Meeting Dogs vs. Being Married, Searching for God, and Building Community

The dogs are excited enough.

First, the dogs --

 

Whether you are meeting a dog for the first time or coming home to your own dog … whether the dog is reactive or simply exuberant or whatever … the rules of engagement as formulated by Cesar Milan are simple: No talk, no touch, no eye contact. Or as I tell friends coming to my house, “Ignore the dog.” What you’re doing is keeping your own energy calm. You don’t ignore the dog indefinitely, of course, but what you want to reward is calm behavior, not excitement, on the part of the dog. 

Calm is rewarded with play.

I am completely on board with Cesar’s advice and only wish more people would practice it. Even when directly instructed, too many find it difficult not to approach a dog head-on (an aggressive approach in the dog world) with big smiles (showing teeth) and/or cooing voices (inviting dominant behavior from the dog). Then when jumped on, many of those people assure the owner, “It’s all right.” No, it is not all right! You are working against the owner and not in the dog’s best interest! 

 

But that’s all I’m going to say today about dogs...

Then, marriage --

 

...because what I want to focus on today is a book by David Brooks, and I want to begin by saying that the way to approach a dog is not the way to make a good, strong, satisfying and lasting marriage. 

 

On Sunday morning I was writing to a friend, telling her about The Second Mountain, and admitting that I did not fully engage with the book until I came to the section on marriage. And then, as I was writing that to my friend, it occurred to me that what I miss most since my husband died is exactly what we should not do when meeting or reuniting with a dog! 

 

I miss the talk: the shorthand of “trivial” daily sharing (never trivial to the sharers of it) and the deeper conversations extending over hours or even years. 

 

I miss the touch: holding hands while walking, sitting side by side in a restaurant instead of across the table from one another, being in direct physical contact as much as possible. 

 

I miss the eye contact: seeing and being seen, not as two strangers glancing at one another on a sidewalk but as intimates, seeing each other’s hearts and minds and souls. “He saw you,” that same friend wrote to me once. 

"The first time ever" -- I saw him.

Here is the sentence from the section called “The Stages of Intimacy” that changed my casual, desultory reading of Brooks to total engagement:

 

When you choose to marry someone, you had better choose someone you’ll enjoy talking with for the rest of your life. 

 

That sentence stopped me in my tracks. Brooks continues:

 

It doesn’t work unless two people can fall into a state of fluid conversational flow. The phone calls can last hours. They can spend a fourteen-hour day together and the words don’t stop. Everything can eventually be said, and every topic can be discussed. This is what Martin Buber called ‘pure relation,’ when I-It becomes I-Thou. This is what it feels like to be known.

 

We saw each other.

I really appreciate how David Brooks does not set aside passion to focus on common interests and common values. Friendship is not enough to make the kind of “maximum marriage” he describes and most of us (those who wanted marriage) always wanted to find. A relationship can “make sense” without touching the depths of the soul. Couples who enjoy each other’s company and admire each other 

 

…may tell each other that they love each other, they may feel real love for each other, but somehow it’s not the kind of love that makes it painful to be away from the person, the kind of love that stirs up turmoils of fear that the other person might go away, the kind of love that produces enchantment and deep happiness when the two of you are just next to each other doing nothing, the kind of love that calls forth the everyday service and constant solicitude that marriage requires.

 

I can almost see some of my readers recoiling in disgust at this description of what they would call “codependence,” but my money is on the quite well-known woman whose name escapes me at present who said in one of her comedy routines (or in a book she wrote?) that what other people call codependence she simply calls the human condition. Well, but maybe not everyone wants enchantment. Someone once accused me of romanticizing my life, something the Artist and I certainly did, but if we didn’t, who would, and why would we want to stop? 

The Second Mountain is not a book about marriage alone but about commitment and transformation. (Or should I say transformation and commitment?) Brooks calls the first mountain the one on which we strive to measure up as adults.

 

On the first mountain, we all have to perform certain life tasks: establish an identity, separate from our parents, cultivate our talents, build a secure ego, and try to make a mark on the world….

 

The goals on that first mountain are the normal goals that our culture endorces….

 

Then something happens.

 

What happens varies from one person to another, but the result is the sense that there is another mountain to be climbed. There may be but is not necessarily a change in careers or marriages, but it is transformation that characterizes the second mountain, a move from acquisition to contribution. Topics such as intellectual commitments, spiritual seeking and/or conversion, and community building—these are reasons why I think everyone, not just romantics, should read this book. I loved the idea of community building focusing on possibilities rather than problems, especially the story of the Spartanburg (SC) Academic Movement. 

