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?

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.

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.

A Movie’s Gorgeous Take on Time, Place, Loss & Gain

February 9, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a kid, I was a digger. Always outside in the meadow that ran the back of my house, in the woods that huddled behind the half-circle of homes down the hill, or even in the less visited recesses of my yard, I was always looking for something “down there.” But I never found anything like the spines of the Anglo-Saxon long ship that were unearthed in the picture above.

In a post from December called Digging for a Sense of Place, I described how I didn’t really find anything you’d call “archeological” until I got to Philadelphia and came upon what might have been an 18^th century kitchen dump beneath our magnolia tree out back. (My home is a block and a half from an historical marker that tells of British troops camping here before the Battle of Germantown, so I suppose the pottery shards I found there could also have been left behind when these very soldiers moved to their next encampment.) Anyway, while thinking about my relationship to the places where I’ve lived, I also saw some of the roots of my commitment to and indifference about the ravages of climate change—and how I might get that wavering to settle down into something more like steady resolve.

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… 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.

Maybe because I’d written this post so recently, I couldn’t believe the coincidence when a British filmmaker presented his movie, called The Dig, on Netflix this week. Told with unsettling beauty, it’s a story about the quixotic excavation of an ancient burial mound on a manor estate in southeast England. With remarkable restraint, it uses its Dark Age discoveries to throw the early bombing raids over Britain during World War II (whenThe Dig takes place) into bold relief.

These bombers, like heavy, lumbering cows, crisscross the skies above the excavation site, falling down to earth on one occasion while simultaneously calling more young Englishmen up into the clouds to risk their lives. Much like them, we also need the memories of our place in the world to anchor an uncertain future. With new viral strains announced almost daily and the need to inoculate an entire planet before “normal” or “safe” can return, it still remains unnervingly unclear how any of us will come out the other end. As with the pilots and diggers of rural England in the 1940s, it might get us thinking about what we’d most like to carry with us–what we’d most like to preserve–as we too face the unknown.

This trailer for The Dig will give you the flavor of its juxtapositions on time, place, loss as well as the kind of gain that becomes possible when you seize the day.

Among many other things, this is an actors’ movie, particularly for Mulligan, Barnes and Fiennes.

Mulligan’s Edith Pretty is weighed down by the emotional and physical ailments that have increasingly burdened her since her husband, a soldier himself, died shortly after they married and their son was born. It is her estate that houses the ancient burial mounds, she’s always wondered what secrets they might hold, and perhaps because of her own dwindling, she finally resolves to find out. Mulligan’s startling performance pushes Edith to the boundaries of her fragile condition and to small bursts of vitality beyond it.

Edith finds the complement she needs “for a dig” in Basil Brown, “a self-taught excavator” who knows “everything there is to know” about the ground and soil of Suffolk since, as he takes pains to explain, his hands have been combing through it for over sixty years. A hard-working man, he learns how to find common ground with Edith across the gapping class divides of rural England in a dance of blunt and sometimes comical exchanges. Basil Brown is played by Ralph Fiennes, who has inhabited everyone from Voldermort to Jonathan Steed (the TV Avengers protagonist) and the English Patient in his years playing leading men on the big-screen. Given those marquee roles, his understated Basil is a departure.

When interviewed about it, Fiennes (himself a Suffolk native) said he spent weeks riding an old bike along the country roads of southeast England to refresh his feelings for the place and its rhythms before filming began. In other interviews The Dig’s creative force, Simon Stone, said he encouraged his actors to ad-lib the script when it felt right to them. For the character of Basil in particular, deep knowledge of the land and the freedom to be spontaneous produce a kind of honest power that is evident throughout this performance, which is the best of his that I’ve seen in his long career.

The eight (or so)-year-old actor Archie Brown plays Edith’s son Robert. A dazzling counterpoint to the mumbling Basil and his frail mother, Robert brings the fireworks of childish excitement and gushing enthusiasm to this dig for buried treasure. In their small community quest, he also discovers a father figure, awakening in Basil the best kind of paternalism when the old codger least expects it. A sequence where Robert takes off from home on his bike in search of Basil is gorgeously realized and almost unbearably sad in its desperate longing. But while the buried treasures here are frequently emotional, there are also splendid discoveries to be made as this ragtag band carves its way beneath the ground.

