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You are here: Home / Archives for Daily Preparation

For the Birds

January 5, 2022 By David Griesing 3 Comments

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I’d be lying if I told you that the first sounds I hear when I take Wally out in the morning are bird sounds.  Instead, it’s the soft roll of tires on one of the streets that crisscross my neighborhood or urban beats booming louder than seems possible behind the windows of a passing car. But especially when it’s early enough, those sound-trails tend to fade into a quiet distance before too long, and the next things I usually hear are the local birds.
 
This time of year it can be the urgent squawking of Canadian geese, formed in a vee directly above us, after leaving the reservoir nearby and heading north by north-east in their annual migration. Or the tittering sparrows and wrens. But it can also be our talkative crows. They live in social groupings that have been called “murders” for as long as anyone can remember. While many explanations have been given, it seems that their name originated in folklore when many animal groups were described for dramatic effect by their characteristics, like an ostentation of peacocks, a parliament of owls, a knot of frogs, or a skulk of foxes. 
 
Crows are highly social, mate for life, protect one another (including unfamiliar crows that are looking for help), and vocalize by using upwards of 250 different calls. This last character trait may actually go some distance towards explaining why crows are called a “murder” when they start chattering. Informal English has always accused the lower classes of “murdering” the common tongue.

Until a huge tree fell from an old neighbor’s yard and onto the new one’s next door, the resident murder would roost in its canopy and converse for hours. Wally would bark back at them when he was out and I’d also say “hello” if I thought of it. I’ve come to appreciate that our crows know exactly who we are and that we’re in some kind of conversation with them too.
 
Since they’ve been particularly noisy this week, their chatter made me take a second look at a book I read and reviewed here this time last year: Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, a word that means an object or, in this instance a story. with an infinite number of sides. McCann’s book is about the endless conversations, memories and illuminations that characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, how those relevancies and asides add dimension to a dialogue between two real-life fathers (one Israeli, one Palestinian) who has each lost a daughter to the murderous violence and struggles to transcend his loss. In the jumble of images, fables and impressions that he assembles, McCann continuously returns to the birds who also live in this elemental place, or pass through it on their annual migrations. “Our” crows made me want to re-revisit their stories-within-stories.

For example, this is the third of “the thousand-and-one” (or endless) digressions and reflections that make up Apeirogon:

Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year. They move by ancient ancestry:  hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swifts, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bushchats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns. 

It is the world’s second busiest migratory superhighway: at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels of sky. Long vees of honking intent. Sole travelers skimming low over the grass.

Every year a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, by-pass roads.

Some of the birds migrate at night to avoid predators, flying in their sidereal patterns, elliptic with speed, devouring their own muscles and intestines in flight. Others travel during the day to take advantage of the thermals rising from below, the warm wind lifting their wings so they can coast.

At times whole flocks block out the sun and daub shadows across Beit Jala: the fields, the steep terraces, the olive groves on the outskirts of town.

Lie down in the vineyard in the Cremian monastery at any time of day and you can see the birds overhead, traveling in their talkative lanes.

They land on trees, telegraph poles, electricity cables, water towers, even the rim of the Wall, where they are a sometime target for the young stone throwers. 

You see, the birds also get caught up in the violence that inflicts this corner of the Levant, one of the birthplaces of the human world. But at the same time, they give wing to the aspirations that can also emerge from the grief of many of those who live there today.

Two bird masks that I bought, several years ago, from a couple of backpackers who had set up shop in an Upper-West Side parking lot, just back from Latin America and financing their return to life in NYC. 

It’a probably not “five hundred million birds” in Apeirogon‘s migrating sky anymore. While the enormous bio-diversity loss is not what preoccupies me most about birds this morning (it’s more their soaring possibility), the decline in their numbers is still alarming. 
 
For example, in 1970 there were nearly 3 billion more birds in North America than there are today, a decline of nearly a third. It’s impossible to wrap one’s head around a number like that, easier to simply notice how many fewer birds you’re hearing or seeing wherever you are today.  They’re another of our dwindling resources.
 
Confronted by murder on this scale, I always want to go beyond noticing and “do” something about it. But as I learned (and reported here) after listening to a couple of wildlife experts, the next time I come upon, say, a baby bird who’s out of its nest, it’s better, almost every single time, to assume that it’s fine, that mom knows exactly where it is, and that it will be happier and far less afraid without my “help.” Usually, the better lesson is to simply notice, or to double-down on what I’m already noticing about the world I’m trying to inhabit:  like how much it’s worth to me knowing that the birds I’m encountering already know about good parenting and that maybe what I need to do most “in order to save them” is to understand them better and appreciate them enough.
 
Which is why I wanted to share with you a groundbreaking tool that, for the first time, enables us to identify the birds that are still around us by their songs and other forms of vocalizing. A  bird-song identifier that’s as accurate as this one has never been generally available before.
 
Over the summer, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology released its Merlin Bird ID app, which enables its users to identify some 400 North American birds (and counting) by the sounds that they make. According to one armchair reviewer, the app doesn’t claim to be 100% accurate, but “it comes very close.”  It’s developers relied on a crowd-sourcing initiative that continues to draw upon a database of notes and recordings contributed by tens of thousands of citizen scientists through the Lab’s eBird Initiative. In what Fast Company called “a Shazam for bird songs,” the Merlin app turns a Babel of voices into one-on-one concerts that tell you exactly who’s playing a particular instrument.
 
