Serious Things on my Mind

So many serious things are on my mind tonight I almost don't know where to start -- in a sense none of it is personal, and in a sense all of it is personal. I will only mention three.

To begin with the ugliest: I say the documentary film about Emmett Till this afternoon. I had known the story that was a catalyst in the civil rights movement but this documentary showed a picture of him in his casket after his mother was heard describing many of his wounds. The extreme brutality was shocking. I know brutality goes on at all times somewhere in the world but my imagination cannot manage to understand how anyone can so mutilate another person. His murderers did not even know the boy. What they did was from some blood lust, some massive perversion of humanity. And they were acquitted by the jury and eventually died "natural" deaths of cancer. I find some consolation in knowing that the civil rights movement gained many victories although prejudice still exists in this country even in this liberal area as some people in the audience recounted.

The most exciting is that I just watched the You Tube video reading of the statement of the protesters in the park on Wall Street. I signed the solidarity petition yesterday for what tiny bit that is worth. I am delighted a movement has begun to protest and hope it will be picked up all across the country. The statement is very inclusive; I'd be happy if this turned into a movement as big as the anti-Vietnam war movement of the '60s. It's way past time to push back at the corporations and financial institutions.

The saddest was Steve Job's death at such a young age. Almost since I have began working on a PC I have been aware that Mac computers inspired a special fanatical devotion among their users. I did not get one until about five years ago but I have become a dedicated fan as well. I copied a part of the address Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005. I don't know if he already knew he was fighting cancer, perhaps not, but he was a serious man, focused on individuality. This is some of what he said:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

“And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

The Elephant and the Dragon

I am taking a discussion class based on the book The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meridith, a writer on economics. The subject is the economic rise of India and China, with China predominant. Economists make me profoundly uneasy. They see the world in terms of money, and I realize that money is powerful. But economic discussions are always abstract and these discussions talk only about manufacturing and trade balances. Economists concentrate on that portion of the population who work for big corporations whatever country they're talking about. But the truth is only a small percentage of the people in any country actually work for big corporations. Furthermore everything else is generalized. Saying that 4% of Americans control over 40% of America's wealth means nothing. The same is true in China or India. I have a deep distrust of thinkers who don't factor 96% of the people into an equation. The statements that people make in the class are essentially meaningless to me.

As a product of a "fly over" state [Indiana] where no one I knew worked for a large corporation, or had a bank account in excess of $10,000 [if ever that!] or an education much above high school, I think of the vastness of China [and India] and all the "fly over" land there and the millions of people who are not taken into the abstract patterns of economists except when they mention that rural people are moving to the cities at greater rates than ever because they hope to find jobs in those factories. But that is so simplistic, so inhuman and finally so meaningless. I am frustrated as I read the book -- which was published in 2007 and so is already five years out of date -- and I'm even more frustrated in the class as a room full of well meaning, curious, intelligent senior citizens tries to understand something about the world they hear about on TV and read about in newspapers. It seems to me they haven't the tools to understand another country if they have only economic abstractions. I'll revisit this subject in a couple of weeks when I have an opportunity to speak to the class about what I know and feel about China having been there more often than anyone else in the class [4 times although two of those times, to me, were not to China but to Tibet -- no matter what my passport says.]

A panoramic view

Just thought I'd do a panoramic view of the beach I walk on. Above is looking east which goes on for about two miles at the very tip [on the right] is the Kennedy Compound which is really not visible from where I was standing.

Below is the beach I walk on. The picture is a little deceiving because the end is a blend of another land mass across a small inlet area


The whole thing is very peaceful -- especially in the quiet hours of morning when I sometimes see only one or two other people, and perhaps a dog or two. Then it feels like my private world with nice wide perspectives. On the watery horizon I can see something tall on Martha's Vineyard and at night a lighted beacon. Often I see the ferries cross the eastern horizon going or from the Vineyard. And of course many smaller craft, from kayaks and rowboats [like the one in the picture, to graceful sail boars and all sizes of motor boats. Lately there have been quite a few fishermen out there and I was told they are catching tuna -- smallish, but, surprisingly, tuna.

