Digging for a Sense of Place

December 6, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m reminded that we know very little about the land we live and work on.

Too often, we have no “sense of place” beyond our familiarity with the surface improvements that make our houses or workplaces more comfortable and attractive, efficient and accessible.

We rarely know—or try to discover—stories about “our” land’s prior visitors, inhabitants and laborers, or how it looks different today than it did before our childhoods or the settlers came or the glaciers rolled over it.

It’s not our fault if it’s never really occurred to us.

But I was reminded this week that I feel more grounded or connected when it does occur to me.

Among other things, little knowledge or even curiosity about the land we live and work on may explain some of the indifference we feel (and that I sometimes feel) towards climate change and global warming. How abstract it is and why we don’t relate to it more.

Because our plots of land are relative strangers to us, we don’t embrace them with the same protective bonds that draw us, to say, a child under threat. Instead, they are sometimes little more than addresses, places to arrive at or depart from but not necessarily learn more about even while we’re spending most of our time there.

There are other explanations for this disconnection, of course. Most of us no longer work our land for sustenance and fewer of us even “keep it up,” leaving that job to yard crews or a neighborhood kid with a lawnmower. As a result, we know less and maybe care less about where our land has been and might be headed, what it needs (beyond lawn food and holiday lights) and what secrets it might hold.

I started learning about where I live today by working the grounds after moving in. I’d come to love “groundwork” because I’d done so much of it “around the house” as a kid. We had a 3/4 acre size yard where I grew up, and by around 8 or 9 my job became taking care of the grass, the snow and leaf removal, and the landscaping, such as it was. I was always digging around, moving something from here to there, making the place look like someone cared about it. I learned about this place, my home, by getting my hands into it and sometimes around it on a regular basis.

My childhood yard had a big slice of the meadow that Meadow Circle Road in Branford was named after. That was one thing it had been before my father built a house on it, with help from lanky old Mr. Bartholomew who still lived in a far greater house a stone’s throw away. There’d been Native Americans there too, leaving pathways through the trees that we still walked on, along with the occasional arrowhead. I must have brought this kind of place-memory and curiosity about its long cast of characters to the new plot of land we found ourselves on after coming to Philadelphia.

It barely had a yard when we moved in and layer on layer to dig through before finding any more of one. There were rows of boxwood that had spilled outward into every space we had out back that hadn’t already been colonized by similarly neglected grapevines. There were tufts of saplings on the side that no one had plucked out after their seeds had fallen from the yard’s tulip, chestnut, ginko, cherry and copper beech trees.

I started appreciating my new yard’s back-story (as opposed to the sweaty hours it kept demanding) when I learned from its last owner how the house gardener used to live in the enclosed porch. As if for the first time, I saw how human and natural forces had conspired to create the complexity of overgrowth that confronted me every time I stepped outside.

Breaking the ground to remove or plant something provided deeper information. For example, near the rambling magnolia that was lost to a winter storm a couple of years ago, I found some pottery shards that looked Colonial-era, at least to me. A historical marker a few streets away might have explained them when it noted: “this was the site of the British encampment before the Battle of Germantown in the late summer and early fall of 1777.” Or maybe I’d just found some broken crockery in a farmhouse dump from when my yard had extended beyond some previous dwelling into fields of wheat or root vegetables long before regular trash days had ever been imagined. This week I remembered that I should still be wondering as well as poking around for more clues.

Is there more from that dump or encampment out there? Since none of us are here for very long, what will I leave behind for the next caretaker? What should I want him or her to find?

Every piece of land doesn’t hold surprises like these pottery shards of course, but as Robert MacFarlane recently observed while discussing his new book (called Ghostways), “There are rarely innocent landscapes,” by which he meant, I think, ones untrammeled by complicated pasts that await our discovery. He reminded me of old life-lines like these fragments of pottery, about the likelihood of additional ones that extend through the ground and towards the surface, and how place memories such as these might provide a deeper kind of education (and maybe a more necessary one) than I can find anywhere else.

+ + +

Thinking about the land I’m on like this brought me back to those final scenes in the movie Avatar, where James Cameron conjured (in sight and song) swaying braids of native people under a sacred tree whose roots gave them life and returned them to earth when it was time.

Until the middle of last year, Avatar held the record as the highest grossing movie ever, but it was likely more successful at entertaining us than at suggesting a richer way of seeing how humans are bound up with the land.

This week, a similarly appealing but out-of- the-mainstream way of solidifying this relationship was captured in a short video posted on Aeon.com. It’s about how the native Zuni people of New Mexico have recently been involved in “a counter-mapping project” with the aim of capturing their experience of the land in ways that two-dimensional American maps (with North on the top, South on the bottom and a mileage calculator in the corner) or Google Map’s aerial views never do.

The Zuni mapping project illustrates the difference between knowing where something is and understanding what it means to be there.

A Zuni map like this one tries to record a people’s visual “knowledge of place.” It doesn’t “eclipse” native language and ways of seeing but tries to capture “vignettes of experience” viewers will recognize, not only in the rivers, gorges, plains and rocks that they see around them but also in what they’ve been singing and telling stories about since they were children.

Maps like these are one more way to teach new generations and remind older ones about their roots and dreams, where they’ve been and hope to return, what is significant to them and what is not. Above all, they are a way of navigating through life and work, with the land and their connections to it as perhaps their most important points of reference.

