Spinning Yarns

Different areas of the world are noted for a variety of things. Tibet, for example, is noted for its steep, impassable mountains, and the equally unbreachable austerity of its monastic orders. Texas is noted for its size, and the ability of the natives to pronounce the word “shit” with at least half a dozen syllables. Florida is renowned as the mecca for America’s senior citizens — and indeed, Mecca itself is probably the world’s most popular pilgrimage destination, as the home of the Ka’aba. Canterbury is famous for its immense cathedral, once itself the focus of much of the British population of Christian pilgrims; in Moscow, there is Crazy Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin. Madagascar is rightly praised just for being exactly what it is and where it is. California has mighty sequoias that make the old maple in my back yard look like a little twig in the ground.

In fact, you might well say that just about every place in the world has its own special attraction, something for which it is especially known or regarded, flocked to (or abjectly shunned) by tourists, photographed and catalogued and in all other ways duly noted. If you’ve heard of it, chances are people think it’s important for something.

This, of course raises the question, “What is New England famous for?”

There are probably a variety of answers to this question — they range all over the spectrum. For the politically minded, there is the cynically named “Massachusetts Miracle” of the Dukakis administration, or Vermont’s Bernard Sanders, the Socialist representative to Congress; for the musician, Grantham, New Hampshire is the home of the world-famous rock’n'roll band Aerosmith. Burlington, Vermont gave rise to the popular band “Phish,” which has a following almost as devoted as that of the Grateful Dead or Rush. Connecticut has the U.S. Navy’s principal east-coast manufacturer of nuclear submarines (Groton, in fact, at least during the 80’s, was considered the #1 target for a first-strike nuclear attack from the Soviet Union). Maine is well-known for its stolid, “Downeast” wisdom, and of course lobster. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. New England is also the East Coast’s primary skiing region in the wintertime, and people travel for miles to watch the leaves turn colour in the autumn.

But I would hazard that none of these is really what people remember New England for.

No, in fact, what people remember about New England is the one thing that makes all the rest of the wonders that reside here pale by comparison. I’m talking, of course, about the weather.

The old-timers around here often refer to the weather as “wait-a-minute weather” — if you don’t like it, wait a minute. It’ll change. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon for a bright sunny day to convert into a thundershower in about as long as it takes you to set up a nice, comfortable picnic out in a meadow someplace. And in about as long as it takes to pack it all back up again, the sun will probably come back out. It’s impossible to predict. It has been known to snow in June here, but at times there will be rain showers in February too.

When it comes right down to it, the only consistent thing you can say about the weather in New England is that it’s unpredictable.

Of course, as soon as you say that, you get the kind of weather we’ve been having here in Hanover for the past several weeks. With one exception that I can recall, since about the second week of June, the skies have been sunny and bright, with the usual varying degrees of cloudiness. It’s been hot, muggy, buggy, and generally all around pretty miserable. For those of us who grew up in New England, and who are accustomed to eight months of cold, this is an all-around abysmal situation.

What we most need right now is a long, hard, wet, loud, exciting THUNDERSTORM. Much to the amusement of my friends from California, who have been dealing with water shortages their whole lives, the local weather “authorities” are calling this “drought conditions.” New England is also the only place in the world where you can have what feels like 105% humidity, at the same time the grass on the verges by the sidewalks is parched, dry, and dead.

Even my poor chive plant, which, admittedly suffered the ravages of poor transplanting, has not survived. Chives grow in almost any conditions…and mine’s toast.

So I bet you’re wondering why I’ve wasted all this breath talking about New England weather, right? Well, it’s because I have this theory, about how the weather around here works. “Sure,” you’re saying, “you’re an untrained, uncultured rube living in the middle of a meteorologist’s custom hell, and you think you can predict the weather, right?” Wrong. In fact, that’s my theory. I’m firmly convinced, after living in New England for over 23 years, that any prediction made in good faith concerning the forthcoming weather in a New England state is bound to be wrong. If the meteorologist predicted sunny skies, that’s the only thing we will not have.

“But,” you’re saying, “there are millions of people in New England. Surely one of them has to be right sometimes!”

You’re right. It’s entirely possible that someone living up in Northern Maine might make predictions about the weather that would turn out to be true in western Rhode Island. But the other major fact about New England weather is that the size of an area of weather is approximately as far as a human being with reasonably good vision can see on the day in question. So it doesn’t help much.

