Of Wind and Drought and History

“The air is harsh in its dryness, gentle in its movement — most of the time. Naturally, high winds that trigger dust storms are the exception. Most mornings, however, the air is quite still, a gentle breeze developing as the sun rises higher in the sky and dying away with sunset.”

No sooner do I compose such lines, fondly believing I have captured an important regional truth, than the wind kicks up in the morning, maddeningly putting me in my place. “You presume to think you know me?” the high desert seems to say. “We have only begun to get acquainted, and already you have forgotten the extremes of which I am capable!” If the winter sun of the Southwest is drying (as indeed it is), the sun’s drying quality is nothing compared to that of the wind. Winter, moreover, already the dry season, is also the windy season, making for a dangerous situation, particularly in a drought year. The wind is so strong that the Saturday “swap meet” (what in Michigan we would call a flea market) falls apart almost as soon as it gets underway, vendors packing up and going home before noon.

In the overgrazed grasslands, and across the ancient dry lakebed known as the Willcox Playa, wind also means dust, and the dust gets into everything, which is point #2 against the wind. Point #3 is the noise, the constant rattling of blinds and any loose metal anywhere. When the wind blows all night, it seems as if it would lift the roof clean off the cabin and open our living space to the stars. The wind chases away sleep.

The stars, however, regardless of what poets and songwriters say, do not blow around in the wind and neither do the mountains give way. Is that where unchanging truth lies? Hardly.

This land has been covered by ocean and uncovered and then covered and uncovered again. I lose track of how many “transgressions” and “regressions” of the sea have taken place in geologic time. Just now the landforms seem stable, but that is stability as seen by the human eye, in the context of a human lifetime. Presumably, erosion of the mountains continues, albeit at a rate slower than the movement of glaciers. Change, I remember from the first day of my freshman high school earth science class, is the one geographic and geologic constant, though from one day to the next we cannot mark its transformations.

Harsh in its dryness, in stirring up dust, in the nonstop and enervating noise it makes, the wind bears us no ill will. It is impersonal, not malicious or vindictive. We watch the clouds and hope for rain.

*****

My reading so far this year, beginning with the upheaval of packing up our Michigan life, followed by a week on the road accompanied by a wretched cold, and continuing with our days of settling in here for the winter, has had a flighty quality, to say the least. I pick up a book and read a few chapters — sometimes, with even less discipline, turn pages in a constant search for who-knows-what, looking for something to stay my mind. Beginning a novel on the Columbia River, I find it is not what I expected and for several evenings pick it up only reluctantly, making slow progress. I find a book on Arizona geology at the library but am vexed by the multitude of examples drawn from the Grand Canyon (so far from my ghost town cabin home), a complete absence of reference to “sky islands” in general and Chiricahua in particular, and the inexcusable lack of an index. One of Chiang Lee’s delightful “Silent Traveler” books comes to my hand at the Friendly Bookstore in Willcox, and I purchase it happily but then find it difficult to lose myself in the traveler’s gentle prose and reflections from the mid-twentieth century. 

My mind is too full of urgent questions! How were these mountains formed? When will the drought end? What is a reasonable solution to the maintenance of national borders? How did we, as individuals and as groups of people, come to be where we are now? I need to find a book that sets my hair on fire!

William H. McNeill’s The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, & Community may turn out to be the book. It's off to a fiery start! 

The underlying question in all McNeil’s researches and speculations is not simply “what happened” at any given time but “what really matters in human history,” and his way of trying to get at an answer is to look carefully at purposes and processes. Human beings, as individuals and as groups up to the level of nations, have purposes and act to achieve them. We are intentional beings. And yet again and again, not only do our diverse purposes clash with those of others, but larger processes — biological, cultural, economic  evolutionary, meteorological, etc. — interact and distort and often completely derail the plans of mice and men. In terms of our judgments, we assign praise and blame within the context of purposes, conveniently (for the purposes of our judgments!) ignoring larger global processes within individuals and nations are caught up and tossed around like playthings of the gods. — I am mixing my own concerns and observations here with exposition of McNeill’s lectures, so do not judge his work by this paragraph, please....

Thus far I have read only the few pages of preface to a collection of five lectures McNeill gave over the course of seven years. In the lectures he explores the question of how historians should address the relationship of purposes and processes and how they can decide “what really matters” in clarifying this relationship and the course of human events. He says in his preface,

History as a course of study cannot be exhaustive: too much is knowable. What should be left out to make the past intelligible?