Basically, the story is about the joy of commitment, which reminds me of the answer Richard Leakey gave when asked if he was really willing to give his life to Kenyan politics. His response was, “What else does any of us have to give?” Where we give our attention and care and time is where we give our life. Something to ponder….

 

Look in the Mirror. Do You Read the Future There?

Marina sunrise, Monday, October 1, 2023

What kind of world do you see around you today, and what future world do you envision? Is it one you want?

 

Years ago here in Northport, when our community was even deeper in the doldrums than the rest of the country, a series of “visioning” meetings was held for local residents, and at one meeting, we were asked to draw a picture of our “vision” for the future. I use scare quotes there because I interpreted the word as meaning something positive – something like a best-case scenario that we might be able to work toward and bring about. (Yeah, yeah, prepositions at the end of the sentence. Move along, move along!) One local woman, however, took “vision” to mean a prediction, and hers (obviously based on the times we were in) was ominous: her drawing showed a street of empty storefronts with big CLOSED signs on all the windows. Very unhappy "vision," I thought. 

View from inside my bookstore to Saturday morning preparations for street fair --

Leelanau UnCaged 2023! Northport was full of life!

My bookstore, like all the village, was full of life, full of people this past Saturday for our annual street fair, Leelanau UnCaged. Music, food, arts and crafts, face painting and art fun for the kids! It is a happy day in Northport, and my guest poets, Fleda Brown and Michael Delp, read to an attentive audience – though I fell down on the job, neglecting to pick up my camera, too overwhelmed by their powerful words. If you weren’t here, I’m sorry you missed them.

But coming back to my sheep (meaning and origin of that French phrase here): Asking the question about the future today, I’m not trying to elicit only positive visions but not exactly asking for predictions, either. I’m asking what you expect, personally, in our country and in the world in the coming years. Is yours an optimistic or a fearful vision? Do you welcome the future you see? Or maybe you don’t look very far ahead, but even if you’re focused more on today than tomorrow, please keep reading, anyway, because today is where we all are now.

 

This post will not be a book review. (For a fuller idea of the contents of the book, please see the publisher’s description I have included in the comment section below.) Everything Naomi Klein has written in Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World is worth reading, and most of it is very, very important, but I want to address a single narrow issue, more or less, one that has been hurting my heart. And I’m not just pointing a finger, either, because the temptation and danger are there for me as much as for anyone else. 

 

Klein notes that as the political divide has widened across the U.S., thinking has become binary on the left as well as on the right, with the left, simply to counter lies and conspiracy theories on the right, often defending the status quo rather than offering nuanced critique.

 

It's as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. This has happened on so many issues that I sometimes feel we are tethered to each other as reverse marionettes…. 

 

When fear-mongers on the right encourage panic, the left knee-jerk is to dismiss all worry, and vice versa. The problem doesn’t stop there, either. 

 

There are also uncomfortable ways we have begun to imitate each other.

 

I added emphasis to the sentence above and set it apart by itself (though it does not take up three lines on my laptop screen) because that sentence brings into focus my today's concern. 

Potentially murky waters --

 

There were groups of people during the height of COVID concern who refused to wear masks, and when some went so far as to say it was for the good of the country and the human species if the weak and old were to die, mask wearers were indignant and horrified at such heartlessness. And yet, when unvaccinated people began to die, how many mask wearers made jokes about people dying of stupidity? “How,” Klein asks, “did we cede so much territory? Become so heartless [ourselves]?"

 

Klein uses this insight to introduce Steve Bannon’s strategy, that of picking up and using the left has dropped,

 

…identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have left neglected or betrayed…

 

-- but my concern here and now, in this post, is with what we are all becoming. The radio/television network that its followers call “conservative” has long hosted name-calling screamers who ridicule their opposition. (I choose to read their news online occasionally to know what they’re saying without having to hear the mocking voices.) I find it equally disturbing, however, when my fellow liberals stoop to name-calling and bad jokes, though I understand the temptation. “We have to laugh so we don’t cry,” one friend told me. But ridiculing our political opponents and those the opposition holds up as leaders and pundits will not open a single mind or heart, and, beyond that, it certainly does not make us kinder, happier people. A hate-filled future for our country? Is this what we want?

 

*****

 

Okay, let me switch gears. How do we escape from what Klein calls “the mirror world”? When I had almost reached the final chapter of her book, I picked up a paperback from 1962, The Image: A Guide to Pseudoevents in America, by Daniel J. Boorstin. Historian Boorstin’s thesis was that America had replaced originals with images, and now, like Narcissus in the Greek myth...