If you’re interested in more information about the Zuni mapping project and in watching a slide-show that includes several more maps by native artists, here’s a link that will take you to it. And because the Zuni are not unique among native peoples, you can also read and download a discussion here about maps and map-making by Australia’s aboriginal people.

They too were reminding me that this is as good a time as any to understand where you are, dig into what it means to be there, and deepen your sense of place.

The image up top is of several panels from David Hockney’s 2007 painting “The Bigger Trees Near Warter.”

This post was adapted from my November 29, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Amish Test & Tame New Technologies Before Adopting Them: We Can Learn How to Safeguard What’s Important to Us Too

October 13, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Given the speed of innovation and the loftiness of its promises to improve our comfort or convenience, we often embrace a new technology long before we experience its most worrisome consequences. As consumers, we are pushed to adopt new tech (or tech-driven services) by advertising that “understands” our susceptibilities, by whatever the Joneses are doing next door, and by the speculation “that somehow it will make our lives better.” The sticker shock doesn’t come until we realize that our natural defenses have been overwhelmed or we’ve been herded by marketers like so many sheep.

By tech devices and services, I’m thinking about our personal embrace of everything from smart phones to camera-ready doorbells, from Google’s search engine to Amazon’s Prime memberships, from car-hailing services like Uber to social networks like Facebook. Only after we’ve built our lives around these marvels do we start recognizing their downsides or struggle with the real costs that got buried in their promises and fine print.

As consumers, we feel entitled to make decisions about tech adoption on our own, not wishing to be told by anybody that “we can buy this but can’t buy that,” let alone by authorities in our communities who are supposedly keeping “what’s good for us” in mind. Not only do we reject a gatekeeper between us and our “Buy” buttons, there is also no Consumer Reports that assesses the potential harms of these technologies to our autonomy as decision-makers, our privacy as individuals, or our democratic way of life — no resource that warns us “to hold off” until we can weigh the long-term risks against the short-term rewards. As a result, we defend our unfettered freedom until we start discovering just how terrible our freedom can be.

If there were consumer gatekeepers or even reliable guidebooks, they could evaluate the suitability of new technologies not just for individuals but also for groups of consumers. Before community adoption, they’d consider whether a new innovation serves particular priorities in the community, asking questions like:

– Will smartphones make us more or less distracted?

– Will on-line video games like Fortnite strengthen or weaken our families?

– Does freedom from outside manipulation outweigh the value of, say, Facebook’s social network or Google’s search engine, since both sell others (from marketers to governments) personal information about our use of their platforms so that these outsiders can manipulate us further given what they are learning about us?

Gatekeepers that are worried about such things might even urge testing of new technologies before they’re marketed and sold so that: the initial hype doesn’t become the last word in buying decisions; the crowd-sourced wisdom of advance users can be publically gathered and assessed; and recommendations that consider the up- and down-sides become possible.

By welcoming testing data from across the community, this kind of gatekeeper authority would likely gain legitimacy from the strength of its feedback loop. Back-and-forth reactions would aim to discover “what is good (and not so good) for us” instead of merely relying upon tech company claims about convenience or cost-savings. Before endorsing a new device or tech-driven service, these testers would take the time to ensure that it serves the human purposes that are most important to the group while also recommending suitable safeguards (like age or use restrictions). Moderated time trials would be like previewing and rating new TV shows before their general release.

What I’m proposing is a community driven, rigorously interactive and “take as much time as needed” approach to new tech adoption that — to our free-market ears — might sound impossibly utopian. But it’s already happening in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, and has been for generations. Amish gatekeepers and community members continuously test and tame new technologies, making them conform to their view of what is good for them, with startling and even inspiring results.

Startled, then inspired were certainly my reactions to a story about the Amish that Kevin Kelly told Tim Ferriss in his podcast a few years back. It led me to a Kelly essay about Amish Hackers, a post from a different storyteller about an Amish community’s “experimentation” with genetic technologies to fight inherited diseases, and other dispatches from this rarely consulted edge of American life. (Kevin Kelly is one of the founding editors of Wired magazine and a firm believer that wandering beyond the familiar is the most effective education you can get.) I’d argue there are broader lessons to be taken from Kelly’s and other sojourners’ perspectives about how Amish communities have been grappling with new technologies, particularly when you start (as they do) with a sense of awe that skews less towards “what’s in it for me right now” and more towards pursuit of the greater good over time.

As Kelly followed his curiosity, he noticed that the Amish seem to choose all of their gadgets or tech-driven services “collectively as a group.” Because it’s a collaborative endeavor throughout, they have to start with “the criteria” that they’ll use in their selection process.

When a new technology comes along they say, ‘Will this strengthen our local community or send us out [of it]?’ The second thing that they’re looking at is what’s good for their families. The goal of the typical Amish man or woman is to have every single meal with their children until they leave home.

So they also ask: will a tech-driven innovation increase the quality of our family time together, or somehow lessen it?

Since owning your own car will take you away from your community, they frown on automobiles, favoring more localized forms of transit like the horse and buggy. Similarly, because electricity ties you to a public energy grid and makes the community dependent on outsiders, they limit its use, preferring fuel, wind or sun-powered energy controlled from their homes and workshops. At the same time, while Amish beliefs are founded on the principle that their community should remain “in the world, but not of it,” their inward focus has never dampened their curiosity about new technologies or the practical advantages they might gain by utilizing them.

