Joe Pa, the Master Coach of college football, who has guided the Penn State Nittany Lions to huge success over so many years, compiling more wins than any other coach in college football, is a testimonial to mental sharpness and longevity. He WINS even when he LOSES (as he did Saturday night with a "building year" team.) Each step that Joe Pa takes seems to be an instruction to the rest of us mortals on how to properly handle oneself.
Take half-time efficiency (and transparency).
Joe, having coached hundreds of games, is now accustomed to being asked questions about everything and anything, as he tries to escape the field for recharging his team in the locker room, where he will join numerous assistant coaches in charge of the on-field mechanics and micro-tactics. The questions, often launched hurriedly as a the questioner tries to keep pace with Joe's 80+ jog, can be about anything, especially since the queries are usually conceived by an on-the-sidelines reporter who is in charge of "color" reports--things of little interest to everyone squeezed into otherwise dead air moments in the broadcast....
So it was no surprise to Joe that he was accosted with one of these incisive little probes by a young woman wielding a broadcast microphone Saturday night, just as Joe had hit what he likely thought was the safety of the end zone on his way to his locker.
Some would have thought it a curious question, at least if it was proposed to get to the bottom of Joe's first-half strategy. It regarded a delay-the-game penalty that Joe's team took on the opponents' 3-yard-line with three seconds left.
"What caused the delay penalty???" the reporter earnestly dogged Joe with the burning controversy of the moment.....
Joe had just the right touch, just the right magic. No sneer. Just a quick little nod in the direction of the reporter, with an absolutely straight face......with maybe his glasses-magnified eyes magnified just a little larger for a fleeting moment as Joe explained the key logic of the event....
The perfect words.....with perfect regard.....but meaningful eye contact:
"They took.......too....much...........TIIIME!" (Joe Pa's emphasis.) Joe explained it softly, in measured cadence.
And, then, Joe was suddenly gone to the locker room......, his reputation for diverse genius....and apt communication.....enhanced.....once again!
Monday, October 4, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Monkey Madness at Harvard U
I've seen monkey madness before. In the middle of New York City. It was not a pretty sight.
A cool fall or spring day, about 1955, at the Central Park Zoo. Billy Chase, my fifth-grade classmate representing the Humans (the decided favorite--a fit and aggressive ten years of age--to defeat the mere Chimpanezee representative he mocked, trapped inside an iron-barred cage).
I had just spotted the small glint of meanness, or at least of mischief, in Billy's eye, as his lucky gaze dropped to the perfect weapon..... Just as quickly, he bent to retrieve it, performing a characteristic twist known well by those deft at capitalizing on a teacher's momentary distraction--particularly likely on a class trip (even with a group of class-mothers in tow.)
All was clear. Shhh!!! Billy's gaze, complete with the requisite lear, returned to the monkey-in-the-cage (with imaginary bullseye superimposed) in what had now become, in Billy's mind I am sure, a firing range. I didn't really want to see the result. It was too mean....With a momentary double-check from the corner of his eye, his missile was stealthily launched at his unspecting prey. Was a head shot out of the question? A body-blow, anything to make him hop!!!! Near his feet, even!!!! Bring him to his knees!!!Expertly launched, the projectile sailed quietly between the bars, without interference, towards the helpless "Menkey" (pronunciation preferred by Peter Sellers) trapped within the vertical black bars.....
On that day, though, the monkey was more than he appeared to be--in either Billy's mind or mine. He saw it coming! Was not supposed to be that way! Omnisciently, and quietly, the little figure dodged deftly to his left, catching the assault from the corner of his eye, and in fact calmly blocking the incoming banana-piece with his large hand, letting if fall harmlessly to the cage floor, skin intact. It should have ended there....
A disappointed Billy could do no more than check again for teacher glances, and stare about for another stray loaded banana-shell with which to spoil this creature's witless day. Billy thought no further than that....
It happened so fast! Billy, at that micro-second of a moment, was far closer to a banana than the realized. At precisely the moment that Billy's eyes furtively glanced now in the direction of his trapped quarry--at precisely a milli-second after Billy's eyes, instead of spying the helpless monkey, may have vaguely recognized a large moving yellow blob catapulting through the bars--Billy's young cranium experienced a shock wave unlike any I had seen before, radiating outward from a spot exactly between Billy's eyes, sufficient to split the banana and release its mother-load onto the furthest locations of Billy's face. It was the speed and absolute accuracy, at 20 paces, that was so convincing. In the parlance of the gridiron, this was no Y.A.Title wobbly pass, or Norm Van Brocklin looping bomb; this was a Johnny Unitas bullet straight to its target. One thing to get it between the bars at that distance, another thing to achieve a perfectly timed end-over-end hit at that range. I knew in a moment it was not an accident. Absolute accuracy never is. Nor was the evident glee of the monkey-now-turned-adversary, wildly jumping behind his protective bars, eyes and lips bulging at young Billy, in triumph and derision..... I knew, then, the monkey was not what I previously thought he was.
To complete the perfect justice of this divine moment, which only I saw, Billy's lividly-angry retrieval and preparations for final relaunch of the spent banana fragment had, this time, caught the eyes of the teacher herself. "Don't you dare!!!!!!" I looked at the monkey quickly, and saw what I saw.... He knew!!! He planned it all....in an instant! It was his world laughing at us!!! I will never forget that moment....
Billy, for his part, could barely fumble for a few words that could explain even approximately that the little guy behind the cage bars was far more devious than he appeared. "Billy! Really! You're such a story-teller!" the teacher, Miss Arp, huffed in disdain; not a chimp but a little ____..... Well, Billy never got to those words. He was hauled off to the front of the line, which the girls seemed to prefer, to experience New York City at the teacher's side for the rest of the day, and probably remembering throughout the back-flips and gestures of the little guy in the cage. This is not what I had seen in the home movies, or even the Tarzan movies!!!