He argues for history to be expanded beyond national borders, for the study of world history, and the development of a global consciousness, because only that larger perspective can take account of the processes that work upon our lives. He also insists that “history” must include physico-chemical, biological, and semiotic systems, noting that the more skillful human beings become in carrying out their purposes on earth, “the greater the potential for tragedy.” He does a quick sketch of the history of his purposes-and-processes question as it was treated from Ancient Greece down to the present, and it is in coming to the end of the twentieth century that he finds “scientific” national histories — a notable nineteenth-century achievement — inadequate. Remarks on a “global economy” have become commonplace in the transition to the twenty-first century, but McNeill goes further.

In particular, I have become far more aware since 1963, when my major effort at a history of the world was first published, that what happens among humankind is embedded within events affecting  the biosphere as a whole. 

Finally, he admits the enormity and impossibility of the task he sets for himself.

No one is ever likely to put all knowledge together in a way that will command the assent of all reasonable persons, yet trying to understand is irresistible. 

The historical question of purposes and processes reminds me of the philosophical question of the one and the many that crops all over the place. How can many birds, for example, all be the same thing, ‘bird’, and how can a collection of individuals become one polity, act as one person, e pluribus unum? The great philosophical systematizers sought to explain the whole dizzying plurality and diversity of existence in terms of a single system, each one criticizing and rejecting the system preceding his own and being critiized and rejected in turn. But I digress....

I will never know all there is to know. I will never put together enough to see more than a vague, very likely mistaken, whole. And long before I can even begin to satisfy my craving for understanding, my time on earth will be over, while impersonal processes continue and human purposes intelligent and ignorant, collaborative and conflicting, go on being enacted. In short, the party will go on, and I will never see what happens next, let alone how it all turns out. 

But I am here now, and just as I take my primary task in the world to be paying attention, I also feel a corollary duty in the search for understanding, and it wouldn’t matter to me if the entire rest of the world were to see (were they to look at) my self-assigned work as a ridiculous waste of time. These are the purposes I set myself.

So I am quite pleased and very excited at having fallen serendipitously on this little book by an author whose name is entirely new to me. The richness of the nine pages of McNeill's preface have admirably prepared my appetite for the lectures to come, and I predict I will stick to the last page. 

*****

Will I finally finish an entire book? Will rain come to the high desert at last? Such are the ephemeral concerns of Books in Northport today. According to the Sunday morning weather forecast, there is a possibility of rain by the end of the coming week, and while another week's end seems very far off, I know it will arrive quickly. For now, we can only hope the rain will come with it. 

Views, Texts, and Subtexts

We had an interesting if ordinary weekend. No huge adventures, but we stumbled on a little flea market in Willcox on Saturday, where I was happy to find a woman with lot of housewares priced to sell. I found this lovely coffee mug, three others not quite as stunning (but the Artist is happy with solid black), and a steamer pot, with steamer but without lid. I love the Southwest colors of my mug. David bought a few DVDs he can watch on his laptop if he gets too desperate without movies.

But we went to the movies, too. On Sunday afternoon we went to a matinee at the Willcox Historic Theatre, down on Railroad Street. The movie was “Hostiles,” one a lot of friends back in Michigan have seen recently. 

In discussing the film afterward, we agreed that “Hostiles” was pretty much a set piece. You knew right from the beginning that the Indian-hating cavalry officer would come around to an understanding with his old enemy, Chief Yellow Hawk, and you knew the chief would survive the trip to die on his home ground, or at least in sight of it. (Spoiler: He makes it all the way.) Once the woman whose family was murdered joins the group on the trail, you know she’s going to end up with the cavalry officer, and you also know that the captain’s friend, the bearded one who has lost track of how many people he’s killed (he tells a young soldier, “You get used to it”) and says his soldiering days are over — you know he’ll be dead before the last frame. 

I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy aspects of the film, but what I enjoyed most was the scenery. The opening scenes in New Mexico, vast grassy desert and rocky mountains (though not the Rocky Mountains) were very much like the scenery here in Cochise County, Arizona. So if you see the movie, you’ll have a good idea of what we see every day when we go outdoors from our cabin. 

Back to the movie, though. It was very much a white man’s movie. The chief is noble and stoic, the settler woman whose family was murdered is blonde and beautiful, the cavalry captain ruggedly handsome. Both the captain and his doomed, bearded friend come around in the end to realization of the white man’s sins against the Indians, and the captain “does the right thing” by the chief and his family, but in the end all the Indians are dead except the little boy, who is taken under the wing of the woman who lost her own children, and we’re pretty sure the captain will complete that little family circle. As I say, a white man’s movie. 