Strengthening family ties dictates the pace and manner of their tech adoption too. While the Amish engage in a broad spectrum of industries, their work places tend to be close to home so that workers can spend meal times with their families. And there are additional benefits to this proximity. Because the Amish are effectively living and working in the same place, the technology they rely upon to forge farm equipment, make furniture or process their produce tends to be friendly to the land and the people living there. In other words, instead of exporting the environmental and social costs of their economic activities, their means of production are also sustainable for the Amish families that live nearby.

While these criteria seem to imply a kind of primitive simplicity, the reality couldn’t be more different. One wrinkle is the way the Amish distinguish between owning technology and merely using it. For example, those who need the internet at work or school might share that access instead so it’s available for an intended purpose (like operating a business or learning) but not for getting lost in distraction whenever, say, a laptop owner feels like it.

Their work-arounds for living and working off-the-grid are also ingenious. Sometimes instead of electricity, they’ll use gas- or propane-fueled appliances and equipment. The Amish also adapt a startling array of machines and other contraptions to use pneumatic or compressed-air power. Of the later, Kelly writes:

At first pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops [where compressed air systems powers nearly every machine], but it was seen as so useful that air-power migrated to Amish households. In fact there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to [so-called] Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electrical-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine, and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo each other in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions.

How some Amish communities began utilizing genetically modified seeds on their farms — after the customary period of trial and error — also illustrate how their priorities drive their decisions. Unlike the huge turbines used in commercial agriculture, their old, but highly effective (and debt-free) farm equipment could not harvest the pest-weakened cornstalks that GMOs were designed to fight. Amish farmers embraced this seed innovation because they could continue to use their harvesters in a cost-effective manner with little apparent downside. On the other hand, the Amish jury is still out on cellphones. But instead of banning them outright, they are still trying to figure out which uses are good for them and which are to be avoided. In his essay, Kelly celebrated their endless beta testing, both here and in many other areas:

This is how the Amish determine whether technology works for them. Rather than employ the precautionary principle, which says, unless you can prove there is no harm, don’t use new technology, the Amish rely on the enthusiasm of Amish early adopters to try stuff out until they prove harm.

When downsides become apparent, they find ways to minimize them (again, sharing phones instead of owning them) or to eliminate them altogether for community members (like young people) who are most prone to their harms. It’s a time-intensive process where an Amish bishop or gatekeeper can always step in to forbid them, but there is usually a dizzying array of experimentation before that happens.

These time trials may place the Amish as much as 50 years behind the rest of us in terms of tech adoption — “slow geeks” Kelly calls them — but he finds their manner of tech adoption “instructive” and so do I.

1) They are selective. They know how to say ‘no’ and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt.
2) They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
3) They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
4) The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

As a result, the Amish are never going to wake up one day and discover that a generation of their teenagers has become addicted to video games; that smartphones have reduced everyone’s attention span to the next externally-generated prompt; or that surveillance capitalism has “suddenly” reduced their ability to make decisions for themselves as citizens, shoppers, parents or young people.

Given where most of us non-Amish find ourselves today, we’d likely be unwilling (at least at first) to step back from the edge of the technology curve for the sake of discovering what a new technology “is all about”—for worse as well as for better—before adapting our lives around it.

In Western cultures, individuals as consumers may have criteria for purchasing or adopting new technologies—like lower cost or greater convenience—but it seems almost impossible to believe that we’d ever be willing to bring others (beyond say a parent or life partner) into this highly personal decision-making process.

Indeed, our individualism as consumers seems so complete that it’s difficult to envision any community whose criteria we would willingly subject ourselves to for the common good. Or as Kelly puts it: we’d have to learn an entirely new skill, which is how “to relinquish” technologies and tech-driven services “as a group” until their efficacy, under the group’s standards, could be demonstrated.

So is it unlikely? “Yes.” But impossible? “No.” And what about desirable? I would argue that learning how to take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest when it comes to adopting new technologies is a consumer-wide competence that’s long overdue.

The Amish are clear that strengthening community and family are the primary goods for them. Like us, they’re drawn to “more convenient” and “less costly” too, but only if these lesser priorities can be made to serve their most important ones. At the same time, they’ll work long and hard to find accommodations for the sake of convenience or low cost by crowd-sourcing their experiences and considering all of the necessary angles before deciding how to proceed. They’re also willing to be one step or even several behind the technology curve. And when they can’t get over the hurdle of likely or actual harms with a product or service, they’ll put it behind them and move on without it.

At this point, it bears mentioning that Amish families and communities are not exemplary in terms of “goodness,” and they don’t claim to be. Indeed, their faith tends to make them more aware of their spiritual vulnerabilities than lesser believers, so they’ll readily acknowledge their sinfulness and struggles with temptation. On the other hand, their awareness of sin also distinguishes them from most of the rest of us. Compared to the Amish, we are relatively thoughtless about what is more and less “good for us,” especially in the long run.

That means our next step would be a big one. The unfettered freedom that we “enjoy” around what we buy and end up adopting makes it difficult for us to band together with others and agree to be subject to any group’s veto power. Our ad-based, consumer-driven economies have hooked us on instant gratification to the point that most of us would be unwilling (at least initially) to wait until the other beta testers in our group have finished their work and a consensus for the greater good could be reached.

On the other hand, given the deluge of new consumer technologies that keeps washing over us and the troubling consequences that come with many of them—like the community weakening propensities of “smart” doorbells and the privacy destroying nature of “smart” home assistants—we might be better off if we joined with others to learn more about what’s involved before embracing “the next shiny new thing” and discovering the downsides later.

