Reminding

    Nobody cares to be constantly reminded about something, perhaps that trait being a leftover from childhood days when parents "reminded" you to do your homework or to take a bath (showers were pretty rare back in the day).  And in many ways, that thought hit home for me due to the drop in readers on my last post, understandably so since even I tend to hesitate to continue when a warning or cautionary note appears before a video or article (although I do find it a bit ironic that in today's world we seem not to be bothered with warnings of "explicit" or "offensive" news photos or movie ratings).  After all, who wants to hear about brutality or mistreatment or poisons, especially since we're already bombarded by so much of it that at times we appear ready to lean out the car window and yell ENOUGH!  Which brings me to a book recommend, one by author Heather Havrilesky titled (of all things), What If This Were Enough.  She begins her rail against our worlds of marketing and consumption, what she partially terms "the poisons of our culture," with this: Some of these poisons lie in the most unexpected places: among our principles and values, in our private hopes and dreams, in our fears and anxieties about how we should be living and what we might never achieve, in our long-held notions of what we do and don't deserve and we should and should not accept.  Some of these poisons are embedded in the shared ideals of our culture, with its focus on constant improvement and perpetual forward motion...Thoughtfulness is misread as uncertainty; melancholy is misunderstood as a stubborn refusal to play nicely with others.  A century ago, survival was the main event.  Longing was an accepted part of existence.  Today, the inability to achieve happiness or fit in with the herd is treated as a kind of moral failure.

    Personally I have to admit that I can no longer keep up, a paean to that saying of one aging gracefully.  Acceptance has come that it is well past the time to turn over the reigns, that perhaps my boomer generation did indeed "blow it" and that despite all of my generation's protests and rallies for change, little has happened.  We're still at war everywhere, we still have corruption in government, we still have lifetime politicians locked in gridlock, we still have mass shootings...as David Byrne and the Talking Heads used to say, "same as it ever was" (an interesting and quite different view of the Vietnam war* appears in the link below).  Nootropics, purple hair dyes, circle of fifths?  Heard of them?  My point might be that despite it all seeming to both never change and to ever change, there is always something to learn; as but one example (and despite my having a bit of musical background) I didn't know a thing about the circle of fifths, something most composers and performing musicians say is essential to know (it was created 1200 years ago by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras**).  As for those purple hair dyes, again it returns to an age-old circle, one of color, and its use isn't really meant to turn your hair purple; said Good Housekeeping: Shades sitting opposite one another on the color wheel, called complimentary colors, neutralize each other...(they) deposit a sheer violet tint that helps cancel unwanted yellow or brassy tones that can develop over time from oxidation, exposure to UV rays and chemicals and minerals in water, such as chlorine and copper.

     When I write about certain things that might appear conflictive with others' views, my goal is not to shock or to glorify but rather to emphasize that we shouldn't gloss over certain things, that unpleasant as they might be, such things are happening (still happening, in many cases) and that we might also want to make sure that we should also see that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that good is out there and that change can happen.  As in the movie Coco, we just shouldn't forget that which truly matters.  Pico Iyer pointed this out in his recent book Autumn Light, writing: Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.  How to see the world as it is, yet find light within the truth.  The late Oliver Sacks, upon realizing that the cancer from his eye had metastasized and spread, wrote a short and simple book titled Gratitude (he also swam a mile every day up until he turned 80): I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but those are no longer my business; they belong to the future.  I rejoice when I meet gifted young people -- even the one who biopsided and diagnosed my metastases.  I feel the future is in good hands...My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself.  There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever.  When people die they cannot be replaced.  They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate --the genetic and neural fate-- of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death...I cannot pretend I am without fear.  But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.  I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written...Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

     Author Havrilesky writes of something similar, of keeping her father's wallet in her desk, a wallet which contained $26 and a lifetime of memories for her; and despite his short life (he died unexpectedly at 56) and his owning a condo, a new Lexus, and some investment properties, she remembers most his sticky note on which he had written his own reminder in pen that "All of heaven is within you."  Writes Havrilesky: When I take my dad's wallet out of my desk drawer and hold it in my hands, it brings me what the Japanese would call mono no aware, which translates literally as "the pathos of the transience of existence."  My father's wallet reminds me that nothing lasts.  Just when you're starting to get comfortable, you disappear.  And maybe only one or two of your things will seem important to someone else when you're gone.  That's sad, but it's also a reason to wake up to the enormity of the moment, to the unbelievable gift of being alive, right now.  You don't need more than this.  All of heaven is within you.