What The Dig’s spirited amateurs discover became known as the Sutton Hoo Treasure, stored in the buried hull of a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon ship to honor a Dark Age king. As a long-time believer in buried treasure, if I have a complaint about this movie it’s that we get to see too little of this magnificent horde—mostly as it temporarily rests on the mossy beds of wooden crates that are placed, one after another, under Edith’s bed, near a suitcase that had been her husband’s.

She ultimately gives the Sutton Hoo Treasure to the British Museum despite sniveling among the “professional” archeologists and museum curators that provide the film’s suspense (“What will become of this magical discovery at a time when we all need to feel the joy of it?”) Representing an almost entirely unknown chapter of the nation’s memory, there is never really any doubt where it’s headed. The Sutton Hoo Treasure will go to the place where the greatest number of Edith’s and Basil’s countrymen and women can gather around its campfire and face whatever tomorrow holds together.

Well into The Dig, Basil’s bedrock of a wife wonders at his conviction and tenacity, over “just how he is,” not really asking as much as telling him: “Why else would you be playing around in the dirt while the rest of the country prepares for war?”

So it’s fitting that his and Edith’s quiet obsessions play out not in a “post-card pretty England” but in more of a dreamscape of grays and ochers during the day or in a nightmare when it’s dark and raining and Basil is trying to pull reluctant tarps over the excavation site despite being blinded by the spattering mud. What’s at stake here is not the rose-colored surfaces of England’s countryside but what supports that splendor underneath: its long buried past and the quiet furnaces that animate the men and women who have lived for centuries “closest to its ground.”

In an echo of the Anglo-Saxon ship that’s being unearthed, my favorite scene in the movie is of a contemporary sailboat drifting along the same nearby river that carried the burial chamber of an ancient king to what might have been his final resting place 1500 years before. It was like a message-in-a-bottle or maybe a promise of things to come. Like Basil for a moment, I could almost hear the past reverberating into the present and maybe even the future.

When you see The Dig, you’ll know what I mean about “how Basil is,” the silent quest that drives Edith, and how valuable spirit voices like theirs might be in each of us too as we worry and wonder about what’s worth preserving in our fragile world today so we can take it into the future.

This post was adapted from my February 7, 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.

Extra from the Ordinary

July 19, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

For some writing that I have ahead of me, I’ve been researching how to make good use of a refuge that you’ve created from the outside world. When bad things are happening out there and they’ve torn you apart, how do you re-group enough to go back out and face them all over again?

For that project, I won’t be writing directly about the pandemic, but some of what I’ve unearthed also speaks to our efforts to recover our internal focus, sanity and productive drives while trying to stay safe from the risks outside.

We’re working more at home, seeing fewer people and keeping our distance from almost everyone else. Health threats have made living and working an isolating experience. There’s more time alone to stew on our feelings than when our routines kept us busier and more people would take us out of ourselves.

The disorder ot the outside world leaks in too. It’s harder to make even small things—like getting a haircut or going to the gym—happen, or to manage whatever confronts us after we leave home. Moreover, today seems a lot like yesterday and the day before that, the drift of hours and days making it harder to feel grounded in time or able to put one foot in front of another. As panic, despair or hopelessness sets in, it can feel like the disorder outside is living inside too, that the shelter from the storm we thought we had isn’t protecting us any more.

Several years ago, Arthur Kleinman was in “the slow motion calamity” of caring for his wife Joan during her 10-year struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. To keep his feelings of isolation and disorder at bay, Kleinman (who’s a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist) brought new joys into the most ordinary routines of the life that they shared by focusing more attention on how they were doing them.

[I]ntensifying attention [on] mundane tasks, we filled those moments with passion and awareness. Exercise, cooking, eating, reading, work and even watching the news became more deliberate components of our daily ritual, giving us happy moments to look forward to, creating a mood of anticipation rather than paralysis. In a time of randomness and uncertainty, it made us feel proactive instead of reactive.