We could learn the restraint of slowing down, the power of beta-testing new technologies, and the connectedness of considering what we discover with our fellow experimenters before jumping head-first into unchartered waters.

And perhaps most importantly, we could learn how to come to a collective agreement on the criteria for assessing whether a new technology is likely to be good for us, bad for us, or only acceptable with safeguards in place before adoption.

– What priorities would we test against as we experiment with new products and services?

– What assessment criteria would we apply in our consumer reporting about the next smart speakers, cell phone apps, facial recognition tools or geo-tracking devices?

– How could an interactive gatekeeper group like this avoid becoming a 21^st Century version of the Legion of Decency?

On this last point, any consumer protection group would certainly have to tone down the holier-than-thou attitude in its crowd-sourced application of first principles. As tech testers and reporters, the group would need to say: “we don’t know better than you, we’ve just thought about it from various, specific angles, and here’s how.”

Instead of authority residing in an Amish bishop, the wisdom of this group of early adopters and community members could be captured in an evolving body of experience that is informed by both the testers’ feedback (like Yelp’s) as well as by moderating influences on the direction of the debate (like the guidance of Wikipedia editors). Built this way, arguments about what is likely to be good or bad for everyone will always embrace a broader perspective than that of any single tech influencer or seller. In fact, the counter-weight of a consumer protection group to each of us being “on our own” with consequential technology choices would be one of this group’s two greatest strengths.

The other would be pushing a leading edge of tech consumers to decide what is important to them and worth protecting with the strength of their numbers in the free market.

A consumer protection group like this would begin by deciding on the zones it would be committed to safeguarding. They might be our zones of personal privacy (from those who wish to exploit our data for their gain as opposed to ours) and autonomous decision-making (from those who aim to use our behavioral information to manipulate our choices). Group criteria could also include protecting socially or economically vulnerable populations (like the susceptible young or old, or even the self-employed doing ride-hailing, delivery or other gig-economy work) from exploitation or harm by new tech products and services. The group’s overall aim would be to offer a persuasive new perspective to a critical mass of the tech consuming public before we decide to consume a new technology.

Their invitation might sound something like this:

Given our stated priorities, we urge you to slow down your purchases and hold off on your adoption of this new technology until — because it will always take time — its likely impacts can be assessed. We, in turn, will provide you with regular updates as our assessment of the risks and benefits as our experience with this new technology evolves.

Group creation of a public interface that provides criteria-driven, crowd-sourced information about new technology would almost certainly have an additional benefit in the marketplace. As the group’s standing and credibility is established, it’s assessments would likely influence tech companies to be more forthcoming about the potential downsides of their products and services before we’re introduced to them, and even whether they keep fraught technologies on a path to market.

Instead of individual consumers (on the one hand) or government regulators (on the other) trying to figure out how to put the ketchup back in the bottle or toothpaste back in the tube once they’ve made a mess of things, the wisdom of a consumer protection group with “greater good” priorities could serve as a counterweight before a new technology’s stains become permanent.

The group could function like a crowd-sourced Consumer Reports, publishing its assessments on a quality-controlled Wikipedia-type page that every consumer can see, with the aim of laying out the risks (as well as rewards) of new technologies before they’re widely adopted.

The Amish have found a way to test and to tame new technologies so that their priorities of family and community are continuously served.

Aren’t there enough of the rest of us — united in our concern about privacy, surveillance and on-line manipulation — to test and then tame these same technologies?

This post was adapted from my October 11, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Two Books Worth Reading

September 16, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading quite a lot over the past couple of months, and want to recommend two books that have brought me immense pleasure during a challenging time. Each is noteworthy for different reasons.

The first is a page-turner that’s built upon the harrowing but also laugh-out-loud and stop-you-in-your-tracks details its author has unearthed and pieced together around the airborne bombing of London from May, 1940 to May, 1941. The book is Eric Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, and it features the overheard statements and personal accounts of Winston Churchill (who, at 65, is Britain’s new prime minister when the book begins) as well as statements from his inner circle, family members, earshot diarists and a host of Londoners who were about to experience one of the worst and, on occasion, one of the best years of their lives. I found Larsen’s chronicle both bracing and timely as we absorb 2020’s assaults from a similarly vengeful host of external enemies and personal demons.

My second recommendation engrosses with its high-wire act of storytelling. Apeirogon by Colum McCann uses snippets (a line, a couple of paragraphs, sometimes a photograph) to tell at least 1001 interrelated stories that illuminate, in often magical ways, the central drama that unfolds here. It involves the coming together of a Palestinian and an Israeli father. Each has lost a child in the seemingly endless strife between tribal imperatives, but these extraordinary men somehow manage to find common cause for the sake of their pasts as well as their futures. Given America’s increasingly existential divides, Apeirogon also resonates deeply as we struggle to live and work together sanely today.

Both books are unfortunately titled. Neither what was “splendid” nor what was “vile” about this phase of World War II were nearly as extraordinary as the adaptability, courage, sense of humor, ambition, discipline, personality, or throbbing humanity of London’s inhabitants during the Blitz. For its part, “apeirogon” is a word that would stump even a crossword puzzler. It’s defined as a structure with too many sides to count, and therefore apt given McCann’s seemingly endless angles into his central story—but it too fails to suggest the emotional depths that he manages to reveal here. Don’t be put off by the titles of either book.

Here are a few more words about The Splendid and the Vile and Apeirogon that might convince you to dive into one or both of them.