I have never forgotten Billy, nor his adversarial monkey-turned-hood. Billy lurched still meaner in a few years, and maybe the showdown in Central Park had a little something to do with that. It is like sharing a secret no one else knows. Billy seemed made to persecute the benign; that the benign should suddenly erupt into something else could turn someone's world upside down. They are not what they appear to be. Not the same as the stereotyped, gummy-toothed cut-ups ambling peacefully across the screens of countless short movies in the 1940s and 1950's.
Recently, though, a more realistic image has been emerging! Primarily from a couple of seriously murderous chimpanzee gang attacks on clueless humans.
Secondarily, though, the boys (and girls) at Harvard University have gotten into it, conducting an elaborate study into the basis of cognition and morality in the mind of the monkey. At least Dr. Marc Hauser has, according to the NYT (August 21). He even wrote a "well-received" book from his work in 2006, "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong." Apparently, some of his students along the way thought a little too much was attributed to the timing of a monkeys continuing stare at a display despite the audible assault of a suddenly-emitted sound. Is that necessarily reflection? Thought? And now a Harvard faculty committee has shared similar concerns with the public, theirs mainly about "data acquisition, data analysis, data retention" and some other things. Data not gonna be the last of the news for the study either. Seems the United States attorney's office for the District of Massachusetts, according to the Dean of the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences, has taken an interest in several (8) instances of suspected scientific misconduct in the case.
Now, I know better, of course, because I still remember that little gremlin in Central Park. I still know these guys are a lot different than we think they are, and that they have a lot more going on upstairs. Maybe the bars are there because they want them there.... I'm just not sure you can find that out in a lab, attributing great things to zoned-in or zoned-out moments. Besides, the whole episode reminds me of a few other instances of purported applied-scientfic misconduct.
The first instance reaches back to a 1929 book by a famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Somoa. Turns out, according to the accounts of more than one investigator, Ms. Mead faked her entire account of promiscuous but very happy young women growing up in Somoa, in order to successfully convince society that traditional sexual mores were counterproductive. (See especially, http://jewishphilosopher.blogspot.com/2010/08/evolutionary-morality.html) Her effort proved quite successful, to judge by the behavior of succeeding American generations, Harvard not excluded according to recent reports. Turns out the nymphets of Somoa were anything but that, sharing in the values of chastity followed by the Western World at that time.
And then we have the global warming scientific scandal, in which Scandinavian scientists, at the heart of the global warming interpretation, exchanged emails that essentially admitted to a desire to smother contrary evidence. Even in the last few days, the New York Times published an article that summarized the general feeling of the scientific community that both the extreme heat of this summer AND the deep snows of this past winter can be explained by global warming--due to the added moisture absorbed by a warm atmosphere. (The article, and apparently the scientists, neglected to explain the extremely low temperatures of the past winter, AND neglected to mention the story from other sources this spring predicting several summers of very hot weather until 2014 based on increased sun flare activity just starting up!)
None of this should be any surprise. It is difficult to get the diverse data and experience of this life to fit into theories, and one alternative is to ignore or lose some of the data. Richard Hofstadter (The Age of Reform; The American Political Tradition), a highly thought-provoking historian in his day, was well-known for the sloppiness and inaccuracy of some of his footnotes, as I recall. Another, maybe Margaret Mead's choice, is to just make most of it up.....Not to say that either of those happened at Harvard. But one would think that there might be a little more scrutiny of study design and methodology at the outset, and, if I could say it, a little more respect for Monkey capabilities. It seems a little stilted to attribute great meaning to the unperturbed staring of monkeys focused on displays, when they seem capable of so much more observable behavior. (Those who stare the longest could, afterall, just be the most spaced-out.) Better to look for something more obvious and real-world. Look for a few Monkey-world ring-leaders capable of leading a pack, or at least exacting sweet revenge between-the-eyes at 25 paces.
My guess is that Dr. Marc Hauser is wise to all this. He knows that there's more there (or thinks he does) than we realize. Knows in his heart that they are just like us. But like Billy Chase, he's a little at a loss for the methods to convince everyone else of what he already knows....! Let's remember that Billy had a great reputation for storytelling to impress a target audience, and it would be a real shame if Dr. Hauser becomes famous for the same skill...
A cool fall or spring day, about 1955, at the Central Park Zoo. Billy Chase, my fifth-grade classmate representing the Humans (the decided favorite--a fit and aggressive ten years of age--to defeat the mere Chimpanezee representative he mocked, trapped inside an iron-barred cage).
I had just spotted the small glint of meanness, or at least of mischief, in Billy's eye, as his lucky gaze dropped to the perfect weapon..... Just as quickly, he bent to retrieve it, performing a characteristic twist known well by those deft at capitalizing on a teacher's momentary distraction--particularly likely on a class trip (even with a group of class-mothers in tow.)
All was clear. Shhh!!! Billy's gaze, complete with the requisite lear, returned to the monkey-in-the-cage (with imaginary bullseye superimposed) in what had now become, in Billy's mind I am sure, a firing range. I didn't really want to see the result. It was too mean....With a momentary double-check from the corner of his eye, his missile was stealthily launched at his unspecting prey. Was a head shot out of the question? A body-blow, anything to make him hop!!!! Near his feet, even!!!! Bring him to his knees!!!Expertly launched, the projectile sailed quietly between the bars, without interference, towards the helpless "Menkey" (pronunciation preferred by Peter Sellers) trapped within the vertical black bars.....
