Susan Orlean

I/Thou/We: A Surprised Affection

August 6, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Selfie (at Altitude),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I don’t often post one of my photos here within a few days of doing so over at Instagram, but this one felt to me to fit easily into the context of this week’s readings, as a sort of visual counterpoint.]

Here’s one of whiskey river‘s offerings over the past week:

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

In one of those rare, unironically happy coincidences with which social media sometimes blesses us, Facebook offered me a “Your Memories” item a few days ago — I’d shared it on the same day in 2017. Less coincidentally, probably, I’d also shared a chunk of it here at RAMH on the same day I posted it to Facebook (and a different chunk a couple years before that):

I came away from the [Tucson] zoo with something, a piece of news about myself: I am coded, somehow, for otters and beavers. I exhibit instinctive behavior in their presence, when they are displayed close at hand behind glass, simultaneously below water and at the surface. I have receptors· for this display. Beavers and otters possess a “releaser” for me, in the terminology of ethology, and the releasing was my experience. What was released? Behavior. What behavior? Standing, swiveling flabbergasted, feeling exultation and a rush of friendship. I could not, as the result of the transaction, tell you anything more about beavers and otters than you already know. I learned nothing new about them. Only about me, and I suspect also about you, maybe about human beings at large: We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are stamped with stereotyped, unalterable patterns of response, ready to be released. And the behavior released in us, by such confrontations, is, essentially, a surprised affection. It is compulsory behavior and we can avoid it only by straining with the full power of our conscious minds, making up conscious excuses all the way. Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls. When they are massed together, all touching, exchanging bits of information held in their jaws like memoranda, they become a single animal. Look out for that. It is a debasement, a loss of individuality, a violation of human nature, an unnatural act.
Sometimes people argue this point of view seriously and with deep thought. Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print up leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to all of them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: Be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can’t do this and keep a straight face.
Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our mind of civilization, as affection or friendship or attachment. I don’t see why it should be unreasonable for all human beings to have strands of DNA coiled up in chromosomes, coding out instincts for usefulness and helpfulness. Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.

(Lewis Thomas [source])

Addendum: Another social-media coincidence… For more on the interrelationships between humans and animals, see this Susan Orlean essay over at Medium. It made me wonder about how Thomas’s essay might have differed if he’d imagined the otters as food animals rather than objects of curiosity or entertainment.

What to Do, What to Do…

January 24, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Observer’s Paradox,” by Zach Stern (found on Flicker, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!). This photo seems to have been taken at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, during a 2012 exhibit called “Fifteen Pairs of Hands,” by Bruce Nauman. The same sign probably appears on many walls in the museum, and has nothing to do with this exhibit, per se — but the photographer has picked up on the inherent mystery of a hands-off injunction in a room whose contents all appear to defy it. If I’d been the photographer, I’d have been very pleased with myself!]

From whiskey river:

Purring
The internet says science is not sure
how cats purr, probably
a vibration of the whole larynx,
unlike what we do when we talk.
Less likely, a blood vessel
moving across the chest wall.
As a child I tried to make every cat I met
purr. That was one of the early miracles,
the stroking to perfection.
Here is something I have never heard:
a feline purrs in two conditions,
when deeply content and when
mortally wounded, to calm themselves,
readying for the death-opening.
The low frequency evidently helps
to strengthen bones and heal
damaged organs.
Say poetry is a human purr,
vessel mooring in the chest,
a closed-mouthed refuge, the feel
of a glide through dying.
One winter morning on a sunny chair,
inside this only body,
a far-off inboard motorboat
sings the empty room, urrrrrrrhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhh

(Coleman Barks [source])

…and:

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming “This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!” we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.
It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

(Richard Feynman [source])

…and:

If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I’d have to say he can’t do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.

(William S. Burroughs [source])

[Read more…]

Read the Hints, Come at Last

February 1, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Book Art,” by Blondinrikard Fröberg. Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). The photo’s caption at Flickr says, only, “The window of the Göteborg city museum gift shop.” But the work of art which it captures seems to suggest much more about the nature of books, no?]

From whiskey river:

The Story of Our Lives
(excerpt)

5

If only there were a perfect moment in the book;
if only we could live in that moment,
we could begin the book again
as if we had not written it,
as if we were not in it.
But the dark approaches
to any page are too numerous
and the escapes are too narrow.
We read through the day.
Each page turning is like a candle
moving through the mind.
Each moment is like a hopeless cause.
If only we could stop reading.
He never wanted to read another book
and she kept staring into the street.
The cars were still there,
the deep shade of trees covered them.
The shades were drawn in the new house.
Maybe the man who lived there,
the man she loved, was reading
the story of another life.
She imagine a bare parlor,
a cold fireplace, a man sitting
writing a letter to a woman
who has sacrificed her life for love.
If there were a perfect moment in the book,
it would be the last.
The book never discusses the causes of love.
It claims confusion is a necessary good.
It never explains. It only reveals.

(Mark Strand [source])

…and:

On rare occasions there comes along a profound original, an odd little book that appears out of nowhere, from the pen of some obscure storyteller, and once you have read it, you will never go completely back to where you were before. The kind of book you might hesitate to lend for fear you might miss its company. The kind of book that echoes from the heart of some ancient knowing, and whispers from time’s forgotten cave that life may be more than it seems, and less.

(Edmund James Banfield [source: see the Note at the foot of this post]) [Read more…]

The World Was Too Much With Them All

May 17, 2012 by John 6 Comments

I just finished reading Susan Orlean‘s Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. Aside from the heart (and I mean heart) of the main story itself, after something like ten years of borderline-obsessive research Orlean managed to weave into the book dozens of little stray details about the lives and personalities of the many people whose lives drifted into and out of the great movie and TV dog‘s* orbit. Here’s one such side story.

Background: TV producer H.B. “Bert” Leonard ran into financial difficulties and ended up owing his lawyer, a man named James Tierney, a ton of cash. To partially settle the debt, he gave Tierney his shares of two TV programs whose rights Leonard had retained over the years: Naked City and Route 66. Orlean writes:

…this cinematic windfall couldn’t distract [Tierney] from his own troubles. A year earlier, in 1992, one of his clients told him he needed some cash. The client owned a number of valuable paintings, including a Monet and a Picasso, and, he explained, if the paintings disappeared, he could file a $17 million insurance claim for them. Tierney agreed to help him out. By their arrangement, Tierney broke into the client’s house and stole the paintings. Then he gave the paintings to a young lawyer in his firm for safekeeping. The young lawyer decided to stash the paintings in a warehouse in Cleveland.

Unfortunately, the young lawyer also had some problems, including a volatile ex-wife, who happened to be the first California highway patrolwoman to pose for Playboy, a jealous girlfriend, and a crack cocaine addiction. He was also, evidently, unable to keep a secret and ended up telling both his ex-wife and his girlfriend about the stolen paintings; they, in turn, both informed on him to the police, each hoping to beat the other to the $250,000 reward being offered for information on the case. When the young lawyer was arrested, he immediately pointed the police back to Tierney. Before long, Tierney ended up in prison and lost his law license, his house, and his marriage.

No word on whether either the ex-wife or the girlfriend scored the hoped-for reward. I did love this story, though.

____________________

* Technically, that should be dogs’ — plural possessive — as Rin Tin Tin was and continues to be played (in film, on TV, in hundreds of personal appearances) by a whole list of German shepherd dogs, from only one or two paternal bloodlines. The current incarnation is up to somewhere around Rin Tin Tin X or XI.