They created together a sustaining home life that enabled both the caregiving that went on there and his outside endeavors as a teacher and doctor.

Now living alone but still hard at work, Kleinman continues to conduct his ordinary routines with attention to their details, like preparing “a proper meal” for lunch everyday and taking the time that’s needed to enjoy it. He called the essay he wrote about those routines “How Rituals and Focus Can Turn Isolation Into a Time for Growth” because repeating these rituals every day has brought him a kind of “joy” that he’d never known before.

Charles Eisenstein takes Kleinman’s ideas about attention to our rituals both deeper and wider.

In “Every Act a Ceremony,“ Eisenstein notes that religious people and indigenous communities in many parts of the world view each of their daily actions as important and meaningful. As a result, their individual actions regularly unite “the ceremonial with the pragmatic.” Think of the daily routines in monastic communities that range from praying and singing at set times throughout the day, to rituals around farming, fishing and food preparation, and on to marking the seasons or “feast days” in suitable ways. Making yourself susceptible to discovering new ways to celebrate the practical details of life and work can make the ordinary feel extraordinary.

It’s preparing and then taking the time to enjoy a sit-down lunch everyday, or using a special cup for the first coffee you drink each morning. One says: valuing the food you’ve selected, preparing it carefully and well, setting it out in a pleasing way and taking the time to savor your efforts are all important to you. Because they’re special, they’re worth your time and effort. The other says: how you wake up every day, the feel and look of the cup, the smell, taste and heat of the coffee, noticing how the day streams in around you as you wake up, these are important and valuable too, bringing you pleasure from your attention to their details. They are rituals you can look forward to, structure the rest of your day around, and enjoy because you’ve taken the time to uncover what’s special and important to you about them.

Eisenstein says that ceremonies like this are not so much created as discovered.

Here is how it might work. You start with a rudimentary ceremony, perhaps lighting a candle each morning and taking a moment to meditate on who you want to be today. But how do you light the candle perfectly? Maybe you pick it up and tilt it over the match. Then where do you put the match? On a little plate perhaps, kept off to the side. And you put the candle back down just right. Then maybe you ring a chime three times. How long between rings? Are you in a hurry? No, you wait until each tone fades into silence?….
To discover a ceremony, follow the thread of ‘Yes, that is how to do it,’ that mindfulness reveals. Watching, listening, concentrating the attention, we discover what to do, what to say, and how to participate.

Our intuition learns how to unite the ceremonial with something as practical as starting every day. It’s only aim is to support your well-being in whatever ways feel right to you.

I know this might have “a New Age vibe” to it, but it doesn’t have to. Candles and a plate for the match may not equal “ceremony” to you. Something with less fuss perhaps. Every day, Dr. Kleinman simply takes the time he needs from his appointments and other demands to enjoy “a proper lunch.” Waking up may involve no more than your favorite cup and appreciating every part of it before you launch yourself into the rest of your day. It’s whatever makes that launch special or ceremonial for you, the equivalent of a champagne bottle across the bow.

Eisenstein argues elsewhere that taking one action like this creates a “field” around it that makes other, similarly motivated actions more likely. I think he’s right. The first time on a path makes it easier to follow the second time.

[A]ny change that happens in one place creates a field that allows the same kind of change to happen elsewhere. Acts of kindness strengthen the field of kindness, acts of love strengthen the field of love, acts of hate strengthen the field of hate.

It’s the same with discovering daily ceremonies: a ritual at the beginning of the day makes another one more likely to mark the middle or the end of the day. “[A] practice in doing everything just as it should be done,” he writes, “is like a magnet that aligns more and more of life to its field.” It could turn more of your ordinary routines (at work or after work) into bulwarks against panic or resignation, particularly given how easy it’s been to feel isolated and disordered in recent months.

Start small. Try this wisdom out, particularly if too much time in your head and desperate news cycles are wearing you down. Try it because today’s disruptions are likely to continue for months (if not longer) and because bringing enjoyment into the most ordinary parts of daily life are like free vacations.

Some of these rituals will occur face to face while others (of necessity these days) will happen on-line.

