Tag: children

On Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.’

On Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.’

All art is designed to alter the audience’s minds.

Even more accurately: all art is designed to alter the physical structure of the audience’s brains.

Art reshapes the biological world. And from that foundation, perchance, art can change the world at large as well.

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At the simplest level, the changes wrought by art are memories. Each new memory is created through physical changes in the composition of our brains – freshly pruned connections between neurons, or new synapses that begin reaching out from one cell to another. The pair become more or less likely to fire in concert.

If ever an artwork doesn’t change the physical structure of your brain, then you won’t recall having experienced it. If you happen to see that painting, read that book, or hear that song again, it’ll be as though it were the first time.

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Most artists hope to create works that will make more significant changes in their audience. Not just that the artwork will remembered, but that the audience might think of the world differently, perhaps even act upon newfound philosophical priorities.

I played a lot of video games while growing up, including first-person shooters like Wolfenstein, Doom II, and Golden Eye. But despite the plethora of violence that I immersed myself in – artworks that constantly suggested I could murder my problems – I’ve never wanted to hold a gun. Luckily, video games didn’t change my brain that way.

But a peculiar commonality between all the video games I played did fundamentally alter my view of the world.

By the time I started playing, most computer games had save functions. A player could create a backup copy of their game’s progress just before a tricky section, and then the player could repeat the ensuing challenge again and again, loading the saved copy after each new mistake while attempting to complete that section of the game perfectly. (A mid-nineties rock album – I believe by the band Ben Folds Five – toyed with this idea of computerized perfection by claiming in the liner notes that each measure of every song was recorded in a separate take, all to give listeners an experience absolutely free of musical mistakes.)

Over many years playing video games, I grew so accustomed to this opportunity to save my progress and repeat sections again and again – whether in openly violent games like Doom and Diablo, in games where the violence was partially abstracted like Civilization 2, or even in peaceable games like Sim City and Sierra’s pinball simulator – that I felt confident whenever I played. I was absolutely certain that I’d eventually get things right.

In video games, a player could always try again.

And so an awful feeling gnawed at me when things went wrong in my day-to-day life, outside the world of games. Whether it was asking someone to prom, running poorly in a track meet, going through a bad collegiate break-up, or a depressed semester that culminated with my research advisor asking for a progress report about the work I (hadn’t) done in his laboratory: I wanted to reload my save file. If I were playing a game, then I’d be prepared. I could zip back and attempt the previous few hours – or months – again.

With repetition, I’d get it right.

Which isn’t a desire to re-live the past, exactly. Instead, video games cultivate a desire to bring all our present knowledge with us. The past, but blessed with portents from an unrealized future. If I’d gotten to try again, I would’ve been a different person – wiser, more experienced – who could make different choices from my prior self and thereby reap a more glorious present.

In his game Braid, Jonathan Blow describes this dream:

Tim and the princess lounge in the castle garden, laughing together, giving names to the colorful birds. Their mistakes are hidden from each other, tucked away between the folds of time, safe.

While playing Braid, players don’t even have to save their game. There are six buttons: left, right, up, down, jump, & “rewind time.” With any mistake – the game’s protagonist tumbling aflame toward the bottom of the screen – a player simply presses “rewind time” and tries again.

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Even midway through my life, I still experience this misguided desire. Perhaps it’s worse in people predisposed toward rumination. I find myself thinking about how phenomenally well I could re-live my youth, if I were able to keep my knowledge from all this practice that I’ve had living but was somehow given the chance to try again.

And that, to me, is the most horrible fallout from playing video games. They inculcated such a strong expectation that there would always be identical second chances. Not just the potential for forgiveness or redemption, but an opportunity for repetition until perfection.

I assume this sensation was experienced by people even before anyone played video games. I also assume it’s stronger now. And commoner.

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Still, there are certain types of artistic messages that video games convey more adroitly than any other media. When we play a game, we control what happens. Our impulses are reflected in movements on a screen. This is a powerful way to engender empathy.

First-person narration in books does something similar. At times I cringed, but I still thrilled at the protagonist’s misbehavior in Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! because I’d felt welcomed into her experiences. (A bold novel, since our culture considers Bukowskian misbehavior to be much less acceptable if described from a woman’s perspective – Anna Kavan’s Julia and the Bazooka was never granted the same cachet as William Burrough’s Naked Lunch.)

Even with the mind-control fungus in Hiron Ennes’s Leech, the first-person narration swayed me to root for the fungus’s destructively selfish pursuits.

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Nearly all the games made by the designers at the heart of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow have narratives that are rigidly circumscribed. A game’s protagonist might jump only when the player presses “jump,” but in this sort of game – heavily scripted, with a pre-programmed “correct” way to win – players have only the illusion of choice and freedom. The artwork’s audience is forced to follow a single structured path (much like how Mario can’t even turn back to revisit areas that have passed off the left side of the screen) if they want to experience the story.

The designers in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow don’t allow emergent behaviors into their games (which are generally the most interesting and / or bizarre aspects of artificial intelligence, all the strange interactions that occur when a sufficient quantity of simple systems concurrently pursue mathematically-designated goals. A few years ago, researchers O. Peleg & colleagues found that a very basic algorithm could replicate the gravity- and wind-defying stability of honeybee clusters. And a simple word prediction model – albeit trained on a huge trove of data – creates the lifelike creepiness of chat algorithms.)

In the games described in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a player’s choice is generally to either do the “right” thing, which will allow the game to progress, or to stop playing and never reach its ending.

Which does carry an inherent drawback. Artists want for an audience to be able to experience their creations. But when that artwork is a game, many people find themselves excluded.

Recently, my youngest child started drawing video game levels on paper (despite living in a house without a television and having never played that type of game), so over spring break I invited them to sit in front of my 17-year-old laptop computer and play Braid. I thought this would be a good introduction to gaming because there’s no risk – with the “rewind time” button, the game’s protagonist can’t die.

But my kids couldn’t coordinate the button pressing required for jumping between platforms. Neither can my spouse. I think Braid is a fantastic piece of artwork, but without me sitting with them, ready to press the buttons at the tricky parts, they wouldn’t get to experience it.

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The game Limbo, like Mario, is a left to right sidescroller, and the player begins by moving through a forest world where other children have set murderous traps or will attack you when you approach. Limbo is replete with puzzles that can’t be solved without multiple attempts – often the signs of danger won’t be noticed until you’ve succumbed to them several times – forcing the player to watch their protagonist die again and again.

I felt like the experience of playing was changing me, making me inured to the game’s incessant horror and tragedy as I continued. If the final levels of the game had included puzzles in which the player had to move from right to left and construct traps to thwart the next “generation” of characters attempting to escape the forest, I think the game would’ve been more compelling. It would have had a closed circle of meaning and conveyed a powerful message about trauma and its aftereffects.

My youngest child is in a multi-age classroom where several students are lashing out in pretty terrible, disruptive ways – my kid has often sobbed at bedtime while describing things that happened. But the outbursts are coming from kindergartners and first-graders. No child that age wants to be terrible! No child wants to rage and scream and invite punishment. It takes problematic occurrences earlier in life, and not enough support in the moment, for a child to devolve to that.

A game like Limbo (with a more compelling ending) could readily teach this, because players could reflect upon the changes that had occurred in their own behavior from the beginning to the end of the game.

Video games, by putting us in “control” of characters in desperate situations, can demonstrate how close we are to ethical slips. Video games are the art form best suited to inspire their audience to reckon with their own behavior. (Admittedly, players don’t always undertake this reckoning.)

For instance, the game Grand Theft Auto 5 asks players to torture a character in order to continue the story. I don’t think that kids should have been exposed to that game, but for adult audiences, I believe there’s real value in demonstrating what regular people will do when they feel trapped or bullied into unethical behavior. In demonstrating what you might do.

There was no way to experience the rest of the game without committing torture, but then again, GTA was just a game – not getting to experience the rest of the plot isn’t a huge punishment, is it? And even so, most players chose to torture. How much more severe do you think the pressure would be if you’d devoted your life to a certain career and then felt like all your progress – your income, your identity – would be wrenched away from you if you failed to conform with a culture of unethical behavior?

