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Psychology

First you see it, then you – think

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

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Necropolitics

Honestly, I am not trying to add to all of our fears and sadness. I do think, however, that we need to face some substantive issues, if we want to learn from this crisis before the next one, climate catastrophe, hits on an incomparably larger scale than Covid 19.

This way: Justice

Therefore I decided to introduce a paradigm today that has been in my thoughts. Fascists in Germany revived a concept in the 1930s of “Thinning The Herd” which goes back to the 18th century belief that when the population exceeds resources government should use war, famine or widespread disease to thin the herd. Now why am I thinking of that?

To counterbalance the heaviness of the topic, photographs today are of chalk arrows that I found on Sunday’s walk in the neighborhood park. In my imagination they point to the goals we are all trying to reach. Should be trying. MUST try!

This way: Peace

Achille Mbembe is a distinguished Cameroonian historian and political philosopher, one of the most brilliant thinkers on the African continent as well as in the US – he holds dual appointments at Duke University and in South Africa. Among the honors he received for his work on social grievances, postcolonial politics and racist thought structures was the 2015 Geschwister Scholl prize (members of the resistance group the White Rose executed by Hitler) and the 2018 Ernst Bloch prize (a German philosopher known for his seminal work The Principle of Hope,) for his philosophy outlining the need for a more humane world.

This way: Solidarity

Mbembe has developed the concept of Necropolitics, the idea of the subjugation of life to the power of death in our contemporary world. In simple words: There are powers that get to decide who lives and who dies, using proximity of death as population control. Before we apply this to our current situation let’s acknowledge that not everything is about the virus. Instead, there are ubiquitous ways in which large populations have been politically and economically managed: people exposed to wars, genocide, refugee crises, prisons, in Syria or the Gaza strip, as well as those whose poverty and precarious living circumstances have been increased through political removal of safety nets, all are governed through direct or indirect proximity to death.

This way: Equity

The philosopher talks about new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of “living-dead,” calling them death-worlds. They are governed by certain forms of economics, which withholds public goods and rights, making existence precarious. They are structured through confinement of precarious populations in certain spaces, most often in camp-form. Refugee-camps, prisons, ghettos, banlieues, suburbs, favelas, all serve as examples. Often these are policed or militarized spaces in which human beings are controlled and can be killed, “a permanent condition of living in pain.” Underlying these management structures is the key characteristic of those in power accepting (e.g. the refugee camps on the Greek Islands) if not actively pursuing (e.g. war in Syria) the possibility of death on a large scale.

This way: Bridge to Safety

We can find these kinds of politics not just in authoritarian, but also in democratic states, where the state confines, imprisons and persecutes certain populations. Not that violence is a state monopoly: when private groups in a society separate into those who arm themselves, and those who are not armed (militias vs citizens,) the idea of killings as something acceptable is normalized. The production of weapons, both for private use or in the context of expanding wars, is a source of economic revenue in these political systems. Exploiting natural resources for economic gain also tolerates that populations are endangered, displaced or eliminated, or future generations sacrificed (Amazon rain forest destruction, for example.)

This way: Anti-Racism

What moral justifications can possibly be given for the way human populations are treated by the powerful? Mbembe offers a catalogue of their excuses, such as the eradication of corruption, different types of “therapeutic liturgy”, “the desire for sacrifice”, “messianic eschatologies”, and, importantly, “modern discourses of utilitarianism, materialism, and consumerism.” The underlying causal mechanism for necropolitics to be performed and expanded in a given society, allowing for exploitation and natural elimination of poor or powerless populations? Racism, both in its institutional and private forms. It’s beyond my scope here to go into detail – here is his book. (And here is the article that I relied on heavily for the summary of the concept.) Eye-openers.

This way: Environmental Protection

*

Back to Covid 19. Doctors and first responders who have to make utilitarian decisions about who gets to live and who will die are not to be faulted in this crisis. Younger lives are weighed against older one, existing conditions against healthy bodies, parenthood against singles, how else can you justify distribution of scarce resources. There are, however, whole governments who have also made utilitarian decisions – this time to benefit individuals (keep the numbers low so my re-election is not endangered) or political ideologies (the free market rules, I am not invoking the Defense Production Act for manufacture of rescue items, or the closing of beaches) or, as I write this, to choose a structural system – our economy and its value – over people’s lives (scrap “expendable” scientific offices, fire “expendable” administrative personell, remove social distancing rules to restart production.)