On that day, though, the monkey was more than he appeared to be--in either Billy's mind or mine. He saw it coming! Was not supposed to be that way! Omnisciently, and quietly, the little figure dodged deftly to his left, catching the assault from the corner of his eye, and in fact calmly blocking the incoming banana-piece with his large hand, letting if fall harmlessly to the cage floor, skin intact. It should have ended there....
A disappointed Billy could do no more than check again for teacher glances, and stare about for another stray loaded banana-shell with which to spoil this creature's witless day. Billy thought no further than that....
It happened so fast! Billy, at that micro-second of a moment, was far closer to a banana than the realized. At precisely the moment that Billy's eyes furtively glanced now in the direction of his trapped quarry--at precisely a milli-second after Billy's eyes, instead of spying the helpless monkey, may have vaguely recognized a large moving yellow blob catapulting through the bars--Billy's young cranium experienced a shock wave unlike any I had seen before, radiating outward from a spot exactly between Billy's eyes, sufficient to split the banana and release its mother-load onto the furthest locations of Billy's face. It was the speed and absolute accuracy, at 20 paces, that was so convincing. In the parlance of the gridiron, this was no Y.A.Title wobbly pass, or Norm Van Brocklin looping bomb; this was a Johnny Unitas bullet straight to its target. One thing to get it between the bars at that distance, another thing to achieve a perfectly timed end-over-end hit at that range. I knew in a moment it was not an accident. Absolute accuracy never is. Nor was the evident glee of the monkey-now-turned-adversary, wildly jumping behind his protective bars, eyes and lips bulging at young Billy, in triumph and derision..... I knew, then, the monkey was not what I previously thought he was.
To complete the perfect justice of this divine moment, which only I saw, Billy's lividly-angry retrieval and preparations for final relaunch of the spent banana fragment had, this time, caught the eyes of the teacher herself. "Don't you dare!!!!!!" I looked at the monkey quickly, and saw what I saw.... He knew!!! He planned it all....in an instant! It was his world laughing at us!!! I will never forget that moment....
Billy, for his part, could barely fumble for a few words that could explain even approximately that the little guy behind the cage bars was far more devious than he appeared. "Billy! Really! You're such a story-teller!" the teacher, Miss Arp, huffed in disdain; not a chimp but a little ____..... Well, Billy never got to those words. He was hauled off to the front of the line, which the girls seemed to prefer, to experience New York City at the teacher's side for the rest of the day, and probably remembering throughout the back-flips and gestures of the little guy in the cage. This is not what I had seen in the home movies, or even the Tarzan movies!!!
I have never forgotten Billy, nor his adversarial monkey-turned-hood. Billy lurched still meaner in a few years, and maybe the showdown in Central Park had a little something to do with that. It is like sharing a secret no one else knows. Billy seemed made to persecute the benign; that the benign should suddenly erupt into something else could turn someone's world upside down. They are not what they appear to be. Not the same as the stereotyped, gummy-toothed cut-ups ambling peacefully across the screens of countless short movies in the 1940s and 1950's.
Recently, though, a more realistic image has been emerging! Primarily from a couple of seriously murderous chimpanzee gang attacks on clueless humans.
Secondarily, though, the boys (and girls) at Harvard University have gotten into it, conducting an elaborate study into the basis of cognition and morality in the mind of the monkey. At least Dr. Marc Hauser has, according to the NYT (August 21). He even wrote a "well-received" book from his work in 2006, "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong." Apparently, some of his students along the way thought a little too much was attributed to the timing of a monkeys continuing stare at a display despite the audible assault of a suddenly-emitted sound. Is that necessarily reflection? Thought? And now a Harvard faculty committee has shared similar concerns with the public, theirs mainly about "data acquisition, data analysis, data retention" and some other things. Data not gonna be the last of the news for the study either. Seems the United States attorney's office for the District of Massachusetts, according to the Dean of the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences, has taken an interest in several (8) instances of suspected scientific misconduct in the case.
Now, I know better, of course, because I still remember that little gremlin in Central Park. I still know these guys are a lot different than we think they are, and that they have a lot more going on upstairs. Maybe the bars are there because they want them there.... I'm just not sure you can find that out in a lab, attributing great things to zoned-in or zoned-out moments. Besides, the whole episode reminds me of a few other instances of purported applied-scientfic misconduct.
The first instance reaches back to a 1929 book by a famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Somoa. Turns out, according to the accounts of more than one investigator, Ms. Mead faked her entire account of promiscuous but very happy young women growing up in Somoa, in order to successfully convince society that traditional sexual mores were counterproductive. (See especially, http://jewishphilosopher.blogspot.com/2010/08/evolutionary-morality.html) Her effort proved quite successful, to judge by the behavior of succeeding American generations, Harvard not excluded according to recent reports. Turns out the nymphets of Somoa were anything but that, sharing in the values of chastity followed by the Western World at that time.
And then we have the global warming scientific scandal, in which Scandinavian scientists, at the heart of the global warming interpretation, exchanged emails that essentially admitted to a desire to smother contrary evidence. Even in the last few days, the New York Times published an article that summarized the general feeling of the scientific community that both the extreme heat of this summer AND the deep snows of this past winter can be explained by global warming--due to the added moisture absorbed by a warm atmosphere. (The article, and apparently the scientists, neglected to explain the extremely low temperatures of the past winter, AND neglected to mention the story from other sources this spring predicting several summers of very hot weather until 2014 based on increased sun flare activity just starting up!)
