“Dada, the frog’s legs are stretched out really far! Is it OK?”
Ess and I were out in the yard, picking up birch sticks, enjoying that kind of convivial togetherness in doing a common chore. We weren’t playing a game, or pretending the sticks were giantess hair, or trying to wring anything in particular out of the moment: just being in the same place, in parallel.
So I wasn’t paying much attention when Ess went to check on a frog. A particular frog, one she had named Melissa Doug “Missy D” Frogchair. A frog that lived in the well next to our house, three feet below grade, outside our basement egress window. A frog we all met early in the summer, after an unseasonably warm June day when Mykala found it and thought it might be growing desiccated. She sprayed some water down over Missy D Frogchair, a gentle “rain” from the June sky, and Mx Frogchair turned and stared at her for a long long time, stretching its neck to catch every drop.
Shortly thereafter, we found a shallow broad container, filled it with water, and set it next to Missy D. After a few days, they decided the water was safe and spent their time mostly submerged in it. Some days we’d go in the basement and check on Missy D through the window, and sometimes we’d find them staring directly at us. We wondered what they saw.
What do you do with a nice frog, one happy in shade, in water? One who has, presumably, plentiful food from the buggy night air? One far away from any animal that might eat it? How do you protect something wild, but still let it be wild? We decided not to intervene: after all, Missy D had grown to be a good adult size, so whatever path they were on did not seem to need human intervention.
And so I responded to Ess on our stick-chore day: “Oh, I’m sure the frog is just fine!” Reflexive, that response of mine. Like I can’t bear the pain of things not being okay, so I’m going to just force them into a box labelled “OK”. I should stop doing that. Was I convinced Missy D was fine, or desperately needing it to be so? I don’t know. Both?
But you know where this is going. I peeked over the ledge of the window well and whatever instinct I have left in my techno-addled brain told me two things: (1) Missy D had died and (2) it was time to bury them.
Ess took the news better than Mykala and myself, I think because dominant ego at her young age obscures much: it convinces a person these cycles of life and death run separate from You. You are the watcher and observer, and perhaps the thing is sad, but you are set apart from it. You move through the world, as if in a dream, working to meet your needs on your timetable for You. And then, as you grow older, if you work on it, you are humbled by the connections between every one and every thing and every event. How we’re just here by weird cosmic luck. How our ability to think about thinking (about this right here, right now!) is another weird universal quirk. How it isn’t put yourself in the frog’s shoes but I AMTHEFROG.
These are spots where I feel my limited language falling short in description: I hope Ess can learn to feel that smallness, vulnerability, sense of powerless wonder; but I don’t know how to communicate it. Heck, I can barely wrap my own arms around wisdom and enlightenment, much less pass the spark to another.
You’re not fully grown! We keep on growing! There are
identifiable developmental stages that proceed into old
age, and most of them involve becoming less focused on
yourself.
Not everyone does it.
Many people choose to stop.
[But] that’s the exciting thing about life: the
constant opportunity to grow.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I
answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other
days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to
which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration
is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your
national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of
rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of
tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty
and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns,
your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious
parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud,
deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover
up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There
is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more
shocking and bloody than are the people of the United
States, at this very hour.
…
No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding
world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers
without interference. The time was when such could be
done. Long established customs of hurtful character could
formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with
social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed
by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in
mental darkness. But a change has now come over the
affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become
unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the
gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the
darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over
and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam,
and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer
divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London
is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively
annihilated. — Thoughts expressed on one side of the
Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.
Wisdom from Marc Hamer’s Spring Rain: A Life Lived in Gardens, in Rivka Galchen’s review:
“There are two kinds of old people,” Hamer writes. “There
are the old people who are in pain and are miserable, and
there are the old people who are in pain and are
light-hearted. All old people are in pain.” He has an
inclination to celebrate and express love—an inclination
that seems built out of the humus of a difficult
childhood, characterized by an angry and critical father.
“There’s nothing else to do with life but celebrate it,
believe me; I am old, and there’s truly nothing other to
do with life than celebrate the fact that it exists.”
I’ve been thinking about that last sentence a lot lately.
Almost two thousand years after it was built, the
Pantheon’s dome is still the world’s largest unreinforced
concrete dome.
…
It is one of the best-preserved of
all Ancient Roman buildings, in large part because it has
been in continuous use throughout its history.