I couldn’t agree more with that armchair reviewer when she wrote: “Love can’t save the environment, but when enough voters fall in love [with pieces of it like this], they can surely shift the political winds….” 
 
We can’t fall in love with what we’re unaware of, or know almost nothing about.

When I was 3 or 4, I took this book with me on the first vacation I can remember, beginning with our drive from Connecticut to Florida. Along the way, I tried to match the birds I was seeing outside our car with the pictures in the book, but I still remember how hard it was to never know (except for the robins and the crows) whether I had gotten it right.

While falling in love with birds again or for the first time are two of “the why’s” behind the Merlin app, here are some other things that are worth knowing about it.
 
You can find out more about the app, including where to download it for use with your smart phone, here.
 
You’ll need to be outside when using it. After opening the app, once you hear a bird talking or singing, choose “Sound ID” in the menu and hit the microphone button. You will immediately begin to see a “spectrogram” of sound waves scrolling across your phone screen, effectively “taking a picture” of its vocalizing. By using its algorithms to compare that picture with others in its database, the app will provide you with the bird’s identity. Clicking “This is my bird” after recording the date and their geographical location will save the sighting and share its specifics with the underlying database to improve the app’s future performance—effectively turning all app users into data gatherers and collaborators.
 
Using another feature in the app called the Bird ID Wizard comes at bird identification more incrementally. It asks you three questions about the bird you’re hearing (and hopefully seeing) before narrowing the likely possibilities: what size is it, what are its principal colors, and where did you see it (e.g. at a birdfeeder, on the ground, soaring or flying?). The app then provides you with a list of possible matches, which you can narrow further by using Sound ID or by taking and uploading a picture of the bird you’re seeing. The Wizard feature expands on the specifics you notice along the way to your identification and introduces you to other birds making similar sounds, adding more layers to your appreciation and to the thousand-and-one stories that you’re telling yourself about the birds around you.  

Finally, if all of this listening and looking has peaked your interest even further, there is ebird, an inter-related app that feeds and utilizes the same database of bird sounds. With ebird, it’s possible to share your most unexpected sightings with an extensive community of birdwatchers as well as to track the sightings that others have had of particular birds you’ve become interested in. 
 
This last adjunct to bird song ID reminds me that as winter approaches, neighbors of mine will be conducting their annual bird census. They ask people with birdfeeders like me whether they can observe what’s happening in my yard and whether I’ve been seeing any unusual visitors this year. These are the folks who came long before the Merlin app but are likely a part of its data gathering now. They’re invested in noticing as much as they can about the birds around here during a barren time when leaving seeds for them brings them closer, makes them more visible, and encourages them to keep us company. 
 
Particularly as the days get shorter and colder and the overall muck of daily life starts to pull you down. it may be as good a time as any to let the wing’d updrafts and cacophony of bird sounds help to lift you up too.

This post was adapted from my October 24, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation Tagged With: biodiversity, biome, bird population decline, bird song, bird sounds, birds, Merlin bird app, nature

The Giving Part of Taking Other People’s Pictures

June 14, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s harder than ever to maintain, and then safeguard, our zones of privacy.
 
I’ve been thinking about it in terms of pictures that other people take of us or that we take of them—sometimes when those other people are friends, sometimes when they’re strangers, and sometimes when its companies or authorities who are taking them for their own purposes.
 
In these photographs, what is the line between a fair exchange (with mutual benefits) and an unwelcomed intrusion?
 
What exactly are we “taking” when we take a picture of somebody?
 
(When shown their photographs, tribal people often complain that the camera has somehow stolen their souls.)
 
Is there, or should there be, a “give” as well as a “take” with photography?
 
Two encounters this week sharpened that last question for me.
 
A close colleague of mine in counseling work stopped by unannounced with some cookies to end our just concluded school year on a celebratory note. We’d been meeting with our kids on Zoom and hadn’t seen one another in person for months. She was so glad to see me that she wanted to take my picture before leaving, but I waved her gesture off. I’d stopped mowing the lawn when I saw her heading my way and felt that my sweaty appearance would have made a poor souvenir (even though she clearly felt otherwise). “What just happened?” I wondered afterwards.
 
My second encounter came by way of reminiscence.
 
Three years ago this week, I had been in New Orleans and was remembering that unbelievably rich and flavorful time, eager to go back and dig in even deeper. Part of my return trip would be taking in a “second line” street parade, because every week of the year at least one of them takes place somewhere in the City.

A “second line” street parade photo by Aeisha Palmer, May 20, 2007

As you can imagine, these parades (which are sponsored by New Orlean’s “social aid and pleasure clubs”) are a kind of paradise for professional and amateur photographers.  While following a random NOLA thread last week, I came across a story about “the etiquette of making photos” of the performers at these parades. This story also speculated about the “taking and giving” boundaries of photographing other people. For example:
 
Are there different rules for friends than there are for strangers?
 
Several years ago, Susan Sontag explored these boundaries and expectations in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books, later published in her own book, On Photography. Sontag focused on the “acquisitive” nature of cameras, how they “take something” from whoever or whatever is being photographed, a sentiment that’s similar to those tribal member fears about having their essences stolen. She wrote:

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Sontag also commented on the vicarious nature of picture taking. 

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, [or at least] for giving the appearance of participation.

The way she saw it, we may not be marching in (or even watching) the parade, “but somehow we feel that we are” if we can capture a picture of it for savoring now and later on. Instead of “being in the moment,” we’re counting on the triggering nature of these pictures to approximate the real experience we’ve missed by “capturing enough of it” to still feel satisfied. 
 