This way: Sustainability

When someone literally says that the cure cannot be worse than the disease in this situation, they imply that lives need to be sacrificed for profit. And whose lives will this be? Who are the disposable people that no-one is directly mentioning? For every single middle-class or wealthy person there are masses of those who are already going to work sick, because they cannot afford to lose their wages. For every safely ensconced work-from-home person there will be those stuffed into public transportation and factories. There are those who live in cramped quarters because of poverty, or imprisonment, who will drop like flies. There are those who have no access to medical help until it is too late, for fear of cost, or absence of clinics in their counties. There are the homeless who have a high percentage of underlying conditions.

This way: Community

We should say it out loud: those who are deemed disposable are, for the most part, poor, uneducated, deprived of resources, and, in the US, all that is correlated with being black or brown. You think I’m making this up? Look at yesterday’s comments from the Republican right after our dear leader started to get impatient with the duration of the shut-down: here is but one example

Or the Texas Governor suggesting that lots of grandparents would be willing to die to rescue the economy for their grandchildren (never mind that 3.6 million children are raised by their grandparents in this country…) – an expendable group is identified.

This way: Grace

Our task, then, first and foremost, seems to me to identify who is in power, who employs necropolitics, and who benefits from them. That is where the first change has to be forced, by putting someone else at the helm. Secondly we have to pinpoint the underlying economic systems that have enthroned their representatives for their purposes, and figure out how they can be shifted towards a more just and balanced distributions of our communal resources. We can no longer rely on a patchwork of individual support, non-profits, mutual aide societies who try at alleviate the worst of the suffering. Structural change is the only thing that will save us. Quite literally save us, as it turns out.

This way: Back home to write about it all…..

Music today are cheerful African acoustic tunes (Happy birthday, Lieblingsschwester!)

And Rest in Power: Cameroonian Jazz legend Manu Dibango has died from Covid-19 at age 86. Here is his 1972 hit, “Soul Makossa”

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Wait, Charmain!

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.






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Go, Stella

Maybe my brain is certifiably going downhill, but I watched this video of Stella, the dog, jumping over and over and over and over into leaf piles yesterday with such fascination and abandon that I actually forgot to worry for the entire 3 minutes of its duration.

I have, as you’ll know if you have followed me for the last years, never posted an animal video, I believe, outside of some scientific demonstrations of the intelligence of crows or some such. But this was what I needed. Joy, pure. Go ahead, roll your eyes already….

It mattered, because I was thinking about animals in two very different, but related contexts: For one, the horrific use of racist language – the Chinese virus, the Kung flu – by people working in our government is just one step removed from the language that comes next: dehumanizing terms that compare people to animals, humans to what is conceived of as subhumans. From a previous blog entry:

Psychological research, originally looking into Nazi use of dehumanizing language in preparation for the Holocaust, has shown that merely listening to it increases the willingness to use violence; some international agencies even consider that kind of naming a precursor to genocide. Once a class of people is dehumanized, the usual compassion and empathy that we extend to fellow human beings is weakened. The part of your brain that controls social relations becomes less active, a physiologically measurable effect when you are exposed to this kind of language. The door to systematic mistreatment is then wide open.

And secondly, I learned about the (differing) roles animals played in the Third Reich, from a by all reports fabulously researched and described new German book by Jan Mohnhaupt, Tiere im Nationalsozialismus. Here is my summary of the book review (not yet in English translation, alas):

The book looks at animals as the daily companions of Nazis, as means of propaganda, as depictions of the enemy and as pest. Horses were seen as heroic, trained to find landmines and boiled to save soldiers from starvation. Potato beetles were intended to be used as a biological weapon to induce starvation in nations at the Eastern front. Brown bear cubs were kept as a source of entertainment for concentration camp wardens, in a “zoo” on site built by inmates. Dogs were seen as part of the master race, cats as Jewish. German Shepherds in particular, represented the purest of German dogs, the idealization of the populist-national race ideologies. Apex animals like lions and wolves (Hitler’s code name was Wolf ) ranked net to ………pigs! Pigs scored high in their fanatical phylogenetic universe, setting a contrast to Jewish custom that declares pigs unclean for consumption.