Occasionally, when other volunteers visit the county jail to help with my classes, they’ve expressed disappointment afterward that I’m always friendly and polite with the correctional officers who work there. I ask about the COs plans for their weekends (at the jail, staff are typically assigned a 9-day work week, with three weekend days and a back-to-back pair of “Wednesdays” mid-week, so you never know how close somebody is to their own personal Friday). Everyone who volunteers at the jail is, like me, extremely liberal, and sometimes the other volunteers say that it feels disquieting to be chummy with the people administering state-sponsored violence and incarceration.

But it’s not the fault of anyone who work in jail. Honestly, the jail staff is in jail every day they go to work, and we live in a country where most people have to work in order to have enough to eat. (I’m very privileged, but much of my extended family has been on food stamps at some time or other, and the money always ran out before the end of the month.)

Even at jails or prisons where the staff are openly abuse toward inmates – or police departments that cultivate a culture of brutality – it’s worth considering what pressures caused people to break and behave that way.

Video games – with their twitchy dexterity challenges that cause our hearts to race – can demonstrate the ways that we, too, might break.

Playing Minecraft at the local YMCA, I watched my gentle vegan child swing a pickax at a sheep.

If I were playing, I’d probably do it, too. Just to see what happens.

The moving pixels stopped moving. The sheep became a resource.

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I haven’t learned to program yet, but the first game I make will probably be called Psalmist, where players write poems to conjure forth a deity. The deity would become the player’s character, with its controls made intentionally buggy in ways that reflected the player’s style of worship. If a player wrote something like Psalm 137 (“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”) they might reap a god wrathful enough to lunge and squash the player’s own people even as the player attempted to navigate toward an enemy city.

Automated text analysis isn’t good enough to understand poetry yet, but a simple statistical model could register the emotional tenor of the words, whether there was frantic or lugubrious pacing, tight or loose syntax.

The main problem, in making a game like that, would be a question of artistic intent: it’s easy to imagine incorporating deities into strategy games like Starcraft or Civilization, but do we need another work of art that reinforces players’ assumptions that it’s good to conquer the world? To extract every resource and crush enemies?

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Near the end of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a protagonist says,

“Art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.”

And while it’s true that all art aims to change the world, I think it’s possible to simultaneously experience both happiness and a recognition that the world has many flaws.

When my spouse and I moved into our home, I remarked that our bedroom ceiling looked wrong. “The round light fixture, the square walls, they don’t look right. There ought to be a maze.” Every time I looked at that ceiling, something felt off to me.

Then, two years later, I painted the maze that I thought should have been there all along. (I painted while standing precariously on a folding chair, and at one point slipped and dumped half a can of black paint on my face and dreadlocked hair. The next day I was telling this story to a local poet, and he said, “Oh, and it’s not like you even needed to paint it, which probably makes it worse.” Except that I did need to paint that ceiling – it hadn’t looked right to me!)

It’s not that I was unhappy then, or am blissfully happy now – we make art to make the world that we think ought to be.

Whether from a place of happiness or unhappiness, artists want the world to change.

On disillusionment and knock knock jokes.

On disillusionment and knock knock jokes.

Most children love telling knock knock jokes – the traditional call and response gives them such power.

When a child says, “Knock knock,” you have to say, “Who’s there?” That’s the system!

The jokes aren’t funny. They’re never funny. At their worst, they’re also long – “Orange-n’t you glad I didn’t say banana?”

And yet, kids know that when they say, “Knock knock,” you have to say “Who’s there?”

Until, one day, somebody doesn’t.

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In “Rational Snacking: Young Children’s Decision-Making on the Marshmallow Task Is Moderated by Beliefs about Environmental Reliability,”Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri, & Richard Aslin write that:

“When children draw on walls, reject daily baths, or leave the house wearing no pants and a tutu, caretakers may reasonably doubt their capacity for rational decision-making.”

“However, recent evidence suggests that even very young children possess sophisticated decision-making capabilities …”

The authors conducted an experiment: a marshmallow was set in front of a small child; the child was told that if they waited to eat it, they’d be given two marshmallows instead; the child was left alone in the room with the marshmallow for up to fifteen minutes.

This is a common experiment – variants have been conducted since the 1970s. In Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin’s 2013 version, each child was first shown that the researcher offering marshmallows was either reliable or unreliable. At the beginning of each child’s encounter with the researcher, the researcher provided mediocre art supplies and promised that, if the child waited, the researcher would bring something better. Then the researcher either fulfilled that promise (bringing fresh markers or cool stickers!), or came back offering only apologies and saying that the child should just use the mediocre supplies that had been in the room all along. The wait had been for naught!

During the subsequent marshmallow test, children were asked to trust this same researcher to fulfill a promise, even after being shown that the researcher wasn’t reliable.

The children who’d been disappointed were less likely to wait.

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Actually, it’s not just “knock knock” jokes – none of the jokes that children tell are funny.

And yet, parents feign excitement. We smile, maybe even laugh.

My kids are two years apart. When they were six and four, my younger child would often watch and listen and then tell the exact same joke to me.

I’d do my best to respond in the exact same way. As though surely I couldn’t know – no child wants for you to actually try to guess the answer when they tell a joke.

“I don’t know, where does a cow go for entertainment?”

Eventually a child will experience disillusionment from the world; it needn’t come from a caretaker.

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At the end of Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin’s marshmallow experiment, every child was given evidence that the researchers were unreliable. No matter if the child had waited to eat the marshmallow or had scarfed it right away, each child was given three additional marshmallows.

No child’s expectations were met. And the children who’d decided that waiting was pointless had their beliefs reinforced.

In the great scheme of things, giving children a few extra marshmallows doesn’t cause much harm. Although it’s curious that this group of researchers would intentionally undermine children’s trust in scientists.

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At the local high school, the boys’ bathroom adjacent to the cafeteria doesn’t have soap. Empty plastic shells are affixed to the wall where soap dispensers used to be.

There’s a soap dispenser in the hallway outside the bathroom. If someone wanted to wash their hands properly, they’d have to turn on a sink, get their hands wet, walk outside, use the dispenser, then walk back into the bathroom to rinse the soap off. Few students do.

The administration removed the dispensers because some students were stealing them, and, at least once, somebody urinated into the soap pouch – these students needed devious licks to boast about on social. Similar incidents happened all around the country.

The problem, several high school seniors insisted to me, is that schools were closed for a while during the pandemic, which meant that current sophomores and juniors didn’t get bullied enough during middle school.

Obviously, their theory is ridiculous – “more bullying” is never a good solution to the world’s problems. But I find it fascinating that this would be the students’ first hypothesis. That the underlying problem isn’t that children were forcibly isolated during a crucial phase of their development, nor that we’ve inundated children’s lives with addictive, psychologically manipulative smartphone apps. No, the real problem is that these young people weren’t bullied enough!

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By middle school, nearly all students will have experienced the disillusionment of having a knock knock joke batted away without a “Who’s there?” in response – I believe most middle school humor still revolves around sex, sarcasm, and dead baby jokes.

But I find it difficult to believe that young people – whose lives transitioned from in-person interactions with people their own age to transpiring almost entirely on the internet – would’ve experienced significantly less bullying during the pandemic. The internet is a nightmare!

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The best audience for a child’s knock knock joke is another child – maybe, just maybe, a child might think it’s funny to hear the turnabout from “Boo who?” to “Oh, what’s wrong, are you hurt?”

The interaction is personal, localized, and impermanent.

And when the disillusionment comes – a friend not saying “Who’s there?” – the moment is brief and private.

How much worse might it feel to have your moments of embarrassment linger in full view?

Personally, I’m embarrassed about the world we’re building for young people.

On unrequited love.

On unrequited love.

As translated by Edith Grossman, Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera begins:

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

An unhealthy longing. Unidirectional affection is often based on an illusion, with the besotted failing to see the whole complex, contradictory, living person in front of them.

Infatuation can feel overwhelming: the scent of bitter almonds, which about 40% of us can’t detect (early in my research career, a lab director counseled that “You should find some and check, you’ll be safer if you know whether or not you can smell it”) is cyanide, an agent of suicide. A release from the emotions that a person momentarily believes they cannot live with.

Throughout high school and college – bumbling through social situations as an undiagnosed, awkward, empathetic autistic person – I was prone to unrequited love. I could recognize when a classmate was intelligent, friendly, and fun; I understood less about the scaffolding of mutual care that might allow for reciprocal love to grow.