Of course, there are consequences on both sides to this kind of “taking.” A drive to accumulate photographic experiences can not only rob us of more direct engagement with other people and places (say, the actual smells and sounds of the parade, or the conversations we might otherwise be having with spectators and participants), it also raises questions about the boundaries that can be crossed when we’re driven by a kind of hunger to “take” more and more of them without ever realizing the impacts that we’re having by doing so. To our camera’s subjects, it can feel like violation.
 
As I’ve become more thoughtful about these impacts, it’s meant thinking through my picture-taking drive in advance.
 
What is gained and what can be lost when I’m taking somebody’s picture? What is (or should be) the etiquette around photographing others? These are questions that seem impossible to ignore since cameras are literally everywhere today, devouring what they see through their lenses.  As a result, going through some Q&A with myself by way of preparation—whether I’m likely to be the photographer or the photographed—increasingly seems like a good idea. 
 
For instance, what if strangers “who would make me a great picture” are performing in public or, even more commonly, just being themselves in a public place when I happen upon them with my camera? 
 
My most indelible experience of the latter happened at the Damascus Gate, which leads to the “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City. In arcs along the honey-colored steps that sweep down to that massive archway, Palestinian women, many in traditional clothes, were gathering and talking in a highly animated fashion against the backdrop of ancient battlements, but as soon as I pointed my camera in their direction to take “my perfect shot,” they raised their hands, almost as one, and shielded their faces from me. Was that ever sobering! I didn’t know whether they were protecting their souls or simply their modesty and privacy from another invasive tourist.
 
In the story about picture taking at parades in New Orleans, one photographer who is drawn by their similarly incredible visuals observed:

You really have to be present and aware and know when the right time is to take a photo. Photography can be an extractive thing, exploitative, especially now when so many people have cameras. 

To her, knowing when to shoot and when to refrain from picture taking is about reading the situation, 

a vibe. You know when somebody wants you to take their photo, and you know when somebody doesn’t.

Another regular parade photographer elaborated on her comments:

If you carry yourself the right way . . . people putting on that parade see you know how to handle yourself and will give you a beautiful shot.

I’ve also found that performers want you to portray them in the best light and will help you “to light the scene” when you make eye contact and invite them to do so. On the other hand, they will also tell you (if you’re paying attention) when the lighting is off and you should just back off.

Here’s one where I got it right, at least about “working the scene together.” 

Because everybody wants to look their best while being photographed, the same rules usually apply when the subjects aren’t part of a performance but simply out in public, being interesting by being themselves. For the would-be photographer, it’s about initiating a conversation and establishing at least a brief connection before asking: can I take your picture? If they don’t feel “looked down upon” by your interest, they’ll often agree. But as with those “on stage,” these preliminaries can also result in: “No, I’d rather that you didn’t right now,” a phrase that’s hard to hear when “a great picture” is right there in front of you if only you could “take it.”
 
Whenever you know in advance that taking pictures could be uncomfortable for those being photographed, one New Orleans parade regular talked about the need to deepen his relationship with those he wants to photograph before showing up with his camera. Because he takes pictures at NOLA’s legendary funeral parades, he brings club members photos that he’s taken of the deceased on prior occasions so that colleagues and family “have a record of that person’s street style.” It’s his sign of respect at what is, after all, a time for grieving a loss as well as celebrating a life.

We go and we shoot funerals and [then] it’s not a voyeuristic thing. You’re doing what you do within the context of the community

—a community that you’ve already made yourself at least “an honorary member of” through your empathy and generosity. 
 
Then, what you’re giving tends to balance what you’ll be taking.

Here’s a gentleman I’d just purchased something from at the annual flea market.

So what about my cookie-bearing friend who showed up unannounced this week? 
 
Should I have relaxed “my best foot forward” enough to permit one sweaty shot when she so clearly wanted a memento of our reunion after so many months apart?  
 
Yes, probably. 
 
But I’ve become so defensive about cameras taking my picture on every city street, whenever I ring somebody’s doorbell or face my laptop screen that sometimes it’s hard to recognize when “putting down my guard” is actually relationship building and for my own good instead of some kind of robbery.
 
Where zones of personal privacy are concerned, this is a tricky time to navigate either taking pictures of somebody or being captured by one.
 
It’s one more reason to try and rehearse my camera-related transactions before I find myself, once again, in the middle of one. 
 

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(If you’re interested in a photo essay I posted after my last visit to New Orleans, here it is, from May, 2018. Another post, with photos taken at the Mummers Parade in January, 2019, can be found here. Taking pictures has always been a way that I recharge for work, although I’m still in the process of learning its complicated rules.)

This post was adapted from my May 30, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Being Proud of Your Work, Building Your Values into Your Work, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Introducing Yourself & Your Work Tagged With: collaboration, etiquette, giving and taking, New Orleans, photography, privacy, reciprocity, rules of the road, Second Line Parades, Susan Sontag

The Spark of Getting Out of Your Head & Into Somebody Else’s

April 18, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There are many voices urging us to bridge the divides in our society, but not nearly as many explaining why it would be good for us too if we learned how to bridge them.

Luckily, recent research in neuroscience has been proving that Perspective Taking—or making the conscious effort to stand in the shoes of people who are different from us—activates regions in our brains that make us more innovative and creative overall. In other words, Perspective Taking is not just a one way street.  It also produces reciprocal benefits for whoever’s making the effort.