Jews were soon not allow to keep pets and had to euthanize the ones they already owned, because the Gestapo did not want to deal with them after their owners were deported. Nazi scientists applied knowledge and methodological approaches extrapolated from animal research to humans once the moral borders had shifted toward labeling our own kind as subhumans or human animals. The racial fanaticism managed to elevate some animals above humans, in other words. But it also allowed to engage in plans for genetic “purification,” just like farmers attempted to perfect the breed and purge the coarser element.

This becomes particularly evident if you look at Nazi legislation. (Here is an essay in English that delivers the details.) To summarize, by 1933 laws for the protection of animals and the regulation of slaughter and hunting were passed. Herman Goering announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments” and threatened to “commit to concentration camps those who still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property.” Between Nazi leaders’ affection for animals (Hitler was a committed vegetarian) and enmity towards humans, and the political and ideological purpose served by abolishing the moral distinctions between animals and people the systematic extinction of whole groups of subhumans was just a matter of time.

How is that for downward comparison? Did I make you forget about our own situation for a minute? If not, just watch Stella again!

Yesterday’s walk – you guessed it, Oaks Bottom – served as the background for composing today’s blog. It’s a miracle that so many birds hung out, given that the place was filled with young, noisy families trying to escape cabin fever…

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Ach, Emily….

Dickinson, she leaves me confounded. Always. And now this poem, that I have been mulling over for some weeks. What to make of the words below, what do they intend to represent? (You can tell I am still thinking about yesterday’s musings about artists and representation….)

By the Sea

Published 1896 (posthumously)

I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – opon the Sands –

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Boddice – too –

And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion’s Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –

And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –

Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –

So here is a woman poet, a recluse, who never saw the sea, I am told, writing about her visit. Planning a visit, note, not a walk on the beach, or a look at the water, but an encounter. She left early, thus avoiding being caught by the dark, took the protective dog, sensible precaution if you think this is about a woman out there on her own. She encounters a world just like the one she knows from home, the women at the bottom, the men on top. The mermaids doing what women do so well, looking their sisters over, judging.

The sailors trying to get their hands on you and rope you in – all menacing enough to induce that familiar feeling, being just a little mouse easy to be stepped on in the sand.

A slightly hypnotizing ballad rhythm, interspersed with these long dashes, making you stop and take in what she says.

And then she’s in the water – no man moved her; did she move herself into the waves, slowly going in like so many before her, ready to give up? Or is the ocean approaching, about to drown her, or representing a sexual danger – or enticement – an interpretation frequently offered because of the various items of clothing described in the inevitable rising, items that hint at fetishistic objects? Is the dew drop on a dandelion leaf describing her sense of diminutiveness, fragility, to be devoured by the floods, water returning to water, like dust to dust? Or is it a watery pearl, a metaphor for an altogether different aspect of the female anatomy?

But then she starts to move herself – just like she set out for the visit (remember started in the first line?) she now sets to leave, willing it, with him (the sea took on a personal pronoun) following. Her shoes filled with foam, a precious, pearly gift, or something to weigh her down or a tantalizing allusion to other bodily fluids, she turns her back on the pursuer. He decides to bow out – this time – once she reaches solid ground, anchored in community unfamiliar to his solitary existence.

Death? Desired or inflicted? Sex? Desired or inflicted? A feminist clarion call? I couldn’t care less. The poem whispered something altogether different in my ear in our current situation of unfamiliar danger.

We have a choice.

We can succumb to varying forms and degrees of despair, feeling helpless like little creatures easily crushed. We can give up and step into the devouring vastness of fear, letting it drown us. We can permit the lead of fomenting depression weigh down our shoes. We can allow panic to rise practically to our throats and choke us.

Or we can turn our backs to all that, willing it. There is no guarantee of safety – the sea – be it our fears, sadness or the pathogen itself – might not be willing to bow out the next time. But here and now, we can start to step back from it, both literally and metaphorically, and turn our eyes to the solid town, the community of friends, neighbors and strangers, who can act in solidarity (albeit in physical distance) to get us all through this, if not make us safer. We can focus on increasing support for those in need instead of catastrophizing. We can organize or be part of a movement that will carry the lessons we learn during crisis into a reshaping of our society for the better in the long run.

