Cassandra, Meet Pollyanna

Three hundred-odd years ago Jean-Jacque Rousseau wrote "Almighty God, thou who holds all spirits in thy hands, deliver us from the Enlightenment and fatal arts of our fathers and give us back ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the sole goods that might create our happiness and which are precious in thy sight." You'll find similar sentiments in Plato.  They've been echoing down the ages since the Fall, I guess. The contradiction they harbor is most succinctly conveyed, perhaps, by the old Italian saying: "We were better off when things were worse."

In an article that appeared recently in the New York Times, free lance psychologist Adam Mastroianni makes an effort to explain why we so often feel that everything's going downhill—even though by most statistical measures the opposite is true. It carries the title "Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse." He bases his argument on what he calls two "well-established psychological phenomena."

1. We often seek out and pay attention to negative information. Our news sources, whatever they may be, emphasis such information. I'm referring here not only Fox News but also the more well-researched, mature, and reliable liberal press. The issue of the Times in which the article I'm referring appeared also carried headlines on page one informing us that nutritional science "is failing us"; that very few states includes climate change education in their curriculum for all twelve grades; that the night sky as we know it is disappearing due to light pollution and wildfires; and that the late Cormac McCarthy's celebrated writing career "would never happen today."

I have grown increasingly sensitive over the years to the fact that headlines and lead paragraphs, whatever the news happens to be, often carry adjectives such as "alarming," "unsettling," and "surprising." Alarming to whom? To the economists, pundits, scientists, and pollsters whose prognostications more often than not turn out to be wrong, one way or the other?

2. Mastroianni's second point is that over time we tend to forget about the bad stuff, and as a result, the past develops the sheen of a Golden Age. No argument there. In fact, thirty-five-odd years ago I made the same argument in a piece titled "Cultural Requirements." And due to the marvelous powers of desk-top computing, I can easily find the text and reproduce a few lines here. (You can read the entire essay in my book Mountain Upside Down.)

It is of the essence of culture, I think, in its nutritive capacity, to be exemplary rather than typical or symptomatic. Those who argue differently face a Catch-22, the illogicality of which has not in any way diminished its popularity as a journalistic hook. It goes like this:

A) Culture is in decline. Look at TV, look at films, etc.

B) But no, look at this fine book, or this jazz performance.

A) Yes, but the things you’ve just mentioned aren’t truly representative. The masses know nothing about them. They’re the tastes of an elite. Therefore, culture is in decline.

 The flaw in this line of analysis stems from a stubborn determination to equate mass culture, which is only occasionally significant, and exemplary culture, which may well be unpopular or obscure in its day, although it increases in significance with the passage of time. Anyone who expects popular culture to rise to the level of that body of resilient works of art and thought which, having retained their vigor through time, offer us a vision of the past, is bound to be disappointed. No one in our day is likely to be as cryptically profound as Heraclitus, as proper as Confucius, as compassionate as Christ, as noble as El Cid, as observant as Jan van Eck, as cosmic as Giordano Bruno, as feverishly romantic as Cervantes, as clever as Shakespeare, as sublime as Mozart, as charismatic as Napoleon, as melancholy as Leopardi, as guileless as Therese of Liseaux, as intellectually perverse as Wittgenstein, or as humane as Jean Renoir. When we examine the climate of our own times the commonplace habits and artifacts we meet up with daily or read about in the papers, and not the isolated ideas and images that posterity will remember us for, tend to dominate our field of view. Therefore, it would appear that our culture is “in decline.” It’s a simple matter of perspective.               

Nicolas of Cusa, writing at the end of the fifteenth century, argued that the infinitely large and the infinitely small amount to the same thing, which is God. It’s a thought worth pondering; yet I must say that in the end the idea of “infinity” in either form, being mathematical and abstract, leads us away from the truth. Whatever else he, or she, (or they?) may be, God is not an abstraction. Nothing real is abstract.