Word Play, a film about cross word puzzles

Today's documentary was the delightful film about New York Times crossword puzzles and the annual contest for puzzle solvers, Word Play. I saw the movie three or four years ago when it was first out in NYC because I have been a puzzle addict for a very long time and feel deeply deprived if for some reason I don't get my Sunday Times magazine with the puzzle. I rarely want to watch a film twice but this one was so much fun I totally enjoyed watching it again.

Not surprisingly many people in the documentary class were also puzzle addicts. I especially loved the part of the conversation afterwards that talked about Howard Gardner's book about different kinds of intelligence. Within verbal intelligence Gardner describes 3 or 4 subsets, as he does within musical intelligence and scientific intelligence. Clearly puzzle solvers have some of that verbal intelligence and using it gives them great pleasure. A man brought up the subject but a woman who has been taking the class several years, actually knows Gardner personally and suggested that, since writing his book 25 or so years ago, he has added a couple of other "intelligences." The woman suggested that he should also add culinary intelligence for the people who can cook anything without recipes and it's always delicious. I love when the conversation ranges so freely from the original topic.

In fact, it was a day of connecting with people's ideas which has left me in a great mood this evening. In my writing class we had some brief but thoughtful/thought provoking discussions and at lunch with three of the writers, more discussion. Then in the late afternoon a friend stopped by and we had a good conversation ranging over a number of topics. At least for me, at this stage of life, my greatest and most satisfying experiences are discussions. It's been a most satisfying day.

Horseshoe Crab remains

Last summer especially and this summer less so, I have habitually picked up the horseshoe crab shells, some young and small, 3 to 5 inches, others ancient, 10 to 12 inches and much darker than the young ones, and lay them in groups high up above the tide line because I feel such ancient creatures deserved reverence.

About the first of August there was a huge die off. One morning I counted over 65 shells washed up along the mile long beach, mostly relatively young crabs. [It might have been a molting instead of a die off. I hope so. I'm ignorant bout how to tell the difference.] After that the numbers have decreased, and are fewer than last year. A few times I've come across huge shells that I think of as the remnants of Methusalahs, perhaps 50, 60 years old, often with a covering of barnacles, and very dark in color. Those I've put in prominent places high up on the shore so others can see them and be amazed as I am.

The last two week there have been a scattering of shells, mostly within a fairly short stretch of the beach, perhaps where the tide comes in at a different angle than elsewhere. I noticed that someone else had taken my hint and gathered a great many together in one group, 17 shells one day, over 20 another. The picture shows them one morning this week. The tide may reach them, perhaps walkers come by paying no attention, or dogs being walked nose around among them. But I was touched to see that my respect for the shells, which I always turn up so the messy, semi-empty internal structure is covered, is shared by others. Perhaps they only need a small hint -- or perhaps it was an original impulse of their own.

Horseshoe crabs were around when the dinosaurs were, they have persevered through enormous geological changes. They deserve respect as do all living creatures but they deserve an extra degree of respect for the connection that goes back to such an early part of earth's history.

How I Ended My Summer

How I Ended My Summer is a Russian film -- all 132 minutes of it -- with only two characters in a tiny bit of the Arctic, at a weather station. Claustrophobic? No, the scenery goes on forever with full knowledge that they are the only two people for miles and miles. There is a rabbit, a polar bear and some bird, an older man and a younger man. The younger man makes a youthful, cowardly choice not to pass on a message to the older man which eventually leads to a nearly deadly feud. The movie has no music until the lsat 3 or so minutes, we see long minutes of inaction. The two actors shared a best actor aware at the Berlin Film Festival because they WERE the film.

I feel as if I have been in the Arctic for a long time because this movie comes on top of finished T.C.Boyle's Drop City, the final half of which takes place above the Arctic circle in Alaska. I have been above, by a matter of not may feet, the Arctic circle in Finland, in August. but extreme places fasciante me. This movie however worked on our nerves with its slowness. The feeling of being trapped and in danger was nerve wracking. I am not sorry I saw it and I will not forget it.

Catching the DAwn

This was the sky at 6:00 this morning. I've been up before dawn every day this week but this morning was the most dramatic dawn. I purposly chose an eastward facing apartment because I wanted to see dawns. Ideally I'd have another room that looks west for sunsets but that's not the architecture of this apartment complex so dawn it is and who can complain? I'll be seeing dawns for the next six months because I am a morning person and often am awake by 5:30.