It is personal diaries and memoirs, some of them newly available, that give The Splendid and the Vile (“The S&V”) it’s wonderfully intimate and telling point of view. For example, take this recollection from the early summer of 1940. Churchill is anticipating the fall of France from the advancing Nazi forces as well as the first bombing raids over Britain: “the softening up” that would precede the expected German invasion. Despite his worries about his nation’s ability to stand against the Nazis alone—the US is still publically proclaiming its neutrality and isolation—Churchill had no doubt whatsoever that if anyone can lead his country in its darkest hour it is him, and he revels in his self-confidence.

Some of the best passages inThe S&V interweave the worse forebodings and Churchill’s moody responses with startling periods of gaiety after a good dinner and rivers of champagne with senior advisors, family and friends at Chequers, the prime minister’s official residence. It is the place where Churchill could refortify himself today for whatever challenges will be coming his way tomorrow. It is also where his effervescence had its most emboldening effects on those who shared the weight of the war effort with him.

Churchill felt more at ease at Chequers, and understood that here he could behave as he wished, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened within would be kept a secret (possibly misplaced trust, given the memoirs and diaries that emerged after the war, like desert flowers after a first rain). This was, [Churchill] said a ‘cercle sacre.’ A sacred circle.

Sometime later Alan Brooke, who was the Commander in Chief of the Home Forces, recalled one of those nights. It was:

when Churchill, at two-fifteen a.m., suggested that everyone present retire to the great hall for sandwiches, which Brooke, exhausted, hoped was a signal that soon the night would end, and he could get to bed.
’But no!’ he wrote.
What followed was one of those moments often to occur at Chequers that would remain lodged in visitors’ minds forever after.
’He had the gramophone turned on,’ wrote Brooke, ‘and, in the many-colored dressing gown, with a sandwich in one hand and watercress in another, he trotted round and round the hall, giving occasional little skips to the tune of the gramophone.’ At intervals as he rounded the room, he would stop ‘to release some priceless quotation or thought.’ During one such pause, Churchill likened a man’s life to a walk down a passage with closed windows. ‘As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness at the end of the passage.’

On another Chequers evening, when Churchill and others had spilled outside during an air raid–he loved to watch what was happening in the night skies–a similar display of confidence and personality led another high-ranking diary keeper to exclaim: “What a tonic he is!”

The S&V is a master’s assemblage of day-to-day recollections about Churchill as well as the general mood of the country from a cast of characters that extends from the Buckingham Palace to the East End. For example, there is Churchill family intrigue, as in the chapter Larson mischievously calls “White Gloves at Dawn” about Churchill’s wife Clementine or “Clemy” (“When angry, Clementine had a habit of wearing white gloves. She was wearing them now.”) In another chapter, we learn about the practical side of “defending the homeland” from a pamphlet which described, in detail, what to do if a Panzer tank suddenly appears in your neighborhood (“Jab a crowbar into the point where the tank’s steel tread passes over a guide wheel.”) And on the startling refreshment of a child’s clear eyes when everything else seems up for grabs, there is this:

The [nightly bombing] raids generated a paradox: The odds that any one person would die on any one night were slim, but the odds that someone somewhere in London would die were 100 percent. Safety was a product of luck alone. One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered:
’Alive.’

And we think we have problems homeschooling our children.

One reviewer said that this book provides “the kind of wrenching, carefully chosen facts that not only bring a story to life but also make a reader stop, look up and say to whoever happens to be nearby, ‘Listen to this.’” And she’s right! On nearly every page, The S&V brings perspective to our tribulations today, while revealing more of a life force in its parade of characters than seems humanly possible. I’d be surprised if you didn’t feel better about just about everything after reading it.

What distinguishes Apeirogon and accounts for its emotional wallop is the way that Colum McCann tells the story.

First of all, it’s not exactly fact and not exactly fiction, but a mix of the two. Interwoven in small fragments, there is a tremendous amount of information provided about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict over the years as well as about the political and natural history of the region. At the same time, a 1001 stories from the Arabian Nights, stories about legendary heroes who happened to be Jews or Arabs, and fragments of songs passed on through generations leaven “the facts” with more metaphorical ways of understanding what has happened and continues to happen in this ancient land.

The two fathers at the convergence of fact and fiction are Bassam, who is Palestinian, and Rami, an Israeli. In their grieving over the needless deaths of their daughters, Samadar and Abir, in different terror-driven incidents, these battle hardened men cautiously strive for a measure of forgiveness and reconciliation. Their story and the stories that surround it are assembled by McCann like you would a mosaic. For example, here are story fragments that he rubs up against prior lines and paragraphs about the use of slingshots in the Middle East, the apocryphal giant-slaying David from the Old Testament, and his daughter’s random death from thrown explosives:

169
The plutonium core of the Nagasaki bomb was the size of a throwable rock.
170
And we think the myths are startling.
171
Often Rami thinks of this: but for an accident of cloud vapor—a small defect in the weave of atmospheric weather—seventy-five thousand lives were lost in one place and preserved, then, in another.
172
But for a turn toward the book store. But for an early bus. But for a random movement on Ben Yehuda Street. But for a trip to Ben Gurion airport to collect her grandmother. But for a late sleep-in. But for a break in the babysitting routine. But for the homework to do later that night. But for the crush of pedestrians on the corner of Hillel Street. But for the hobbling man that she [Abir, his daughter] had to loop around.
173
Geography is everything.