I’m more inclined to endorse the remark of Thomas Aquinas that “we know God implicitly in everything we know.” But this slant presents us with problems as well. Perhaps we ought to dispense with the theological nostrums altogether, (though they’re always there, in the logical substratum of our personal attempts to show or to explain the way we feel about things) and merely echo the sentiment of an odd and now slightly obscure French novelist, Henry de Montherlant, who once wrote: "Life is a wonderful thing. When you turn it over and examine it thoroughly, when you see that which is, you feel like getting down on your knees. That which is—three remarkable syllables!"

Mastroianni extends the argument to other aspects of modern life, including politics and morals, but the reasoning is the same. Yet he bases his argument, not on reasoning, but on 574,000 survey responses. He writes:

While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.

Well, it hardly seems necessary to interview that many people to get at the truth. All you need to do is look inside your own head. 

Modern life presents us with plenty of serious challenges, needless to say. But I think Flaubert was right when he remarked, two hundred-odd years ago: "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times."

One avenue I might recommend to improve the doom-and-gloom mood would be to scuttle the grade school lectures about climate change and develop a K-12 curriculum devoted to poetry, not only as a literary genre but also as a mental discipline designed to open the richness of daily life—"that which is"—to wider view. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani once expressed the belief that poetry should "empty into the reader's heart a charge of spiritual energy that contains all parts of the soul, making all life fall into place." Of course, the effect isn't permanent. As we shift our perspective or expand our field of view, we are reminded once again of the many parts of life that remain painfully out of joint. But both perspectives are valid, and the refreshment we take from one makes it easier to face, and change, the other. 

Building upon that foundation, it might be possible to develop a deeper understanding of what history is, bending it away from the currently popular but historiographically jejune "hermeneutics of suspicion" toward a deeper and more mature "hermeneutics of recovery and understanding."

But that's a subject for another time.

  

Summer Solstice Meditations

 The winter solstice is a big deal, or at least it can be imagined to be. The sun had been retreating, day after day, but now it seems to be returning. That's great! On the longest night of the year, it makes good sense to gather together around a fire of some sort.

The summer solstice has less of a claim to the imagination, though in this epoch of climate change, perhaps we should all celebrate the fact that the sunlight will grow less prolonged and severe.

Hilary and I decided to celebrate this less-than-staggering astronomical event with an overnight trip to Myre-Big Island State Park, a few miles from the Iowa border, near Albert Lea. Not many people go there mid-week, and even fewer, I suspect, when the temperature hits 90 degrees.

An added deterrent was the predicted level of "ground-level ozone," something I'd never heard of. Evidently the combination of sunny skies, warm temperatures, and low humidity creates an environment conducive to a reaction of volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, the result being a dramatic increase in ground-level ozone. The warning I read advised "children and older adults, and people who are active outdoors" to avoid prolonged or heavy outdoor exertion. Like hiking?

I had always imagined ozone to be a thin, wispy gas, way up in the stratosphere, protecting us from various harmful forms of solar radiation. I don't see what purpose it serves down here on the ground.

For whatever reason, our favorite campsite (#52) was available, with no other site reserved for several hundred yards. And the park is only ninety minutes by freeway down the lovely Bemis Moraine from Minneapolis. So we went.

Myre-Big Island is a grand and curious park, with at least four distinct areas of natural interest. The oddest thing about it is that it wraps itself around a large lake that can be seen from many vantage points, yet the lake itself has little recreational value. Cool breezes blow across it. Pelicans and cormorants drift here and there. Deer drink on the shore near herons and egrets poised to feed on passing minnows. But no one swims in it, and there are precious few boats around. Which is good.

Our plan was to hike the shady, marshy trails in the southwest corner of the park during the afternoon heat, and hike the Pelican Trail across the high, open fields the next morning when heat (and ozone?) would be low.

What one notices on such rambles is the beauty of the grassy, rolling hills covered with golden alexander, and the shady woods full of well-spaced burr oaks and walnut trees. 

The sumac fruit is still green and succulent. The migrant birds have gone north, and the songs and chirps of the same few species assault the ears again and again: common yellowthroat, redstart, yellow warbler, red-eyed vireo, field sparrow, catbird. To be surprised by the slurpy call of the indigo bunting, the buzz-buzz of the clay-colored sparrow, or the irritated chatter of the house wren was always a treat.

For every bird we saw, we heard twenty.