None of this should be any surprise. It is difficult to get the diverse data and experience of this life to fit into theories, and one alternative is to ignore or lose some of the data. Richard Hofstadter (The Age of Reform; The American Political Tradition), a highly thought-provoking historian in his day, was well-known for the sloppiness and inaccuracy of some of his footnotes, as I recall. Another, maybe Margaret Mead's choice, is to just make most of it up.....Not to say that either of those happened at Harvard. But one would think that there might be a little more scrutiny of study design and methodology at the outset, and, if I could say it, a little more respect for Monkey capabilities. It seems a little stilted to attribute great meaning to the unperturbed staring of monkeys focused on displays, when they seem capable of so much more observable behavior. (Those who stare the longest could, afterall, just be the most spaced-out.) Better to look for something more obvious and real-world. Look for a few Monkey-world ring-leaders capable of leading a pack, or at least exacting sweet revenge between-the-eyes at 25 paces.
My guess is that Dr. Marc Hauser is wise to all this. He knows that there's more there (or thinks he does) than we realize. Knows in his heart that they are just like us. But like Billy Chase, he's a little at a loss for the methods to convince everyone else of what he already knows....! Let's remember that Billy had a great reputation for storytelling to impress a target audience, and it would be a real shame if Dr. Hauser becomes famous for the same skill...
Monday, August 16, 2010
Raphael's Secret
Raphael’s Secret
Choosing a Pet Companion
"Cats and dogs living together!!!!" It was the most hilarious line in Bill Murray's earth-threatening definition of "A disaster of Biblical proportions!" [Ghostbusters (1984)]. It was at that point in the phantasmic tale that we realized, however much in spoof, that things truly might be coming apart...And we know just the same thing when angry clouds release furiously over our heads in the lightning and thunder of a chaotic summer storm that threatens to raise the rafters and drown us while doing so: "MY GOD, IT'S RAINING CATS AND DOGS OUTSIDE!!!!!"
We know in our hearts how different the two are--sly cats and vicious dogs….
However, in reality, the two species can live very peacefully under the same roof, as our Siamese, Sammie, and toy poodle, Smokey, proved for ten years; as our neighbor's distinctive pumpkin-shaped (orange) cat (named, of course, "Pumkin," and pinkish-nosed Border collie (who ran like a Blaze around cars...) proved for years (both before departing long before their years, of the "big C"). (I mourned the cat most, their owner, mourned the dog much more.) Cats and dogs are, regardless, the polar opposites of temperament, and, in fact, lifestyle. Rare is the devoted fan of both. Usually, it is either one or the other.....
In America, Fido wins.....It's interesting to wonder, "Why?"
I have to admit, I am one of the rare ones--tilted historically towards the mysteries of the mystical cat (Men are not supposed to like cats, of course: they don’t fetch, they don’t hunt, and they have failed miserably in frightening intruders away…save perhaps, for Halloween night.) Nearly everyone is engaged by the playfulness of a kitten, but my family went further in decidedly preferring the full-grown tuxedo half-Persian we lived with for 18 years--over the 5-6 dogs we tried to live with in the first half of the same time period. I think we were amazed how, wherever our frequently-moving family settled for a while, our cat, Pandy, was always able to feel at home, entertain herself, play by herself, find adventure somewhere, everywhere, through curiosity. Even if caught in the hottest of those long summer days before air-conditioning, she just basked in it and dozed—better than with any drug--as if she had just handed over a certificate to a free sauna or steamroom..... I never, ever learned to be that content in life--had too much to do to "stay afloat"--but I will always deeply admire the ability of cats to find entertainment and satisfaction in the deep reaches of themselves, seeming even to opiate themselves, for however long the day lasts….
My sister, an MD, like our Dad, has harbored up to six cats at a time, each with a wonderfully creative name I could never have conjured up, like Misses Perky Punkin, or Misses Merissa Mocalatte, or Rowdy Redbeard, the veritable pirate about whom she is now penning a book. It should be a testimonial to the level of inspiration we have received from them, putting us at one, I guess, with the wellspring of all spiritual cultures, and pinnacle of feline admirers, the Egyptians. (It is neither a secret that Christianity embodies elements pre-saged there, nor a surprise that my sister is still devoted much of her life to her version of spiritual focus and discipline. She is tuned in, just as the cats seem to be, both sublimely satisfied with the long silences apparently needed to satisfactorily beam up.)
What about the litter box? Our cat had none. It was the days before subdivisions, when everyone who didn't live on a farm, lived in-town. Towns don't pass by-laws about cats, or at least they didn't back then. Pandy (Pandora) roamed the neighborhood at night, reliably arriving on our step in the early morning, with either a prize for us in her small jaws, which she would drop on our step just as we opened the back door (a snake or mouse eliminated) or the scars of a truly terrible night-time mother-of-all-battles, in her efforts to protect what she understood to be our territory (violated by some lowly possum or raccoon too ignorant to acknowledge such clear, civilized concepts--but, unfortunately, armed with teeth sharper and bigger than hers). Of course, to be fair to her, we never got to see what the raccoon looked like in the morning. We simply imagined the skulky creature unscathed and only slightly bothered. But, for those forced to live in subdivisions, my daughter has solved the litter box conundrum by training her rescued Himalayan, "Picasso", to use properly use "the facilities"…in a separate bathroom (of course!)