And so I grew adept at expressing unrequited affection: heartfelt handwritten letters; delivering home-cooked meals; offering compassion and care when a person I liked was sick; making fumbling offers to hold hands during an evening we spent jaunting about together.

It wasn’t love, exactly, which between adults needs both trust and the accumulation of shared memories to grow, but it was something. An imagined swirl of possibility that helped me feel hopeful about the future. In Love and the Time of Cholera, a character maintains his unrequited love for fifty-three years before finally building a reciprocal relationship:

Then [the captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

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Unrequited love is unhealthy, and it surrounds us. The world depends on our desire to care, our willingness to occasionally sacrifice our own interests for the benefit of others.

In “The Bear’s Kiss,” Leslie Jamison writes that:

Every consciousness, whether human or animal, loves differently. When we love animals, we love creatures whose conception of love we’ll never fully understand. We love creatures whose love for us will always be different from our love for them.

But isn’t this, you might wonder, the state of loving other people as well? Aren’t we always flinging our desire at the opacity of another person, and receiving care we cannot fully comprehend?

Well, yes.

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A friend recently contacted me in the middle of the night: he and his spouse just had their first child, and – surprise, surprise! – they weren’t sleeping.

“Right now,” my friend told me, “he’s quiet if he’s nursing, or if we’re walking around with him in the carrier, but other than that, he’ll wake up and yell.”

I tried to think of what cheerful advice I could possibly give. “Sometimes I’d put my kids in the carrier,” I said, “then bounce on an exercise ball while I watched TV, to trick them into thinking we were walking.”

“Hey!” shouted my six-year-old, who was drawing cartoon monsters at my feet. “You tricked us!”

“Yup,” I told her, “and you’ll be glad to know how I did it, in case you’re ever trying to soothe a baby.”

For most of human evolution, most people’s lives were intimately entwined with their whole community. New parents would have watched other people raise children. But in recent years, upper and middle class Americans have segregated themselves by age. After leaving college, many rarely spend time around babies until having their own. And then, wham! After only a few months preparation, there’s a hungry, helpless, needy being who needs care.

Those first few weeks – which hazily become the first few months – are particularly punishing because very young babies can express contentment or angst, but not appreciation. New parents upend everything about their lives to provide for these tiny creatures, and they’re given so little back. In the beginning there are no smiles, no giggles or coos – just a few moments’ absence of yelling.

Upon reflection – thinking about the handwritten letters that my spouse and I have penned in journals for our children, interspersed with bits of their art that we’ve taped to the pages; all the excessively bland meals I’ve cooked; the doting cuddles and care when their stuffy noses made it hard for them to breathe; my continued insistence that we hold hands when crossing busy streets – I realized that unrequited love was perhaps my major preparation.

“I guess it was nice,” I told my friend, “that after all those years, I finally had a relationship where unrequited love was considered healthy.”

Luckily for me, my friend was sleep deprived enough to laugh.

On magic.

On magic.

There’s broad scientific consensus that school closures hurt children, probably making a significant contribution to future increases in premature death.

There’s also broad scientific consensus that school closures – particularly elementary school closures – aren’t helpful in slowing the spread of Covid-19. Children aren’t major vectors for this virus. Adults just have to remember not to congregate in the teachers’ lounge.

Worldwide, a vanishingly small percentage of viral transmissions have occurred inside schools.

And … our district just closed in-person school for all children.

In-person indoor dining at restaurants is still allowed. Bars are still open.

Older people are sending a clear message to kids: “Your lives matter less than ours.”

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For at-risk children, school closures are devastating. A disruption in social-emotional learning; lifelong education gaps; skipped meals.

But for my (privileged!) family, the closure will be pretty nice. I was recently feeling nostalgic about the weeks in August when my eldest and I spent each morning together.

Our youngest attends pre-K at a private school. Her school, like most private schools around the country, (sensibly) re-opened on time and is following its regular academic calendar.

My eldest and I will do two weeks of home schooling before winter break. And it’ll be fun. I like spending time with my kids, and my eldest loves school so much that she often uses up most of her energy during the day – teachers tell us what a calm, lovely, hard-working kid she is. And then she comes home and yells, all her resilience dissipated.

Which is normal! Totally normal. But it’s a little crummy, as a parent, to know you’ve got a great kid but that you don’t get to see her at her best.

Right now she’s sad about not going to school – on Monday, she came home crying, “There was an announcement that we all have to switch to online only!” – but I’m lucky that I can be here with her. Writing stories together, doing math puzzles, cooking lunch.

Maybe we’ll practice magic tricks. She loves magic.

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Last month, I was getting ready to drive the kids to school. T. (4 years old) and I were in the bathroom. I’d just handed T. her toothbrush.

N. (6 years old) walked over holding a gallon-sized plastic bag.

“Father, do you want to see a magic trick?” she asked.

“Okay, but I have to brush my teeth while you’re doing it.”

“Okay,” she said, and opened the bag. She took out a multi-colored lump of clay. It was vaguely spherical. Globs of red, white, and blue poked up from random patches across the surface, as though three colors of clay had been haphazardly moshed together.

“So you think this is just this,” she said, but then …”

She took out a little wooden knife and began sawing at the lump. “This is just this?”, I wondered. It’s an interesting phrase.

Her sawing had little effect. The knife appeared useless. I’m pretty sure this wooden knife is part of the play food set she received as a hand-me-down when she was 9 months old. “Safe for babies” is generally correlated with “Useless for cutting.”

She was having trouble breaking the surface of her lump.

I spat out my toothpaste.

She kept sawing. She set down the knife and stared at the clay intently. A worthy adversary.

I stood there, watching.

She grabbed the knife again and resumed sawing. More vigorously, this time. She started stabbing, whacking. This was enough to make a tiny furrow. She tossed aside the knife and pulled with her fingertips, managing to pry two lobes of the strange lump away from each other.

“Okay,” she said, “it’s hard to see, but there’s some green in there.”

T. and I crouched down and peered closely. Indeed, there was a small bit of round green clay at the center of the lump.

“Wow!” exclaimed T. “I thought it was just a red, and, uh, blue, and white ball! But then, on the inside, there’s some green!”

“I know!” said N., happy that at least one member of her audience understood the significance of her trick. “And look, I might even get it back together!”

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N. started performing magic when she was four. T. was asleep for her afternoon nap.

“Okay,” she said, “you sit there, and I’ll put on a magic show. Watch, I’ll make, um … this cup! See this cup? I’ll make it disappear.”

“Okay,” I said, curious. We’d just read a book that explained how to make a penny disappear from a glass cup – the trick is to start with the cup sitting on top of the penny, so that the coin looks like it’s inside the cup but actually isn’t.

I had no idea how she planned to make the cup itself disappear.

“Okay, so, um, now you’re ready, and …” she looked at the cup in her hands. Suddenly, she whisked it behind her back. And stood there, looking at me somberly, with her hands behind her back.

“I don’t have it,” she said.

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Magic – convincing an audience to believe in an illusion.

This is just this.

I don’t have the cup – it’s gone.

Much of our Covid-19 response has been magic-based. We repeat illusory beliefs – schools are dangerous, reinfections are rare, death at any age is a tragedy – and maybe our audience is swayed.

But that doesn’t change the underlying reality.

The cup still exists – it was behind her back.

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Everyone will die. Mortality is inescapable.

Our species is blessed with prodigious longevity, probably because so many grandmothers among our ancestors worked hard to help their grandchildren survive.

(The long lives of men are probably an accidental evolutionary byproduct, like male nipples or female orgasms. Elderly men, with their propensity to commandeer resources and start conflicts, probably reduced the fitness of their families and tribes.)

After we reach our seventies, though – when our ancestors’ grandchildren had probably passed their most risky developmental years – our bodies fail. We undergo immunosenescence – our immune systems become worse at suppressing cancer and infections.

We will die. Expensive interventions can stave off death for longer – we can now vaccinate 90-year-olds against Covid-19 – but we will still die.

Dying at the end of a long, full life shouldn’t feel sad, though. Everybody dies. Stories end. That’s the natural arc of the world.

What’s sad is when people die young.

Children will face the risk of dying younger due to unnecessary school closures.

Children will face the risk of dying younger due to unmitigated climate change.

Children will face the risk of dying younger due to antibiotic resistant bacteria.

These are urgent threats facing our world. And we’re not addressing them.

The cup is still there.