It seems that meteorologists, in a simultaneous attempt to keep their jobs and not go completely insane, have developed a very happy-go-lucky conservatism about how they predict the weather here. For example, I recently heard the following report on Q106, one of the local radio stations:

“Meteorologist Jim Smith* says tonight, a chance of showers and thunderstorms through early evening and again toward morning. Otherwise partly cloudy. Lows in the lower to mid 60’s. Light south winds. Outside our studio it’s 85 degrees and the air is dead still, now back to the tunes here on the Q!”

*Jim Smith isn’t actually his name, but I can’t remember the name they actually used — I was too amused by the forecast itself.

What the heck does that mean? They’re predicting rain! Thus, one could nearly guarantee that’s what we will not have tonight. Furthermore, since they’re claiming the lows will get down into the 60’s, it will probably stay a hot and humid 85 all night.

But you see, this is their game. If most people believe it’s going to rain, the populational inertia is probably enough to keep it from actually doing so. And if it’s sunny instead of rainy, most people will simply chuckle at the poor meteorologist beating his balding head against the walls of his padded cell. On the other hand, if it rains on the 4th of July, for which he predicted sunshine (it almost certainly will, since everyone wants it to be sunny and clear), there will be lynch mobs awaiting the poor sod when he returns to work.

The point to all of this is, of course, to let you know that it is very hot and dry around here (at least at the ground level — it’s hot and humid above 6 inches off the ground). As a result, there is a distinct likelihood that I will go learn to kayak tomorrow instead of actually doing my schoolwork, which is what I ought to be doing on a Saturday.

There will probably be lightning.

Filed by Michael at 22:37 under Personal, Story
Comments Off

“Time flies like an arrow,” said Groucho Marx. “Fruit flies like a banana.”

You may well be wondering what provoked this deep expression of thoughtful contemplation. But even if you’re not, I’m going to tell you. If you want to skip the long boring bits, you can go right to the end, but that would obviate the point of the entire message, so you might want to wait a bit before you do that.

Anthropologists and linguists are quick to tell us that one of the effects of the development of literacy within a culture is that the overall mnemonic capacity of its members decays significantly. This is usually attributed to the fact that, as the culture keeps more and more written records, they rely upon them to keep track of their history, instead of memorizing it in the form of long epics, songs, and so forth. We always hear stories about these amazing old tribal elders who can recite the names and personal history of thirty generations of their forebears, in one long elaborate chant…and one can’t help but think, upon hearing this, about the fact that most people’s written records don’t go back that far.

Even our own culture wasn’t always a literate one, although it has been for so long now that we are hard pressed to even imagine it being any other way. But I should take a moment to say what I mean by “literate”—I don’t just mean that everyone knows how to read, although that is part of it. The literate culture is most aptly described as a “society of letters,” in which people’s day to day lives are wrapped up in written language, and for which that is among the primary means of recording events. This is distinguished by what linguists usually refer to as “non-literate” or (more often) “pre-literate” cultures, in which the main cultural records are kept in people’s heads. If you are thinking that “pre-literate” implies that most cultures which do things in this way are on their way to becoming literate, you’re right—it does imply that—but whether or not that is true is the subject of vehement debate. So I will not take it up here. Suffice it to say, however, that the state of “literacy” of a culture is not a value judgment about its members.

The degree to which a culture is literate seems to have affected the way its members perceive the notion of intelligence. For example, in modern times, we think of a highly intelligent person as someone who is creative and intuitive—who can synthesize and invent, and who is quick and clever. How often do we hear (or say) something like “Oh, he knows a lot, but he’s not really very bright with it…he’s just memorized a bunch of facts.” You see? The model of the “genius” is the archetypal Einstein-type figure, who, like Rene Descartes, makes fabulous leaps of reason that encompass new ways of viewing the world.

But it was not always so, even in our culture. Mary Carruthers, in The Book of Memory, writes about how in mediæval times, the true genius was not someone who could simply draw clever conclusions from a series of observations—that was something any old dolt could do, to their minds. But the real intellect was seen to lie in the ability of someone to recall instantly from a great store of learned knowledge. Not just rote memorization, where the facts were simply lined up in some arbitrary order, and selected sequentially—the true genius knew his or her facts “backward and forward.” In Bocaccio’s time, writers spoke in awe of a man who could recite the discourses of Cicero from memory, in any order, and could argue based on all their facts.

Today, the situation is almost entirely reversed—the person who memorizes by “brute force” is thought to be doing too much work. (S)he isn’t thinking, just “memorizing.” The more dependent we have become upon our written language, the less important feats of recall and memory have become.