I know those words are more easily written than enacted. I have days where I barely make it out of bed. But we can alternate – on days where I am low, you can lift me up, and I’ll do the same on other days for you.

We can refuse to be a mouse!

So what happened to the dog – so prominently mentioned in the very first line and disappeared ever since as if protection was but an illusion?

Why, modeling social distancing, of course!

Where’s Milo???

Here is Copland’s music for some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Hang in there, folks!

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Silence, golden?

So here is a dilemma: do I listen to the advice of my Beloved who insists that art shouldn’t come with an instruction manual? Or do I listen to the urging of friends to provide extensive explanations for my, admittedly, often complex photomontages? Do I tease with titles? Rely on short introductory artist statements? Write up lengthy descriptions of individual works?

Montages today from an old series (S)Elective Affinities Here: Water Rats

It is not just a theoretical question. I have two exhibitions coming up, with two very different series, and quite a body of work. (Details attached below.) With no introduction whatsoever you can have the most personal encounter with an image possible, defined by your own visual pleasure or your own thoughts evoked by the piece. Will you miss something? Perhaps. Will you understand what I was trying to accomplish? Maybe. Will your reaction be influenced by some extraneous manipulations? Definitely not.

On the other hand, does it help to understand the context of the larger body of work to decipher this or that meaning? You bet. Do textual references enable you to understand the framework and relations to art-historical elements? I’d say. Can I smuggle concepts and ideas into your head that guide your perception? Count on it.

La Couturière

It is all about manipulating attention.

I’ll save the truly fascinating, larger topic of attention research for some other day and focus on the basics today relevant to the questions above.

In the simplest of terms, attention is a mechanism that relies on multiple control mechanism. The exogenous control of attention comes from stimuli in the environment that trigger your attention automatically – the streaking movement perceived from the corner of your eye that has you look to where it came from. The piercing noise that alerts you whether your like it or not. A sudden burst of color that grabs you. A design of a page that draws your eye to a certain position. Something is literally grabbing your attention, hard, if not impossible, to resist.

Parallel to that we can control much of our attention endogenously, choosing where to look and what to process on the basis of what holds meaning for us, what we are trying to find, or what we expect to see or when to see it. (This, by the way, is what makes experts so good at perceiving in their field of expertise: they know where to attend at what point in time, which is crucial for events unfolding in time – think referees at a sports competition or mothers catching the kid at the moment where it falls off the play-structure.

The Analysis

Back to art: If I put a concept into your head, by alluding to something, or simply asking a question, or showing you hints that trigger stereotypes, you will attend to the work in front of you trying to integrate what you see with what you ponder. Here is the classic demonstration (Yarbus, 1967) by a Russian psychologist who used one of the very first eye trackers to check where people attended when moving their eyes to various locations on a given stimulus.

He asked subjects to look at a reproduction of a Russion oil painting An Unexpected Visitor painted by Ilya Repin in 1884, with different questions in mind, provided by the experimenter. The conditions included [1] examine the painting freely. [2] estimate the material circumstances of the family. [3] assess the ages of the characters [4] determine the activities of the family prior to the visitor’s arrival. [5] remember the characters’ clothes. And [6] surmise how long the visitor had been away from the family.

As you can see the patterns of eye movements (the black lines going back and forth) to explore the painting was dramatically different from condition to condition, with your “set” or assumptions about the potential discovery guiding your attention.

Here is an overlay of 2 question conditions and the recorded eye movements onto the actual color reproduction, making the differences even clearer (work by Sasha Archibald) (free examination at center, question about material circumstances of the family to the right.)

And here is of course the trick: only those things you attend to will get fully processed in your visual system, and potentially put into your memory stores. Unattended input might linger on some low levels of the processing hierarchy but will soon end up in the dustbin with all the other junk our brains discard. Details that might have significance will be simply overlooked if we were not conceptually driven to check them out. That might be of crucial importance if you are called as an eyewitness. But it also might affect how you embrace or understand a work of art, particularly if it is detailed and representational.

The Director

Then again, you might share the opinion of one half of our current household: I either like it or not!

