“…there’s bugger all down here on Earth!”

Colder still this morning in the Bark of Beyond, but not as cold as it COULD get and MIGHT get. -4 F/-15C and, so far, nothing going on and that’s OK with me.

I was thinking yesterday of how disoriented I still feel after the past 3 years. I feel like I live in a completely different place from the one in which I lived in 2020. Some of the people I knew — and liked! — are no longer living here, and I feel that. And I’m changed. Yesterday’s prompt was ‘recharge,’ and just seeing that word made me see what I would really like to experience, but I’m not a cell phone or computer battery. Having gotten Covid while I was in the midst of attempting re-entry didn’t help, and long covid was very strange, particularly the mental stuff. I know I’m not alone in this and I know that a lot of people have had much bigger struggles than I have had.

And the politics continues. I’d like a hiatus from elections for five years or so, just stop for a minute, but that’s not how things work. The media magnifies things that are often, in and of themselves, unimportant and everyone looks at a car wreck.

Overall, I’m dealing with it OK, but some mornings I wake up and wonder what the hell happened? I think I need to point that space heater into the studio and get to work because it’s really largely up to me what my world consists of.

That’s brilliant. The meaning of life is a question that humans debate. I LOVE that!!!

I don’t think this blog post is going to get better than that this morning, so onward and upward. I guess it’s time to thaw out my paints and bring the linseed oil into a warmer part of the house. After all, the temperature is up to 0.

Lyrics to “Galaxy Song”

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/01/26/ragtag-daily-prompt-thursday-magnify/

“Freedom!!!!!”

In the book I’ve been reading, The Spell of New Mexico, I read a line which mentions Erich Fromm, “As Dr. Fromm long since reminded us, most people try to escape freedom.” It’s in a long essay by a writer named Winfield Townley Scott — an American poet I had never heard of. His essay goes month-by-month of his first year in Santa Fe, NM. I liked it. He writes about how many people in the early 20th century (now?) were essentially ex-pats in New Mexico. Pretty much every essay in this book makes that point one way or another. We all know that there was a big art colony kind of thing going on in New Mexico during that time (still) so that isn’t new. But reading the perspectives of all these different writers has been interesting, particularly since New Mexico has played a big part in my life since I was a baby.

But…what struck me is that reference to Erich Fromm, that statement that most of us run from freedom. It made me think about freedom, particularly in these days when the word is thrown around so loudly and so shrilly by people who seem, to me, to represent the opposite of freedom. Maybe proving Fromm’s point? And now I know there’s a whole book entitled, Escape from Freedom? Again, one of those “O Brave new world,” moments and I want to read this.

Escape from Freedom is a book by the Frankfurt-born psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, first published in the United States… in 1941 with the title Escape from Freedom and a year later as The Fear of Freedom in UK. It was translated into German and first published in 1952 under the title ‘Die Angst vor der Freiheit’ (The Fear of Freedom). In the book, Fromm explores humanity’s shifting relationship with freedom, with particular regard to the personal consequences of its absence. His special emphasis is the psychosocial conditions that facilitated the rise of Nazism.

Wikipedia “Escape from Freedom”

–

I don’t know what freedom is. The little I’ve read about Fromm’s book mentions his idea that there are two kinds of freedom; negative and positive. Freedom from (negative) and freedom to (positive). I’ll take that on faith for now until I have the chance to see for myself, but it makes sense to me.

Living here in the San Luis Valley after a lifetime in a very different world and environment, I have been puzzled by freedom. I have freedom TO paint, to write, to think, but I do not have freedom to “be” in a more social sense. People around me are suspicious of “intellectuals,” and I am one. That’s not ALL I am, but I am that. It never occurred to me that this would be the case until my neighbor looked down her nose at me and called me “privileged” because of my education. This happened at the beginning of this summer. After that I saw how often it had happened in my small gestures in a more social world. I scare people.

During my training to become an intellectual (ha ha) I didn’t do all that well. I was not a star student and the coterie of brains in my graduate program seemed bloodless and vague. I have hardly ever found a kindred spirit which is all fine. An aspect of freedom is liberty from encumbrances, expectations and ties, I guess. I have learned here that people expect that I am judging them and looking down at them, and, before I understood that, I wasn’t. Now, probably, I am. Prejudice of any kind is unappealing and destructive. I don’t like it when it’s turned toward me, but who does?

I don’t expect people all to be the same. I also know where my life has taken me and that not everyone has gone there. I believe we’ve all had choices to make in our labyrinthine lives, difficulties, terrors, mistakes, opportunities — both missed and not missed — bad relationships, illness, bizarre elements of fate. Godnose what any single person has had to deal with, and as such I believe all are worthy of respect. “What a poor good thing is man after all.” Goethe

Freedom is a weird word. Personally, I think may be too obscure and absolute to be discussed in a meaningful way. I think what people want is not the obscurity of “freedom,” but liberty which is the legal protection of their rights. BUT the Far Right in this country harps on freedom all the time when what it seems to offer is authoritarianism. That makes Fromm’s book even more interesting to me.

Freedom — as a concept? As a reality? Would seem to respect the individual, and I’ve seen in recent months that the Far Right doesn’t respect individual rights/freedom, not even to decide what a woman can do with her own body or a young person can do if he/she realizes that his/her mind and spirit were born in the wrong body. Minuscule things, these two things, affecting a small, small, small percentage of the population, but they reflect respect for the most personal and individual freedoms — freedom to be ones self, freedom of physical integrity. Why should these things interest anyone but the individuals faced with a couple of pretty excruciating problems? Being prohibited from choosing what’s right for her in the case of a woman with a complicated pregnancy, or prohibited from pursuing medical intervention to make life work for young person diminishes freedom to and puts the burden on freedom from. “You don’t have to make this decision, sweet cheeks. The government will make it for you.”