Memory is a funny thing. I find I can often remember with perfect clarity the things which happened to me when I was very small, and yet have difficulty remembering the telephone number of that woman I ran into at a party last week. Sometimes you go through whole stages in your life where something is so regular and pervasive that you never bother to write it down—only to wake up three years later, when your life has changed, and realize that you can’t remember it for the life of you. That’s what motivates people to keep diaries, I think—it’s a way of writing a letter to someone far away…but not far away in space; far away in time. I always start my diaries “Dear Michael,” just for that reason.

Older friends of mine—notably people my grandmother’s age—assure me this gets worse as you get older. Apparently you have an easier and easier time remembering things that happened to you when you were twenty-five, and a harder and harder time remembering where you left your teeth. I’m inclined to think this is why old people tend to tell lots of stories about the “good old days”—it’s not so much that the times were better, but that they can actually remember what happened then. My original explanation was that when you got to a certain age, this little thing clicked on in your head that made you start dumping all your stories out onto other people’s memories, like a computer that’s saving its data files before the power goes out. Who knows…maybe that is how it works.

Needless to say, I often piss myself off because I didn’t bother to write something down, and now I can’t remember it.

You might be wondering, “If you can’t remember, how come it bothers you?” And, “If you can remember, why are you whining?” That’s a good question.

Have you ever, in a fit of procrastination, decided that it’s really important that you go digging through the stuff in the back corner of your attic? You know, the stuff that has been sitting back there for about fifteen years, peacefully undisturbed, gathering dust like it’s supposed to? Once in a while, when you’re going through those things, you come across a forgotten photograph, or an old piece of clothing, or a scribbled note you were too damned sentimental to throw out like you should have—and snap! there it is, that memory. You didn’t even know it was gone until it came back. And then you sit there in a dreamy state of nostalgia, collecting dust yourself, and making people who wander by wonder what kind of drugs you took (and whether you’ll share).

The problem arises when you start “wandering down memory lane,” from the starting point you just found. All of a sudden, you hit something you want to be able to remember, but you just can’t. You bite your tongue, shake your head, look around, root through the box for more reminders, and start talking to yourself. The passers-by usually start crossing themselves at this point, and your housemates generally look up the phone number for the people who have those white jackets with the arms that tie in the back.

Inevitably, you can’t remember, and you become irritated.

What set me off today was the (re)discovery of my high school year book.

“Oh, lord,” I can hear you saying, “let me out. He’s going to talk about sappy happy good old days in high school, when he was this little goody-two-shoes honors student and everything was so much nicer, and blaaaaah, blah blah.”

Nope. Actually, I really loathed almost every minute of high school, and I have never been quite so happy as when I got the hell out of there. I did lots of stupid stuff, had no life, and got picked on a lot. Basically, I was a complete nerd with about two friends, and they were nerds too.

I’m ignoring those of you who asked, “So what’s changed?”

All the same, though, that didn’t stop me from sitting hunched over on top of my guitar amplifier, getting a really amazing kink in my spine poring over the glossy pages of my yearbook. Nor, from crowing to myself when I remembered the people I’d forgotten, and chuckling at the people I had tried to forget. I’m kind of glad Preston (my roommate) wasn’t home at the time—I am nearly certain he would have called in the padded van to take me away.

The nostalgia breaks down into a few basic categories:

• Amusement about things that used to be the plague of my existence;
• Fond, sappy remembrances of people I used to be close to;
• Profound, heartstopping guilt upon the realization I haven’t written someone in five years;
• Vague puzzlement trying to decipher the things people wrote when they signed the book;

and, finally,

• Shock, realizing that all the underclassmen—all of them—have now graduated.

It was really the shock that got me to start writing this monologue in the first place. Well, that, and the guilt. Somehow, in the back of my mind, I think I have this notion that by talking about how I haven’t even so much as called these people, who were once among my best friends in the world, in over five years, I will be able to allay my guilt. This is, of course, wrong, but at least it gives me something to do in the meantime.

You may be somewhat surprised to hear me talk about having “guilt,” since most times I will vehemently deny that I ever feel guilty about anything. But while it is broadly true that I do not feel guilty over most things, it does occasionally happen. It’s just rare. Besides, I’ve learned that if people believe you can’t be guilted into doing something, they don’t try as hard, which makes my life much easier. There, now I’ve gone and given away my biggest secret. I hope you’re happy.