When I was growing up, my parents and their friends sometimes gathered at one house or another for cocktails on Friday nights to end the work week and start the weekend. Well the Frick Museum in New York City started a similar tradition as the pandemic overtook the City and even virtual get-togethers were treasured. They called their weekly gatherings “A Drink With a Curator,” each one featuring one of the Frick’s curators, an item or more to discuss from the museum’s collection, and a special cocktail you could enjoy with the conversation for 15 or 20 minutes every Friday evening at 5 p.m. (EST).

There are several episodes you can preview on You Tube. I’d recommend that you get a taste of the proceedings by viewing curator Aimie Ng’s discussion of John Constable’s “The White Horse.” To many, Constable is the greatest British landscape painter, and “The White Horse” may be his best painting. For me, the virtual gathering was like a short trip to the English countryside. Moreover, Ng is a delightful tour guide of the artist and painting, enjoying (while she does so) the same cocktail we’re told that the Queen enjoys during the ceremony of her lunch everyday. If you’re taken with this episode of “A Drink With a Curator,” you can subscribe to the weekly series, learn the identity of the piece to be discussed, and gather the cocktail ingredients in advance of your next Friday-at-5 date with a Frick curator.

There is nothing more ordinary than ending the work week and beginning the weekend until you turn it into a ceremony.

This post was adapted from my July 12, 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.

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.

True Greatness is Always Complicated

February 25, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

After my post about Kobe Bryant two weeks ago, I heard from a number of you who couldn’t get over the accusation of rape that still metastasized in the middle of his legacy.

I’d acknowledged that Bryant was an introvert who still needed to tell his story about the struggle between good and evil inside him—and, by implication—how laudable that was. But as I read it again, the shortness of the piece didn’t do justice to the darkness in him, at least in part because so many of Bryant’s mourners didn’t seem to be grappling with his dark side at all. They were fans who had lost a hero, and for them the “Mamba” in him was mostly, if not entirely, a good thing given the adolescent ways we think about winning and sum up complicated lives while the grief of loss still stings.

So I’ve poured over the memorial articles about him, including those that Longreads (an on-line curator of stories) assembled into “The Ugliness of Greatness Reading List” about his life, his passing and our reactions to it.

After he retired from his obsession of playing basketball better than anyone, Bryant reverted to an even deeper preoccupation, making it (along with his family) into his fulltime projects. Since his retirement from basketball in 2016, a big part of his life work became telling the story that had always interested him most, so that he could profit (and others might too) from his portrayal of struggles like the ones that were inside of him. Stories about competition and the pursuit of excellence and falling along the way. Like his storytelling heroes created Darth Vader, Voldermort and Jaws, Bryant would tell stories that spoke to his alter-ego and how to hold him in check.

I thought it a worthy encore career for him (or for anyone, really), but again the short-form of my research and subsequent post didn’t remove the suspicion that this might be a marketing proposition for the Kobe Bryant product line instead of the kind of soul-searching that could impact the ways that we saw ourselves too. So I wanted to read more, and by seeing him through others’ eyes, decide whether I’d been right in concluding that there are deeper lessons in his life, in his death and in what we seemed to be taking from them.

What follows are excerpts from articles that were written about Kobe Bryant after his helicopter fell from the sky and his story risked getting lost in the shuffle of our grief. My job was easier because the Longreads editors gathered so many terrific stories, with the haunting (but unattributed) photograph up top coming from one of them: Jeremy Gordon’s “Two Things Can Be True, But One is Always Mentioned First” in The Outline.

I brought three questions with me while I read, and I’ve grouped what I discovered about Bryant and the troubling ways we process the passing of conflicted heroes under them.

What set Kobe Bryant apart?

First off, it is useful to recall the range of his excellence as an athlete. In his article in The Outline, Gordon says of Bryant:

He exemplified excellence as grim-jawed killer instinct (murder your opponents on the court), relentless hard work (practice for hours, because the sport demands it), blunt honesty (if your teammates suck, call them out), and beatific monologing about loving the game, which to him was a way of life.