Exhibit 1: Tied to the Moon

Stevens-Crawford Heritage House Museum
603 6th St, Oregon City
March – June 2020
Open: Friday – Saturday, 11:00am – 4:00pm
Admission: $5

Artist Reception on March 21st – 11:00 am – 1:00 pm

http://clackamashistory.org

This 2019 photomontage series describes some of the common experiences of women across centuries. Just like our physiologies are tied to the phases of the moon so are we tied through shared life events and states connected to our lives. A lot has changed for women; not enough has changed for women. Giving birth, raising children, aging, being loved or abandoned, being controlled or forging our own path has always been basic to the female experience. Finding solace among sisters or competing for scraps as rivals was often part of our existence. Curiosity, skepticism, learning and rebelling had to be fought for. Longing, dreaming and hope were part of the way.

Exhibit 2: Postcards from Nineveh

Oregon Coast Council for the Arts

Newport Visual Arts Center – 777 NW Beach Drive, Newport, OR 97365

March 7 – April 25, 2020

Artist Reception March 14, 1:00 – 5:00 pm, talk at 4:00 pm

On display is a new (2020) series of works that combine photographed snippets of 17th-century Dutch paintings of whaling expeditions along with contemporary environments.  It calls for attention to environmental stewardship at a time where nature is under threat. The title is a play on Jonah (the one swallowed by a whale) who was a reluctant prophet, ignored by the people of Nineveh. We, on the other hand, should listen to clarion calls about the need to protect our oceans and fish populations.”

Postcards from Nineveh: Photomontages by Friderike Heuer

Here is a piece of music by Arvo Pärt where silence commands everything around it. (For more examples of composers using silence, go here.)

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Moss Green

And when thou art weary I’ll find thee a bed
Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head; – John Keats To Emma (ca. 1815)

I cherish this couplet, find the thought of a pillow of moss appealing (although currently you might want to bring a waterproof plane before you sit down…)

And since I want to start the week with making you less weary, the couplet is the perfect fit. (Which cannot be said for the rest of the poem, which closes with this: So smile acquiescence, and give me thy hand,
With love-looking eyes, and with voice sweetly bland. No sweetly bland voice here, googly eyes and/or acquiescence…. but lots of intentions to get your spirits up.

Moss it shall be: for one, because it shines, glimmers, glows in abundance right now, greenest, most brilliant green in those watery woods (Tryon Creek). Secondly because it gives me the opportunity to cite Wikipedia’s color page where I found this gem: Green is common in nature, especially in plants.

I hope you spill your coffee laughing. I did. Or maybe you need to know German, where the equivalent of nature is green: Wir gehen ins Grüne…

Let’s proceed to name the biological greens:

We are subsequently told that:

Moss green is a tone of green that resembles moss. Who would have thought.

Tidbit: Moss is practical. It used to be the diaper of millennia of babies – Native Americans stuffed spagnum in bags with which they swaddled their children, the Inuit used moss inside sealskin covers, and Mongolians used fur sacks stuffed with moss to carry the young. Biodegradable, too. It was used as antiseptic bandages to treat the wounds of thousands of WWI soldiers, when the Allied forces ran out of cotton bandages. (Link is to a fascinating article in the Smithsonian.)

I have written a bit more seriously some time back on moss and lichen, with a focus on the latter. If memory serves me right, we talked about rootless Bryophyta, which is the botanical name for moss, attaching themselves to their environment via hairy protrusions called rhizoids, take water and air in to create their food through photo synthesis.

Today I am more interested in why moss appears so intensely luminous when you hike through the forests during these dark, rainy days.

It has to do with a process called the Purkinje effect, or Purkinje shift, named after the Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkyne, who proposed it at the beginning of the 19th century. It is the tendency for the peak luminance sensitivity of the human eye to shift toward the blue-green end of the spectrum at low illumination levels. Simply put, we have two main receptor types in the retina, the rods and the cones. The former are more light sensitive, but pretty much worthless for distinguishing color. They take over when it gets dark, because the cones, which are color-sensitive, fire best only when there is lots of light.

When light is scarce, at dawn and dusk, but also on these cloudy, rainy days in the woods, the reds, processed by cones now starved of stimulation, will appear duller and duller. The greens take on a contrasting brightness, because the rods take over. Voilà, iridescent green.

