Vignettes for Saturday
My younger daughter is the smartest person in our home. Her AP History teacher, and the course, change her life daily and make her excited about our expansive world, both geographically and temporally. She, a sophomore in high school, expressed to me the other day that, no matter her college major, she wants to at least minor in history. She understands its methodology and content to be important. She hasn’t been taught or lectured that “the humanities are important!” by her English professor parents—she instinctually understands this. Sadly, this instinct is not support in how our economic system (capitalism) increasingly demonstrates its unwillingness to productively align itself with knowledge of human thought, action, and expression in our institutions of learning. This itself is a history.
This is not to say my younger daughter is perfect. She has a serious condition that some of you may be familiar with, and I am seeking advice on how to help her—she has debilitating “garbage blindness.” Everywhere she goes results in a trail of gum wrappers, plastic, napkins, and fishbones. We returned from Chicago the other day, and I asked everyone in the car as we pulled into the garage (I am like this) to please clean up everything and “take out all of your stuff and put your tray tables in the upright position.” The next morning I get in the car to drive to the YMCA. On the way I hear crunching and rolling. I look in the backseat and what do I see? Napkins, a water bottle, geological layers of crumbs. Unbelievable. I swear, if I dressed her in one of those suits that ski jumpers wear, she’d still stand up and wrappers would just naturally explode off her body like confetti. We don’t believe this condition is curable. If you or someone you love suffers from Garbage Blindness, call 1-800-GARBAGE. Help stop garbage blindness today.
Midjourney Rendering of “Garbage Blindness” Homer means the world to me. As an undergraduate I took a senior honors seminar on Homer and was forever changed. Many of you will know one of The Odyssey’s most famous episodes: when Odysseus tricks the Cyclops, Polyphemus, by telling him that his name is “Nobody.” I love the fact that, going back over two millennia, humans share a recognizable bond transmitted through language as time: irony, jokes, playfulness. To overly insist on “correctness” in language is to not be playful, to not be Odysseus. Instead, you become the Poseidon of grammar and usage, which means you’re petty and want to prevent messages from reaching the home that resides in a waiting audience. In The Odyssey, being “nobody” is cool, even if it works against him, as “Polyphemus,” which translates as “many voiced,” uses that voice to turn the wily Odysseus from the trickster Nobody into a nobody nobody, once again drastically set back from his goal of returning home.
Given the enormous rise in concern for, and linguistic prominence of, mental health in our contemporary world, sometimes it’s worth revisiting these texts and at least poking around for connection. I’m experimenting with the idea that Odysseus as “Nobody” might open up a reading of depression: first, there’s the trickster, successful element where everything is good. You’re on your game, help others, and effectively solve problems. In other words, you get out of the cave (if I may evoke Plato). Then, there’s the nobody that is a nobody, feels set back from their goals by an internal and petty Poseidon. I associate Poseidon with the color blue—him being the god of the sea and all—and thus maybe Poseidon himself is a muse for the blues. You thought you had the wind in your sails? Think again shitbird! This is where I find myself right now, flickering between nobodies, with this plural form disturbing in that it makes plain what has been hiding in the open… to be “nobody” is either to have “no body,” or if you are in Odysseus mode, that lack of a body works for you, as the Cyclops cannot seize and eat what doesn’t exist.
I love sandhill cranes. They are my favorite bird. I say this because we, as people, must have a favorite of everything: food, color, song, movie, you name it. When it comes to birds, I am tempted to say all birds are my favorite birds, but that wouldn’t be true. The sandhill crane generates true wonder for me, especially their call. Have you ever heard the sound a sandhill crane makes? It’s truly singular. I’ll do my best to provide a simile. You know how when a door has expanded over the years in the warmth and humidity and becomes tight in its frame, like tight enough to get stuck and you have to grab the knob with two hands and pull, and I mean really pull? At the moment the door comes unstuck it vibrates, an awkward instrument, and produces a croaking echo that can’t be an echo because the sound emerges from the throat of its creator, not on the return from some distant surface. That sound. That’s what sandhill cranes sound like.
Oddly, I find this to be one of the most beautiful sounds in our world. I don’t want to record it. I want to bottle it. I want a bottle that I can put somewhere, say on a mantle, and whenever I uncork it the call of a sandhill crane will spread throughout the room. I need there to be sandhill cranes forever, so let us fix the planet because we owe it to the earth and it’s our responsibility. The call of a sandhill crane alone is worth any inconvenience we could ever experience.
I enjoyed this article, empathised with parts of it and other aspects caused me some amount of deliberation or, at least, prompted my thinking.
That you daughter considers that the 'humanities' are important is a credit to her. Unfortunately, our governments and their lack of commitment to higher education that has been largely responsible for universities increasingly having to fund-raise in order to survive, has caused a diminution and in some cases, elimination of humanities courses, in particular those in classics, philosophy and literature. Indeed, the BA is now considered by many to be virtually worthless and even more-so if it is not an occupational degree in disguise.
Increasingly, industries and that most awful of hypocrisies 'jobs' provide the drivers for higher education curriculum and pseudo sciences such as psychology have resulted, paradoxically, not in a health system offering ready and affordable access to those needing help with mental issues but rather an inadequate pool of 'professionals' who charge fees at the level of dentistry, together with an astonishing increase in largely self-anointed 'life coaches' and similar specious occupations.
Perhaps more paradoxically still, I'd suggest, is that the symptoms of those most served by these occupations are almost certainly, in large part, the result of precisely the materialist and economically focused society in which we now live.
Your daughter's lack of consideration for your property, comfort and feelings by not taking responsibility for the freedom she has to indulge her, (probably conditioned), attachment to junk food and drink and simply leave its detritus cluttering your car and, (probably), other places is another paradox or, at least, a contradiction with her apparent intelligent understanding of what is important to life. - Perhaps, a discussion around this contradiction might result in a change of behaviour on her part?
As, if not more importantly, for me is what I've taken to be the substantive reason for that particular anecdote you offered. Given the undoubtedly ever-increasing rate of mental illness and even suicide in the young; the horrendous rates of domestic violence; the failure of so many marriages; the rates of homelessness; the inability of so many to access the health care they need, the obscenely large incarceration rates and the many other ills in modern, technologically and scientifically advanced nations which are the financially richest in the World, surely it ought to be evident to any rational and reasonably intelligent individual that *something is wrong.*
Of course, something is wrong and, in my mind, you have in a quiet way, drawn attention to it. (Of course, I have no way of knowing whether that was your intention or whether I am under a misapprehension about your motive or the content of your article - in which case, I apologise.) My comments are, of course, an impression of what my reading of the article caused in my own thought processes.
I'll shut up and go away now. I've probably said too much and said it not too well. I probably have it all wrong for that would match what I mostly hear from others about my understandings and interpretations of the machinations of human society.
Take care. Stay safe. ☮️