It reminded me of the French movie, “Indochine,” with Catherine Deneuve. That film was set in Indochina, obviously — Vietnam — and clearly the challenge to the movie makers was how to make a film about colonialism and war in Vietnam, a sad chapter in the history of France, palatable to a French audience. I’m hazy now on the details but retain a general impression that the young Vietnamese man, near the end of the film, acknowledges Catherine Deneuve as his “real mother,” which I took as an intentional subtextual metaphor, Vietnam acknowledging France as its cultural parent. Again, white man’s view.

We'd been to the only bookstore in town on Saturday, a little shop run by the Friends of the Library, where books are cheap and where local honey and jam can also be purchased (mesquite blossom honey seemed an appropriate choice), and among a selection of battered volumes in French and Spanish -- Spanish because I'm learning and French because I don't want to lose it -- I also bought a river story. David and I both appreciate river stories, and I thought Swift Flows the River might be good for bedtime reading aloud, an imaginary travel up the Columbia. Wouldn't you know! The novel begins with an Indian massacre! I didn't even get through the whole scene before laying the book aside. I'll probably go back to it, because the map endpapers promise quite a lot in the way of upriver exploration, but why did it have to begin the way it did? I feel trapped in the history of my country.

And aren't we all? Trapped in the histories of our various countries, trapped in world history and world "progress," such as it is? There was a quote from D. H. Lawrence at the beginning of "Hostiles" that I'll have to look up online....

The view of the country around here pleases me, but I cannot claim the view of the hawk. What does she see from her high, slow swoops across the sky? I read the Range News and wonder at the subtext of stories on various local and regional issues. The starting point for any view I have, on any subject, is that of a white Midwestern American woman of my generation, but I hope I can imagine, if only imperfectly, how those of different backgrounds might see my view and how it surely differs from their own. 

I have reviewed the first eight chapters in Ultimate Spanish that I'd labored through back in Michigan and am now launching into Chapter 9. Clearly, any success I manage to achieve will be due to review, review, review. ¡Siempre me olvido! It is so easy to forget what one has "learned" only recently, easy to fall back on what is familiar but wrong in the new context, since ça fait longtemps or it's been a long time is not the same as hace mucho tiempo. 

And isn't that exactly the problem with the subjective, parochial, and monocultural points of view that all human beings can't help having? It takes a lot of work to get outside and stay there for any length of time. The filmmakers tried with "Hostiles," but the pull of unconscious and deeply held narrative expectations and standards brought them in the end to dead Indians and a conventionally handsome white couple left with the Indian boy they would adopt and raise. 

What would that boy's life be? What was it up to this point, and what would it be from now on? Through his eyes. Now there would be a movie.

And here's the D.H. Lawrence quote:

"The essential American soul is hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer. It has never yet melted."

Agree or disagree?

Thoughts on Escape

Escape?

In December I was on a headlong, high-speed, emotional retreat from the world. I read three Lee Child “Jack Reacher” novels practically in a nonstop row, beginning the second immediately upon finishing the first and then, after a short interval with other material, returning for a third. But running (away) that fast can be exhausting, and it doesn’t really work, anyway. Never mind. It was a phase it seems I just had to go through.

Depression, Nightmares, Insomnia, and Facts

The very phrases ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ are depressing, not to mention the way nightmares involving the U.S. Congress have invaded and interrupted my sleep. Me, not the world’s most politically engaged person for most of my life!

As for truth and facts, though, I’ve long realized (I remember a few insights when I was a young child) that we all have different perspectives on the world around us. It’s winter now, so take the fact of snow:

To a puppy, blowing snow might be frightening or wildly exciting. A human toddler might greet snow as does the braver puppy, but if snow keeps blowing in the baby’s face, he’ll probably start to cry. Athletic types cheer up at the prospect of good skiing, while old people worry about slippery sidewalks and roads. Even the plow driver and UPS driver don’t have identical perspectives on snowy weather. But no one denies the fact. No one says, “That isn’t snow, it’s confetti! It’s little bits of paper people threw to celebrate my victory! Whaddya mean, dangerous? Nah! Don' worry about it!"

No, we recognize snow, and we understand that we have to deal with it for what it is, like it or not.

Anyway, I am hardly alone in depression and insomnia. Numerous friends share the same experiences, and we try to buck up for one another’s sakes.

Day of Ups and Downs

On Thursday I walked out of the house to drifted snow and an unplowed shared drive. Don’t ask. As crises go, this one was not so much as a blip on the radar. Merely a challenge. The low right front tire was another, more serious matter.