Before we all get too happy basking in that glow, here is the dark side of moss: half a billion years ago, when Bryophyta first appeared on land, they plunged earth into an ice-age and caused mass extinction of ocean life. Before you freak out, it took them 35 million years to do so, and they might just be the antidote to global warming if we could only wait that long.

Nonetheless, then it was a catastrophe – moss secretes a wide range of organic acids that can dissolve rock, and the altered rock can then suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Sharp reduction in carbon dioxide levels ensues – here comes the ice. (For a more detailed account, go here.)

Reminder to self: this was supposed to cheer, not make more weary. Music to the rescue:

So here is a ditty from the 50s – Ja ja im Moos, da ist was los – well, well, things are hopping in the moss…..

Pileated woodpecker

and one a little older: Brahms says it all about the cool forest.



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Sound Description

Sometimes a piece of writing makes me drool. This, for example:

“The piece of music I have in mind lasts only forty-five seconds, which is shockingly brief measured against the inner world it evokes. In what I now know is a fragmentary motif, a few lowing bass notes rise like bubbles from the bottom of a pool, becoming increasingly ragged as they approach the surface. They get close enough to one another to imply melancholy harmony before they dissipate. The riff repeats only once, a little more achingly. Then the bass hands its figurative duties over to a dulcimer, whose jaunty fatalism carries the mood forward even as a more deliberate structure begins to eat away at the oceanic resonance of those bass notes. As the bass recedes into a supporting role, providing squiggly accents at odd intervals, a mental image slides back into inaccessibility too. In my memory, the soundtrack, by Henny Vrienten, to George Sluizer’s 1988 film The Vanishing, was an expanse of fretless bass only, mournful and spare, diaphanous and purplish, like neon light filtered through glass bricks. I feel a spasm of disappointment in realizing its magic is more contained than I recalled, that the film’s music on the whole is not remarkable enough to justify a soundtrack album in which I could wallow between viewings.”

Jaunty fatalism, oceanic resonance…. now wouldn’t you have liked to coin those terms? The short essay goes on to describe the actual affinity to The Vanishing beyond loving the introductory music: a longing for time spent without supervision, without fulfilling expectations of constant busyness, of “a reflexive drive to busyness defined my experience of free time as a terrifying void to be filled, a wish for blithe indifference to the internalized requirements of managerial bureaucracy,”(another winner!) (The film refers to a young French couple going on vacation before crisis erupts, evoking French cinematic history of all those aimless hours spent in Provençal town squares and at Mediterranean beaches.)

Loitering, in other words, seems to be a thing of the past. And even if you manage to take a bit or a lot of time off work, the space that opens is filled with: sound. Books on Tape at the elliptical. Music in your headphones while doing routine tasks like ironing or the dishes, or folding the laundry or cooking. Podcasts while taking a walk. I think the last one irks me the most – how are you going to hear yourself think, which is what walking allows you to do in the most effective ways possible? Never mind being connected to the soundtrack of nature that happens during walks in the woods, or connected to humanity which happen if you walk the city? From the New Yorker essay, linked above:

There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts.

Writing might organize the thoughts, but walking actually improves the content of them – there are numerous studies now that show that creativity and problem solving is enhanced because of free floating attention and spurious environmental stimulation during walks. That will not happen if your attention is focused on following Chris Hayes’ arguments.

Another way of looking at it:

On my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village…What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something other than the woods?
Henry David Thoreau, 1862, in an essay entitled “Walking”

I, personally, hold it with Virginia Woolf and spend my afternoon in solitary trampling. That description is as sound as it gets.

If you don’t have time or have trouble walking, then listen to this: Mendelsohn’s music here was inspired by hiking the Hebrides.

Photographs are from the Tuscany countryside. As close to dolce far niente as I’ve been on my journeys.

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Sound Variations

Let’s start this week on a quiet note. Like really quiet, preparing for silence in space – quiet. Not a random choice of metaphor, either, since I learned that astronauts are sent by NASA to an anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota where they practice being in environments where sound does not reverberate.

“An anechoic chamber is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from waves entering from their surroundings.” It turns out that you cannot stand being in one of those chambers for very long – 45 minute has been the longest someone endured before fearing they would go insane. When you hear nothing else, you start hearing the noises that your own body makes, “you become the sound.”

