Today I had breakfast with a woman who has at her finger tips and the tip of her tongue 10,000 stories. She is Yaqui and has published the poetry she has written of her ancestors, the land and its plants and animals, and the traditions. She said she is a renegada, interesting word, no? To re-deny. It must come from people who deny traditions. However, she clearly saw traditions as a blessing. What she must denounce is the absurdity of tribal politics, a topic I will cover with an altar cloth and holy water and leave aside for another day.
She told me that when she was young they would go out into the desert to find willow wood and out of it they would make a simple cross. The cross would be dressed as an old woman and they would hang her at the front of their house and talk to her as a grandmother. She protected the home and the family. The old woman cross hangs there for many years until it becomes very old and is falling apart. It is then replaced.
She said that all of her poetry came from the cadence of speaking that she had learned when her grandmother told stories. The evening would come and they would build a large bonfire on the desert and she would tell them one story after another, some lovely, some sad, some full of fear and dread. I had to sit and wonder if the way we tell stories has not been damaging. In the past, people sat together and the story telling was more ritualized. People faced each other and made eye contract. Today, we read books, our eyes often on the book, not peering into the child's eyes.
She also told me that she had learned that unless you could tell a story simply, in few words, you did not understand its essence. The mark of a good storytelling was that gift of few words.
11/27/2007
11/25/2007
Part II. Saga of the Disappearing Damsel
I once read that you can never put your foot in the same river twice, as every time you dip your foot in the river, it is a new river. While this is both true (e.g., the water atoms (hydrogen and oxygen) are different and pebbles at the bottom might have been moved along and new fish might have appeared--or old ones disappeared), it is also untrue (e.g., the Mississipi is not now the Nile).
A human life is often described as a river, beginning as a tiny streamlette and rushing down into full strength. I am not sure where old age fits in, but if a river runs long enough and does not end at the sea it may seem to disappear, sinking perhaps into the earth to an underground cave. More likely new streams and rivers will join it, and it will become more and more grand. Eventually, however, all rivers end. However, in this sense--rivers are made up of contributing bodies of water -- rivers are like communities, with its strength measured in the numbers of collaborating partners. I will have to think more about that metaphor.
It is doubtful that the river ever forgets what it is. The Nile, which as far as we know has no conscious mind (it is not sentient) will never wake up and begin to argue that it is actually the Missouri River and that Lewis and Clark are caught up in dugout canoes on the surface of its waters, wrapped in time warp that encircles and enbraces them like Echinodorus latifolius and Hydrocotyle leucocephala (which are actually amazonian fresh water plants)or even Dwarf Sagittaria, which is described as a completely undemanding plant?
It would seem that as we move along through life, the person we were before would be a part of us, perhaps 1/4 of us that is identifiable in the upper arm, thigh, and forehead and certainly in a percentage of the memory. Certainly one would think that the way we thought in the past would make up a quarter or some percentage of our thinking and that there would be a graceful evolution from Time A, to Time B, to Time X... If this were true, then you could take out any thought and look at it, and identify the root thoughts and the evolutionary process. This does not seem to be the case as it is possible to wake up one morning early and think: My god, how could that child (teenager, young adult) have ever been me? This does not mean you do not like the old you, you may even mourn the non-existence of the old you, but that the old you is a stranger.
A human life is often described as a river, beginning as a tiny streamlette and rushing down into full strength. I am not sure where old age fits in, but if a river runs long enough and does not end at the sea it may seem to disappear, sinking perhaps into the earth to an underground cave. More likely new streams and rivers will join it, and it will become more and more grand. Eventually, however, all rivers end. However, in this sense--rivers are made up of contributing bodies of water -- rivers are like communities, with its strength measured in the numbers of collaborating partners. I will have to think more about that metaphor.
It is doubtful that the river ever forgets what it is. The Nile, which as far as we know has no conscious mind (it is not sentient) will never wake up and begin to argue that it is actually the Missouri River and that Lewis and Clark are caught up in dugout canoes on the surface of its waters, wrapped in time warp that encircles and enbraces them like Echinodorus latifolius and Hydrocotyle leucocephala (which are actually amazonian fresh water plants)or even Dwarf Sagittaria, which is described as a completely undemanding plant?
It would seem that as we move along through life, the person we were before would be a part of us, perhaps 1/4 of us that is identifiable in the upper arm, thigh, and forehead and certainly in a percentage of the memory. Certainly one would think that the way we thought in the past would make up a quarter or some percentage of our thinking and that there would be a graceful evolution from Time A, to Time B, to Time X... If this were true, then you could take out any thought and look at it, and identify the root thoughts and the evolutionary process. This does not seem to be the case as it is possible to wake up one morning early and think: My god, how could that child (teenager, young adult) have ever been me? This does not mean you do not like the old you, you may even mourn the non-existence of the old you, but that the old you is a stranger.