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For my daughter, of course, I played along. I smiled, and laughed. She stood there beaming, holding the cup behind her back.

“Magic!” I said.

N. nodded proudly, then asked, “Do you want me to bring it back?”

It’ll take the same measure of magic to bring back schools.

On predictions and a scientific response to calamity.

On predictions and a scientific response to calamity.

We’re fast approaching flu season, which is especially harrowing this year.

We, as a people, have struggled to respond to this calamity. We have a lot of scientific data about Covid-19 now, but science is never value-neutral. The way we design experiments reflects our biases; the way we report our findings, even more so.

For example, many people know the history of Edward Jenner inventing the world’s first vaccine. Fewer are aware of the long history of inoculation in Africa (essentially, low-tech vaccination) that preceded Jenner’s work.

So it’s worthwhile taking a moment to consider the current data on Covid-19.

Data alone can’t tell us what to do – the course of action we choose will reflect our values as a society. But the data may surprise a lot of people – which is strange considering how much we all feel that we know about Covid-19.

Indeed, we may realize that our response so far goes against our professed values.

Spoiler: I think we shouldn’t close in-person school.

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Since April, I’ve written several essays about Covid-19. In these, I’ve made a number of predictions. It’s worthwhile to consider how accurate these predictions have been.

This, after all, is what science is. We use data to make an informed prediction, and then we collect more data to evaluate how good our prediction was.

Without the second step – a reckoning with our success or failure – we’re just slinging bullshit.

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I predicted that our PCR tests were missing most Covid-19 infections, that people’s immunity was likely to be short-lived (lasting for months, not years), and that Covid-19 was less dangerous than seasonal influenza for young people.

These predictions have turned out to be correct.

In my essays, I’ve tried to unpack the implications of each of these. From the vantage of the present, with much more data at our disposal, I still stand by what I’ve written.

But gloating’s no fun. So I’d rather start with what I got wrong.

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My initial predictions about Covid-19 were terrible.

I didn’t articulate my beliefs at the time, but they can be inferred from my actions. In December, January, and February, I made absolutely no changes to my usual life. I didn’t recommend that travelers be quarantined. I didn’t care enough to even follow the news, aside from a cursory glance at the headlines.

While volunteering with the high school running team, I was jogging with a young man who was finishing up his EMT training.

“That new coronavirus is really scary,” he said. “There’s no immunity, and there’s no cure for it.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know anything about the new coronavirus. I talked with him about the 1918 influenza epidemic instead.

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I didn’t make any change in my life until mid-March. And even then, what did I do?

I called my brother and talked to him about the pizza restaurant – he needed a plan in case there was no in-person dining for a few months.

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My next set of predictions were off, but in the other direction – I estimated that Covid-19 was about four-fold more dangerous than seasonal influenza. The current best estimate from the CDC is that Covid-19 is about twice as dangerous, with an infection fatality ratio of 0.25%.

But seasonal influenza typically infects a tenth of our population, or less.

We’re unlikely to see a significant disruption in the transmission of Covid-19 (this is the concept of “herd immunity”) until about 50% of our population has immunity from it, whether from vaccination or recovery. Or possibly higher – in some densely populated areas, Covid-19 has spread until 70% (in NYC) or even 90% (in prisons) of people have contracted the disease.

Population density is hugely important for the dynamics of Covid-19’s spread, so it’s difficult to predict a nation-wide threshold for herd immunity. For a ballpark estimate, we could calculate what we’d see with a herd immunity threshold of about 40% in rural areas and 60% in urban areas.

Plugging in some numbers, 330 million people, 80% urban population, 0.25% IFR, 60% herd immunity threshold in urban areas, we’d anticipate 450,000 deaths.

That’s about half of what I predicted. And you know what? That’s awful.

Each of those 450,000 is a person. Someone with friends and family. And “slow the spread” doesn’t help them, it just stretches our grieving to encompass a whole year of tragedy instead of a horrific month of tragedy.

If we don’t have a safe, effective vaccine soon enough, the only way to save some of those 450,000 people is to shift the demographics of exposure.

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Based on the initial data, I concluded that the age demographics for Covid-19 risk were skewed more heavily toward elderly people than influenza risk.

I may have been wrong.

It’s difficult to directly compare the dangers of influenza to the dangers of Covid-19. Both are deadly diseases. Both result in hospitalizations and death. Both are more dangerous for elderly or immunocompromised people, but both also kill young, healthy people.

Typically, we use an antigen test for influenza and a PCR-based test for Covid-19. The PCR test is significantly more sensitive, so it’s easier to determine whether Covid-19 is involved a person’s death. If there are any viral particles in a sample, PCR will detect them. Whereas antigen tests have a much higher “false negative” rate.

Instead of using data from these tests, I looked at the total set of pneumonia deaths. Many different viruses can cause pneumonia symptoms, but the biggest culprits are influenza and, in 2020, Covid-19.

So I used these data to ask a simple question – in 2020, are the people dying of pneumonia disproportionately more elderly than in other years?

I expected that they would be. That is, after all, the prediction from my claims about Covid-19 demographic risks.

I was wrong.

In a normal year (I used the data from 2013, 2014, and 2015, three years with “mild” seasonal influenza), 130,000 people die of flu-like symptoms.

In 2020 (at the time I checked), 330,000 people have died of flu-like symptoms. Almost three times as many people as in a “normal” year.

For people under the age of 18, we’ve seen the same number of deaths (or fewer) in 2020 as in other years. The introduction of Covid-19 appears to have caused no increased risk for these people.

But for people of all other ages, there have been almost three times as many people dying of these symptoms in 2020 compared to other years.

In most years, one thousand people aged 25-34 die of these symptoms; in 2020, three thousand have died. In most years, two thousand people aged 35-44 die of these symptoms; in 2020, six thousand have died. This same ratio holds for all ages above eighteen.

Younger people are at much less risk of harm from Covid-19 than older people are. But, aside from children under the age of eighteen, they don’t seem to be exceptionally protected.

Of course, my predictions about the age skew of risk might be less incorrect than I’m claiming here. If people’s dramatically altered behavior in 2020 has changed the demographics of exposure as compared to other years – which is what we should be doing to save the most lives – then we could see numbers like this even if Covid-19 had the risk skew that I initially predicted.

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I predicted that four or more years would pass before we’d be able to vaccinate significant numbers of people against Covid-19.

I sure hope that I was wrong!

We now know that it should be relatively easy to confer immunity to Covid-19. Infection with other coronaviruses, including those that cause common colds, induce the production of protective antibodies. This may partly explain the low risk for children – because they get exposed to common-cold-causing coronaviruses so often, they may have high levels of protective antibodies all the time.

Several pharmaceutical companies have reported great results for their vaccine trials. Protection rates over 90%.

So the problem facing us now is manufacturing and distributing enough doses. But, honestly, that’s the sort of engineering problem that can easily be addressed by throwing money at it. Totally unlike the problem with HIV vaccines, which is that the basic science isn’t there – we just don’t know how to make a vaccine against HIV. No amount of money thrown at that problem would guarantee wide distribution of an effective vaccine.

We will still have to overcome the (unfortunately significant) hurdle of convincing people to be vaccinated.

For any individual, the risk of Covid-19 is about twice the risk of seasonal influenza. But huge numbers of people choose not to get a flu vaccine each year. In the past, the United States has had a vaccination rate of about 50%. Here’s hoping that this year will be different.

Covid-19 spreads so fast – and so silently, with many cases of infected people who feel fine but are still able to spread the virus – that it will almost certainly be a permanent resident of the world we live in. We’re unlikely to eradicate Covid-19.

Which means that elderly people will always be at risk of dying from Covid-19.

The only way to protect people whose bodies have gone through “age-related immunosenence” – the inevitable weakening of an immune system after a person passes the evolutionarily-determined natural human lifespan of about 75 years – will be to vaccinate everybody else.

Depending on how long vaccine-conferred immunity lasts, we may need to vaccinate people annually. I worry, though, that it will become increasingly difficult to persuade people to get a Covid-19 vaccine once the yearly death toll drops to influenza-like levels – 50,000 to 100,000 deaths per year in the United States.

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I wrote, repeatedly, that immunity to Covid-19 is likely to be short-lived. Immunity to other coronaviruses fades within a few months.