But the dogs!!!! That is another story, far less gratifying: Two bit us, one by accident in Montclair NJ, in a panic from being chased a couple of blocks by the lemonade-stand folding-chair he was moored to--hot-on-his-trail, all two blocks down the hill to the really "bad" part of town. (The other biting dog was motivated from just a strikingly vile temperament that scared us every night as he growled viciously behind the door of the laundry room, and which finally came out in a quick attack as we tried to calm him one morning in the yard.) One ran away in a storm, never to return; one, a beautiful mature boxer named Blitzen, donated to us in Montclair, transferred with us to Mendham, forced us kids to get up at 5:00 am for long solitary walks every morning. The other I simply forget. Probably couldn't house-train him.
On the occasions when we sat in the evening as a family, with our father, who I am convinced still felt Mississippi dirt under his boyhood bare feet when he spoke of hunting there with .22 cartridges he loaded--on whatever terrace or porch our then-current house gave us, our dog too-often was the one who just had to be on the other side of the screen door he or she was sitting in front of at that moment....at least until he changed his mind on the other side. Pandy, on the other hand, had the adequate social prescience to remain quiet, listening to the wafting of this reconnoitering family talk, the planning of strategy, and positively enjoying the graces of dust, the oncoming breeze of the night. These were the days when the three black and white channels on TV couldn't quite compete with a family precisely parsing what the outside world had told us all this week….
And yet, America loves dogs……while cats, for their part, are in danger of being on the receiving end of rocks thrown by truly mean versions of teenagers who need to be "hardcore" to keep from feeling vulnerable. So cats know the woods and tall grass of fields at night.
Nevertheless, I have not been a real fan of dogs, for the reasons and events mentioned...until recently, until Raphi--short for "Raphael", the archangel of healing--who came into my life at just the right time.
The Platonic Ideal tells us that there is a Perfect form of “Dog” somewhere beyond our reckoning, from which all real dogs are just an entertaining variation on a theme.....I wonder if the one real Perfect Dog guides the big goofy smile--almost a knowing leer--my standard poodle directs at me every morning, which clearly says to my approach--with its head tilted to one side, and wise droopy eyes--"I know you! You'd rather just be playing ball....can't fooool me!!!! You're just a kid, like me....huh?" No worry, no protestation of higher concerns can faze him.
I finally understand. That goofy-toothy smile of his embodies the genius of dogs everywhere: the ability to bring out in us the very least sophisticated, least pretentious in us--to be as we were before we had any of the accomplishments or skills we think set us aside, and a little up, from others--any literacy that prevents us from communicating fully and openly....
Not to say that Raphi is stupid! Remember, I said he is a genius. My wife knew that when she meticulously selected him out in the country. He knows how to get the job done! When I step out onto the patio without him, he is on his hind legs, first only to tap on the glass of the door, but quickly and intensely using his big paws to flip the dead-bolt lock, or turn the knob, if I don't cooperate. And when I accidentally left him without water in the kitchen last week, he very logically solved the problem by proceeding to the water dispenser on the fridge and dispensing an adequate portion for him to drink directly with some left on the floor for his smaller friend, Smokey. Raphi knows. He's no fool. (Though I have to admit that he didn't seem like much of a genius last night at 2 am, when I found him and his smaller cohort seemingly drifting slowly in an approximate counter-clockwise circle in the laundry room--on the lake of blue detergent Raphi had managed to deliver with a strategic bite to the bottom of a yellow one-gallon container.)
I now know the main method of dogs' genius: to bring us to the real world we knew as children, near the grass, with feet in the dirt, and to fetch a morning greeting from others so inclined; to enjoy the simple things.
Their secret weapon is the Walk. The wake-up, down-to-earth walk. Sure, they can hunt too, but only a few of us are interested in that.
I remember better now what Blitzen, the regal boxer, actually did for us at that early hour out in the Mendham farm field, at 11 years old, examining the rough earth with the first hint of light, my sight drawn to the thousand-foot grand hill above our house, wondering about the huge, seemingly silent, convent there--whether anyone there was looking down on me, a speck in the eye, away from the world of school and fast-talking kids, a couple of hours in front of me--listening to the wakening of birds, and spying the outlines of the clouds.
Even then, it was just to say hello.
Maybe I always was a dog person, Raphael!
Choosing a Pet Companion
"Cats and dogs living together!!!!" It was the most hilarious line in Bill Murray's earth-threatening definition of "A disaster of Biblical proportions!" [Ghostbusters (1984)]. It was at that point in the phantasmic tale that we realized, however much in spoof, that things truly might be coming apart...And we know just the same thing when angry clouds release furiously over our heads in the lightning and thunder of a chaotic summer storm that threatens to raise the rafters and drown us while doing so: "MY GOD, IT'S RAINING CATS AND DOGS OUTSIDE!!!!!"
We know in our hearts how different the two are--sly cats and vicious dogs….
However, in reality, the two species can live very peacefully under the same roof, as our Siamese, Sammie, and toy poodle, Smokey, proved for ten years; as our neighbor's distinctive pumpkin-shaped (orange) cat (named, of course, "Pumkin," and pinkish-nosed Border collie (who ran like a Blaze around cars...) proved for years (both before departing long before their years, of the "big C"). (I mourned the cat most, their owner, mourned the dog much more.) Cats and dogs are, regardless, the polar opposites of temperament, and, in fact, lifestyle. Rare is the devoted fan of both. Usually, it is either one or the other.....
In America, Fido wins.....It's interesting to wonder, "Why?"