11/24/2007
The Saga of the Disappearing Damsel....
The Saga of the Disappearing Damsel....
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in a fiefdom far away there lived a young lady of gentle birth and quiet manner. Of her, people said that still waters run deep. The still waters was probably a guess, as silence does not, in truth, predict ability or depth. To do that, one needs a depth sounder, something that should be invented, as grades in school are not accurate depth sounders either. Everything I know about depth sounders comes from Mark Twain.
Well, this young damsel did recognize that there was more than one side to her, but the quiet side was more comfortable and, more important, sustainable, as being the life of any party was a drain on her soul and intellect, requiring a rest afterward.
Gentle and quiet did not mean she was not a risk taker; if anything she was too much of one, riding horses with abandon, traveling alone into the rainforest, walking undaunted into high crime fishing villages, making angry those with power. She did stop short, in her risk taking, of being a total fool.
Anyway, when I think back over my youth, it is hard to remember being her, although tiny splinters of her seem to lie in hidden places.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in a fiefdom far away there lived a young lady of gentle birth and quiet manner. Of her, people said that still waters run deep. The still waters was probably a guess, as silence does not, in truth, predict ability or depth. To do that, one needs a depth sounder, something that should be invented, as grades in school are not accurate depth sounders either. Everything I know about depth sounders comes from Mark Twain.
Well, this young damsel did recognize that there was more than one side to her, but the quiet side was more comfortable and, more important, sustainable, as being the life of any party was a drain on her soul and intellect, requiring a rest afterward.
Gentle and quiet did not mean she was not a risk taker; if anything she was too much of one, riding horses with abandon, traveling alone into the rainforest, walking undaunted into high crime fishing villages, making angry those with power. She did stop short, in her risk taking, of being a total fool.
Anyway, when I think back over my youth, it is hard to remember being her, although tiny splinters of her seem to lie in hidden places.
11/23/2007
Given the script writers strike and general malaise
I am going to recycle my thanksgiving message from two years ago:
11/24/2005
From killer apes to happy thanksgiving
Darwinian theorists, at least those who think beyond accepted dogma and limited set of data that can acceptably be used to test theories (i.e., surveys done with undergraduate psychology students, cross cultural studies of highly westernized people, and limited amounts of descriptive data drawn from the worst ethnographies of all time), realize that they need to account, at some point, not only for altruism (e.g., the bountiful meal that the Indians fed to the starving and largely ignorant British colonists), particularly if that altruism is not returned in kind (did the British ever return that act of altruism, double fold, to those who fed them? What the theory requires is a quick return, probably among people with regular interactions, that is greater than the original gift), but that they need to account for other human behaviors, including rituals. **
This brings us to the topic of rituals involving gifts, or actually we started with rituals, but I have been trying to get from killer apes to ritualized, bountiful, and generous feeding of the stranger, and this requires meandering a bit through the morass that theory has built around human behavior. Modern Darwinian theorists explain altruism (gifts, generosity?) in several ways. The first is group selection, a theory that is wrong and I will not even bother to discuss it, as some very intelligent people have spent a lot of effort doing so (read their stuff, with skepticism of course). This just means that group x, because it has cooperative folk in it, can beat the pants off group y, because group x can, if nothing else, create killer fighting groups).* The second theory is reciprocal altruism, which can explain some behavior, especially that seen in the modern world (this refers to tit for tat--you give to me, I give to you, as discussed in the first paragraph), and the third is kin selection. In the case of the first thanksgiving, I have dismissed explanation one and two (because the colonists did not quickly and adequately reward their saviors and group selection is wrong), but explanation three, kin selection, obviously does not fit either--unless we go back to the early, early common ancestor of all humans (that killer ape?) these people eating together were not close kin, the co-efficient of relatedness was too low
Further, this limited handful of theories, it seems to me, cannot account for the fact that for several hundred years, that first set of thanksgiving behaviors has been ritualized, handed down, from one generation to the next. Thanksgiving, today, is a family ritual of generosity and sharing. I would argue it was a family ritual the first time it was done, with family defined in that case fictively--metaphorical kin. I argue in my book that a fundamental maternal behavior, which is the foundation of kinship, is generosity and care of the vulnerable. Of course this brings us to the topic of "good" mothers, a topic I will discuss on another day when I want to tweak the militant feminists and their easily aroused ire.