The heat of the day persisted into evening, and we decided not to put the rain-fly on the tent. This would allow such breezes as there were to flow through it, and it would also make it possible to see the stars through the mosquito netting in the roof.  This can be a great experience, not only for its poetic effect, but also because one tends to wake up frequently during the night when sleeping on the ground, and the movement of the stars reminds us that time is passing and the discomforts of the night won't last forever.

Yet I have to admit that on the longest day of the year, I also felt a little bit exposed without the rain fly, because our tent has a panel of transparent netting right along the ground, and campers taking their evening walk around the campground—a common habit—would be able to see me lying there on the ground in evening light, covered with a sheet and defenseless.  

Of greater interest than the birds at this time of year are the prairie plants. There were lots of white indigo in the fields on the first part of the Pelican Trail. I noticed just now that this plant is listed as "native, rare" on the Minnesota Wildflowers website.

We also spotted the clump of compass plant we'd admired a few years ago on the same trail, but they were still a few weeks from blooming.

We investigated the four backpacking campsite along the route. All of them were along the shore of the lake, and several were nice. But you would have to carry in your water, and I had to remind myself it would be a drag hauling your comfy and indispensable camp chair way out there.

The various butterflies and dragonflies along the trail were also beautiful and intriguing. And fleeting. And nameless.

It was getting hot by the time we got back to our site and broke camp. By midday we were exploring the backstreets of Albert Lea, trying to find Edgewater Park.

Past Lives — a Love Story?

I saw a sneak preview of the Korean/American film Past Lives a few days ago. It's a quiet, enigmatic film—in many ways the opposite of the frenetic Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and it's been getting a lot of press. It follows a few decades in the life of Nora, who leaves Korea at the age of twelve along with her parents, who have arranged for the family to emigrate to Canada. Nora seems unperturbed by the change; She's bright and willful. In an instant she's become an adult and moved to New York to pursue a career as a playwright.

The plot centers on Nora's relationship with Hae Sung, the boy she left behind in Korea when both were pre-teen kids. At some point Nora and a friend (her mother?) are having some fun on the laptop, looking up people they knew in Korea, and Nora discovers that Hae Sung has also been looking for her. They reconnect via Zoom or Skype, and begin a vague, dreamy correspondence about where their lives are going, how they still think about each other, and so on. Should Hae Sung pay Nora a visit in New York? No, he's studying engineering and plans to go to China to learn Mandarin. It will be good for his career. Maybe Nora should visit him in Seoul? No thanks.

Nora finally suggests that it would be best if they discontinue their conversations. Reluctantly, Hae Sung agrees.  

At a writer's retreat, Nora meets Arthur, a likeable novelist and self-styled "New York Jew" in the Joel Fleischman mold. On their first evening together (as I recall), Nora shares a few bottles of beer with Arthur, and also the Korean concept of “inyun,” a personal connection established in past lives and now bearing fruit—not dissimilar, as far as I can tell, from the Turkish concept of "kismet."

A few frames, and ten years, later, we find Arthur and Nora married and living together in a tiny Brooklyn apartment.

Although the film isn't long by modern standards, it seems to have taken a long time to reach this point. Nora is lively and interesting to look at, and she and Arthur seem to be a good pair, but many viewers will be eager for the other shoe to drop.

Yes, Hae Sung plans to visit New York. Nora agrees to spend some time with him, of course, and Arthur is pretty cool about. Hae Sung has a good job and a fiancée in Korea, but as Arthur puts it: "He's coming half way around the world to see you, after all."

What happens? I'm not going to say. Nor do Nora and Hae Sung have much of interest to say to each other, though they visit quite a few bits of New York scenery while moodily not saying it. All the interesting conversations take place between Nora and Arthur as he grapples with the challenge of sharing his life with a woman who only dreams in Korean, and she struggles to find a place in her heart for Hae Sung's dyed-in-the-wool Korean-ness, and perhaps her own. (Isn't that what the play she's writing and rehearsing is all about?)

The street scenes in Past Lives are colorful and fun to watch. Viewers are likely to be reminded at various points of Woody Allen's Manhattan and Nora Ephraim's You've Got Mail, and even Everything, Everywhere All at Once, in so far as that film considers alternative life paths for its characters, and also creates a meta-verse where they actually take place.