All this came up when, as so often, I randomly ran across a poem that caught my attention.

Anechoic

George Foy stayed in the anechoic chamber
for 45 minutes and nearly went mad.
He could hear the blood rushing in
his veins and began to wonder if he was
hallucinating. He had been to a monastery,
an American Indian sweat lodge,
and a nickel mine two kilometers underground.
In the anechoic chamber, the floor’s design
eliminates the sound of footsteps.
NASA trains astronauts in anechoic chambers
to cope with the silence of space.
Without echo, in the quietest place on earth,
what else can we hold onto? What replaces sound
in concert with what you see? The human voice,
the timber when a person says kamsahamnida
or yes, please, or fuerte, is 25 to 35 decibels.
Hearing damage can start around 115 decibels.
Metallica, front row, possible damage
albeit possible love. The Who, 126 decibels.
A Boeing jet, 165 decibels. The whale, low rumble
frequency and all, 188 decibels, can be heard
for hundreds of miles underwater.
I once walked around inside a whale heart,
which is the size of a small car. The sound
was like Brian Doyle’s heart that gave out
at 60 after he wrote my favorite essay
about the joyas voladoras and the humming
bird heart, the whale heart, and the human
heart. Glass can break at 163 decibels.
Hearing is the last sense to leave us.
Some say that upon death, our vision,
our taste, our touch, and our smell
might leave us, but some have been
pronounced dead and by all indication
are, but they can hear. In this moment,
when the doctor pronounces the time
or when the handgun pumps once more,
what light arrives? What sounds, the angels?
The Ultrasonic Weapon is used for crowd
control or to combat riots—as too many
humans gathered in one place for a unified
purpose can threaten the state. The state
permits gatherings if the flag waves. Sound
can be weaponized or made into art.
It can kill. It can heal a wound. It is
a navigation device and can help determine
if the woman has a second heart inside of her
now, the beating heart of a baby on the ultrasound,
a boy or a girl, making a new music in the body
of another body, a chorus, a concert, a hush.

by Lee Herrick
from Scar and Flower,
Word Poetry, 2019.

To tell the truth, I was not particularly taken by this poem as a whole. Little things, the list -like quality of researched facts (I mean who knows all those decibel numbers….) or the discussion of hearing being the last sense to go (after he cued in on hearing all along,) and then wondering “which light will arrive,” they irritate me. Or the tale of walking inside a whale’s heart and affixing the sound to the memory of a favorite author’s writing – I was in one of those last summer (they have them as plastic reproductions in all kinds of science museums, and all you hear is the delightful screaming of young visitors around you. Nitpicky, I know. Not granting generous artistic license. Guilty as charged. Perhaps it would help to know more of his work, apparently often preoccupied with hearing, but also quite political. Herrick, of Korean descent, was the poet laureate of Fresno, 4 years ago, teaches at college there. Here is a review.

But one line stuck, and made it worth slogging through all those facts he lines up: Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound.

Think of how sound was used to manipulate you when you were a child. Ok, when I was a child, sent off, sickly still, to boarding school. Being yelled at loudly was pretty upsetting. Worse, though, was when punitive words came out really quietly, almost whispered, ominous as can be.

Sounds could be frightening, the pillow-muffled homesick sobs, my own included, of the new arrivals. Sounds could be disturbing, the penetrating school bell that cut time into slices. Sounds could be shaming – the snickering of the girls behind your back. The tsk tsk of a revered teacher, handing back insufficient work, not even worth a verbal assessment, just those devaluing sounds. The screeching of the coach on the sports field, egging you on to run even faster, until your lungs hurt so badly that you were ready to collapse. Sounds that were missing hurt as well: my childhood background chorus of lowing cows and songbirds, the farmer’s peacock.

Sounds could be healing. A hummed melody of a (forbidden) pop song as a reminder that there was still a world out there beyond the dormitory walls. The clinking of the silverware when 120 places were laid for breakfast, the only edible meal, really, of the day. The sounds of the gentle river waves of the Neckar, when you were allowed twice weekly to leave the walled estate, for an hour’s walk. Or being assigned an empty quiet classroom to practice your cello or piano, day after day escaping the noises of overcrowded, restless adolescent girls. Add the music, however incompetently, scratchily executed, with a blueprint in mind of the beauty of the real thing, and you were ready to tackle the next day. Healing, indeed. (My most played piece during those horrid years was this, (Khatchaturian’s Toccata ) allowing rage to flow into the fingers as well. It’s not as hard as it sounds, particularly if you play it slower like the older Russian recordings.)