Maternal-child interactions, from very early in human prehistory, were ritualized, involving such things as particular feeding interactions, play activities to keep a child quiet if nothing else. I see as stereotyped behavior. A handshake is a ritual, as is a religious service, which involves a large set of stereotyped behaviors. Predictability in a pretty unpredictable world must have been essential for our ancestors and their survival and reproduction.
However, to end this topic, I must return to that act of generosity and the vulnerable position in which such an act places the generous person. Now, at a time when American Indians are vulnerable and in many cases desperate (unemployment being 50% on many reservations), I see no caravans going out to reservations carrying bountiful amounts of food. When a person is generous, that person uses his/her important resources for the benefit of others, in this case relative strangers. These resources go to promote the survival and reproduction of the stranger. They also put those colonists in a position to reward the generous act, but over and over, generation after generation, quite the opposite has been done.
I am not arguing for nobility of past peoples, so much as I am arguing that we need to focus some of our studies on the altruism seen in traditional peoples. Of course, there will be some quick and slick response (at least in my mind, as no one knows this site exists, except my family and this blog is aimed at explaining my book to them in bits and pieces) on the part of theorists. Without having heard any of the arguments, although they will be predictable, probably drawn from something obscure in history that provides another view of the event (something like a statement saying that the Indians only served the worst looking and lowest in nutrient content foods, and kept the good food for themselves--it is way too tempting to rewrite history, as we often do, to fit our theories, and it begs the question of why serve the stranger anything that was at all edible).
So, happy thanksgiving and think about the fact that you may be here because generations ago someone fed a stranger.
*while it may be true that a cooperative set of individuals, meaning they work together towards an aim, can whip a less cooperative set (who can't get an act together), too many genes were being swapped for group selection to explain this.
**my mother would have hated that sentence as she always said that anything important enough to write should not be lessened by putting it in parentheses.
11/24/2005
From killer apes to happy thanksgiving
Darwinian theorists, at least those who think beyond accepted dogma and limited set of data that can acceptably be used to test theories (i.e., surveys done with undergraduate psychology students, cross cultural studies of highly westernized people, and limited amounts of descriptive data drawn from the worst ethnographies of all time), realize that they need to account, at some point, not only for altruism (e.g., the bountiful meal that the Indians fed to the starving and largely ignorant British colonists), particularly if that altruism is not returned in kind (did the British ever return that act of altruism, double fold, to those who fed them? What the theory requires is a quick return, probably among people with regular interactions, that is greater than the original gift), but that they need to account for other human behaviors, including rituals. **
This brings us to the topic of rituals involving gifts, or actually we started with rituals, but I have been trying to get from killer apes to ritualized, bountiful, and generous feeding of the stranger, and this requires meandering a bit through the morass that theory has built around human behavior. Modern Darwinian theorists explain altruism (gifts, generosity?) in several ways. The first is group selection, a theory that is wrong and I will not even bother to discuss it, as some very intelligent people have spent a lot of effort doing so (read their stuff, with skepticism of course). This just means that group x, because it has cooperative folk in it, can beat the pants off group y, because group x can, if nothing else, create killer fighting groups).* The second theory is reciprocal altruism, which can explain some behavior, especially that seen in the modern world (this refers to tit for tat--you give to me, I give to you, as discussed in the first paragraph), and the third is kin selection. In the case of the first thanksgiving, I have dismissed explanation one and two (because the colonists did not quickly and adequately reward their saviors and group selection is wrong), but explanation three, kin selection, obviously does not fit either--unless we go back to the early, early common ancestor of all humans (that killer ape?) these people eating together were not close kin, the co-efficient of relatedness was too low
Further, this limited handful of theories, it seems to me, cannot account for the fact that for several hundred years, that first set of thanksgiving behaviors has been ritualized, handed down, from one generation to the next. Thanksgiving, today, is a family ritual of generosity and sharing. I would argue it was a family ritual the first time it was done, with family defined in that case fictively--metaphorical kin. I argue in my book that a fundamental maternal behavior, which is the foundation of kinship, is generosity and care of the vulnerable. Of course this brings us to the topic of "good" mothers, a topic I will discuss on another day when I want to tweak the militant feminists and their easily aroused ire.
Maternal-child interactions, from very early in human prehistory, were ritualized, involving such things as particular feeding interactions, play activities to keep a child quiet if nothing else. I see as stereotyped behavior. A handshake is a ritual, as is a religious service, which involves a large set of stereotyped behaviors. Predictability in a pretty unpredictable world must have been essential for our ancestors and their survival and reproduction.