(Note: you may have seen articles in the New York Times suggesting that we’ll have long-lasting protection. They’re addressing a different question — after recovery, or vaccination, are you likely to become severely ill with Covid-19? And the answer is “probably not,” although it’s possible. When I discuss immunity here, I mean “after recovery, or vaccination, are you likely to be able to spread the virus after re-infection?” And the answer is almost certainly “yes, within months.”)

And I wrote about the interplay between short-lived immunity and the transmission dynamics of an extremely virulent, air-born virus.

This is what the Harvard public health team got so wrong. When we slow transmission enough that a virus is still circulating after people’s immunity wanes, they can get sick again.

For this person, the consequences aren’t so dire – an individual is likely to get less sick with each subsequent infection by a virus. But the implications for those who have not yet been exposed are horrible. The virus circulates forever, and people with naive immune systems are always in danger.

It’s the same dynamics as when European voyagers traveled to the Americas. Because the European people’s ancestors lived in unsanitary conditions surrounded by farm animals, they’d cultivated a whole host of zoogenic pathogens (like influenza and this new coronavirus). The Europeans got sick from these viruses often – they’d cough and sneeze, have a runny nose, some inflammation, a headache.

In the Americas, there were fewer endemic diseases. Year by year, people wouldn’t spend much time sick. Which sounds great, honestly – I would love to go a whole year without headaches.

But then the disgusting Europeans reached the Americas. The Europeans coughed and sneezed. The Americans died.

And then the Europeans set about murdering anyone who recovered. Today, descendants of the few survivors are made to feel like second-class citizens in their ancestral homelands.

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In a world with endemic diseases, people who have never been exposed will always be at risk.

That’s why predictions made in venues such as the August New York Times editorial claiming that a six- to eight-week lockdown would stop Covid-19 were so clearly false. They wrote:

Six to eight weeks. That’s how long some of the nation’s leading public health experts say it would take to finally get the United States’ coronavirus epidemic under control.

For proof, look at Germany. Or Thailand. Or France.

Obviously, this didn’t work – in the presence of an endemic pathogen, the lockdowns preserved a large pool of people with naive immune systems, and they allowed enough time to pass that people who’d been sick lost their initial immunity. After a few months of seeming calm, case numbers rose again. For proof, look at Germany. Or France.

Case numbers are currently low in Thailand, but a new outbreak could be seeded at any time.

And the same thing is currently happening in NYC. Seven months after the initial outbreak, immunity has waned; case numbers are rising; people with mild second infections might be spreading the virus to friends or neighbors who weren’t infected previously.

All of which is why I initially thought that universal mask orders were a bad idea.

We’ve known for over a hundred years that masks would slow the spread of a virus. The only question was whether slowing the spread of Covid-19 would cause more people to die of Covid-19.

And it would – if a vaccine was years away.

But we may have vaccines within a year. Which means that I may have been wrong. Again, the dynamics of Covid-19 transmission are still poorly understood – I’ll try to explain some of this below.

In any case, I’ve always complied with our mask orders. I wear a mask – in stores, at school pickup, any time I pass within six feet of people while jogging.

To address global problems like Covid-19 and climate change, we need global consensus. One renegade polluting wantonly, or spewing viral particles into the air, could endanger the whole world. This is precisely the sort of circumstance where personal freedom is less important than community consensus.

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The transmission dynamics of Covid-19 are extremely sensitive to environment. Whether you’re indoors or outdoors. How fast the air is moving. The population density. How close people are standing. Whether they’re wearing masks. Whether they’re shouting or speaking quietly.

Because there are so many variable, we don’t have good data. My father attended a lecture and a colleague (whom he admires) said, “Covid-19 is three-fold more infectious than seasonal influenza.” Which is bullshit – the transmission dynamics are different, so the relative infectivity depends on our behaviors. You can’t make a claim like this.

It’s difficult to measure precisely how well masks are slowing the spread of this virus.

But here’s a good estimate: according to Hsiang et al., the number of cases of Covid-19, left unchecked, might have increased exponentially at a rate of about 34% per day in the United States.

That’s fast. If about 1% of the population was infected, it could spread to everyone within a week or two. In NYC, Covid-19 appear to spread to over 70% of the population within about a month.

(To estimate the number of infections in New York City, I’m looking at the number of people who died and dividing by 0.004 – this is much higher than the infection fatality rate eventually reported by the CDC, but early in the epidemic, we were treating people with hydroxychloraquine, an unhelpful poison, and rushing to put people on ventilators. We now know that ventilation is so dangerous that it should only be used as a last resort, and that a much more effective therapy is to ask people to lie on their stomachs – “proning” makes it easier to get enough oxygen even when the virus has weakened a person’s lungs.)

Masks dramatically slow the rate of transmission.

A study conducted at a military college – where full-time mask-wearing and social distancing were strictly enforced – showed that the number of cases increased from 1% to 3% of the population over the course of two weeks.

So, some math! Solve by taking ten to the power of (log 3)/14, which gives an exponential growth rate of 8% per day. Five-fold slower than without masks.

But 8% per day is still fast.

Even though we might be able to vaccinate large numbers of people by the end of next year, that’s not soon enough. Most of us will have been sick with this – at least once – before then.

I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but the biggest benefit of wearing masks isn’t that we slow the rate of spread for everyone — exponential growth of 8% is still fast — but that we’re better able to protect the people who need to be protected. Covid-19 is deadly, and we really don’t want high-risk people to be infected with it.

I’ve tried to walk you through the reasoning here — the actual science behind mask policies — but also, in case it wasn’t absolutely clear: please comply with your local mask policy.

You should wear a mask around people who aren’t in your (small) network of close contacts.

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I’m writing this essay the day after New York City announced the end of in-person classes for school children.

This policy is terrible.

A major problem with our response to Covid-19 is that there’s a time lag between our actions and the consequences. Human brains are bad at understanding laggy data. It’s not our fault. Our ancestors lived in a world where they’d throw a spear at an antelope, see the antelope die, and then eat it. Immediate cause and effect makes intuitive sense.

Delayed cause and effect is tricky.

If somebody hosts a party, there might be an increase in the number of people who get sick in the community over the next three weeks. Which causes an increase in the number of hospitalizations about two weeks after that. Which causes people to die about three weeks after that.

There’s a two-month gap between the party and the death. The connection is difficult for our brains to grasp.

As a direct consequence, we’ve got ass-hats and hypocrites attending parties for, say, their newly appointed Supreme Court justice.

But the problem with school closures is worse. There’s a thirty year gap between the school closure and the death. The connection is even more difficult to spot.

Even if you have relatively limited experience reading scientific research papers, I think you could make your way through this excellent article from Chistakis et al.

The authors link two sets of existing data: the correlation between school closures and low educational achievement, and the correlation between low educational achievement and premature death.

The public debate has pitted “school closures” against “lives saved,” or the education of children against the health of the community. Presenting the tradeoffs in this way obscures the very real health consequences of interrupted education.

These consequences are especially dire for young children.

The authors calculate that elementary school closures in the United States might have (already!) caused 5.5 million years of life lost.

Hsiang et al. found that school closures probably gave us no benefit in terms of reducing the number of Covid-19 cases, because children under 18 aren’t significant vectors for transmission (elementary-aged children even less so), but even if school closures had reduced the number of Covid-19 cases, closing schools would have caused more total years of life to be lost than saved.

The problem – from a political standpoint – is that Covid-19 kills older people, who vote, whereas school closures kill young people, who are intentionally disenfranchised.

And, personally, as someone with far-left political views, it’s sickening for me to see “my” political party adopt policies that are so destructive to children and disadvantaged people.

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So, here’s what the scientific data can tell us so far:

  • We will eventually have effective vaccines for Covid-19. Probably within a year.
  • Covid-19 spreads even with social distancing and masks, but the spread is slower.
  • You have no way of knowing the risk status of people in a stranger’s bubble. (Please, follow your local mask orders!)
  • Schools – especially elementary schools – don’t contribute much to the spread of Covid-19.
  • School closures shorten children’s lives (and that’s not even accounting for their quality of life over the coming decades).
  • An individual case of Covid-19 is about twice as dangerous as a case of seasonal influenza (which is scary!).
  • Underlying immunity (from prior disease and vaccination) to Covid-19 is much lower than for seasonal influenza, so there will be many more cases.
  • Most people’s immunity to Covid-19 probably lasts several months, after which a person can be re-infected and spread the virus again.

