Aliveness, Flourishing, and Languishing

I read this article in the WaPo the other day on Aliveness. Well, it was actually a book review of On Giving Up by Adam Philips. It ended up being a fascinating intersection of literature and psychoanalysis. It started with a quote from a young James Joyce:

At the start of 1900, 10 days into the new century, a 17-year-old James Joyce delivered a lecture to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin. His topic: “Drama and Life.” His conclusion: that ordinary experience is sufficient to yield up the stuff of literature: “I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.” It’s a striking phrase, “the deadest among the living.” We know, I think, instinctively what it means, though Joyce provides a gloss, too — “the most commonplace” — and we’ll come back to that. But it asks us to think of aliveness as something more than a biological state.

The literary references continue throughout. The review contains a wide ranging look at the essays within the book and is worth a read. But to draw on one more quote from the review:

Put another way, one way to stave off the deadness of the commonplace is by countering the urge to assimilate people, opinions, experiences into commonplaces in the first place — to be attuned to detail, alert to specificity, curious about difference.

I like that. In a way, it recalls the opening Joyce quote. When we’re alert to the details and differences and curious, suddenly we realize the drama in what could have been glossed over as commonplace.

Joyce is speaking about writing and this is all applicable to that craft, but of course Philips is really concerns with how we live. This combination of alterness, awareness, and curiosity  – engagement at its heart, what the article calls aliveness, seems akin to  flourishing, in the technical sense of “a combination of physical, emotional and mental well-being,” “experience engagement and joy in their lives… characterized by a sense of connectedness to life, relationships, and career.” vs. languishing: “disconnected and disillusioned,” “joyless blah feeling.” To thrive, to flourish, to be alive beyond the biological sense requires us to seek out the details and differences and be curious, not just left things pass us by in a blur of commonplaceness. 

Songs that confused me when I was a kid

Time once again for Long and Short Reviews Wednesday Weekly Blog hop. Given the prompt of songs that confused me when I was a kid, I immediately thought of Prince’s “I would die 4 U.”

I suffered from a bit of mondegreen – you know, when you mishear something as different words (from Sylvia Wright, who misheard “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen”). My brain sort of mixed it up with Fred Flinstone’s trademark interjection:

Othertimes, I thought he was singing, “Apple Dapple Do.” I once mentioned the song to a friend, using what I thought was the right lyrics, and she looked at me like I was crazy. She explained the actual lyrics and laughed heartily at the thought that Prince would be quoting Fred Flinstone or saying Apple Dapple Do. She asked if either made sense to me, but I didn’t really think lyrics had to make sense.  

Lemon and Blueberry

What finer spring flavor combination is there than citrus and berry. So when a departmental get-together arouse, I decided to try the King Arthur Double Lemon Thumbprint cookies. They recommended either lemon curd or raspberry jam for the filling. with an optional lemon glaze drizzled over. My first thought was to make it a blueberry glaze for contrasting flavor/color, using powdered blueberries. But then I thought, what about a blueberry curd?  So I tried this recipe.

The first step was to boil the blueberries with lemon juice and zest to release the juice. 

The you strain it to remove the skin bits etc. You can see the strainer and bowl in the upper right of the right hand picture. I had a moment of temptation to buy blueberry juice, but the resulting “juice” was a thicker concentrate and I don’t think store bought juice would work, although it would have produced smoother results. Perhaps if one reduced it down by boiling. Once you have the juice, you cook it with the sugar, eggs, and a bit of salt, then pour the hot liquid over the butter. Nice taste but not as thick as I would like for this purpose, so I’d either try a different recipe or tweak this one should I make them again.

I made lemon curd to go on the other half the cookies and did contrasting glazes on both. You might be able to see below the difference in thickness between the blueberry curd chilled over night and the slightly still warm lemon curd. The lemon glaze ended up absorbed by the blueberry curd, but the blueberry glaze remained as pictured below. But both were quite tasty.

Civil War

I was listening to On The Media about the new movie, Civil War. If you don’t know the movie, it’s about an alternative present/near future America. 

On The Media did a great segment on the movie that you can find here (the segment begins at 35:27). (Confession, I have seen the movie). As Zack Beauchamp, the guest on OTM, describes it, the movie doesn’t care about why there’s civil war. Instead it focuses on the chaos, the total loss of civilization in a civil war, “what happens when social trust breaks down completely. … Even the rules that soldiers are supposed to follow have broken down entirely. Even massacres are a thing that just happens. That’s what life is like in the context of social collapse.” It goes on to discuss how violence becomes not motivated by ideology but “by perceptions of who has control.”