His first magic trick is McCann’s ensuring that his readers never get lost in all of these counterpoints. For example, we already know how, where and when Adir was killed and that Rami obsessively replays the circumstances that took his daughter from him and can never bring her back.

In this author’s masterful hands, one piece in the mosaic plays off another—over and over again—providing larger and smaller understandings of what is happening to Bassam, Rami and the elemental forces that are swirling around them. That accounts for the second magic trick, which is how deeply we get immersed in the overlapping storylines about checkpoints, bird migrations, hawk hunting, surveillance drones, the importance of tunnels and of access to water in Israel and on the West Bank: seemingly everything that contributes to memories and anticipations. I spent time in Jerusalem a few years ago and was regularly amazed as I read along at how vividly the layers of the place were recalled for me.

According to one of Apeirogon’s reviewers, the unusual structure of its storytelling enables readers:

to move beyond an understanding of Rami and Bassam’s grief from the outside; [indeed] we begin to share it…. By replicating the messy nonlinear passage of time, by dealing in unexpected juxtapositions that reveal latent truths, it allows us to inhabit the interiority of human beings who are not ourselves.

There is never a single truth in any story, least of all stories that are as fraught and complex as the ones told in Apeirogon. But as different truths mix and flow over one another, the certainties around each of them begins to soften and something more nuanced and hopeful begins to emerge. At least for me, the alchemy that McCann performs in Apeirogon was always fascinating and sometimes astonishing.

This post was adapted from my September 13, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

How Much of a Wake-Up Call Do We Need?

July 4, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking about our national death wish.

I’d finally gotten around to an essay about the California wildfires in 2018 and how quickly we seemed to forget about their horrors in the year that followed. It’s also because we’re now in the wake of our first mass casualties from Covid19, two terrible months after I thought we’d learned the hard way how to slow its deadly spread. Side by side, the way that many Americans exited the recent lockdowns looks uncannily similar to how many Californians fell back into the same fatal routines after its communities burned—the same reckless defiance.

I bury stories that look promising (like how disasters bring out the best or worst in us) until I can find the attention they deserve. There is always a pile of essays and news articles, along with a laptop-created document that I’ve cut and pasted together, that are waiting to be digested. Like acorns buried in the ground, these repositories are also available when I’m hungry for inspiration or more proofs that seem timely in the echoes of recent history.

Last November, a year after fires ripped through California devastating the town of Paradise (above) and many others, Mark Arax looked back at the ruination and rebuilding that followed with the reproachful eyes of an Old Testament prophet. Arax is a journalist and author of a beautifully titled book, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, that was published early in 2019, right after the firestorms were contained. Nine months later, after seeing for himself his home state’s response to the catastrophe, he wrote this essay. It’s a cri de coeur for a community he both loves and refuses to let off the hook.

Before reviewing his bill of particulars, here are some of the facts that support it.

The 2018 wild fire season was the deadliest and most destructive ever recorded in California. That year saw a total of 8,527 fires burning 1,893,913 acres. Given the magnitude of the economic and material losses, it’s a mercy that so few died: $12 billion in property insurance claims, more than 18,000 structures destroyed, and at least 85 people killed. I wrote about the Paradise fire in November of 2018 and, on several occasions since have commented about how forward-thinking Californians can be about environmental issues. So I was eager to gain Arax’s perspective as a life-long Californian on what his community did next. Much like our reckless abandon today, his account shook me by the lapels.

Arax began his survey of the recovery with a drive from north to south through the Golden State.

On the outskirts of Kern County, I crossed the Aqueduct, the 444-mile-long concrete river that moves snowmelt from mountain to farm to city and allows us to thumb our noses at nature. There I landed in an orchard that belongs to the most defiant Californian of all, Stewart Resnick. He grows more almonds, pistachios, oranges and pomegranates than any other person in the world and uses nearly as much water each year as the whole city of Los Angeles. He calls his barony—121,000 irrigated acres in the San Joaquin Valley alone—the Wonderful Company.
Three summers ago [in 2016], amid one of the worst droughts in California history, I stood in the same place and watched Mr. Resnick’s giant earth movers erase thousands of acres of nuts and fruits. Even Wonderful had gone dry, I thought. But three years is a long time ago in California. After back-to-back winters of rain, Mr. Resnick has stocked the ground with new almond and pistachio trees. Herds of agriculturalists have followed the Nut King right into the horizon.
The Gold Rush might have ended 140 years ago, but its ethos of extraction still dominates California.

Extracting instead of sustaining is some of what the state’s tree huggers—and many more of its commonsensical residents—are up against, but not all. Crossing California’s “Mason Dixon line, where the sprawl of valley farmland gives way to the urban sprawl of the Southland,” Arax views with dismay another crisis in the making because the state is a tinderbox. It is subdivision upon subdivision of new houses, that are:

marching out to the chaparral, hill and forest, straight into the path of wildfire. These are the new exurbs, kindling for the next killer blaze….
Here in the Santa Clarita Valley, I arrived just in time to see the levelers grading earth to build the first phase of Newhall Ranch. When it’s finished, it will be the largest master-planned community in California history—21,500 dwellings, seven public schools and a golf course, rising right where the 2017 Rye Fire jumped Interstate 5 and scorched the same ground.
‘We went to the county planning commission and showed them photos of people running from the fire in Pico Canyon in 2016,’ says Lynne Plambeck, a resident of Santa Clarita who’s been fighting growth in the path of wildfire for 25 years. ‘But it fell on deaf ears. It always falls on deaf ears. Until the next one.’