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So, those are some data. But data don’t tell us what to do. Only our values can do that.

Personally, I value the lives of children.

I wouldn’t close schools.

On childcare.

On childcare.

After my eldest was born, I spent the first autumn as her sole daytime caretaker. She spent a lot of time strapped to my chest, either sleeping or wiggling her head about to look at things I gestured to as I chittered at her.

We walked around our home town, visiting museums and the library. I stacked a chair on top of my desk to make a standing workspace and sometimes swayed from side to side while I typed. At times, she reached up and wrapped her little hands around my neck; I gently tucked them back down at my sternum so that I could breath.

She seemed happy, but it felt unsustainable for me. Actually getting my work done while parenting was nigh impossible.

And so our family bought a membership at the YMCA. They offer two hour blocks of child care for children between six weeks and six years old.

The people who work in our YMCA’s child care space are wonderful. Most seem to be “overqualified” for the work, which is a strange thing to write. Childhood development has huge ramifications for both the child’s and their family’s whole lifetime, and child psychology is an incredibly rich, complex subject. Helping to raise children is important, fulfilling work. No one is overqualified to do it.

Yet we often judge value based on salary. Childcare, because it was traditionally seen by European society as “women’s work,” is poorly remunerated. The wages are low, there’s little prestige – many people working in childcare have been excluded from other occupations because of a lack of degrees, language barriers, or immigration status.

I like to think that I appreciate the value of caretaking – I’m voting with my feet – but even I insufficiently valued the work being done at our YMCA’s childcare space.

Each time I dropped my children off – at which point I’d sit and type at one of the small tables in the snack room, which were invariably sticky with spilled juice or the like – I viewed it as a trade-off. I thought that I was being a worse parent for those two hours, but by giving myself time to do my work, I could be a fuller human, and maybe would compensate for those lapsed hours by doing better parenting later in the day.

I mistakenly thought that time away from their primary parent would be detrimental for my children.

Recently, I’ve been reading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s marvelous Mothers and Others, about the evolutionary roots of human childhood development, and learned my mistake.

Time spent in our YMCA’s childcare space was, in and of itself, almost surely beneficial for my children. My kids formed strong attachments to the workers there; each time my children visited, they were showered with love. And, most importantly, they were showered with love by someone who wasn’t me.

Hrdy explains:

A team headed by the Israeli psychologist Abraham Sagi and his Dutch collaborator Marinus van IJzendoorn undertook an ambitious series of studies in Israel and the Netherlands to compare children cared for primarily by mothers with those cared for by both mothers and other adults.

Overall, children seemed to do best when they have three secure relationships – that is, three relationships that send the clear message “You will be cared for no matter what.”

Such findings led van IJzendoorn and Sagi to conclude that “the most powerful predictor of later socioemotional development involves the quality of the entire attachment network.”

In the United States, we celebrate self-sufficient nuclear families, but these are a strange development for our species. In the past, most humans lived in groups of close family and friends; children would be cared for by several trusted people in addition to their parents.

Kids couldn’t be tucked away in a suburban house with their mother all day. They’d spend some time with her; they’d spend time with their father; they’d spend time with their grandparents; they’d spend time with aunties and uncles, and with friends whom they called auntie or uncle. Each week, children would be cared for by many different people.

The world was a harsh place for our ancestors to live in. There was always a risk of death – by starvation, injury, or disease. Everyone in the group had an incentive to help each child learn, because everyone would someday depend upon that child’s contributions.

And here I was – beneficiary of some million years of human evolution – thinking that I’d done so well by unlearning the American propaganda that caretaking is unimportant work.

And yet, I still mistakenly believed that my kids needed it to be done by me.

Being showered with love by parents is important. Love from primary caretakers is essential for a child to feel secure with their place in the world. But love from others is crucial, too.

I am so grateful that our YMCA provided that for my kids.

And, now that they’re old enough, my kids receive that love from school. Each day when they go in, they’re with teachers who let them know: You will be cared for no matter what.

On ‘Among Us’ and parenting.

On ‘Among Us’ and parenting.

Last week, I wrote a reflection on the popular social deduction game Among Us. It’s a charming game, I had a lot of fun while playing, and I probably won’t play again.

And yet.

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In Among Us, players are assigned to be either interstellar scientists, attempting to complete a variety of mundane chores in order to return home, or evil aliens who sabotage the ship and slay the crew.

While the scientists complete their chores, they have to snoop for suspicious evidence, hoping to discover which of their crewmates are secretly aliens in disguise. At plurality-vote meetings, the crew can choose to fling people out the airlocks – if that person was an alien, perhaps the sabotage will cease! If that person was actually a hapless human scientist who couldn’t convince you of their innocence, well, your team is that much closer to doom.

Soon the aliens will vote you off your own ship.

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I was brushing my teeth, staring at the black constellations of mold that have infiltrated our bathtub’s caulking. I thought, I should fix this.

It wouldn’t take so long. Scrape away the old caulking. Bleach everything. Run a dehumidifier to dry the room. Lay fresh caulk. Remind everyone not to use the bathtub that day.

An easy chore.

The chores in Among Us are all quite easy, too. The most difficult is just five rounds of the pattern-matching game Simon. Or clicking twenty asteroids as they hurtle across the screen. Most of the chores involve pressing a button and waiting.

But the chores become tense when aliens are constantly sabotaging your spacecraft. Or you might finish half a task when someone yells that they’ve found a dead body and interrupts your work with another meeting.

As I was looking at the moldy caulk, I heard that sound. The gut-wrenching alert noise, coming from our dining table.

“Ooops.”

Toothbrush still in mouth, I went to the table. Our eldest had poured a large quantity of almond milk directly on the tablecloth. Her cup was mostly empty. She was watching the milk drip from the edge of the table.

“Gmmph um dff cluff!” I said.

My kid just stared at me.

I sighed. You’re not supposed to swallow toothpaste.

I swallowed the toothpaste and said, “Get a dishcloth!”

“Ohhh,” she said, and went to the kitchen to find one. Nearly a minute passed while the milk drip, drip, dripped onto the floor. Eventually I went to get a dishcloth. My kid was sitting on the floor with several dishcloths in her lap, trying to pick her favorite.

Parenting small children is rather like Among Us. There’s an endless parade of tiny chores, each made more difficult by the fact that saboteurs are in your midst.

Except that it’s quite easy to identify the saboteurs. And I love them too much to vote them out the airlock.

Both imposters vented into the butterfly gardens … chaos is sure to follow.

On explaining religion to my child, part two.

On explaining religion to my child, part two.

When we attended my grandmother’s memorial service, my children sat in the front pew.  They flanked my mother and mostly succeeded in sitting quietly, despite having just ridden for two hours in the car.  We were proud.

The service was held inside the Presbyterian church where my grandmother worked for twenty-five years.  Large stained glass windows poured colorful light into the room. The walls were adorned with Christmas decorations.

“It’s so beautiful,” said our five-year-old.

The minister was wearing a white robe with gold trim.  Before he began to describe my grandmother’s complicated hair and meticulous proofreading, he told stories about Jesus.  “We must welcome the Lord into our heart,” he said from the pulpit. 

“Myrtle has joined Him there,” he said.

Our younger child – three-and-a-half – turned and asked, quite loudly and clear as a bell, “Which sky ghost do these people believe in?”

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Driving home from the ceremony, the song “Heaven’s Only Wishful” by MorMor came on the radio. 

“Heaven is the name of the sky ghost kingdom in Christianity.  That religion isn’t always kind toward women – there were thirteen apostles, but one was a woman and the people who wrote the Bible left her out – so there isn’t a queen in the stories about Heaven.  There’s a prince, the kid, Jesus, and there’s a king, the father, usually just called God, or Yahweh, and there’s a grandfather figure, the Holy Ghost.”

“And maybe you’ve seen in books … like in Mr. Putter and Tabby, whenever Mr. Putter really likes something he says it’s ‘heavenly.’  Which means the cake or whatever is so good that you could serve it in the sky ghost kingdom.  Even Jesus would think it was delicious.”

“His grandfather is a ghost?” exclaimed our youngest. 

She understands that there’s a difference between “sky ghost,” which is the phrase I began using to describe divinities and myths, and “ghost,” the spooky creatures that haunt Halloween.  But “Holy Ghost” sounds more like the second kind – a spook covered by a moth-eaten sheet.