I’ve talked here several times about how toxic it is to “civic friendship” when we no longer bother to understand where “those other people” are coming from or what we still might have in common with them. Democracy relies on civility and common purpose in spite of our occasional differences, and yet we rarely hesitate before writing off fellow citizens who disagree with us about immigration or climate change or voting. Without even thinking, we ask ourselves: How can they be so wrong when we’re so right?

After the last presidential election, I waded into these turgid waters with two posts. They argued in favor of so-called Blue State Americans shutting down their knee-jerk reactions, shovling their class prejudices about “rednecks” and similar demonizations to the side, and being curious enough about where Red State Americans are actually coming from to make an effort to understand them. Not to agree with, but simply to consider the different priorities that are motivating them. These posts were “Stop the Steal” Throws a Match on a Dry Forrest and Healing a Divided Country Requires Understanding Others.

Now, research is telling us about the rewards that are available when you make the effort to see your life or work from somebody else’s point of view. Whenever you encourage yourself to  “stand in someone else’s shoes” out of curiosity or an acknowledgement of your biases, brain science is proving that your fields of imagination will expand, making you more creative and innovative in all of the interactions that follow.

Part of it is going deeper than appearances and ferreting out information that challenges your preconceptions. For example, Niccolo Machievelli (who’s often described as a “classical realist”) wanted to discover everything he could about his opponents before he was facing off against them. 500 years ago, he wrote:

“Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.”

A deeper understanding of others applies to more than political adversaries, of course. It can be your customers and clients, the co-worker who’s always challenging you at meetings, the regulator who suddenly shows up in the workplace, the protestor who’s in your office parking lot. The more you know about where “these other people” are coming from, the more effective you can be when interacting with them. (What “hot buttons’’ of mine are they pushing and how do I turn them off? What are our shared objectives, where is our common ground?) By asking and answering such questions, you can gain a broader perspective along with the new options that it affords.

When I was still practicing law, Fran and I co-wrote an article about perspective taking, although we didn’t call it that back then. We titled the piece: “Why Didn’t My Attorney Call Me Back (and How Do Clients Feel About That)?”  

Sure, lawyers are busy—shuttling from one crisis to another—but being unresponsive to your other paying customers says loudly and clearly, “my time is more important than your time,” and it’s one of the legal profession’s most persistent complaints. On the other hand, understanding client irritation to the point of changing the way you practice makes your work more valued by others, more profitable to you, and ultimately more satisfying too because perspective taking literally “hacks” your job. Once you understand a need that you failed to appreciate before, it forces you to become more innovative and creative in meeting it, leavening other aspects of your work at the same time. 

In other words, your discovery that others see your priorities differently leads you—through a more creative application of your problem solving skills—to a broader perspective on your work than you had to begin with. In a burst of discovery, you’ve realized that you’re not the only one who is right all the time.

Today, brain science is providing us with a view of the neurological processes behind Perspective Taking. While there are technical descriptions of the brain’s functional areas in the following quotation, the gist of it should still be pretty clear. 

When we are trying to solve a problem, the frontoparietal attention network activates, meaning that areas at the front and the side of your brain are at work. However, when we take the perspective of another person, we engage a different network, often called the “mentalizing,” or theory-of-mind, network. This has two key components: the temporoparietal junction, located just above and behind the ear, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind the middle of your forehead. These areas help us understand what others know, want, need or find important.

Importantly, the “mentalizing” network partially overlaps with the so-called default mode network. This term was initially chosen because researchers at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that this network became active when people took a break from active problem-solving. After years of research, we now know that this network is activated during exploration, imagination, innovation, thinking outside the box, and engaging in mental time travel by thinking back to the past or imagining possible futures. For those reasons, we often call it the “exploration” network. Thus, perspective taking engages both the mentalizing and exploration networks, perhaps because getting inside someone else’s head requires getting outside our own.

To summarize: the Attention network (or rational problem solving) plus the Mentalizing network (trying to understand others) in our brains also activates our Exploration network (thinking outside the box). Obviously, this is a richer and potentially more fruitful mix of brain power than relying upon the problem-solving function alone.

The description of brain coordination above was provided in an article called “Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions.” It was one of several offerings this week in the KnowledgeWharton newsletter from Penn’s Wharton School of Business. Intriguingly, the authors’ lab at Penn was “investigat[ing] what happens when we turn the [Exploration or thinking outside the box] network up or down” by improving perspective taking. Does it make people in the workforce more innovative and creative overall?

Their answer was a pretty emphatic “Yes.” .

What the Penn researchers concluded was that “practice makes perfect” when their study participants combined both perspective taking with problem solving and started appreciating the work-related benefits that follow. As neuroscientists, they might also describe their findings this way: our neural pathways become more fluid when we traverse them more frequently because of the advantages that we feel we are gaining by doing so. 

In the course of their research, these neuroscientists also developed several exercises that improved the brain’s fluidity and the creativity and innovation that it unlocked. 

They asked study participants to reflect on recent perspective taking and share the experience with colleagues. In a second study, they asked them to visualize future applications of perspective taking, paying attention to the details and writing them down beforehand. Other “muscle building” exercises for the brain included having more conversations with total strangers, trying out new things (like learning a new language or playing a new instrument), and reading novels that transport you into the minds of different characters. 