For more than a century, the stand-off between fire and water in California was produced by miracles of engineering that moved rain “from where it fell in the north to where the people chose to settle in the south.” The Central Valley Project in the 1940’s and State Water Project in the 1960’s “allowed California to build three world class cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego—with a farm belt in the middle that has no rival.” But now the piper is being paid, over and over again, with little or nothing being learned each time around.

[S]ince World War II, the state has [also] gone from 11 million residents to 40 million. The bulwark of dams, aqueducts, canals, ditches and levees is cracking under the demand for ever more water. That system won’t see us into a future of more nuts and houses, that’s for sure. Something will have to give. Yet no place on the map—not north, middle or south—is willing to call a truce in California’s eternal water wars.
One might have thought that the drought of 2011-17 would mark a turning point. In 2013, California received less rainfall than in any other year on record. Entire stretches of the Sierra Nevada, the state’s great watershed, were barren of snow. Real river, concrete river, the aquifer beneath our feet—each had run dry. As the farm pumps reached deeper into the earth to pull out more ancient water, the ground itself was sinking, not in inches but in feet.

They are conditions no fire can resist.

Paradise, November 2018 (photo: Mark McKenna)

Since the 2018 wildfires, the state has mostly tinkered around the edges of the next calamity, arguing about who is willing to give up their “nuts and houses” to strike a truce with nature. From the precipice, Arax found that the “ethos of extraction” still seemed undeterred by considerations of safety or sanity. Even in our most future-oriented and “progressive” state, its people can’t stop consuming or building for long enough to realize that business as usual will almost certainly be killing more of them and destroying more of their homes in the months and years ahead.

Drought and wildfire may be natural occurrences, but California seems determined to make them man-made catastrophes. Here at rock’s edge, west of the West, we live to defy our essential nature, and sometimes we die horrifically because of it.

Of course, it’s not only between fire’s insistence and water’s availability that we’ve failed to learn what the recent past has been saying to us. “Back to normal” is like an undertow that keeps pulling us in, even when its deadly consequences are still fresh in our minds. Maybe we believe that a miracle will make the outcome different the next time or that luck will forgive us our deadly habits, but magical thinking always has its consequences.

As I thought about California’s death wish, it was hard to avoid the one that America’s been fulfilling since the initial virus lockdown.

From mid-March to mid-May, many of us started wearing face masks, social distancing, and even sheltering at home to avoid infection or the risk that we’d spread the virus to others. Few of us liked it, but we changed what we were doing, adapted (at least temporarily) for the sake of our survival, and it seemed to be working.

Some of our leaders and many others of us never embraced these safeguards. As the drive to “get back to normal” intensified six weeks ago, more of us abandoned common sense along with our safety practices. The result is that after suffering 100,000 deaths during the initial two-month surge, infections and deaths are again accelerating. While a headline in yesterday’s Times read, “US Cases Soar as Leadership on Virus Fails,” it would have been more accurate to blame both poor leadership and our astonishing ability to delude ourselves that the risks producing mass casualties just 2 months ago have somehow changed.

Among 6 key nations confronting the coronavirus, this is where the United States finds itself in today.

As you can see, cases are accelerating in Brazil, the United States and India and falling in the UK, Sweden and Germany.

I saw this chart on Twitter this week with the tag, “Without words,“ like it’s an inside joke among those who track the management of nations. (And maybe it is). But it also represents our propensity as a people for hubris; another failure to find a life-saving way forward in the face of fatal threats we’d just confronted; and one more occasion for Biblical lamentation. Once again, Americans are busy turning a natural occurrence (this time, the spread of contagion) into a man-made catastrophe.

Refusing to break our repeatedly destructive patterns—it’s how Einstein defined insanity, after all—we’re taking to the streets and venting our frustrations over being cooped-up by exploding M-80’s and throwing firecrackers at one another.

A vaccine, if they find one, can’t cure us of this.

This post was adapted from my June 28, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Other Wonder of Tourists and Survivors

April 5, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Hello everyone. I’m mostly holding up and hope this finds you holding up too.

Recent weeks, but particularly this past one, have been like being in a foreign country while never entirely leaving the familiarity of home. I wonder if it’s been feeling disjointed like this to you.

When travel takes you to an entirely new place, you notice small differences that would normally escape your attention if you were still back home, things like the music that’s playing in the background, the odd rooflines you’re passing on the bus, or the kinds of shoes that people are wearing. With big things like a new language or culture telling you how far you’ve traveled, you can end up paying closer attention to the smaller differences too.

In an essay he wrote after bringing some of his American students to Ireland for the first time, Liam Heneghan noticed the power that tourists often bring to their observations.

A tourist generally has an eye for the things that, through repetitive familiarity, have become almost invisible to the resident… A tourist can [recognize] … the delicious strangeness of mundane things.

This past week, I’ve felt like a tourist in my suddenly strange country.

Of course, the larger changes and contrasts that shouted “Something new is afoot!” have been apparent for awhile now: how things have gotten quieter and slower, and how the promise of spring keeps contradicting the darker messengers on the news every day. But this kind of quiet and slow, when nearly everything but the march of nature has ground to a halt has, in its novelty, caused me to notice things that I either missed or took for granted as a local before. This week, it’s been surprisingly consoling and enabling to see my home country through a tourist’s wide eyes.