The concept of "inyun" is really just a red herring, though it makes for good late-night conversation at the bar. In the end, what's fated to be is what is;  what "might have been" doesn't fall within its purview. Every life contains more than a few unfulfilled possibilities, which may be worth pondering briefly but are not worth dwelling on. Nor can any single relationship, however deep and strong, be all-absorbing or fully realized. We remain mysterious to one another. 

Or as the Argentine/Italian poet Antonio Porchia put it: "I love you just the way you are, but do not tell me how that is."  

Barbershop Big Bang Theory

I came upon an article in Scientific American recently suggesting that the universe began with a "bang" rather than a "bounce." That was the story we were told as kids, of course, and it even appears in a flashback in Annie Hall (!977) where the young Alvy Singer tells his psychiatrist, "Why do your homework? The universe is expanding, and someday it will explode." The kid's got a point.

More recently, theories have been floated suggesting that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion in an endless series of bounces. So, which is it?

I have often pondered this question while sitting in the barber shop waiting to get a haircut, though a second question often comes to mind first: "I made a reservation online half an hour ago, when there was a half-hour wait; so why do I have to wait an additional half-hour once I get here? Did I pass through a wormhole or what?"

Though I find the question of the origin of the universe intriguing, the first thing that caught my eye in the article was the last phrase of the headline—"New Studies Find."

This is wretched journalism, and not in the least bit scientific. The proper phrase would be "New Studies Suggest." Nothing in astrophysics is definitively "found," and the origins and dim past of the universe will probably remain murky 'til the end of time, and beyond. The "findings" referred to in the article are merely speculations, and shaky ones at that.

Astrophysicists have established with some degree of confidence that in the first few milliseconds during which our current universe expanded—a blindingly hot phase known colloquially as the "inflationary period"—the universe behaved very differently than it does now. The speculations under review here deal with conflicting explanations of irregularities that have been detected recently within the cosmic microwave background, which is commonly considered the "footprint" of that nascent universe. The authors of the current article describe and also critique theories such as bispectrum and loop quantum cosmology before concluding that before the Big Bang produced our universe from a "singularity," there was ... nothing. The mass required to reverse the expansion of a previous incarnation and keep the "accordion" pumping simply does not exist.

Personally, I have my doubts. Four fifths of the mass required to explain the rotation of the galaxies we can see and measure—the infamous Dark Matter—has never been detected at any wave-length. We presume it's there because without it our gravitational formulas don't work. Well, maybe there's even more Dark Matter out there than we think, that we also can't see, that would make a different gravitational formula more accurate while also supporting the theory of an accordion universe—the "bounce" theory mentioned in the title.

Yet such arguments overlook a more basic point. Even if current evidence supported the "accordion" theory of numerous expansions and contractions, it would leave the question unanswered. How did the universe—whether singular and unique or seesaw and musical—get going in the first place? Where did it come from?

Thinking about this issue at any great length will make you seasick. I would not recommend it. But such questions do have their amusing side, because language is incapable of even phrasing the question correctly. For example, a moment ago I asked the question, Where did the universe come from?  Such a question makes sense if it refers to something discrete, like a wood tick that suddenly appears on my forearm, crawling toward my hand, as I'm driving. Where did that come from? It wasn't there a split-second ago. The window's closed, and I doubt if it fell from the inside roof of the car. Weird!

One thing I know for certain is that wherever it came from was somewhere else.

But you can't ask where the universe came from unless you believe there's somewhere else it could have come from. But that place would also be a part of the universe, which includes everything. Right? The question makes no sense.  

Yet it must be asked.   

Another question that makes no sense to me is this: I've been waiting patiently, thumbing through Golf Digest or Minnesota Monthly, until my name rises to the top of the list on the computer screen. I sit down in the barber chair, and the stylist asks me a question like "Why are we here today?" or "What are we thinking of?" Oh, my God. These are profound questions. Why are we here today? Why is anything here today?  

But I think I know what she's driving at. And I have an answer ready.