    Do we really need to be reminded of this, that life is worth living and that all around us are so many things (including family and friends and pets) which we take for granted.  What the heck, our hearts will keep beating...until it doesn't.***  TIME reviewed the new revival on Broadway of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird which took in more in its opening week than any play in the history of Broadway.  Says the star Jeff Daniels of the Alan Sorkin version: “You know, it’s about, where’s goodness and decency? It’s respect and honesty and truthfulness and ‘do unto others.’  Where is that?  I didn’t see it this morning.  I haven’t seen it for two years.”...added the review: Sorkin’s Mockingbird focuses less on race than on some electoral divide, with white liberals and African Americans (chiefly Calpurnia, the maid) assembled on one side, resentful whites on the other.  This Atticus gets into a physical tussle with a redneck, to cheers from the audience.  Daniels sees the hunger every night.  "Yeah, yeah,” he says.  “Remind us what’s right again?  What is ethical?  Remind us what is honest, remind us what decency looks like, remind us what compassion looks like.”  He shrugs.  “Apparently we need reminding.”
     

*Vietnam, however one pictured it, is generally viewed from the angle of U.S. history books.  In a review in the London Review of Books, Chris Mullins talks of the new book by Max Hastings which paints a very different picture, one from the viewpoint of the North Vietnamese fighters and the ordinary farmers and people caught in the war.  As but one example, he cites Hastings in writing: In August 1967 Operation Benton, which almost nobody has heard of, was a brigade-strength search-and-destroy directed against an NVA (North Vietnamese Army) regiment.  During its course some ten thousand Vietnamese in Quang Tin province south of Danang lost their homes.  In an area six miles by 13,  282 tons of bombs and 116 tons on napalm were dropped; a thousand rockets, 132,820  20mm rounds, 119,350  7.62mm cartridges and 8488 shells were fired.  An enemy body count of 397 was announced, 640 civilians evacuated to refugee camps...Such a fortnight's work may be deemed representative.  Added one farmer caught on the ground of a similar B-52 attack: The concussive whump whump whump came closer and closer...Then, the cataclysm walked onto us, everyone hugged the earth -- some screaming quietly, others struggling to suppress surges of violent trembling.  Around us the ground heaved spasmodically, and we were engulfed...From a thousand yards away the sonic roar of the explosion tore eardrums, leaving many victims permanently deaf, while the shockwaves knocked some senseless.  A bomb within five hundred yards collapsed the walls of an unreinforced bunker, burying alive those cowering within...terror was absolute.  One lost control of bodily functions.

*As with many accounts of the time, including that of those who wrote the Bible, virtually everything was passed down orally and nothing has actually been found to have been written down until one or more generations had passed.  Said the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The most detailed, extended and hence most influential accounts of Pythagoras’ life and thought date to the third century CE, some 800 years after he died.  Diogenes Laertius (ca. 200–250 CE) and Porphyry (ca. 234–305 CE) each wrote a Life of Pythagoras, while Iamblichus (ca. 245–325 CE) wrote On the Pythagorean Life, which includes some biography but focuses more on the way of life established by Pythagoras for his followers.  All of these works were written at a time when Pythagoras’ achievements had become considerably exaggerated.

***Okay, this part might indeed prove gruesome for more than a few but Mosaic wrote a rather matter-of-fact story about what happens to our bodies after we die...it's ironically, a fact of life.