By encouraging exercises like these, the researchers were taking advantage of the fact that: 

the human brain is nature’s greatest statistical pattern learning device. This means that the more you exercise perspective taking (whether remembered, imagined or real), the more it will be reinforced. Over time, perspective taking is likely to become more automatic.

In sum, as you start to experience the value of this way of mental processing—by inviting the perspectives of others into your problem solving—you’re likely to keep repeating it. 
 
Wishing to share their Eureka Moment more widely, the Penn researchers also developed something that they call The Nano Tool so that the rest of us can become more creative and innovative at work and outside of it. Despite the fact that its name conjures (for me, at least) a headset with beeping electrodes and matted hair, it’s actually more of “a hand-out” with additional exercises that can be used to activate more “problem-solving through perspective taking.” It’s well-worth checking out.
 
Finally, while perspective taking provides the kind of problem-solving boost that business school types are always eager to promote, I can easily envision some of its most transformative applications in our collective considerations of politics, race, class, religion and other social dividers. We might quickly discover that we’ll be benefiting ourselves at the same time that we’re strengthening our social bonds.

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Post-script:

Along with you I suspect, I’m finding the transition period between a hard year and what I’m hoping will be an easier one a bit of a challenge. As my mother used to say, I’m feeling “betwixt and between” or “at 6’s and 7’s.” Anyway, I saw the picture below after the devastating floods in Australia recently, and thought it seemed an apt metaphor for today, but I’m not sure why. (Maybe I’ve just taken on Wally’s perspective.) If you have any ideas about why this picture of dogs in crates being rescued seems right for these times, feel free to send them along.

This post was adapted from my March 28, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: perspective, perspective taking, seeing the same thing differently

How Toxic Is Masculinity for Men?

March 28, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Social isolation has reduced the space between us and where we fall short, providing some particularly uncomfortable close-ups. That includes the part of masculinity that’s depressing and harmful to men before it’s toxic to anybody else.

Elderbrook is the stage name of the English musician, songwriter, producer and singer behind a remarkable 4-minute music video that has, over the past year, invited millions of us to consider the emotional isolation of men who show up for a group therapy session because they know they have a problem (but not what to do about it) until somebody in the group finds the courage to break their isolation. 

Elderbrook wrote the mesmerizing music and vocalizes the lyrics, which are about the absence of companionship when something bad is happening to you, that is, when someone who’s not there when you need them might have helped “in keeping me sober.”  For the flow and rhythm of the interactions between the ensemble of characters, Elderbrook’s voice is accompanied by an electronic music collective called Rudimental, which is a big deal in Britain but mostly under the radar here. 

The gifted director who visualized the narrative is Luke Davies, the choreography (that fits this assortment of clueless blokes to a tee) is by Jacob Holme, and the lead actor is Michael Socha, who is pictured above and plays his part throughout with a non-comprehending beauty. All of these elements come together in a mix of throb, gut-punch and whimsy that speak with terrific economy to how utterly alone men can be and what needs to happen before we do something about it.

I found it jaw-dropping.

+ + + 

Here’s how the video opens:

You’re about to enter some kind of group dynamic where you’re expected to contribute—a meeting, a book group, a seminar room with limited students—and a big part of you “would just rather not today.” 

They’ll want me to open up, show who I am, know what I’m talking about, have something to say, share.

Call it performance anxiety, because all things considered, on most days I’d rather not.

And because it’s a group therapy room for just men, it’s even harder.

You come to deal with whatever’s been going on with drugs, alcohol, depression or just being messed-up, and it can get pretty personal. 

I don’t want to look at the stain in my drawers let alone his drawers!

Maybe they’ll want me to make some gesture at taking care of one of my fellow losers. Or maybe, one of them will want to start doing that [shi~ver] to me.

They always said, “you’re not good with emotions,” that you keep what’s hurting you at bay or push it down.

Yeah, it is pretty thin ice. I might fall through and keep falling, so I hold on to the brittle however angry or irritable I get when it’s tested, or beat myself up with only a beer for sympathy, so I suppose they’re right. 

What good is anybody in here for that?

And besides, they’ll be holding a pretty sad safety net. 

So the first thing I’ve got to do is get it up to walk in the room with the rest of ’em instead of bolting for the stairs. 

Today, it’s a long hesitation but I decide to step in anyway, and suddenly I find myself in a silence of furtive eyes, waiting for the so-called therapy to start and the first shoes to drop.

The boss starts canvassing for volunteers. “Who wants to go first? Do you Kevin? Michael?”

Then I hear some background music and, against all odds, it’s my feet that want to start talking.

I stand up like the prototype man, like Popeye—making arm muscles with both hands next to my shoulders to show how strong I either am or not, while shuffling a bit tentatively.

And then I’m off.

+ + +

Here’s your link to the “Something About You” music video. Watch it now if you can. Then think about it for a minute or two and maybe watch it again. 

I can’t get over it, and maybe you’ll feel the same—particularly that part when two men make cautious eye contact and start to approach one another, and maybe you’re feeling some of the anxiety our culture has taught us that something “forbidden” or at least “not quite right” is about to happen. 

Call it Taboo. Call it an acknowledgement of vulnerability. Call it one of many insights in a startling stream of them.

After he wrote and recorded “Something About You,” Elderbrook sent it out to film directors to get bids on content for the video. The request mentioned the summery nature of the track, but Luke Davies (who went on to win the bid) also heard a melancholy sadness, and “after listening to the song for an hour and a half” came up with the inspiration for a men’s self-help group (as he recounted in an interview after the music video went viral).  Never really imagining that Elberbrook and his team would go for any of it, Davies had always wanted to make a short film that included line dancing “as a kind of metaphor for something else,” so he built dancing into his bid as well. And then there was this final association: 

I always think of cowboys and for me, cowboys are an archetypal symbol for men. I think of Clint Eastwood and all these Hollywood archetypal superheroes before there were superheroes.