 

We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves. 

 

When cursed-by-the-gods Narcissus saw his reflection in the water, he fell in love with his image and “died of languor” on the spot, his own image a narcotic that not only put him to sleep but ended his life. And so Boorstin can’t help but wonder,

 

How can we flee from this image of ourselves? How can we immunize ourselves to its bewitching conceitful power? 

 

This becomes ever more difficult. The world of our making becomes ever more mirrorlike.

 

(Are dogs wiser than humans?)

Again with the mirrors! In the mirror world both Klein and Boorstin describe, the kneejerk reach for false villains is matched by an equally desperate reach for false heroes. And here is a problem I have with e-mails that plead on a daily basis for my donations in these “dangerous” times: It isn’t that I don’t see our times as dangerous, because I do, but I see our fear and fixation on opponents as dangerous narcotics, too, not as signposts to peace among neighbors. Because what we are being asked to fear is our neighbors! Each other!

 

I don’t know how much common ground there might be between Boorstin (who died in 2004) and Klein, since the former traveled from Communist Party membership to mid-20^th century conservatism, while the latter makes no bones about being an anticapitalist eco-leftist. Boorstin saw the beginnings of today’s mirror world when advertising invaded American politics, and Klein sees how the mirror world has divided Americans until, gazing at doppelgangers of one another over the abyss, we no longer share a view of reality. But somehow I don’t see them greeting each other as hard-and-fast comrades, because while they see similar dangers, they reach very different conclusions on what we need to do to get beyond the impasse.

 

Boorstin’s map for escaping the mirror world is stronger individualism:

 

Though we may suffer from mass illusions, there is no formula for mass disenchantment. By the law of pseudoevents, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions.

 

“Each of us must disenchant himself,” he counsels. 

 

Klein, on the other hand, sees too much individualism as part of what lures us into the mirror world – the idea that each of us, on our own, is responsible only for ourselves. The first wave of COVID, like the shock of 9/11, initial brought Americans together in common cause. Quickly, however, we retreated not only to our respective “sides” (and in the case of COVID, for those fortunate enough to be able to do so, to the safety of our private homes) but also from connectedness. And now, too many who should be making common cause on important issues have become sidetracked into splinter groups with tiny, often entrepreneurial, self-admiring agendas. Fearing and ridiculing a dangerous, monolithic opposition, we subject one another to scrutiny, too, and who on earth can measure up on all possible counts? Even if we don’t begin from individual isolation, it’s where we may end up if we can’t give each other a little slack!

 

So Klein’s recipe for exchanging mirrors and images for reality is not more individualism, but solidarity and connections.

 

We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us and yet are still connected to us. Some aren’t even human.

 

Our doppelgangers can teach us, she urges, that we are “not as separate from each other as we might think.” And while working on ourselves is a start, changing the larger world requires collaboration and coalition, even in the face of discomfort.

 

I cannot urge too strongly the reading of Doppelganger. Naomi Klein writes as a friend, trusting readers with her own errors and weaknesses and difficulties in her journey through the mirror world. As I said, this is not a book review, and I have left vast numbers of the author’s ideas for you to discover on your own, because I have been wanting for a long time to address what I see as outright meanness in utterances and writings of those with whom I otherwise agree, and it makes me sad, and one of the things I most love about Naomi Klein is that she refuses to stoop to unkindness. 

 

Besides, it’s a fascinating journey! Doubles, twins, identity thieves, avatars, doppelgangers, a house of mirrors – it’s an irresistible story, isn’t it? 

 

But now I need to get back to Iain McGilchrist, because a common underground thread I see connecting all of us in this splintered, divided, many-mirrored world is what McGilchrist identifies as a cultural over-reliance on the left brain, that narrowly logical, super-rational “emissary,” with its intolerance for ambiguity and an inability to make room for facts and ideas that conflict with its orderly catalog of guarded knowledge. 

 

Another strength of Klein’s view and her book: she sees the irresistible temptation to judge characters globally on the basis of single issues. Is so-and-so this? Or that? We are all, she says, both this and that, neither devils nor angels. 

 

And every new day is an opportunity for us to make better choices.

Snippets

  

Outdoors Nearby

 

Days are cool now, in the low-to-mid 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but nights are not much cooler (low 50s), so the transition from summer to fall creeps along thus far in small increments. In corners here and there, fall colors begin to sing, but for the most part the world is still green, even if (except for the brightness of rain-refreshed grass) a tired sort of green that seems to say it’s getting ready to give way.