“When your father said ‘grandfather figure,’ maybe he misspoke,” my spouse said.  “When people feel moved, when they see or hear something really beautiful, sometimes they say they’ve been visited by the Holy Ghost.”

I clarified.  “But that’s how people think about their grandparents – and great-grandparents, and great-greats – in a lot of religions that include ancestor worship.  Do you remember in Moana when her grandmother comes to visit her?”

Of course they remembered.  Our kids love Moana.  When they’re sick, they listen to the Moana soundtrack.  Twice a year – to celebrate special events like the winter solstice or the end of school – they watch the movie on my tiny laptop computer screen. 

“Her grandmother came and sang to her.  But her grandmother had died.  She wasn’t really there.  They drew it that way because they wanted to show you how it felt.  It was as though her grandmother had come to her, and that gave her the courage to do a really hard thing, to take back the heart all by herself.”

“Take it to Te Kā, the lava monster!”

“Yes, the lava monster.  But the difference is that in cultures like Moana’s – and Daoism in China, some Native American religions here – the ghost or spirit who visits is your ancestor.  Someone personal.  Family.  The story in Christianity is that everyone shares the same dead grandfather figure, the Holy Ghost.”

“I would want you to visit me, Mama,” said our older kid.  Which I believe was meant sweetly, like I want you instead of the Holy Ghost, and not I want you instead of my pedantic parent.

“Yeah,” agreed our younger.  “I’d want Mama.  And Te Kā!”

Ah, yes.  From lava monsters do we draw our strength.  I’ve clearly taught my children well.

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Featured image: Stained glass in Saint Nicholas Kirk in Aberdeen, Scotland. Photo by denisbin on Flickr.

On bowerbirds, process, and happiness.

On bowerbirds, process, and happiness.

We recently read Donika Kelly’s “Bower” in jail. 

I love this poem.  There’s a undercurrent of darkness as the bird constructs his pleasure dome. “Here, the iron smell of blood.”  But he is undeterred.  “And there, the bowerbird.  Watch as he manicures his lawn.”

This bowerbird has themed his edifice around sparkling bits of blue.  Bower birds incorporate all manner of found objects: berries, beetles (which must be repeatedly returned to their places as they attempt to crawl away), plastic scraps.  A bowerbird has a clear vision, a dream of which colors will go where, and scours the forest to find the treasures he needs.

Will high-contrast white in front of the brown bower bedazzle guests? Our artist can only hope. Image by davidfntau on Flickr.

Female bowerbirds raise children alone, so she doesn’t need a helpful partner..  Instead, she’ll choose someone who can show her a good time.  And her pleasure will be enhanced by a beautiful dome, a splendid arch beneath which several seconds of intercourse can transpire.

A mother-to-be typically visits several bowers before choosing her favorite.  During each inspection, the male will hop and flutter during her evaluation … and then slump, dejected, if she flies away.

Kelly closes her poem with the experience of a crestfallen artist: “And then, / how the female finds him, / lacking.  All that blue for nothing.”

I especially love the wry irony of that final sentence.  We create art hoping to be fawned over; it’d feel nice to know that readers enjoyed a poem so much that they responded with a flush of desire for the author. 

But this is rare.  No piece of writing will appeal to all readers; an author is lucky if it appeals to any.  The same holds true for painting, music, and bowers.  A bowerbird hopes that his magnificent edifice will soon be the site of his acrobatic, if brief, bouts of copulation.  But his life will miserable if he can’t also take pleasure in the sheer act of creation. 

Female tropical birds are free to select whichever male they want.  Their flirtations are unlikely to be turned down.  And because each intimate encounter is vanishingly brief, a single male might service every female in an area.  The other males, having assembled less glorious bowers, will die without ever experiencing erotic delights.

And so a bowerbird needs to enjoy his own arch.  To endure, to thole, even if no one wants to fool around with him.  Even if no one looks.  He needs to feel pleasure as he assembles those beautiful hues.  Every visiting female might quickly fly away, but all that blue will have served a purpose.

I love the poem “Bower,” but I also hope that Kelly enjoyed writing her poem enough that my opinion doesn’t matter.

After reading “Bower,” our class got sidetracked into a wide-ranging conversation about birds.  At first, we did talk about bowerbirds.  Most of the guys had no idea that birds like that existed – that an animal might make art – but one guy had seen a television show about them years ago, and the program made such a deep impression on him that he still remembered much of it.  “They really do,” he said.  “I’ve seen it.  And they showed the people nearby, somebody who was eating breakfast cereal with like a plastic spoon, and this bird flew right over and took it.  Later they found bits of it all broken up, in this weird ring around the bird’s nest.”

And then this man started talking about crows.

He gesticulated profusely as he talked, which was rather distracting.  One of his hands had about 1.3 fingers; his ring finger was missing entirely, and the others, including his thumb, ended after the first knuckle.  I wouldn’t have felt so puzzled – stuff happens, after all – except that one of his stories involved chasing somebody with a steak knife, and this was the hand he brandished.

Many of the people in jail have suffered severe physical injuries.  When we were discussing personality manipulation and mind control, someone told me that he’d been hit by a truck and that everything in his life had felt flat and emotionless ever since.  He showed me the thick scar at the top of his head: “When it happened, I guess I was out for almost a week, and it took another month before I really remembered my name.  Even then, for that first year I felt like I was back in eighth grade again.”  He was twenty-something when it happened.

Another time, I asked a man if he wanted to read the next poem and he said he couldn’t, that he was disabled, then thumped his leg onto the table.  He had a rounded stump where most people’s foot would be.  I didn’t quite see the connection between his injury and the poem, and it’s not as though we ever force people to read.  We have a lot of guys with dyslexia, and I go in with the goal of making their Fridays a little more pleasant; no reason for somebody to suffer unnecessarily.

“I was working in a saw mill,” he said.  “Planer caught me and, zzooomp.  Didn’t even feel anything, at first.”

He got a legal settlement – a few guys muttered that they’d trade a foot for that kind of money – but his pain script led to more opiates and eventually the money was gone and he was in jail and the only help he was getting was from a PD.

But, right, back to the man gesticulating wildly as he talked about birds.  “Real smart animals,” he said.  “Especially crows.”

I nodded.  Crows can use tools – they’ll craft hooks out of wire, cut twigs into the length they need for various tasks.  Their brains are structured differently from primates’, which lets them cram just as many neurons into a much smaller volume. 

Photo by Natalie Uomini on Flickr.

The guy went on: “See, I was living in a tent, and cops kept coming by, harassing me.  Cause there’d always be all this trash on the ground.  They’d say, ‘look, we know that you’re sleeping here, but you can’t just leave all this shit everywhere.’  And they’d make me clean it up.  I’d do it, but then a day or two later, there’d be trash scattered everywhere again.  I thought it must be some homeless guys or something that was doing it.”

“But it turned out these crows – they knew I was drinking, that I’d never be up before about noon – and they were raiding the dumpster out behind McDonalds.  I only found out because I actually woke up one morning to piss.  And I looked up and these crows in the tree above me, they carried tied-off garbage bags way up into that tree and were tearing them apart, looking for things to eat.  And that’s how all that trash was getting everywhere.  I’d thought it was homeless guys, and it was crows!”

Male bowerbirds can afford to be such terrible parents because they live in tropical forests where there’s an abundance of food to eat.  Crows, though, need ingenuity to survive.  Sometimes they pick apart the leavings of hairless apes below.

Because crows raise their young in much harsher environs than bowerbirds, males contribute more than just DNA.  While a mother roosts, the father will gather food.  And so he’ll try to impress a potential mate, beforehand, with his gathering prowess.  He won’t build, paint, or compose poetry, but he’ll scour the land below for tasty treats and shiny things, then leave these gifts at his beloved’s feet.

As with bowerbirds, some crows are helpful without reaping the benefits of a dalliance.  When a female crow begins to build a nest, five other crows might bring sticks and twigs.  These five won’t all be rewarded with the chance to sire her young.

With luck, the crows enjoy the sheer act of helping. 

Neither birds nor humans will be lauded for everything we do.  If we measure success based solely upon the rewards we reap, many of our lives will feel bleak.  In a world full of pyramids – bowerbird mating, corporate finance, the attention economy of social media – not everyone can be at the top.