True creativity is always a leap into the dark, and Elderbrook ended up loving where Davies wanted to take his song. 
 
Interestingly, after the performers were hired and the “cowboy” rehearsals had begun, Davies dropped on the actors that there would not only be line dancing but also “slow dancing,” and, for all the obvious reasons, he was worried about their reactions. This is how he describes what happened next, and (given the theme) the reality in that room was pretty magical in its own right. 

The whole day, without a doubt, was one of the most satisfying and enjoyable shoots of my life. I gotta admit, all the dancing was so much fun to do, especially the slow dancing on rehearsal day, because the actors had no idea it was going to be a part of the music video.

They knew there was going to be line dancing but I hadn’t told them they were going to be slow dancing. And these guys had only met each other a couple hours ago. I was like ‘right, ok so everyone stand in the middle of the room, here are your partners, now I just want you to sort of hug each other’. They hugged each other for about a minute. And once we had done that and got the awkwardness out of the way, we just started slow dancing for a bit.

And what was weird is that I thought that people might be funky or not take it seriously and be embarrassed but straight away, people were just so emotional leaning into each other and it was quite romantic and funny seeing a bunch of blokes slow dancing.

You can see how well it turned out, but in some ways the story behind this little film was just beginning. The choreographers posted a how-to-do-the-line-dance instructional video on You Tube shortly after  “Someone Like You” began to attract attention, and it beautifully reinforced the overall simplicity of the message: This isn’t so hard to do. And then, all of a sudden, there were young men dancing to it in a “Together is Stronger” challenge on TikTok. 
 
Because men who let their guards down together really do become stronger.

Negative emotions eat away at you when they don’t get out, and men often have a harder time than women getting them out. No one denies it. It’s society’s, your parent’s, your own advice to “just suck it up,” to put your negative feelings behind you or bury them deep inside instead of working (even dancing) your way through them.  
 
For example, depression is a self-aggression of trapped emotions that tends to reinforce its isolation at every turn—with booze, drugs and even deeper withdrawals. Ultimately, the answer is putting the pain into words. (If you’re interested in the deep scholarship behind this, I’d recommend Dr. Judith Herman’s landmark Trauma and Recovery.) Unfortunately, there haven’t been many translators–between the medical community and the rest of us–who have talked about men’s particularly constricted side of it, at least in vivid voices that make both the problem and its possible solutions come alive.
 
Davies, the director, was aware of all that because he saw the problem in men from his own family and suspected that it had to exist everywhere.

There is basically a group of people that needs our help and support [but isn’t getting it]. The bigger idea that we’re exploring is masculinity and within that, the unrealistic standards I think society sets for men. You only need to look at mental illness, depression and suicide numbers among young men to see how much of an issue it is and I think part of that has to do with the fact that men find it difficult on the whole to talk feelings. 

Some people have seen [the video] as like an attack on toxic masculinity, which for me it’s never been about. I know toxic masculinity exists and I do think it needs to be discouraged but at the same time, I think people who are most guilty of it are also kind of the victims of this idea of not being able to talk about emotions and being vulnerable.

In other words, men can be as toxic to themselves as they can be to others, and maybe that’s the root of the problem.

Elderbrook and Davies have told at least part of this story about men and their feelings brilliantly, economically and interactively. They’ve shone a light.  And who would have thought that they’d do so by inviting us to slow dance.

This post was adapted from my March 21, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Heroes & Other Role Models, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: dance therapy, depression, Elderbrook, how toxic is masculinity for men, Jacob Holme, Luke Davies, masculinity, men processing emotions, men processing feelings, men's therapy, Michael Socha, Rudimental, Something About You, Something About You music video, trauma and recovery

Embodied Knowledge That’s Grounded in the Places Where We Live & Work

February 22, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

“Embodied knowledge” is a kind of understanding where the body knows what is happening, and sometimes even how to react to it, without really thinking about it. There is no need to verbalize or connect a string of thoughts. You just know or “feel it in your bones.” It happens via the neurotransmitters in our brains, as depicted in the striking image above by Arran Lewis. 

Here are some examples of embodied knowledge:

– I’ve already learned how to distribute my weight on the seat of a bike, put my feet on the pedals, lean forward, so I no longer have to think about how to do it, I just know how get on my bike and ride. 

– I know that when I get a certain kind of headache, a high-pressure weather front is moving in and I need a pain reliever. My head is like a barometer “automatically” telling me what to do.

– A farmer nearby might know from the way his chickens are acting or his kids are behaving that the run-off from a nearby plant has been getting into their water, whatever the township or elected officials are saying about it.

It’s the kind of knowledge that internalizes complicated experiences without the need for an elaborate thought process.

This last example of embodied knowledge—where a deep understanding of the land and the people and fauna that live there differ from what the authorities are telling you about it—has been Kate Brown’s preoccupation for much of the past twenty years.

Brown is a professor at MIT, interested in “where history, science, technology and bio-politics converge to create large-scale disasters and modernist wastelands.” She is a storyteller who has put herself into her stories so she can interview and experience the lives of people with “embodied knowledge” in places like Chernobyl and the Nevada dessert after terrible nuclear accidents. From their first person accounts and her reactions to them, she identifies discrepancies from the expert “investigations,” challenges the official narrative once politicians get involved, and shows how the embodied knowledge of those affected by disasters resonates beyond the borders that we usually place around them. 