What counts as healing, though, is in the ear of the beholder. Just a few centuries back the Church accepted only a limited number of intervals assume to please G-d, and that is why Gregorian chants are as they are. And the Church expressly forbade some intervals, including the tri-tone, composed of three adjacent whole tones, because they were thought to be the devil’s interval. Don’t ask me why. Times have, of course, changed.

Wagner used the tri-tone in Tristan and Isolde, to convey forbidden love and longing.

So did Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story.

Beautiful. Unsettling. I guess it won’t be a quiet Monday morning after all. But one where I made you forget about sham trials and deadly viruses for at least 10 minutes!

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Thursday Morning – a Continuation

Pull up a chair, dear reader, join us at the breakfast table. (I cannot begin to tell you how much it gives me pleasure to think that there are several of you reading this with coffee cup in hand as a morning routine while I write the next installment. Community!)

“It’s a complicated issues.” “I know.” “We should make a list of all the questions.” “Well, there is only one interesting one.” “No, there are at least two!” “Persuade me.” “Let’s look at the list:”

  • There are people who enjoy things because they own them, and the ownership does something for them: signal status, boost self-esteem, soften the mid-life crisis. In fact, if I put you in a situation where (false) feedback on your performance lowers your self esteem, your appreciation for the things you own goes up, as if they enhance the value that was just threatened. Same for the choice you make in buying something after I threatened your fragile ego: you go for luxury goods over garden variety objects in this situation. —-We agree, not particularly interesting, our grandmas could have told us that, right? Or any wife of the convertible-buying 50-year old….(This is, by the way, true for Westerners in these psychological experiments, not for others from collectivist societies, like Asians – threat to a sense of self seems to be of less concern there.)
  • People are attached to objects because they connect them to the past, remind them of the past, allow them to show respect for the past. Much of it is linked to a sense of continuity, across your own life time and between generations, that many cherish. —-True, we agree, and not especially interesting, since it makes perfect sense given how memory works, attachments are formed, and group (tribal) membership is beneficial for the individual. (Never mind that the Jewish grandmas cited above also preach the value of letting something be verfallen (by-gone).
  • People react to historical or rare objects with awe – framing the letter Buzz Aldrin sent them, or getting shivers when touching Charlemagne’s throne. It is almost like the physical connection provides a worm hole into the past, and some essence is connected to us. Now, that IS interesting, we both agree. Why is that? How does it make you feel connected to history and why does that matter to you?
  • People vary in how much they attach to objects as possessions, or as links to personal history, or how much they have emotional responses to historic objects, or all of the above. Where do these individual differences come from? I find that highly interesting, my breakfast partner not at all – too many variables under consideration, therefor hard to test scientifically. Note to self: scour the research literature and see if someone has come up with a plausible answer….

For us this is a continuation of a conversation we had while visiting the strangest little museum in Los Angeles, two weeks ago, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Like the aristocratic collections and cabinets of curiosities assembled in early modern Europe, which were shared by their owners to reflect their status as powerful individuals of knowledge and prestige, it offers a seemingly random mix of exhibits acquired by chance. In fact, it offers – sufficiently dimly lit that you can’t be sure of anything – a hodgepodge of serious scientific objects and description of processes, and whole rooms full of things that are completely made up, nonetheless so perfectly imitating scientific explanations that they are frankly more amazing than the real thing. For someone like me, who is not partial to authenticity to begin with, it was a wondrous time. The creativity and wit and knowledge about museum culture was mind boggling. (They also have live birds wandering around in the museum – my kind of place…) If you can’t make it there in person, the next best thing is to read this: Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Written more than 20 years ago, every word holds.

Less of a mystery novel, and harder reading, is Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It explains, better than I can, the psychological effects of the “aura” of a historically significant object and how it relates to our cravings for authenticity. Just the thing, over the holidays!

Photographs today are my homage to thorny issues and sticky topics.

Music today is by special request: the thing that literally reminds us, the souvenir, captured by Samuel Barber.

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