I have to admit, I am one of the rare ones--tilted historically towards the mysteries of the mystical cat (Men are not supposed to like cats, of course: they don’t fetch, they don’t hunt, and they have failed miserably in frightening intruders away…save perhaps, for Halloween night.) Nearly everyone is engaged by the playfulness of a kitten, but my family went further in decidedly preferring the full-grown tuxedo half-Persian we lived with for 18 years--over the 5-6 dogs we tried to live with in the first half of the same time period. I think we were amazed how, wherever our frequently-moving family settled for a while, our cat, Pandy, was always able to feel at home, entertain herself, play by herself, find adventure somewhere, everywhere, through curiosity. Even if caught in the hottest of those long summer days before air-conditioning, she just basked in it and dozed—better than with any drug--as if she had just handed over a certificate to a free sauna or steamroom..... I never, ever learned to be that content in life--had too much to do to "stay afloat"--but I will always deeply admire the ability of cats to find entertainment and satisfaction in the deep reaches of themselves, seeming even to opiate themselves, for however long the day lasts….
My sister, an MD, like our Dad, has harbored up to six cats at a time, each with a wonderfully creative name I could never have conjured up, like Misses Perky Punkin, or Misses Merissa Mocalatte, or Rowdy Redbeard, the veritable pirate about whom she is now penning a book. It should be a testimonial to the level of inspiration we have received from them, putting us at one, I guess, with the wellspring of all spiritual cultures, and pinnacle of feline admirers, the Egyptians. (It is neither a secret that Christianity embodies elements pre-saged there, nor a surprise that my sister is still devoted much of her life to her version of spiritual focus and discipline. She is tuned in, just as the cats seem to be, both sublimely satisfied with the long silences apparently needed to satisfactorily beam up.)
What about the litter box? Our cat had none. It was the days before subdivisions, when everyone who didn't live on a farm, lived in-town. Towns don't pass by-laws about cats, or at least they didn't back then. Pandy (Pandora) roamed the neighborhood at night, reliably arriving on our step in the early morning, with either a prize for us in her small jaws, which she would drop on our step just as we opened the back door (a snake or mouse eliminated) or the scars of a truly terrible night-time mother-of-all-battles, in her efforts to protect what she understood to be our territory (violated by some lowly possum or raccoon too ignorant to acknowledge such clear, civilized concepts--but, unfortunately, armed with teeth sharper and bigger than hers). Of course, to be fair to her, we never got to see what the raccoon looked like in the morning. We simply imagined the skulky creature unscathed and only slightly bothered. But, for those forced to live in subdivisions, my daughter has solved the litter box conundrum by training her rescued Himalayan, "Picasso", to use properly use "the facilities"…in a separate bathroom (of course!)
But the dogs!!!! That is another story, far less gratifying: Two bit us, one by accident in Montclair NJ, in a panic from being chased a couple of blocks by the lemonade-stand folding-chair he was moored to--hot-on-his-trail, all two blocks down the hill to the really "bad" part of town. (The other biting dog was motivated from just a strikingly vile temperament that scared us every night as he growled viciously behind the door of the laundry room, and which finally came out in a quick attack as we tried to calm him one morning in the yard.) One ran away in a storm, never to return; one, a beautiful mature boxer named Blitzen, donated to us in Montclair, transferred with us to Mendham, forced us kids to get up at 5:00 am for long solitary walks every morning. The other I simply forget. Probably couldn't house-train him.
On the occasions when we sat in the evening as a family, with our father, who I am convinced still felt Mississippi dirt under his boyhood bare feet when he spoke of hunting there with .22 cartridges he loaded--on whatever terrace or porch our then-current house gave us, our dog too-often was the one who just had to be on the other side of the screen door he or she was sitting in front of at that moment....at least until he changed his mind on the other side. Pandy, on the other hand, had the adequate social prescience to remain quiet, listening to the wafting of this reconnoitering family talk, the planning of strategy, and positively enjoying the graces of dust, the oncoming breeze of the night. These were the days when the three black and white channels on TV couldn't quite compete with a family precisely parsing what the outside world had told us all this week….
And yet, America loves dogs……while cats, for their part, are in danger of being on the receiving end of rocks thrown by truly mean versions of teenagers who need to be "hardcore" to keep from feeling vulnerable. So cats know the woods and tall grass of fields at night.
Nevertheless, I have not been a real fan of dogs, for the reasons and events mentioned...until recently, until Raphi--short for "Raphael", the archangel of healing--who came into my life at just the right time.
The Platonic Ideal tells us that there is a Perfect form of “Dog” somewhere beyond our reckoning, from which all real dogs are just an entertaining variation on a theme.....I wonder if the one real Perfect Dog guides the big goofy smile--almost a knowing leer--my standard poodle directs at me every morning, which clearly says to my approach--with its head tilted to one side, and wise droopy eyes--"I know you! You'd rather just be playing ball....can't fooool me!!!! You're just a kid, like me....huh?" No worry, no protestation of higher concerns can faze him.
I finally understand. That goofy-toothy smile of his embodies the genius of dogs everywhere: the ability to bring out in us the very least sophisticated, least pretentious in us--to be as we were before we had any of the accomplishments or skills we think set us aside, and a little up, from others--any literacy that prevents us from communicating fully and openly....
Not to say that Raphi is stupid! Remember, I said he is a genius. My wife knew that when she meticulously selected him out in the country. He knows how to get the job done! When I step out onto the patio without him, he is on his hind legs, first only to tap on the glass of the door, but quickly and intensely using his big paws to flip the dead-bolt lock, or turn the knob, if I don't cooperate. And when I accidentally left him without water in the kitchen last week, he very logically solved the problem by proceeding to the water dispenser on the fridge and dispensing an adequate portion for him to drink directly with some left on the floor for his smaller friend, Smokey. Raphi knows. He's no fool. (Though I have to admit that he didn't seem like much of a genius last night at 2 am, when I found him and his smaller cohort seemingly drifting slowly in an approximate counter-clockwise circle in the laundry room--on the lake of blue detergent Raphi had managed to deliver with a strategic bite to the bottom of a yellow one-gallon container.)