The first way that home had changed is how quiet the city has become. Tires skimming the streets, honking horns, helicopters over Route 1 and I-76, jets streaming towards the airport, sidewalk conversations, pedestrians on their phones, radio sounds—rap, R&B and talk shows mostly, delivery trucks, cars parking, home repairs, street repairs, neighbors coming and going, shouts from the high school’s baseball diamond, a track team running by, that ice cream truck beckoning 3d graders with its annoying song: these sounds that John Cage called the music of a city are no longer being offered in a continuous live stream, if they’re being offered up at all. Even the hourly bells from Penn Charter nearby have gone strangely quiet.

The sounds that survive are now framed by something like silence, as if puffs of snow had blanketed everything around them. For sure, it makes the sirens on rescue vehicles stand out even more, but it also delivers other bells, from that church in Germantown for example, the way they might have told an older city that it’s the middle of the day. Because kids are home from school, their laughing and talking excitedly gains my attention whenever it erupts. If I’m outside and close enough, I can hear the green light at the intersection of Fox and Midvale click. And like fleeing the urban glow can reveal the stars in a sky that’s suddenly gone dark, the bird songs and conversations have also leapt to the fore.

At the same time that we’re learning about essential and non-essential work, maybe the bells ringing, kids chirping, and birds singing are the essential sounds that were getting lost in the shuffle before.

The second way that my home has changed is how it’s turned in on itself.  What’s most familiar to me (my routines and “home-work”) have had to turn their backs, even more than usual, on everything that’s happening “outside.” It seems to me that you can view “sheltering in place” as either being banished from the wider world and losing what it has to offer or as finding a refuge and gaining something you didn’t have before. When the public world becomes a threatening reality, it almost invites you to see whether your private world can provide new sources of comfort: balms and salves that might always have been there but that you’d failed to notice.

I’d recently read that the best workshop (or kitchen or closet) is the one where you can see everything that you need to fix (or cook or wear). The advice was less Marie Kondo and more Yankee practicality, arguing that nothing that you need should ever be buried behind something else and effectively “unavailable.” In other words, the necessary tools and ingredients should always be visible and within easy reach so that they’re “on hand” when you’re ready for them.

Being a tourist in today’s strangeness has enabled me to see the necessities that had been buried in clutter until now and to identify the gaps in needed supplies that I still have to fill. With fresh eyes, I’ve been enabling a kind of preparedness when it comes to day-to-day living whose beauty had escaped me until now and (ironically) that also seems to have escaped many of our leaders as we face a respiratory pandemic without enough ventilators, protective equipment, test kits, hospital beds or medical staff “on hand” while being awash in almost everything that’s non-essential.

The sudden contrast between my public and private worlds has fostered another tourist-like appreciation too. The daily horror of a virus approaching from all directions along with our near helplessness to fend it off puts into bold relief the promise of spring that’s unfolding without any human assistance at all. With different eyes, daily miracles in the trees and on the ground that used to go unnoticed provide me with a deeper hope than even the acts of selfless heroes that life (although not as we’ve known it) will go on.

When the old, familiar world tries to return and the strangeness of the present one recedes, there will be blame enough for this to go around. The question, I suppose, is whether we all bear some of that responsibility and should get on to something that’s far more useful than finger pointing—starting right now.

As we shelter-in-place and social distance, there is another discrepancy between our old and new worlds that provides the ground for those insights. It is how much the familiar world that we used to know has slowed itself down.

There is nowhere to rush to in coming weeks and months; in a very real sense, many of us are already there. Aside from emergency medical and safety net workers, most of us have less paying work if we have any at all, which gives the days a molasses-like quality, concentrating and reserving some of our energy for later on, when it will be sorely needed to rebuild. Even with kids home from school and close quarters, we can still bring the curiosity of tourists to the slow task of contemplating how we’ll need to change our priorities if we’re to thrive and prosper in the next world.

There are easy fixes, like resolving to pay more for local workers (instead of factories overseas) to make essential supplies and then stockpiling these critical reserves. But there are more basic questions about what is, or should be, essential. If China, where the virus started, in fact suffers ten thousand deaths from this plague and America suffers a hundred or two hundred thousand, what does that say about our priorities and way of life and how we might change them going forward? In a democracy like ours, in all democracies, it is for us to decide on what we need most and how our free markets, awesome technologies and representative governments should manage our scarce resources to meet those needs.

Like foreign travel, a shared calamity like this one makes us curious about all manner of things we never seemed to notice when we trusted the familiarity of our old lives and work. Like travel, this virus and our responses to it have torn the blanket off, revealing facets of the ordinary we may have taken for granted while also forcing basic questions about how to move forward more effectively given the lessons we’re learning.

Because we’ve noticed the life force and inventiveness that some of our governors, nearly all of our essential workers, and many DIY by-standers have brought to this calamity, it’s only fair to ask whether we can find ways to harness their extraordinary energies to the energy we’ve been storing so we can build a society that can do a better job of sustaining us than the familiar one we’ve been seeing these last few weeks with different eyes?

Do we have, in Heneghan’s memorable phrase, enough of the tourist’s “other wonder” to imagine and then build a new world on this energetic foundation now that some of the fatal flaws of the world we’re leaving behind have been exposed?

Other-wonder may be this calamity’s greatest gift.  It would be a terrible shame to waste it whenever it arises during these suddenly quiet and slow days that—like the newly planted tree above—promise each of us so much.

Stay safe and in the game. I’ll see you next Sunday.

Now into the second month of this coronavirus, I’ve kept the weekly newsletter format here (from my April 5, 2020 newsletter) instead of adapting it for this post. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them later appear here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.