This week, I heard Brown speak about her work as part of a interview series sponsored by Duke University. That continuing series explores ethical responses to The Anthropocene, or the time in Earth’s evolution where human forces have matched (or overtaken) natural forces in determining the fate of the planet. The Series question to Kate Brown and others has been: What can we, what should we be doing about it?

Brown’s most straightforward answer would be: listen to the people with embodied knowledge. The people who are “closest to the ground of disaster” can tell us much that we need to know about how to deepen our own sense of place in order to survive in a world that has already entered a kind of death spiral. Their world of disaster is increasingly our world too. The ways that embodied knowledge have been gained in Earth’s disaster zones can become a kind of template in our own quests to survive in environments that have been degrading more rapidly than most of us would like to admit. 

Kate Brown’s books have won a cascade of awards for history writing and non-fiction. They include: A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004); Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013); Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015); and her acclaimed Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019). 

I found three things about Kate Brown’s life and research to be particularly noteworthy. First, why has she focused her work on the embodied knowledge of people in disaster zones? (My real question: how do people find their work priorities?) Secondly, as I’ve been thinking about deepening my own “sense of place,” I was fascinated by the role that specific environments and peoples’ deep-seated knowledge of their places play in Brown’s history-writing and storytelling. And lastly, because Brown has traveled to and reported from Earth’s calamitous edges—she calls herself “a professional disaster tourist”—I wondered some more about the message that she’s been carrying back for the rest of us.

What can or should we be doing in order to survive?

Kate Brown

Why any of us gravitates towards the work we end up doing may itself be explained by a kind of “embodied knowledge.” 

For Kate Brown, I wondered what it was in her experience that made her seek out people who were burdened by the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl or the plutonium incidents in Nevada where (according to her) the fallout of “radioactive iodine from atmospheric detonations of nuclear bombs dwarfed Chernobyl emissions three times over”? Clearly, it was not the origin story of someone who would automatically believe that Soviet propaganda is more misleading than the American variety.
 
Brown’s formative years were spent in a small Midwestern town that was gutted after its economy collapsed. She literally grew up among its ruins. As Brown recounts:

The year I was born, 1965, the Elgin watch factory [in Elgin, Illinois] shuttered, and they blew up the watch tower. It was a company town, and that was the main business. I grew up watching the supporting businesses close, and then regular clothing stores and grocery stores went bankrupt. 

It was nothing near what I describe in wartime Ukraine, or Chernobyl, or one of [the] plutonium plants, but I finally realized I was so interested in modernist wastelands because of my own background.

Before she was born, Brown’s mother had already moved four times because of “deindustrialized landscapes,” and her parents “moved to Elgin thinking it was healthy, small-town America. So how many times do they have to jump?…What if you care about your family and [your] community” and didn’t want to abandon them? So she gravitated towards groups of people who stuck it out in the much the same way that her family did.

The drive behind Brown’s work made me think about naturalist and writer Barry Lopez, who has also chronicled our impending environmental disaster. Only in 2013, towards the end of his long career, was he able to describe how he’d been repeatedly victimized as a child in a Harpers magazine article. He told us that the “sliver of sky” in its title was what he was reaching for in his own work from “the edges of our throttled Earth,” an unwaivering attempt “to find a way to turn the darkness [he’d experienced himself] inside out.” 

In her stories about other places that have been grievously injured, I was also reminded of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. Not only do the Americans who live there deserve our understanding during this politically divisive time, but Hochschild’s approach as a sociologist to those who live in the most damaged parts of Louisiana, is startlingly similar to Lopez’s as a naturalist and Brown’s as an historian. Each of them put themselves in the stories they are telling, frankly acknowledging their personal perspectives as interviewers and interpreters, while (in the process) giving their audiences narratives that are intimate and involving precisely because of the personal roles they have chosen to play in them.

Brown, Lopez and Hochschild have been continuing to write their own stories as they invite the rest of us into them.

At Chernobyl

Many of you know that I’ve been thinking a great deal about “sense of place” recently. (Last week, I gave my reactions to the movie “The Dig” and its meditations on what any of us might want to preserve in the face of disaster, like these Englishmen and women were doing before the bombing of Britain in World War II. In mid-December, I ruminated about how the places where we live and work become more meaningful as we learn how to capture and retain their most vivid memories.)
 
Something about “sense of place” for Brown can be understood from the images in her book titles: No Place, Borderland, Dystopia. The places she’s explored have been the toxic waste dumps of industrial civilization. The area around Chernobyl is called Polesia, swamplands populated by a mix of Poles, Germans, Jews and Ukrainians that was either forgotten or dismissed by the urban centers of Kiev and Moscow, with few outsiders expressing any interest in what its people had to say for themselves. Brown did listen, recognizing their “embodied knowledge” when they described what was happening to them, introduced her to their “radiant children” (or those who’d been stunted by radiation), and told her how they continued to survive in a contaminated landscape that the “outside world” wanted everyone to believe had fully recovered. 
 
In one poignantly conflicted moment, Brown describes the tremendous generosity of a local family as they offered to share their homegrown feast with her and her reluctance to eat it and appear ungracious because she knew how contaminated by radiation the region’s entire food chain had become. With images like this, Brown argues that “what it means to be human” in places like this is different than anything we have ever seen before, and that as the climate and Earth begin to change in equally profound ways, what it means for the rest of us to be human is already changing too. 
 