I now know the main method of dogs' genius: to bring us to the real world we knew as children, near the grass, with feet in the dirt, and to fetch a morning greeting from others so inclined; to enjoy the simple things.
Their secret weapon is the Walk. The wake-up, down-to-earth walk. Sure, they can hunt too, but only a few of us are interested in that.
I remember better now what Blitzen, the regal boxer, actually did for us at that early hour out in the Mendham farm field, at 11 years old, examining the rough earth with the first hint of light, my sight drawn to the thousand-foot grand hill above our house, wondering about the huge, seemingly silent, convent there--whether anyone there was looking down on me, a speck in the eye, away from the world of school and fast-talking kids, a couple of hours in front of me--listening to the wakening of birds, and spying the outlines of the clouds.
Even then, it was just to say hello.
Maybe I always was a dog person, Raphael!
Monday, August 9, 2010
Shutter at the Thought....of Reality
The Sunday Times: Extraordinary event. The review ("As Darkness Falls") by Fracine Prose of two searing novels on Nazi Germany, by centenarian (and recently retired) native-German physician Hans Keilson, rivetted our attention. One, Comedy in a Minor Key (1947) is appearing in English for the first time, and the second, The Death of an Adversary (1962) has been long out of print. Ms. Prose (author, herself, of a book on Anne Frank) cut straight to the chase in her first paragraph, unabashedly labelling Mr. Keilson a "genius." Though we will have to actually read the books to have an opinion on that, her review is engrossing in her description of Keilson's art as applied in these works to a failure among Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe to "come to grips with reality by refusing to call that reality by its proper name."
Ms. Prose's more intricate descripton of Keilson's skills in further review gave us a flash of recognition, for frightening aspects our own times, but also for another recent work of art, widely underestimated. "With seeming effortless, Keilson performs the difficult trick of showing how a single psyche can embrace many contradictory thoughts, and how naturally extreme intelligence and sensitivity can coexist with obtuseness, denial and self-deception. To say that this novel makes it impossible not to understand how so many European Jews underestimated the growing menace of Nazism is to acknowledge only a fraction of its range. In fact, the novel shows us how human beings, in any place, at any time, protectively shield themselves from the most frightening truths of their private lives and their historical moment."
One wonders how and why we do it, but we do. Do we not? Turn a blind eye to that we most fear, to imagine a better reality. Even the best of us? We are left wondering about ourselves, and how connected any of us is to our own impacts, and to the world around us, and how much a finite human being is actually served by seeing it, unless we have some means for physical escape. We are not the realistic beings we think we are. We prefer to wear blinders, to shutter ourselves from the light of truth.
We have recently seen the theme brilliantly depicted elsewhere. And only the critic John Anderson of the Wall Street Journal has appreciated the multiple levels of that incisive depiction in the aptly named, Shutter Island. The movie "requires multiple viewings to be fully realized as a work of art. Its process is more important than its story, its structure more important than the almost perfunctory plot twists it perpetrates. It's a thriller, a crime story and a tortured psychological parable about collective guilt." (As the son of a psychiatrist, I can also cast a vote for the savviness of the movie's syncing of the universal psychological/sociological theme with the narrower full-fledged turn towards medication that psychiatry began at that time--in growing recognition of the fruitlessness of bringing patients to reality via the 50-minute counselling hour alone, and with its first tools. Psychiatry today is a matter of intelligently and professionally dispensing, with adjunctive third-party counselling. Not coincidentally, during the same transitional era, many of our youth opted, for similar reasons, for self-dispensing of alternative pharms, though not always in pill form.)
And yet, most major reviewers treated the movie as a simple and, for some, disappointing scare-flick! And these are the guys whose sight should be most practiced and penetrating! Perhaps the blindness of reviewers to the deeper themes of the movie reflects in itself, the very desire to avoid seeing deeper that the movie successfully unveils to those whose sight is unfettered!
Deeply probing novels and movies, as those above, can only leave the thoughtful wondering about ourselves, about what we blind ourselves to in our own personal histories, but also about what we wish not to see about our risk in the world, and its impending future. Those who travel to abject places come back with a clearer vision, but such places are not advertised in the Travel section, so the reviewer vision born there is rare. We seem, instead, to immerse ourselves in reassuring imagery: endless old short footage reviews of The War we won (which we apparently now view as some overweening fate, in contrast to the reality that Ken Burns depicts) and the many cellulose close-escapes from danger of our daring core of Hollywood celebrities--or the "reality-bites" of Survivors who emerged alive from 30-second head-bobbings to cast another tribal vote to eliminate the strong.
Yet the world seems forever filled with darker forces bent on imposing their will, even through atrocity, for their own belief. Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, and those who weilded the sword over 200,000 in Nanking, have been banished from this earth in name only. Technological advances in vision does not always advance our vision of reality. The 1930s used movie screens not for vision, but to escape from the world outside, and what was coming, save for the scripted newsreel. Some of the unsettling stuff of the real world is available on the flat screen, but almost everyone makes the dreamscape selection that DiCaprio's character, Teddy, does. And the rulers who can create a breathtakingly beautiful and synchronized Olympic introduction are the same ones who send trainloads now to commercially exploit the Tibet whose spirituality was trampled by an army. More trivially, movie celebrities with notoriously nasty and dictatorial personalities are worshipped equally with the apparently kind. Same as it has always been.
Reality is not a popular genre these days.