And more. It seems to support a rather whimsical (friendly way to say subjective and unjust) application of the law which diminishes liberty except for the selected group and creates fear.

So, yeah, I’d say people do fear freedom. We’ll see what I think after I get the book and, I hope, read it.

EARLY Childhood Training…

Sometimes a trip up to Colorado Springs is filled with poignant moments. I lived here from the time I was 14 until I was 20, though some of that time I was “away” (85 miles) at college. A lot happened here. It’s amazing to think of the compression of events in childhood, teen years, and young adulthood. At that point in our lives we’re all in a hurry, too. To grow up, to find out “what we’re going to be,” some girls “to be a bride,” to have a family, to have a career, all these things. I remember feeling a LOT of that during the years I lived here. All that, and it seems like adulthood lasts a long time — and not.

I read a little article — a study done at Yale — last night that said scientists have found that it’s likely mammals dream of this world — earth, our species specific lives — before they’re born, kind of an intensive, pre-employment training, maybe like the simulation training astronauts have. Of course, so far the scientists were just studying mice, but it’s not difficult to imagine that even humans — who are among the slowest mammals to reach self-sufficient adulthood — would have some of that evolutionary adaptation, too. It made me wonder about if there’s more of that in prey animals than those who prey upon them. The article (“Eyes Wide Shut”) says, “Mice, of course, differ from humans in their ability to quickly navigate their environment soon after birth. However, human babies are also able to immediately detect objects and identify motion, such as a finger moving across their field of vision, suggesting that their visual system was also primed before birth. Or do prey animals have early visions of lunch and how to find it?

I was intrigued. The earliest dream I remember — and it was a recurring dream — is of going down a long hallway in a hospital. The walls were the green of hospital walls back in the 50’s. The hallway was black and white tiles. Of course, when I was 2 years old, I didn’t know that was a hospital image — or school. I had the dream from time to time until I started school. On both sides of the hallway were doors and I had to choose one. That necessity of choice made the dream a nightmare. And, I have to say, that scenario has happened over and over in my life. What is the right choice?

One thing I loved about living in the People’s Republic of China was that there were very few choices and in many things, no choice at all. The desired thing either was there or it wasn’t. If there was bread there was bread, “Ma Sa! Mien bao!” someone would come and tell me, and I’d hurry to the school bakery to buy bread. Occasionally there was yogurt somewhere in the city. I would ride my bicycle to wherever that was and buy as much as I could carry home. I would use one small bottle to culture my own yogurt from powdered milk and enjoy the rest of it as long as it lasted.

That hallway is a distinctly human metaphor and a modern one. I googled “hallway with doors,” and there was an option, “creepy hallway of doors,” and one of the first images offered was that which I’ve used as the featured photo.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2021/08/01/rdp-sunday-poignant/

Ballistic Satire

“What’s up honey? How was your day?”

“I’ve had better. Yours?”

“Oh, you know. Lots of manufactured drama.”

“Be glad it was manufactured.”

“You look kind of down.”

“I am. Look at this.” Sharon handed her husband the paper she’d found in her mailbox at school.

“WTF? They can’t be serious.”

“They are. Arming us is cheaper than hiring more security guards.”

“And you get to buy your own gun and pay for the training? Honey, you’re not the least conversant in matters ballistic and your temper when the family is here for Christmas? Yikes!”

“Yeah, that’s exactly WHY I shouldn’t be armed at all ever.”

“I know those kids can push your buttons pretty hard sometimes.”

Sharon nodded. “I agree. I don’t want to — can you imagine? The school can’t even supply fucking white board markers and erasers for a whole year, and now GUNS?”

“Whatever was wrong with chalkboards?”

“Nothing and they were virtually free once they were up. What’s cheaper than chalk?”

“OK. So you have to supply your weapon, pay for its ammo and pay for your training.”

“Yep.”

“Where’s the gun going to be kept? In your desk drawer? Locked? So you fumble around for a key while someone’s shooting?”

“They’re talking about a centralized gun locker.”

“Oh yeah, that’s smart. You get a shooter in your classroom. You raise your hand and say, ‘Excuse me Joey, but I have to go down the hall to the principal’s office and get my gun out of the gun locker’? Why?”

“I guess the idea is that in the event of a shooting we ALL go to the gun locker and THEN to the classroom that’s in trouble, an army of people in hand-knit sweaters and soft-soled shoes.”

“Those things are over in 3 minutes.”

“Reality and logic have no currency here.”

“Couldn’t you just assign a gun monitor? I bet there are already kids in your class who know all about using a gun and own one.”

“Right? Hand me that bottle of Scotch, would you?”

“You don’t drink.”

“I do now.”

***

Caveat: I’m not anti-gun. I’m not against the responsible use of shotguns, muzzle loaders or bows and arrows for hunting food. I’m equivocal about rifles but pretty OK with them for hunting. I’m good with people being trained to use firearms. I am NOT OK with weapons designed to kill people being in the possession of private individuals. I am cognizant of the difficulty — I had a student who was an arms dealer. He ended up in the penitentiary, but I actually got a ride home from him once and, without my knowing it, I was also riding with some pretty heavy weaponry. Other than the gun dealer thing, he was a very nice guy, but there was a lot of money in weapons smuggling.

I lived in a neighborhood where there was a lot of violence — including gun violence — and I saw a man die of a gunshot wound. I don’t know the story behind it — jealous husband, angry brother, drug deal gone bad — I don’t know, but he died on the street right in front of me and the Boys on Bikes. It was — sorry, no adjective.

California, around that same time, instituted gun laws that drastically reduced the number of gun-related fatalities. I am really OK with reducing that statistic. Reducing it is better than nothing.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/conversant/