In Swann’s Way, the opening volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust wrote of hawthorns in blossom, and the summer I first read those descriptions of the family’s walk alongside the flowering hedges, I was obsessed with hawthorns. Whenever the Artist and I went for an evening drive, my eyes searched in vain for hawthorns. Later, in another summer, I found one on the hill between our farmhouse and the neighbors’ house on the slope where our dogs used to meet for play. And now there are two or three closer to me, one in my meadow, another bearing its fruit closer to our south boundary.

 

“Hips and haws,” I muse, admiring the bright red berries and thinking of a character in The Borrowers, Homily, Arietty’s mother, so reluctant to leave their indoor home and take up a long outdoor search for fugitive relatives, imagining and mourning in advance the poor diet they might expect: nothing but rose hips and hawthorn berries. To my ear, that sounds as poetic as milk and honey, but the hawthorn berries are small, mealy, and tasteless, I find. Better to leave them for the wild things, although I do love seeing them.

Here, anyway, is a morning Continental breakfast of reading snippets, just small bites to go with morning coffee.

 

On Rereading

 

How can you be objective in the face of a book you love, which you have loved, which you have read at different times in your life? Such a book has a reading past. In rereading it, you have not always suffered in the same way—and above all you no longer hope with the same intensity in all the seasons of a life of reading. … The animus and anima quests do not yield the same riches at every age in the life of the reader. Above all the great books remain psychologically alive. You are never finished reading them.

 

-      Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

 

(Is life too short to reread books? Are there too many people in the world [and is life too short] to hold onto old friendships? In the past two days I have reread Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River and am now embarked, once again, on her Q Road. Her characters find much more sustenance outdoors than mere hips and haws.)

 

On Attention

 

Attention is not just another [cognitive] function…. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to….

 

So it is … with everything with which we come into contact. A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.

 

Science, however purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value-free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object…. Yet this highly objective stance … is itself value-laden. It is one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment….

 

Attention also changes who we are…. [B]y attending to someone else performing an action, and even by thinking about them doing so … we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think and feel.

 

-      Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

 

(Not only the company you keep socially, but the movies you watch, the books you read, the music in your ears, etc. is continually shaping and reshaping you [I/me; we/us]. As race car drivers say, “Where your eyes go, your car goes.” Similarly, where your attention goes, your heart and mind go. Do we live increasingly in a hall of distorting mirrors? I have ordered for Dog Ears Books the new book by Naomi Klein with her investigation of that idea, so stay tuned. And by the way, the left brain, which McGilchrist calls the emissary, rejects facts incompatible with what it already "knows.")

 

On the Comfort of Rocks

 

How can I convey the comfort I find in reading geology? Rocks don’t care. They have no needs or desires of their own and cannot suffer pain or hurt feelings, and neither do they heed ours. Rocks award no prizes, mete out no punishment. They have stories of their own but do not—cannot—clamor to be heard in their own voices, and that lack of argument is restful, even when the subject of an essay is volcanic eruption. There are eruptions, yes, but no wars.

 

      - P. J. Grath, “What I Like Is Sometimes (But Not Always) What Others Like,” Books in Northport, Dec. 27, 2012

 

 

And there you are, here we are, already into the second half of September, with Leelanau UnCaged coming up on Saturday the 30^th. Not only will my bookstore be open on Waukazoo Street, but we will have a special offering of our own that day: 

 

 

DOG EARS BOOKS PRESENTS:

“TWO POETS READING”

106 Waukazoo St., Northport

Saturday, September 30

(during Leelanau UnCaged)

4 p.m.

Fleda Brown

 

Michael Delp

Of Two Minds

Clouds and chill do not dampen a dog's view of the world.

The grass is bright green, almost an unnatural-appearing green, so lush after recent heavy rain, but trees in the orchard, prematurely (from my perspective) shedding their leaves, had an almost wintry look recently against lowering grey skies. Not quite a contradiction, it was a scene to illustrate lack of demarcation between what we humans think of as one season and another – in this case, summer and fall. Seasons, like human emotions and states of mind, blend and interpenetrate more than they conform to any kind of calendar.

 

Which leads me – or, at least, I want to use it to try to lead you to think about fact and imagination, reasons and dreams, and the different ways our brains go at the work of knowing ourselves and the world. For Henri Bergson, my "main man" in philosophy (as the Artist liked to refer to him), two different ways of knowing came out as intellect/intuition. Gaston Bachelard's distinction was reason/imagination. It was psychobiologist Roger Sperry at Cal Tech whose experiments in the 1960s led to the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain specialized in different tasks, the left devoted to language, the naming of objects, and the right to visual construction of what we receive as “the world.” 