The best part about flipping back through the yearbook is looking at all the handwritten comments people scribbled in the margins and inside the covers. I imagine everyone does this—you get your yearbook, and then you get all your friends and their friends and so on to sign it, so you can remember them when you’re off someplace in the world, right? Except, even five years later, you can’t put a face to the person who wrote:

Mike,

Zdravstvuite! You take Russian, right? Well, I haven’t known you long, but you’re pretty cool. Have a great summer, and don’t get into trouble!

Your friend, THE CRAZY BASSOON PLAYER

Now, somewhere in the dim and dusty back corners of my feeble little brain, I have some vague memory of a young woman who played the bassoon. I absolutely love the bassoon, and always have, so it makes sense that, if I knew this person, she would have signed this way. But…and this is the annoying bit…I cannot, for the life of me, remember her name! What the hell is up with that? Here we are, having people sign something so we can remember who the heck they are, and they don’t even sign their names!

Yaigh. So much for that idea.

But still, most of the people who wrote did put down their names, and their comments were all variations on the example I just gave you. Approximately 50% of them mention Russian in some context, either by beginning with “zdravstvuite” (‘hello’) or having something like “…Stop your study and practise of communist activities (i.e., Russian Class)” imbedded in the text.

Almost all of them wrote “keep in touch.”

Of these, however, exactly two left addresses. So I can’t feel entirely guilty, except about those two. And those are really the ones that are bugging me.

The most amusing, however, is one written by my friend Brian, who has been like a brother to me…and who writes, “Yes! We are finally out of this ‘fine school’ (shit hole). All in all it’s been a good four years. Once in a while I’ve questioned your sanity and you’ve probably wondered if I was all there (if you didn’t, you weren’t).” I remember that it took me four times through to get that one, the first time I read it.

My school was a small, rural public institution in Vermont. And I will not contradict any other meanings of ‘institution’ you may collocate. I’ve worked hard to get away from the attitudes and image that implies…I’ve ironed most of the local accent out of my speech, except when I’m talking to one of my old friends…and I’ve always tried to become as well-travelled, knowledgeable, and open-minded as I possibly can. But at a basic level, I grew up right in the middle of a backwoods, rural culture, and I can’t hide that, no matter how much I loathed it. I guess every part of the country and the world has its own brand of “rednecks,” and Vermont is no exception. Sometime, when I get in the right mood, I’ll tell you about them.

These days, it mostly makes me shake my head sadly, to think back on the number of “shotgun weddings” there were among the people in my graduating class. Out of sixty-three people, I would estimate that about a dozen were married within the first year after graduation. I know from having poked around at home since then, that probably on the order of half of those remaining are married now, and have children. God, maybe that’s normal some places, but I consider it kind of tragic. They’re so young, and I shiver to think of them as parents. Maybe that makes me an ivory-tower snob…I guess it probably does. But I’ll bear that label with pride, and live in the happiness that comes from exploring more of this great, giddy globe than is enclosed within my back-yard fence.

The class of 1989 was the 100th class to graduate from the public school in Chester, Vermont where I grew up. A lot happened between 1889 and 1989. And yet even in the few years that have passed since then, our lives have changed immensely. George Bush had just been elected President, then; it was the height of the scandals in Britain between Charles, Diana, and Fergie. Tom Cruise was the sexiest man alive. Mike Tyson and Robyn Givens were in the process of battling out their differences in court. The scares caused by medical wastes washing up on the beaches of New York and New Jersey were still fresh in everyone’s minds. INXS had released their album “Kick,” and America had rocked the Summer Olympics in Seoul. But the Berlin Wall was still up, and the Soviet Union could still be called that. The dizzying ride we like to call the 80’s was just about over, but we still hadn’t cut up our credit cards.

What a difference a day makes.

I wonder what some of these other people think when they look back at their high school yearbooks. Has Dale achieved his “Future and Fame” to ‘win the megabucks’? Did Gabriela ever learn how to drive a car better? Did Jon finally get let out of jail? Where did Christian go after his dad committed suicide? And I don’t just mean the kids from my school, or even my graduating class—what does anyone think when they look back on their own little corner of the memories that we keep in books like this? Back then, my aspirations were listed as “physicist, composer, writer maybe?” And yet here I am applying for graduate studies in linguistics. That’s only five years—just think what the next five will bring. Or the next twenty-five. Or another century.

I can only dream.