There’s a quote from Thucydides that is often cited as you must know history to avoid it repeating. I always read the Greek as you need to know history to recognize what’s happening when it repeats (ὅσοι δὲ βουλήσονται τῶν τε γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν καὶ τῶν μελλόντων ποτὲ αὖθις κατὰ τὸἀνθρώπινον τοιούτων καὶ παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι, ὠφέλιμα κρίνειν αὐτὰ ἀρκούντως ἕξει. Thus. 1.22.4). And thus it seems natural that listening to this segment, I immediately thought of Thucydides’ description of the civil war in Corcyra, which had broken out admist the larger Peloponnesian War, with different factions supported by different external powers (J.M. Dent’s 1910 translation): 

[3.81.2]Corcyraeans, made aware of the approach of the Athenian fleet and of the departure of the enemy, brought the Messenians from outside the walls into the town, and ordered the fleet which they had manned to sail round into the Hyllaic harbor; and while it was so doing, slew such of their enemies as they laid hands on, dispatching  afterwards as they landed them, those whom they had persuaded to go on board the ships. Next they went to the sanctuary of Hera and persuaded about fifty men to take their trial, and condemned them all to death. [3.81.3] The mass of the suppliants who had refused to do so, on seeing what was taking place, slew each other there in the consecrated ground; while some hanged themselves upon the trees, and others destroyed themselves as they were severally able. [3.81.4] During seven days that Eurymedon stayed with his sixty ships, the Corcyraeans were engaged in butchering those of their fellow-citizens whom they regarded as their enemies: and although the  crime imputed was that of attempting to put down the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by their debtors because of the monies owed to them. [3.81.5] Death thus raged in every shape; and, as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and  suppliants dragged from the altar or slain upon it; while some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus  and died there.

Herodotus had set forth his history as an assertion of justice in the world; Thucydides chronicled the complete break down of justice in light of the wars he chronicled (his Melian Dialogue being perhaps the earliest articulation of might makes right, done as a philosophical dialogue).  Beauchamp on OTM tackles Just War Theory  as underlying the message of the movie: that war is inherently bad (due to killing) and thus “the presumption is that you should not go to war. You need to have a compelling reason to think that the world will be better after you fight.” I’m not sure I have another message here, but as wars and violence seem on the rise around the world, this seemed worth sharing. 

 

Good definition of disability

I’m sure this definition is familiar to  many, but I heard it for the first time in a student presentation during an assembly on neurodiversity. I don’t know the original source, but here’s how the student presented it: disability is one’s ability + a barrier. Their example was a wheelchair user. Getting around via a wheelchair is the person’s ability + the barrier of steps without a ramp = a disability. I really liked this positive perspective on a person having certain abilities and the dis- part is not inherent in them but external barriers set up by societal norms and expectations  (such as steps).

Introvert or Extrovert

Time once again for Long and Short Reviews Wednesday Weekly Blog hop, this time asking ourselves to answer whether we are an introvert or extrovert.

My brother years ago, self-identifying as an introvert and identifying me as an extrovert, explained the difference as being that he recharged by being alone and I recharged by being around others. I’ve always liked that definition. And his identifications weren’t without merit.

But I think we are all more complex than that.

Through much of grade/high school I was probably introverted in the sense of being shy and withdrawn socially. I only found my voice at the end of high school and in college when my family moved to Mississippi and confronted with overt racism, I found that silence = complicity, so I couldn’t stay silent. I would say I’ve acted extroverted since then, but friends/colleagues have noted they can see the introvert within me when we’ve discussed this past.

And since the pandemic, I do find myself happily a homebody a lot of time. Big, crowded events don’t appeal. Indeed, I’ve never liked huge crowds period. And, in the words of my brother, sometimes I just need to be alone to recharge. But it’s also true that being around others can really life my spirits.

So to answer the question are you an introvert or an extrovert, I say yes. 

Toni Morrison’s rejection letters

No, not the letters she received as a writer querying her own work, but those she wrote to authors when she was an editor at Random House (back in the day when authors could/would directly query the publisher). Los Angeles Book Review has an interesting post, not just on that collection and other correspondence she wrote as an editor and her responses to the consolidation of the publishing houses (which gained steam during that period, the 1970’s) and the ill-effects of this consolidation on books.

But perhaps most interesting is the craft advice of her letters. This bit caught my eye:

What Morrison repeatedly stressed, trusting her exceptional acuity as both a reader and writer, is that writing is a skill of its own—one that doesn’t automatically follow from intellectual brilliance, nor from simply being an interesting or important person. She told one young writer that his ideas were good, but warned that concept was the first and lowest hurdle he would face:

“Your work needs force—some manner of making these potentially powerful characters alive and of giving texture to the setting. Giving details about the people—more than what they look like—what idiosyncrasies they have, what distinguished mannerism—and details about where the action takes place: what is in the room, what is the light like, the smells, etc.—all of that would give us texture and tone.”

I do recommend hopping over and taking at look at the whole thing on LABR.

The Parable of the Pots

My father pointed me to this parable (apparently the actual experiment was about photography, but the originator of putting the parable out there changed it to ceramics):

There’s a famous business-book parable about “quantity leading to quality”: in a ceramics class, one group of students get told they’ll be graded on how good their very best pot is, and another group are told they’ll be graded simply on how many pots they made, without even checking their quality.

At the end of the experiment, of course, the “quantity” group had made much better pots – because they’d been working and practicing every day, so we’re told – while the “quality” group didn’t even make one good pot, because their perfectionism had stopped them getting their hands dirty and learning as they went.

This could easily be told of writing. Certainly I’ve run across many students who are so concerned about getting it right/perfect that they are stuck frozen and unable to complete their writing. It fits in with the notion of 10,000 hours to master something. Clearly you need to worry about quality along the way (editing stage for writing), but it’s important not to let that keep you from that initial stage of getting words on the page to play with and polish.