No matter the outcome, we can all feel fulfilled if we focus on the process of what we’re doing. 

Admittedly, it’s hard to find the zen in a lot of the shitty jobs out there in the world.  But I did enjoy typing this essay.  And I will try to enjoy the irritating parts of parenting today.  Someday, my children will learn to ask for cereal politely.

On Ann Leckie’s ‘The Raven Tower.’

On Ann Leckie’s ‘The Raven Tower.’

At the beginning of Genesis, God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

“Creation” by Suus Wansink on Flickr.

In her magisterial new novel The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie continues with this simple premise: a god is an entity whose words are true.

A god might say, “The sky is green.”  Well, personally I remember it being blue, but I am not a god.  Within the world of The Raven Tower, after the god announces that the sky is green, the sky will become green.  If the god is sufficiently powerful, that is.  If the god is too weak, then the sky will stay blue, which means the statement is not true, which means that the thing who said “The sky is green” is not a god.  It was a god, sure, but now it’s dead.

Poof!

And so the deities learn to be very cautious with their language, enumerating cases and provisions with the precision of a contemporary lawyer drafting contractual agreements (like the many “individual arbitration” agreements that you’ve no doubt assented to, which allow corporations to strip away your legal rights as a citizen of this country.  But, hey, I’m not trying to judge – I have signed those lousy documents, too.  It’s difficult to navigate the modern world without stumbling across them).

A careless sentence could doom a god.

But if a god were sufficiently powerful, it could say anything, trusting that its words would reshape the fabric of the universe.  And so the gods yearn to become stronger — for their own safety in addition to all the other reasons that people seek power.

In The Raven Tower, the only way for gods to gain strength is through human faith.  When a human prays or conducts a ritual sacrifice, a deity grows stronger.  But human attention is finite (which is true in our own world, too, as demonstrated so painfully by our attention-sapping telephones and our attention-monopolizing president).

Image from svgsilh.com.

And so, like pre-monopoly corporations vying for market share, the gods battle.  By conquering vast kingdoms, a dominant god could receive the prayers of more people, allowing it to grow even stronger … and so be able to speak more freely, inured from the risk that it will not have enough power to make its statements true.

If you haven’t yet read The Raven Tower, you should.  The theological underpinnings are brilliant, the characters compelling, and the plot so craftily constructed that both my spouse and I stayed awake much, much too late while reading it.

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In The Raven Tower, only human faith feeds gods.  The rest of the natural world is both treated with reverence – after all, that bird, or rock, or snake might be a god – and yet also objectified.  There is little difference between a bird and a rock, either of which might provide a fitting receptacle for a god but neither of which can consciously pray to empower a god.

Image by Stephencdickson on Wikimedia Commons.

Although our own world hosts several species that communicate in ways that resemble human language, in The Raven Tower the boundary between human and non-human is absolute.  Within The Raven Tower, this distinction feels totally sensible – after all, that entire world was conjured through Ann Leckie’s assiduous use of human language.

But many people mistakenly believe that they are living in that fantasy world.

In the recent philosophical treatise Thinking and Being, for example, Irad Kimhi attempts to describe what is special about thought, particularly thoughts expressed in a metaphorical language like English, German, or Greek.  (Kimhi neglects mathematical languages, which is at times unfortunate.  I’ve written previously about how hard it is to translate certain concepts from mathematics into metaphorical languages like we speak with, and Kimhi fills many pages attempting to precisely articulate the concept of “compliments” from set theory, which you could probably understand within moments by glancing at a Wikipedia page.)

Kimhi does use English assiduously, but I’m dubious that a metaphorical language was the optimal tool for the task he set himself.  And his approach was further undermined by flawed assumptions.  Kimhi begins with a “Law of Contradiction,” in which he asserts, following Aristotle, that it is impossible for a thing simultaneously to be and not to be, and that no one can simultaneously believe a thing to be and not to be.

Maybe these assumptions seemed reasonable during the time of Aristotle, but we now know that they are false.

Many research findings in quantum mechanics have shown that it is possible for a thing simultaneously to be and not to be.  An electron can have both up spin and down spin at the same moment, even though these two spin states are mutually exclusive (the states are “absolute compliments” in the terminology of set theory).  This seemingly contradictory state of both being and not being is what allows quantum computing to solve certain types of problems much faster than standard computers.

And, as a rebuttal for the psychological formulation, we have the case of free will.  Our brains, which generate consciousness, are composed of ordinary matter.  Ordinary matter evolves through time according to a set of known, predictable rules.  If the matter composing your brain was non-destructively scanned at sufficient resolution, your future behavior could be predicted.  Accurate prediction would demonstrate that you do not have free will.

And yet it feels impossible not to believe in the existence of free will.  After all, we make decisions.  I perceive myself to be choosing the words that I type.

I sincerely, simultaneously believe that humans both do and do not have free will.  And I assume that most other scientists who have pondered this question hold the same pair of seemingly contradictory beliefs.

The “Law of Contradiction” is not a great assumption to begin with.  Kimhi also objectifies nearly all conscious life upon our planet:

The consciousness of one’s thinking must involve the identification of its syncategorematic difference, and hence is essentially tied up with the use of language.

…

A human thinker is also a determinable being.  This book presents us with the task of trying to understand our being, the being of human beings, as that of determinable thinkers.

The Raven Tower is a fantasy novel.  Within that world, it was reasonable that there would be a sharp border separating humans from all other animals.  There are also warring gods, magical spells, and sacred objects like a spear that never misses or an amulet that makes people invisible.

But Kimhi purports to be writing about our world.

In Mama’s Last Hug, biologist Frans de Waal discusses many more instances of human thinkers brazenly touting their uniqueness.  If I jabbed a sharp piece of metal through your cheek, it would hurt.  But many humans claimed that this wouldn’t hurt a fish. 

The fish will bleed.  And writhe.  Its body will produce stress hormones.  But humans claimed that the fish was not actually in pain.

They were wrong.

Image by Catherine Matassa.

de Waal writes that:

… The consensus view is now that fish do feel pain.

Readers may well ask why it has taken so long to reach this conclusion, but a parallel case is even more baffling.  For the longest time, science felt the same about human babies.  Infants were considered sub-human organisms that produced “random sounds,” smiles simply as a result of “gas,” and couldn’t feel pain. 

Serious scientists conducted torturous experiments on human infants with needle pricks, hot and cold water, and head restraints, to make the point that they feel nothing.  The babies’ reactions were considered emotion-free reflexes.  As a result, doctors routinely hurt infants (such as during circumcision or invasive surgery) without the benefit of pain-killing anesthesia.  They only gave them curare, a muscle relaxant, which conveniently kept the infants from resisting what was being done to them. 

Only in the 1980s did medical procedures change, when it was revealed that babies have a full-blown pain response with grimacing and crying.  Today we read about these experiments with disbelief.  One wonders if their pain response couldn’t have been noticed earlier!

Scientific skepticism about pain applies not just to animals, therefore, but to any organism that fails to talk.  It is as if science pays attention to feelings only if they come with an explicit verbal statement, such as “I felt a sharp pain when you did that!”  The importance we attach to language is just ridiculous.  It has given us more than a century of agnosticism with regard to wordless pain and consciousness.

As a parent, I found it extremely difficult to read the lecture de Waal cites, David Chamberlain’s “Babies Don’t Feel Pain: A Century of Denial in Medicine.”

From this lecture, I also learned that I was probably circumcised without anesthesia as a newborn.  Luckily, I don’t remember this procedure, but some people do.  Chamberlain describes several such patients, and, with my own kids, I too have been surprised by how commonly they’ve remembered and asked about things that happened before they had learned to talk.

Vaccination is painful, too, but there’s a difference – vaccination has a clear medical benefit, both for the individual and a community.  Our children have been fully vaccinated for their ages.  They cried for a moment, but we comforted them right away.

But we didn’t subject them to any elective surgical procedures, anesthesia or no.

In our world, even creatures that don’t speak with metaphorical language have feelings.

But Leckie does include a bridge between the world of The Raven Tower and our own.  Although language does not re-shape reality, words can create empathy.  We validate other lives as meaningful when we listen to their stories. 

The narrator of The Raven Tower chooses to speak in the second person to a character in the book, a man who was born with a body that did not match his mind.  Although human thinkers have not always recognized this truth, he too has a story worth sharing.