However, to end this topic, I must return to that act of generosity and the vulnerable position in which such an act places the generous person. Now, at a time when American Indians are vulnerable and in many cases desperate (unemployment being 50% on many reservations), I see no caravans going out to reservations carrying bountiful amounts of food. When a person is generous, that person uses his/her important resources for the benefit of others, in this case relative strangers. These resources go to promote the survival and reproduction of the stranger. They also put those colonists in a position to reward the generous act, but over and over, generation after generation, quite the opposite has been done.
I am not arguing for nobility of past peoples, so much as I am arguing that we need to focus some of our studies on the altruism seen in traditional peoples. Of course, there will be some quick and slick response (at least in my mind, as no one knows this site exists, except my family and this blog is aimed at explaining my book to them in bits and pieces) on the part of theorists. Without having heard any of the arguments, although they will be predictable, probably drawn from something obscure in history that provides another view of the event (something like a statement saying that the Indians only served the worst looking and lowest in nutrient content foods, and kept the good food for themselves--it is way too tempting to rewrite history, as we often do, to fit our theories, and it begs the question of why serve the stranger anything that was at all edible).
So, happy thanksgiving and think about the fact that you may be here because generations ago someone fed a stranger.
*while it may be true that a cooperative set of individuals, meaning they work together towards an aim, can whip a less cooperative set (who can't get an act together), too many genes were being swapped for group selection to explain this.
**my mother would have hated that sentence as she always said that anything important enough to write should not be lessened by putting it in parentheses.
11/19/2007
7 random facts
Hum, my own daughter has requested this of me, so as a dutiful mother, I must reply.
To begin, however, I am pretty much not very weird (isn’t the rule I before e except after c or when sounding like a, such as in neighbor or weigh?).
(1) I went alone into the Ecuadorian rainforest, hitching a ride in a dugout canoe, sailing (do dugout canoes sail?) off into the mists and the meandering river.
(2) I studied horseback riding with the cavalry in Bogota, Colombia, where I quickly realized that I could always have a second career as a trick rider -- as we had to do flips and hops and jumps and all sorts of things. My own horse was an ex race horse and on one of my last rides, she, stubborn mule that she was (actually she was an Anglo Arab) stopped dead right before the jump, so I went sailing over the jump while she stood there with a smile on her face.
(3) I studied sculpture and learned to use the acetylene torch, so I also could be a welder. I also cut off the end of my finger with a chisel. As I dripped blood while walking across campus, I remember thinking that this was the only mark I left on that particular campus. When I got to student health they shoved a form at me and told me to fill it out. I stopped applying pressure to my finger. They ended up filling a new form out for me. It rained the next day and erased my marks. This is quite a story for Arizona.
(4) I love studying prime numbers and when I am bored in meetings I try to identify the prime numbers up to 100,000.
(5) I find pure joy in my children and grandchildren and need nothing more, well maybe food and shelter, to be happy.
(6) I want to write a children’s book about an old rusty car that is abandoned in a vacant lot. A girl, who is much like me, sits in the car and drives into wonderful imaginary journeys. One day a very old man comes around and sits with her. He used to own the car and he tells her stories about where the car traveled.
(7) I want to write another book about the way women civilized the west. I also want to write a lay version of my book.
To begin, however, I am pretty much not very weird (isn’t the rule I before e except after c or when sounding like a, such as in neighbor or weigh?).
(1) I went alone into the Ecuadorian rainforest, hitching a ride in a dugout canoe, sailing (do dugout canoes sail?) off into the mists and the meandering river.
(2) I studied horseback riding with the cavalry in Bogota, Colombia, where I quickly realized that I could always have a second career as a trick rider -- as we had to do flips and hops and jumps and all sorts of things. My own horse was an ex race horse and on one of my last rides, she, stubborn mule that she was (actually she was an Anglo Arab) stopped dead right before the jump, so I went sailing over the jump while she stood there with a smile on her face.
(3) I studied sculpture and learned to use the acetylene torch, so I also could be a welder. I also cut off the end of my finger with a chisel. As I dripped blood while walking across campus, I remember thinking that this was the only mark I left on that particular campus. When I got to student health they shoved a form at me and told me to fill it out. I stopped applying pressure to my finger. They ended up filling a new form out for me. It rained the next day and erased my marks. This is quite a story for Arizona.
(4) I love studying prime numbers and when I am bored in meetings I try to identify the prime numbers up to 100,000.
(5) I find pure joy in my children and grandchildren and need nothing more, well maybe food and shelter, to be happy.
(6) I want to write a children’s book about an old rusty car that is abandoned in a vacant lot. A girl, who is much like me, sits in the car and drives into wonderful imaginary journeys. One day a very old man comes around and sits with her. He used to own the car and he tells her stories about where the car traveled.
(7) I want to write another book about the way women civilized the west. I also want to write a lay version of my book.
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