(For example, while Brown doesn’t recount them, think about how many weeks earlier the Spring will be coming this year than it did only a few years ago. Think about how much less snow there is on the ground or ice on the ponds in Northern states than we remember as kids during this time of year. Think about birds and animals you no longer see in your backyards. Think about how many more 100+ degree days there will be in Arizona this summer than there were only 10 or 15 years ago, or how many more deadly wildfires in California.) 
 
How we experience the degrading nature of the “places” where we live and work profoundly affects us in ways that have much in common with the residents of Brown’s Polesia. But unlike many of us, Brown’s Polesians had gained an embodied kind of knowledge about what they’ve been experiencing. They’ve had to in order to survive. Farm animals became their Geiger counters (as in, “the cows have been acting funny”). Brown is astonished by how women at a local textile plant have learned how to attribute various aches and pains that they experience to particular isotopes lodged in specific organs of their bodies. 
 
We will be gaining that kind of experienced knowledge too—knowledge that’s tied to the ground of our particular “places” as global warming affects them. We’ll need to deepen our sense of place in an embodied way too.

Babushkas who are living near Chernobyl

So what does Brown recommend, what else does she think we should be taking away from (and perhaps applying) after her deep, long look into the hinterlands of disaster? 
 
I believe she’d say that it’s the practical guidance we can take from people who have learned how to cope in profoundly compromised environments. It’s more of their kind of “embodied knowledge”–and maybe less of what the experts and politicians have to say about what’s happening around us– that needs to be our guide.
 
In the way she has approached her history-writing, Brown also offers a counterweight to the obliviating impact of “contested knowledge.” About the farmers and factory workers around Chernobyl she notes:

These people got cancer, these kids have cancer, but we don’t know for sure what caused it.’ I saw how those statements of scientific uncertainty drilled down, undermining the claims of people whose families were riddled with illnesses. Rather than report two sides of a controversy (there are always far more than two sides), I wanted to leave the reader with an informed judgment. As I write in the first person, it’s clear that this is my studied opinion.

Brown’s role in determining the credibility of those she interviews and telling us why she believes them, effectively validates the “embodied knowledge” gained by these victims instead of leaving them in a further hinterland of sorts—one that’s in the shadows beyond credibility—because scientists or government officials lack the time, the money or the commitment “to connect and prove” each toxic cause they claim to each damaging effect. In other words, experts and politicians don’t need to confirm what your experience at surviving tells you to rely upon; they don’t necessarily “know any better” than the folks who are aready doing the hard work of surviving on the ground.
 
An essay comparing various Chernobyl accounts to HBOs 2019 dramatization also discussed how Brown’s “putting herself in the story” allows her to involve readers and listeners in what she’s saying by provoking us to formulate our own perspectives on the events she describes. She tells us her opinion about what farm and factory workers are claiming as well as why she believes them by (for example) referring to records she’s uncovered, and by doing so, invites us to have our own opinions about their testimony.

Crucially, Brown’s interjections of first-person narration are not merely ruminative or speculative. Rather, they are constructed to prompt the critical capacities of a reader who is invited to think with the author through a literal and metaphoric journey that begins with and eventually goes beyond the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

By choosing this almost interactive approach, Brown’s storytelling method not only “prompts” our critical capacities involving Chernobyl, it also invites us to bring the same faculties to places far closer to home (like the Nevada contamination sites that are far less known but even more toxic) or to the negative impacts of impending climate disaster that we’re experiencing in our own backyards. We can become more like actors in (and less like the passive victims of) the place-driven stories that we’re in.

Barry Lopez–who also put himself in his stories–seemed less hopeful than Kate Brown that all of us can be mobilized in time to confront the unfolding climate crisis. Writing about his final book called Horizon, I described the smaller group of actors that he hoped to enlist, but it was never in doubt that he also believed (along with Brown) in the power of hard-won, localized wisdom to help us through the difficult days ahead.

Lopez seems less certain that he can reach the tourists in their lounge chairs around the pool and more reliant on networks of wisdom that still include his ‘family, friends, mentors and professional colleagues’ but now depends at least as much on the wisdom of traditional cultures that have found ways to survive in the face of war, environmental destruction and natural disaster. Unlike citizens of the developed world who act like children looking for heroes to save them, for thousands of years adults who know how to make decisions to care for everyone and ensure that no one gets left behind have guided [what he calls] ‘heroic communities’ of indigenous people across the world. Today, Lopez tries to counter his doubts by imagining networks comprised of all the different communities that depend on adults with the knowledge to survive so that we can claim our uncertain future together.

In the hinterlands of our civilization—where we’ve dumped our refuse and conducted the industrial experiments that help us support our consumer-driven economies and comfortable lifestyles—there are people who have learned and are continuing to learn how to survive in places that many of us would rather forget. As a contrary voice, Brown says loudly and clearly (along with Lopez and Hochschild): Come with us, use your imaginations to become involved in these frontline stories, and perhaps you can also figure out what you need “to know now” and “do now” in order to survive.

This post was adapted from my February 14, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Daily Preparation, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: Anthropocene, Arlie Hochschild, Barry Lopez, Chernobyl, disaster environments, disaster history, embodied knowledge, history, Kate Brown MIT, networks of wisdom, storytelling, survival in Anthropocene

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