So now, I guess, I’ll put my yearbook away again, and pull it out again in a few years. By then, I’ll probably have another yearbook, one from Dartmouth, to squirrel away like a letter from the past. And if you’re bored, why don’t you pull out your own yearbook, if you’ve got one around somewhere. I would never object if you were to write me afterwards, and get all nostalgic about the past—after all, that’s half the fun. And if you think that’s a cheesy ploy to get you to write me, you have never been more right in your life. I look forward to the first installment.

I will leave you with some words of wisdom from Omar Khayyam:

Come fill the cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter garment of Repentance fling
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly…and lo! The Bird is on the wing!

Filed by Michael at 13:00 under Personal
Comments Off

Have you ever stood at a fork in the road?

How do you answer such a question? Is it a question about physical reality, or is it another metaphor? Is he looking for factual information, or is it just rhetorical?

If all you have is the words, it’s really impossible to tell which. That’s one of the consequences of written language—there aren’t really any other contextual cues that will tell you how you’re supposed to interpret it. If someone were to ask you that in a conversation, you would probably know which they meant, immediately and without effort. In speech, almost anything that isn’t informational is almost forced to be interpreted as rhetorical. It’s rare that you hear truly fictional narrative in speech. I suppose the main places you would find it are in storytellers, compulsive liars, and politicians—and since the latter is a subset of the former, you can just as well conflate them.

I think that our unconscious understanding of this principle is what makes a live storyteller so powerful and wonderful to us. Whereas we have become accustomed to fictional accounts in written language, it is uncommon for us to hear them in speech—and so they seem much more alive, much more real, than their equivalent in a novel. It’s hard to do more than speculate as to why this is so…my personal belief is that all written language is, in a certain sense, fictional, since it often isn’t even directly associable with a real person.

Of course, to say that “there aren’t really any other contextual cues” is an overstatement. After all, everything around us, including our own state of mind, is part of the context into which we drop the fragile thread of language. But it is true that there are different kinds of context, and that we humans can distinguish between them with unerring accuracy.

Anyway, the wonderful thing about standing at a fork in the road—a metaphorical fork in a real road—is the strange and overpowering feeling you sometimes get, when you’re not sure which road to take. To step down one or the other will yield two completely discrete, unknown futures. Where will you be an hour from now? Will it be down this road, far from your intended destination, or this other one? And which is which? Either, both, or neither may lead to where you want to go, presuming you have an intended goal at all, and as you reflect on the decision, you’re faced with a curious duality of purpose.

A cautious person might turn smartly about and go back the way he came. A valid choice, to be certain—but to turn around is to permit the decision to overwhelm you. A thoughtful person might stay there, right there at the fork in the road, and wait for others to come, so that their impressions might be consulted. It is almost impossible that you should find a crossroads without finding other signs of human life—a house, maybe a car, maybe a hiker or two stopping to rest in the crook of the road. There are thoughtful people everywhere.

And then, you wonder, as you stand there in the dusty way, how many of the people you passed on your way here decided to turn around, and how many came from beyond the junction? Did they look disappointed, or confused? Were they confident and sure? And what of the earth on their shoes—was there damp clay caked on the stiff leather of a work boot? Or a dusting of bone-dry sand over a soft moccasin? Or smudges of gravel and grass-stains on the bare feet of a local lad? You try to remember, though it didn’t matter enough to bother looking, when you first crossed paths.

Sometimes, when you’re certain of the way, it doesn’t really seem like there’s a fork there at all—just one main road, leading from where you started to where you’re going, that happens to touch another along the way. A division in the road a certain aesthetic quality to it, that it would be difficult to define precisely, since it depends as much on you as the way the road is laid out. Off to the right, the earth is packed smooth by regular automobile traffic, and it follows the languid curvature of the stream-bed. To the left, it’s sandy and rough, and there are horses’ hoofprints along the side. Not far behind you, the dirt yields to pavement.

How we interpret a fork in the road has a lot to do with all these things, plus how intent we are on getting someplace specific. If we have a goal in mind, and we don’t know which way to turn, we say that we’re “lost;” but if we just wanted to see where the road went, we really can’t be lost—we’re just “exploring.” After all, if you don’t have a specific destination, how can you make a wrong turn? So being lost isn’t at all a matter of not knowing where you , it’s about not knowing which way to turn.

The road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began
And ever on the road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some vaster way
Where all the paths and errands meet
And whither then?  I cannot say.

Filed by Michael at 15:40 under Personal
Comments Off