Rocking the truck back and forth and shouting curses (new studies show cursing can help), I finally broke free and slithered and slewed up the hill. I would air the tire up in town before starting back home in the afternoon. Maybe it would be warmer then.

First village stop was at the corner store for gas and a newspaper. The very young) woman at the cash register noticed a Tiffany's ad on the front page and expressed skepticism that anyone would ever be offering her a ring from Tiffany's. When I said I'd never wanted diamonds, she admitted she'd be just fine if some guy offered her a HORSE as an engagement token! I'd been pretty low-key up until then but shouted, "Yes! Me, too!" To which she said, "Or even a goat. I'd take a goat," to which I said, "Not me, but I'd take a cow," and she agreed she'd take a cow, too, but we agreed that a horse would be best. I left with a big smile on my face! What a wonderful interlude on an otherwise cold, bleak day! I loved it!

Six people came in during the day to sign my letter to our new U.S. Representative, and that was gratifying. No one came to look at books, which was discouraging, and my UPS delivery came too late in the day to get word to people to pick up their orders. Oh, and then there was the call to AT&T about my phone bill, up in two years from under $70 to over $100 with no new services added, which made me think again of the price of facial tissue and paper towels, up an even greater percentage, and the cost of having my teeth cleaned, which went from $95 in the spring to $160 this winter....

But the real challenge of the end of my business day was the low tire. Twenty pounds, my gauge said when I went to the air hose, checking the pressure first. Next I put two quarters in, cursing the cold, but couldn't get the hose to work. Tried another two quarters. Fingers freezing! Finally gave up and drove north of town to the garage, where I threw myself on their mercy! Told Mark's wife I was desperately in need of help! Told her my pathetic story. She said someone else had had the same problem and that they had concluded the hose

must be frozen. "You mean it isn't just me?" She smiled and shook her head. Thank god! I was feeling so incompetent! She had me pull around to one of the bays, and Mark came out and checked all four tires and brought them up to 35 pounds. I was so relieved I wanted to cry. Before that I'd been so frustrated and felt so stupid I wanted to cry!

Turning to Fiction

After dinner and a movie, I picked up The Assault, by Harry Mulisch. I figured it was time for another novel after so much nonfiction, but this novel offered no escape, other than from the specifics of 2017, because the same questions recur in the troubled history of human civilization:

What apparently insignificant remark or desire sets chains and webs of events in motion? Why, when every single one of us has such a short tenure on this earth, do we muck it up so badly for ourselves and each other? How can mankind be so cruel? And how can one oppose inhumanity without taking on some of its traits?

Does anyone have ‘clean hands’? Is it possible to remember? Is it possible to forget? If we cannot forget, and if we remember only dimly and confusedly, can we forgive and move on? How?

The central character in The Assault is a boy in the first section of the book. The year is 1945. A cruel Fascist policeman is assassinated on the street by anti-Fascists, and neighbors drag the body from in front of their house to in front of Anton’s family home. German occupiers soon arrive and, in retaliation for the killing, set Anton’s house on fire. After a confusing and frightening series of events, in which the boy is taken into custody by authorities who have no idea what to do with him, he is given over to his uncle and aunt. 

Subsequent events take place in 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981, and gradually the truth of what happened in 1945 comes to light for Anton, piece by piece, and each time Anton has to recalibrate his memory.

Big issues and stunning writing.

And there were not only negative reasons for his choice of anesthesiology. He was fascinated by the delicate equilibrium that must be maintained whenever the butchers planted their knives in someone—this balancing on the edge between life and death, and his responsibility for the poor human being, helpless in unconsciousness. He had, besides, the more or less mystical notion that the narcotics did not make the patient insensitive to pain so much as unable to express that pain, and that although drugs erased the memory of pain, the patient was nevertheless changed by it. When patients woke up, it always seemed evident that they had been suffering. But when he spoke of this theory once to his colleagues, who were talking about yachting, the way they looked at him suggested that he had better keep his thoughts to himself if he wanted to remain in the club.

Final Thought to Ponder

If, under anesthetic, our bodies feel pain – and if bodies continue to feel after-effects, although we have no conscious memory of surgery’s pain – and if learning can take place during sleep – and if, as countless studies have shown, much more takes place in our brains than ever reaches the level of consciousness – why would we ever think we could escape the real world, deny it though we will?

You may be wondering -- was I sorry to have chosen such a serious, non-escapist novel to read? Not at all. It was worth the time spent and left me calm and thoughtful.