Ms. Prose's more intricate descripton of Keilson's skills in further review gave us a flash of recognition, for frightening aspects our own times, but also for another recent work of art, widely underestimated. "With seeming effortless, Keilson performs the difficult trick of showing how a single psyche can embrace many contradictory thoughts, and how naturally extreme intelligence and sensitivity can coexist with obtuseness, denial and self-deception. To say that this novel makes it impossible not to understand how so many European Jews underestimated the growing menace of Nazism is to acknowledge only a fraction of its range. In fact, the novel shows us how human beings, in any place, at any time, protectively shield themselves from the most frightening truths of their private lives and their historical moment."
One wonders how and why we do it, but we do. Do we not? Turn a blind eye to that we most fear, to imagine a better reality. Even the best of us? We are left wondering about ourselves, and how connected any of us is to our own impacts, and to the world around us, and how much a finite human being is actually served by seeing it, unless we have some means for physical escape. We are not the realistic beings we think we are. We prefer to wear blinders, to shutter ourselves from the light of truth.
We have recently seen the theme brilliantly depicted elsewhere. And only the critic John Anderson of the Wall Street Journal has appreciated the multiple levels of that incisive depiction in the aptly named, Shutter Island. The movie "requires multiple viewings to be fully realized as a work of art. Its process is more important than its story, its structure more important than the almost perfunctory plot twists it perpetrates. It's a thriller, a crime story and a tortured psychological parable about collective guilt." (As the son of a psychiatrist, I can also cast a vote for the savviness of the movie's syncing of the universal psychological/sociological theme with the narrower full-fledged turn towards medication that psychiatry began at that time--in growing recognition of the fruitlessness of bringing patients to reality via the 50-minute counselling hour alone, and with its first tools. Psychiatry today is a matter of intelligently and professionally dispensing, with adjunctive third-party counselling. Not coincidentally, during the same transitional era, many of our youth opted, for similar reasons, for self-dispensing of alternative pharms, though not always in pill form.)
And yet, most major reviewers treated the movie as a simple and, for some, disappointing scare-flick! And these are the guys whose sight should be most practiced and penetrating! Perhaps the blindness of reviewers to the deeper themes of the movie reflects in itself, the very desire to avoid seeing deeper that the movie successfully unveils to those whose sight is unfettered!
Deeply probing novels and movies, as those above, can only leave the thoughtful wondering about ourselves, about what we blind ourselves to in our own personal histories, but also about what we wish not to see about our risk in the world, and its impending future. Those who travel to abject places come back with a clearer vision, but such places are not advertised in the Travel section, so the reviewer vision born there is rare. We seem, instead, to immerse ourselves in reassuring imagery: endless old short footage reviews of The War we won (which we apparently now view as some overweening fate, in contrast to the reality that Ken Burns depicts) and the many cellulose close-escapes from danger of our daring core of Hollywood celebrities--or the "reality-bites" of Survivors who emerged alive from 30-second head-bobbings to cast another tribal vote to eliminate the strong.
Yet the world seems forever filled with darker forces bent on imposing their will, even through atrocity, for their own belief. Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, and those who weilded the sword over 200,000 in Nanking, have been banished from this earth in name only. Technological advances in vision does not always advance our vision of reality. The 1930s used movie screens not for vision, but to escape from the world outside, and what was coming, save for the scripted newsreel. Some of the unsettling stuff of the real world is available on the flat screen, but almost everyone makes the dreamscape selection that DiCaprio's character, Teddy, does. And the rulers who can create a breathtakingly beautiful and synchronized Olympic introduction are the same ones who send trainloads now to commercially exploit the Tibet whose spirituality was trampled by an army. More trivially, movie celebrities with notoriously nasty and dictatorial personalities are worshipped equally with the apparently kind. Same as it has always been.
Reality is not a popular genre these days.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Increasing Image-Fixation
The evidence is ample that our society has become more concerned with imagery than substance, with image-makers more than social and political leaders with the insight and experience to direct our society in a effective manner, so critical at this juncture. In musical performance, the focus is on a spectular surreal image-maker, Lady Gaga, or on music that need not be accompanied by singing of the lyrics; in Presidential politics, Dwight Eisenhower's deep executive experience would have little chance today, in the face of an inexperienced idealist with a gift for reading stirring phrases from a teleprompter, nor could Mamie hold a candle to Mrs. Obama's beautiful arms--it is difficult to imagine a partially bald man being elected; A&E Biography, which once detailed the heroic lives of those whose struggle and skills paved the way for us, now adheres to the success principal of featuring ONLY movie celebrities--whose lives, of course, consist of pretending to be other people. TV gives its Emmy Awards to a medical show that skims over surgery on their way to various places to have sex; the award-strewn male version is a show that is able to elicit laughs by depicting mindless fixation on physically beautiful women and endless transparent maneuvers to get them into bed.
These developments do not bode well for our success as a society. Ortega y Gasset, in Revolt of the Masses (1929), indicated that the increasing socio-economic leveling of democratic societies leaves control in the hands of the Mass-Man, who little knows nor cares about the governing knowledge and principles necessary to lead economies and societies to success. Slogans of liberation are sufficient. Our society appears increasingly satisfied with merely the fantasy of success represented by personalities with glamorous images. We cannot succeed domestically or internationally with that life-threatening delusion.
These developments do not bode well for our success as a society. Ortega y Gasset, in Revolt of the Masses (1929), indicated that the increasing socio-economic leveling of democratic societies leaves control in the hands of the Mass-Man, who little knows nor cares about the governing knowledge and principles necessary to lead economies and societies to success. Slogans of liberation are sufficient. Our society appears increasingly satisfied with merely the fantasy of success represented by personalities with glamorous images. We cannot succeed domestically or internationally with that life-threatening delusion.
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