: Revolutionary; Antique Book Seller. How’s that for an interesting shift in live(s)?  If you read up on him, he was switching lanes many, many times in his life, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes forced, in politics, relationships, (pre)occupations and more.

Voynich, Voynich you mutter, where do I know that name from? Most likely in connection with the famous  medieval manuscript that to this day has never been deciphered – a vellum codex filled with an unknown language, drawings of scientific matters, and all kinds of other riddles now residing at Yale. The articles below provide you, in turn, with the newest insights about the manuscript and a short history of Voynich’s life.

Regarding the former, I simply adore the idea that it was after all a hoax perpetrated by some person in the 14oos (carbon dating proved that the codex was indeed generated at that time) trying to make a quick gold ducat from some gullible aristocrat. The smartest cryptographers of our century have not been able to break the code, and the drawings do not concur with any realistic botanicals of our world. It sure fooled many, seemingly continues to fool, for a long time.

Secret Knowledge—or a Hoax?

Regarding the latter, the life of this Polish Leftie, it was one hell of a ride and certainly he’d be on my list of people to take to a deserted island.  (As, for that matter, would be his wife Ethel Boole Voynich, an amazing character in her own right, allied with Karl Marx’ offspring, supporter of revolutionary causes, novelist – here is a video of her on her 95th birthday  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYoxNOJ5fwk in 1959.) Check her out.

Traversing the Globe….

Just think of a life like this:

http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/FeaturesEurope/EasternPoland_Voynich01.htm

Short summary : Voynich was born in 1864 to a Polish family in Lithuania. While a student at the University of Moscow in 1884 graduating in chemistry, he joined the Polish nationalist movement. A year later, he was arrested and accused of engaging in revolutionary activity. He spent 18 months jailed in the Warsaw Citadel and was sentenced without trial to five years exile in Siberia. There he acquired a working knowledge of some 18 languages (!)  – and here I was proud that I have working knowledge of 4…..

He escaped into Mongolia in 1890, made his way through China and eventually reached Hamburg, Germany, boarding a ship to England.

He joined a circle of political exiles in London and worked for a period translating and publishing revolutionary propaganda for distribution in Russia; he abruptly stopped when his political mentor accidentally died; on recommendation of someone from the British museum who knew about his language skills, he opened a bookshop  in London and quickly gained a reputation as a resourceful and knowledgeable dealer. Unclear where his starting capital came from, although he has been rumored to be allied with wealthy female admirers. In any case, he discovered several astounding books, the Voynich manuscript included, and was convinced until his death that we would crack the code to figure out the black magic contained in it.

The flexibility, the stamina, the determination to survive, the smarts and the ability to adapt all truly impress me.

Please don’t touch. ART!

Yesterday it was all about marching. Today it’s going to be about hiking.  Alas, not the real thing, given that trails are muddy streams and/or blocked by landslides wherever you look in this extraordinarily wet state this spring.

Instead, it is about what a Black woman experienced when hiking the Appalachian Trail last year. A young friend sent me the link in response to my “profiles in courage” some weeks back.  The article is long, revealing worlds most of us simply never encounter much less understand, heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. Do yourself a favor and read it through to the glorious end. I felt that if only an iota of the gleaned knowledge sticks in my memory and helps me act differently in this world, there might be progress.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2170266/solo-hiking-appalachian-trail-queer-black-woman

Photographs are of young people of my acquaintance. I experience them as quite resilient right now and try to imagine that that carries over into their young adulthood – I even have the occasional fantasy that things might have improved by the time they hit their twenties. Probably groundless optimism, or wishful thinking or both. I so want them to be not harmed permanently  by racism.  It almost hurts how much I want that.

Today’s profile in this week on courage is about a man who lost his face. It was literally eaten up by a bacterial infection the day after birth. Worse than the physical assault and the endless reconstructive surgeries it necessitated throughout his life, was the fact that his parents abandoned him on the spot.

He lived to write a book about surviving in the absence of love, a void confirmed by a harrowing meeting with his mother when he seeks her out as an adult. 38 years of the most painful life culminate in encountering a shallow, narcissistic, defensive human (?) being who accuses him of making her feel bad. Howard Shulman, then, is testimony to resilience, a capacity to persist in the face of, in his case, unimaginable difficulties.

http://narrative.ly/as-my-face-disappeared-so-did-my-mother-and-father/?utm_source=Narratively+email+list&utm_campaign=89cbd9ffd2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f944cd8d3b-89cbd9ffd2-66322689

Passover inspired my associations with courage this week; it was a week that saw official US governmental reflections on the holocaust describe it as a something where chemical weapons were not used on “one’s own people,” who had been sent to holocaust centers (known to the rest of us as concentration camps). The decision who is one’s own, and who is not, based on race, orientation, religion and in Shulman’s case mere looks, who deserves abandonment or even death is not something only from the history books. Imagine my joy, then, when a message of inclusivity reached me from North Dakota, headlined: the most radical seder in the history of North Dakota: progeny had created a special seder plate.

Today I want to celebrate the courage of a woman known to all of us and the determination and ingenuity of a man known to – I daresay – none of us. I am talking about Rosa Parks, whose courage to insist on her bus seat when challenged by a white man gave rise to the civil rights movement. (Coincidentally, another person not giving up his seat made the news yesterday – a doctor was forcibly and violently dragged from his United Airline seat, paid for and entered legally, after United failed to find volunteers to accommodate their own employees’ needs, and did not offer the amount of money needed to persuade fliers to volunteer their seats.  Flying while Chinese has become another source of danger, apparently. But I digress.)

Rosa Park’s house was about to be razed rather than made into a museum – this country has apparently no interest in a memorial to the successful fight of racism, however unfinished. Ryan Mendoza, an artist living in Germany, managed to dismantle it and reconstruct it bit by bit in his Berlin garden, covering the cost of the transatlantic transport himself.  Details of this amazing feat below.

http://www.dw.com/en/why-rosa-parks-house-now-stands-in-berlin/a-38343924

And while we’re at it, here is another example of private initiative and determination to fight racism. Leaves me in a good mood this morning (as long as I don’t read the rest of the news.)

http://www.dw.com/en/children-are-our-future-german-footballer-gerald-asamoah-tackles-racism-at-school/a-37826264

Featured image says: Mobile Tolerance Zone