The left brain/right brain idea was grabbed up in simplistic dress by the general public, only to be rejected by science as myth and now resurrected in more nuanced form. There is more than one book on this fascinating subject, but the one I’ve been reading is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist.

Reading is a good activity on a chilly day.

McGilchrist’s is as far as possible from a simplistic view. He stresses, for example, that mathematics (and by that we don’t mean simple bookkeeping) is creative as well as logical and that the “indirect, connotative language of poetry,” dependent on the brain’s right hemisphere, 

 

...underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and art.

-      McGilchrist (p. 71)

 

It is the working together of the two hemispheres, he underlines, that allows us to put a world together at all. 

The sun returned!

Most brain scientists these days would have no quarrel with McGilchrist thus far. Where some dig in their heels and think he goes off the deep end is with his thesis that Western culture (going back to the 5^th century BCE and Socrates/Plato) has lost left/right balance (except for a few brief periods) and become overly dependent on – and dominated by – the left hemisphere’s narrowly focused rationality, its impatience and inability to deal with ambiguity and to make “big picture” connections. Although both parts of the brain deal both with units and with aggregates, he writes, the right hemisphere sees individuals and unique instances in holistic, always changing context, while the left categorizes and therefore can deal only with generic objects, types, and a fixed, static world.

Doggie nose prints on the inside of the windshield I just cleaned!

McGilchrist asked himself a question previous brain scientists seem not to have asked: why would mammalian brains, even brains of birds, divide their work in the first place? His answer is that life demands of us two different kinds of attention: first, a broad, flexible, sustained vigilance to everything around us; second, a focused attention on a task at hand (e.g., capturing prey). A machine model of animal behavior is a left-brain re-presentation. All left-brain re-presentations are based on what is already known. They are good at routine. They run as if on computer programs. They are, however, bad at revising in the face of the unexpected: what doesn’t fit is rejected. If McGilchrist hadn’t wanted to make as much reference as he does to Nietzsche, he might have called his book The Sorcerer and the Apprentice. (Don't miss Mickey Mouse in that link!)

 

The Master and His Emissary takes its title from Nietzsche, however, McGilchrist identifying the left brain as the “emissary” that has taken over the role of the “master” right brain, and it is a dense read at almost 600 pages, 54 of them notes and a hefty 67 pages of bibliography. The index, I must say, is disappointing and could have included much more than it does. This book is fascinating reading, though, for anyone interested in how we humans perceive and think.

 

That’s my nonfiction reading for sunlight hours. In the dark of the morning or evening dusk, I turn to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie and am amazed and delighted again and again. In fact, even my use of different times of day for these two books conforms to Bachelard’s idea that even words can have different psychic “weight” 

…depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or the language of daylight life (la vie claire) – to rested language or language under surveillance – to the language of poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

I don’t think I am stretching a point at all to seeing Bachelard in this passage agreeing with McGilchrist as to how the different brain hemispheres construct a world. And when he, Bachelard, uses Jung’s animus and anima language, again McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere distinctions, rather than any gendered differences, make sense of the distinction. Projects and worries, Bachelard says, belong to the animus, while “tranquil images” from the anima … “meld together in an intimate warmth.” And thus there are also two different kinds of reading, one in animus, the other in anima.

…I am not the same man when I am reading a book of ideas where the animus is obliged to be vigilant, quite ready to criticize, quite ready to retort, as when I am reading a poet’s book where images must be received in a sort of transcendental acceptance of gifts. Ah! to return the absolute gift which is a poet’s image, our anima would have to be able to write a hymn of thanksgiving. 

 

The animus reads little; the anima reads a great deal.

 

Sometimes my animus scolds me for having read too much. 

 

Reading, ever reading, the sweet passion of the anima. But when, after having read everything, one sets before himself the task of making a book out of reveries, it is the animus which is in the harness. Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limiting himself to dreaming it. 

 

-      Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

And yet, I think to myself now, reflecting on these two books, on the work of the different hemispheres of the brain (my brain!), and on the expressions and statements of these two writers, I seem to sense the right and left brains, the anima and animus, in dialogue. Or is that the right brain, synthesizing facts handed to it by the left? At any rate, as I read, I take notes (left brain) and smile happily (right brain).

View without doggie nose prints --

And view without the road --

--

Today’s images have nothing to do with today’s text and are only included for relief from what might otherwise seem like overthinking.