Of course, as it turned out, “his way of life” was what he wanted to tell us about most. Writing about Bryant in The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas beautifully observed:

It seemed, for a while, that he only saw himself as a winner, but it turned out that he saw himself as a storyteller. At times, this quality could make him seem a little slick, aware of his own personal mythology. But as his career progressed—and as he fought back from injury after injury—he became more expansive about the narrative power of sports, its ability to transform an inner struggle into an outer one. He didn’t hide the fact that he was angry, that he could be selfish, that he was warped by his overwhelming competitive instincts. In a 2014 [New Yorker] profile by Ben McGrath, Bryant, in discussing an outburst by the football player Richard Sherman, talked about the “ugliness of greatness.

Part of it, surely, was because Bryant’s focus was narrow, inwardly focused and relentless. In his piece “What Made Kobe Different” Jonathan Abrams began with Bryant’s own words to describe his careers as a basketball player and more recently:

I have such a narrow focus. As you can see, I didn’t have much time to socialize at all. When I wasn’t training, I was writing and I was studying the art of writing, of filmmaking. My days were booked. It wasn’t that I went out of my way not to be social. It was just that I was busy preparing for what I’m doing now.

Abrams quotes Del Harris, who was Bryant’s first NBA coach, to similar effect: about his player’s isolation from others and his mesmerizing obsession with doing his best. That he was so unsocialized may also help to explain his troublingly anti-social and often predatory side.

[Bryant] never paid attention to any outside activities that I could tell. He never went out. Of course, he was only 18 and 19. On the airplane, he never had any particular fun—no cards, no video games. He was always looking at basketball things on his computer. In those days, we did not have the DVDs of games to take with us right after the game, no iPads, etc. But he had plenty of DVDs from our earlier games, or of the next team or of [Michael] Jordan. He was a total student of the game.

And, Abrams might have added, to the contributions that he wanted to make and ended up making as a positive role model, but Bryant knew there was more to his story than that.

Around the time he was charged with rape, he started talking about Black Mamba. As he explained in “Muse” (a documentary about his life), Mamba personified his attempt to channel his mean, relentless rage more productively both on the court and off of it, vividly incorporating the serpent into a personal struggle that made sense to him, and maybe to those who were watching too.

The New Yorker’s Thomas brings that story down to today as Kobe Bryant worked with his customary diligence and single focus to continue writing it.

After Bryant retired, in 2016, he made an animated movie that won an Oscar. He launched podcasts, movies, television shows. Many of them were about why he was set apart from the world, even as he tried to connect with it…Bryant’s stories involved rage and self-discipline and anger and, yes, greatness. By all accounts, he was as involved—and even obsessive—with those projects as he was with anything else.

Bryant’s need to write his story was far more than a marketing angle for an encore career. It was like he was fleshing out his character in his own morality plays.

How does public grief reduce greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place?

In my prior post, I should have set out more of the facts about the rape charges against Kobe Bryant. Here are some of them.

In 2003, Bryant was accused of aggravated assault by a 19-year-old hotel worker in Colorado. She later told the police, “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me.” A week after he was charged, Bryant gave a tearful press conference where he confessed to cheating on his wife Vanessa, but vehemently denied the assault allegation. What happened next was all too predictable for its time. Jeremy Gordon recounted what was happening in both the courthouse and in the court of public opinion:

Over the next year and a half, his lawyers attacked the accuser’s credibility by pointing out she’d had sex with another man in the week before the alleged assault, that she’d attempted suicide in the past, and that she had been initially excited to meet Kobe. (Her identity was also leaked.) Predictably, NBA fans took his side. I — and almost every other casual basketball observer from that era — can remember multiple conversations about whether Kobe had really done it, most of which concluded that he had not. (A popular line of logic: ‘Why would someone as famous as Kobe Bryant need to rape someone?’)

In 2004, the assault case was dropped by prosecutors after the accuser decided not to testify at the trial. Following the dismissal of criminal charges, Bryant made the following statement:

Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.

While Gordon read this as Bryant’s “literally admitting” his sexual assault, Ashley Reese in her “How to Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy” saw it differently. To her:

This came off as a non-apology. Sure, he acknowledged how she felt, but it still read as if her interpretation of the night diverted from reality—namely, his experience. But over 15 years later, the allegations are just a blip in Bryant’s legacy.