…
Throughout the day, light from the oculus moves around the
interior in a reverse sundial effect: marking time with
light rather than shadow.
…
The large bronze doors
to the cella, measuring 14.6 ft wide by 24.7 ft high, are
original.
It is incredible that, at so many times in millennia past, humans have stopped fighting and worked together long enough to build things of timeless beauty and monumental scale, things that only existed in imagination before they were wrought: first in two dimensions, wispy tendrils of imagination captured from the astral and fixed to the lines, curves, compression, tension of the terrestrial; secondly in construction, sweat of brow and blood of veins both spilled to compact and level and hew and fit and lift and carve and assemble something we could only make together.
It is equally incredible that, seeing the works of those before us, we have invariably plundered their metal, battered their sculpture, stolen their casings, and trampled them to ruin.
The Pantheon is the exception that proves the rule.
Through the lens of genetic exceptionalism, society often
envisions genetic predictions as infallibly deterministic.
Consider the demand for direct-to-consumer genomic
technologies and the foresight consumers believe it will
bring. In reality, much of genetics is inherently messy
owing to, among other things, the complexity of polygenic
risk profiles, especially in light of unknowable
environmental considerations.
[GATTACA]’s warnings against allowing these statistical
likelihoods to become self-fulfilling prophecies remain
apropos. This is especially true for the increasingly
pervasive ‘walking sick’ — those who underestimate their
disease probabilities — and the ‘worried well’ (or, as the
film refers to them, the ‘healthy ill’) — those who
overestimate their statistical predispositions to future
genetic conditions. Arguably, geneticists in their
professional capacities can also sometimes seem to view
genetic information as too deterministic. Even scientists
can fail to fully appreciate the inexactness of many
genetic predispositions, given penetrance, expressivity
and external environmental factors that modulate the
genetic information.
…
In light of the continual encroachment of genetic
surveillance on privacy, there is a growing
dissatisfaction with the government’s use of genetic
information. In particular, this past spring, a class
action lawsuit was filed against the New York City Police
Department for hosting a genetic database comprising
samples from thousands of people who live in New York.
According to the lawsuit, DNA was surreptitiously
collected, without consent, from gum, drinks and
cigarettes offered to those in police custody, including
minors, regardless of their eventual guilt, and
principally from minority communities. Problematically,
the New York City Police Department’s database lacks the
regulatory oversight of state and federal DNA databases. A
similar lawsuit was filed in Orange County, California,
the year before, about an even larger DNA database of the
County District Attorney’s Office.
If people acknowledge that there are also poor whites,
they will have to acknowledge that it is not a ‘black’
problem. It is a problem with how we reward work, the kind
of work we reward most generously, and how we conceive of
society’s responsibility for its poor and not just to
them—in other words, people are poor because society makes
them that way and keeps them that way, because it is more
important to most of America to pay millions of dollars to
bankers than it is to pay a decent salary to teachers and
sanitation workers and store clerks, and because they need
to keep people poor enough to accept work they may not
want to do. If people admitted all these things, then they
might have to do something about it.
The term poor white trash serves the same purpose—to
dismiss, to deny, to denigrate. If you’re poor, it’s
because of something you did. If people acknowledge that
there are poor whites, they must acknowledge that they
themselves could also be poor at any moment—if they think
about it, perhaps they already are. This threatens the
narrative of American exceptionalism, that anybody can get
rich in America if they work hard enough. That is not
true. It has never been true. But people fervently believe
it; some so that they can view their own success as a sign
of virtue and the result of their own hard work, others so
that they can imagine their struggles as temporary, a bump
in the road to their own eventual American Dream.
This is, my god, so well put. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to not only memorize, but internalize what Livermore is saying above.
None of that changes the fundamental principle of human
autonomy: people have to be able to make their own
decisions in matters that profoundly and intimately
affect their own bodies and the course of their lives.
Regret and ambivalence, the ways that one decision
necessarily precludes others, are inextricable facts of
life, and they are also fluid and personal. Guessing the
extent to which individuals may feel such emotions,
hypothetically, in the future, is not a basis for
legislative bans and restrictions.
If you took this paragraph and published it even twenty years ago, everyone would nod along and say “well, of course.”
But publishing it now? In the midst of (if you follow the reasoning in the Dobbs dissent) a torching of decades of legal progress for human rights? Well, suddenly it takes on new meaning, doesn’t it?