I point to my hair and say, "A little shorter, please. And could you clean up that unruly fluff on the back of my neck."

   

Marvelous May: Forest-shaping

May is the gardening month par excellence, though it doesn't seem to get going until Mother's Day. The weather is cool, the vegetation is fresh, and we discover how well things did over the winter--or not-- which will determine what the new garden will require.

Variations on two common phrases have run through my mind more than once when scattering grass seed, assaying plants at a nursery, or lugging a tub of mulch or topsoil around the garage into the back yard.

— Gardening in the triumph of hope over experience.

— A garden is what springs up while you're making other plans.

Last summer was hot and dry; patches of our front yard became a desert, and several newly purchased plants didn't do well. I considered it a minor miracle to see that the blue beech (Carpinus caroliniana) that we planted last year, which did nothing but drop leaves for the rest of the summer, made it through the winter. It's still the same size as when we planted it, but its new leaves have a beautiful golden sheen. And I was equally pleased to see that two robust chokecherry trees have appeared nearby it in the midst of all the grape vines and Virginia creeper.

Two chokecherries amid the foliage

On the other hand, for several weeks I scrutinized the two witch hazel bushes we planted last year almost daily, looking for new buds, before concluding that I was staring at a couple of dead sticks.

If I had done my research before purchasing the plants I would have learned that—to quote the Chicago Botanic Garden—witch hazels "have preference for well-drained, loamy, acidic soil [which] means that they grow less than happily in clay soil." The soil out back, especially in the band of woods at the edge of our yard, is mostly clay.

I also read just now that the witch hazel is commercially grown and harvested "for the extract of its bark and roots, which is distilled into the common astringent that bears its name." I don't know anything about that, but last summer I watched the squirrels frolicking all over these plants, leaping onto them, bending them down to the ground, and basically going wild in every direction. Even this spring I saw a squirrel spinning around in the dirt at the base of the dead stump. Something in the bark appeals to them.

A few days ago we made a trip across town to the St. Croix River Valley to visit the Out Back Nursery, which specializes in Minnesota-grown native species but doesn't seem too concerned about the retail trade. As usual, our goal was to find a few shrubs to fill in the woods behind our house. After considerable hemming and hawing, we came home with another blue beech, a hazelnut shrub, and a gray dogwood similar to the ones that have lined our deck for the last thirty-five years.

A couple of nannyberry bushes had been doing quite well, but the rabbits girdled them during the winter and I cut them down, hoping they'd bounce back. One of the two is now, a month later,  a flourishing two-foot shrub. (It will take years to return to its former height, of course.) The other, larger, specimen still looks pretty dead. I tried to dig out the roots, but I couldn't lift them; they'd gone too deep. I gave up when the handle of the shovel sounded like it was starting to crack and simply repacked the soil and cut off the stump even closer to the ground. (You never know?)   

A blue beech (left) and a hazelnut

We planted the blue beech and the hazelnut within the deer-proof enclosure a few feet from the moribund nannyberry. (They say a black bear can smell a ripe hazelnut two miles away. That would be just our luck.)

Meanwhile, I'm thrilled by the new growth on the volunteer black locust. I'd say it's now at least four feet high and six feet across. (But maybe I'm exaggerating.) It seems to be suckering up from the roots of the two mature locusts nearby. I would have preferred to see it sprouting ten feet to the east, but it's a welcome addition to the woods just the same. 

Alongside this heavy-duty and perhaps Quixotic forest-shaping we also added a few annuals for color where the sun lingers for an hour or two—browallias, impatiens, astilbe, foxgloves. They don't look like much from a distance but add a little sparkle at close range. We also planted a few wishbone flowers, formally known as Torenia. They're named after my great-great-uncle Olaf (or so I'm told), the eighteenth-century Swedish bishop who "discovered" them in Viet Nam while serving as a ship chaplain for the East India Company.

We've planted them in the past: they never do well. 

Meanwhile, a columbine blew in last year that we hadn't seen in a decade. This year, it's back.

And the other day I transplanted a four-foot buckeye tree from near the woodpile alongside the garage back into the "woods," and I'm almost shocked to see that three weeks later it seems to be doing well. Dr. Seuss would have liked it.