While they interpreted Bryant’s statement differently, both Gordon and Reese agree that everything seemed to shake out in Bryant’s favor at the time and both find it unacceptable to treat it “as little more than an aside” in his story now. When Bryant was killed in that helicopter crash, Gordon lamented the two divides that seemed inevitable on social media, between:

those who cared that Kobe Bryant committed a brutal sexual assault, and those who did not, at least not right now, but probably not ever. In a world in which the creative bodies of numerous public figures — some more talented than others — have recently been invalidated because they (allegedly or not) committed sexual assaults, I knew that Kobe was going to receive an infinite number of gauzy, heartbroken tributes from strangers glossing over or even ignoring the worst thing he’d ever done.

Gordon went on to describe the “acceptable” trade-off for too many people this way: “what’s one maybe-rape measured against 81 points in a game and five championships? What’s the private pain of one anonymous person against the public joy of millions?”

Ashley Reese argues that the consequences extend beyond these false equivalents, recounting the experience of Felicia Sonmez, a journalist at The Washington Post, a few weeks ago.

After Bryant’s death, Sonmez posted to social media a link to a 2016 Daily Beast story titled, “Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession.” For doing so and triggering a thundering backlash across the internet, she was subsequently suspended by the Post. The newspaper’s argument was, essentially, that her doing so was poor timing while people were still coming to terms with their grief.

In an argument that says a great deal about our inability to hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads at one time and our rush to black-or-white judgments, Reese wrote:

People who work at news outlets are going through these same emotions, but they have a responsibility to tell the truth. It can be hard to tell the truth sometimes—especially when it diverts from the legacy we want from a celebrity; especially one who died tragically and young, one who a city revered, one who his daughters loved and who he loved in return, one who fellow athletes looked up to. But someone has to do it, and while it should be done with care, it must be done. The fact that it cannot be done without death threats as a result speaks volumes, but none louder than when a publication that prides itself on defending the truth acts complicit in that violence.

When our public storyteller’s tell an incomplete story about a hero, they effectively reduce his greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place.

Did Kobe Bryant’s full story matter to him and to those who lived (and will continue to live) in the arms of his legacy?

The strength of Bryant’s legacy depends on what you end up believing about him, but one set of beliefs risks losing the almost Greek sense of tragedy in it.

In his Esquire farewell Charles P. Pierce talks about “the terrible irony that he died in a fall from the sky,” because (I think) Bryant’s death speaks to both the lightness of his air and the pull of his gravity. Every mythic figure like him is caught in between, inviting us to look, to never stop looking and to judge him on how he met or failed to meet his internal conflicts head-on. But those judgments are never easy. According to Pierce:

There was no way to work that night in the Colorado hotel into the biography that unspooled thereafter and came to such a sudden end on Sunday. In Massachusetts, for decades, political writers wrestled with where to place Chappaquiddick into the saga of Ted Kennedy, and too many of them gave up and erased the event and Mary Jo Kopechne. But it is 2020 now, and Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Harvey Weinstein is in a New York courtroom, and erasing a female victim is no longer a viable moral and ethical strategy [if it ever was]. Kobe Bryant died on Sunday with one of the young women in his life, and how you will come to measure his life has to be judged by how deeply you believe that he corrected his grievous fault through the life he lived afterwards, and how deeply you believe that he corrected that fault, immediately and beautifully, and in midair.

I don’t think Bryant corrected his faults with the stories he’d already told or in a sacrificial fall from the sky. But I do believe he was still seeking redemption through his stories, bringing the obsessive introspection–that only someone like him could muster–to working through his torments and relieving his soul.

My intuition a few weeks ago was to believe in the earnestness of that quest and the more I discover about him, the more I believe that Kobe Bryant would have attempted to reconcile his demons and angels for his benefit and for ours for as long as he walked among us.

The real tragedy is that he won’t be here to keep trying to tell that story. Elemental struggles like his belong to all of us, whether we grapple with our own versions of them or not.

This post was adapted from my February 23, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter (and not miss out on any), you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.