Sunday, March 17, 2024

History of My Reading: Bluebird of Nothingness

 

Flora Severini high school graduation photo 1938 from a local newspaper

In late January 1974 my father called me in Cambridge to say my mother was in the hospital again and I should come home as soon as I could.  I did.  She had passed the five -year mark that was supposed to indicate she was safe from cancer’s recurrence, but nevertheless it had returned.

 She was in a hospital in Pittsburgh for evaluation and treatment, but basically because of her alarming condition. I soon learned that when my father had called, he’d been told she might not last the night. When I got there, she was out of immediate danger but was being given morphine for her severe pain. When she was conscious she talked a great deal, at times abruptly and irrationally, so that I barely recognized her. But at other times she spoke more calmly, with such conviction that even her strangest insights were compelling. 

The one instance I recall was her insistence that there was an essential piece of information in the work of Christopher Morley, and that a certain high school classmate would know what it was.  She pleaded with me to search it out.  So even as I knew how crazy it was I found this classmate from Youngwood High School in the late 1930s and called her from a pay phone near the hospital.  Of course she didn’t know anything but that they had both liked Morley’s writing. 

Morley was a prolific and well-known American journalist, humorist, essayist, poet and novelist from the 1920s through the 40s.  I don’t recall my mother mentioning him before, but I now surmise that his 1939-1940 best-selling novel Kitty Foyle (later a popular dramatic film starring Ginger Rodgers) was something she would have read. It was about the trials of a young working class woman from a small town who joined the new generation of overworked and underpaid office workers, and had romantic—and tragic--misadventures in confronting the biases of the wealthy ruling class.   Flora Severini, my mother, grew up in a small town in an immigrant family of modest means, graduated high school in 1938, and did some subsequent secretarial and clerical work, among other jobs before her marriage.  But what she remembered in the hospital, if anything real, remained a mystery.

 After a few days she had improved enough that she was taken off morphine and given other medication for pain.  But the doctors also concluded that further treatment of the disease itself was useless. She was taken to Westmoreland Hospital in our hometown of Greensburg.  She had been employed by that hospital for more than a decade, beginning when I was around 11 years old.  She’d worked her way up from a night shift clerk to an administrator and head of her department.  Though she hadn’t worked there for several years due to her illness, she was known and loved there.

Flora's First Communion photo
 She was given a private room, the last at the end of a corridor on an upper floor.  Across from her room was a visitors’ lounge.  Much of the time our family had it to ourselves.  Only a few of us could be in my mother’s room at a time.  Besides myself, there was my father and my sisters, Kathy and Debbie, joined many times by Kathy’s six year old daughter Chrissy, Debbie’s boyfriend Jerry, Kathy’s boyfriend Chad.  My uncle Carl, Flora’s younger brother came often from his job in Pittsburgh or his home in Murrysville, and eventually her younger sister Antoinette, who taught school in Maryland, came for the duration. My grandmother was nearly always there. Other relatives who lived in the area dropped by, as did Flora’s friends, especially those who worked with her at the hospital.

 Though her pain meds were less intense, my mother struggled with their effects.  At times she was lucid but dreamy. Her bed faced a large window, and I remember one day when we watched fast moving clouds over Seton Hill College, high on a distant hill. The school was built around the last remnants of what had been the most elaborate dwelling in Greensburg, built by a wealthy industrialist.  According to Andrew Carnegie, it was where he saw his first private library as a young railroad employee, and was inspired to someday build his own.

 Seen from the south, the college now was a collection of massive stone and brick buildings, replete with spires and turrets. That day she said it reminded her of Wuthering Heights.  I said that when I was younger, and gazing out at it from the living room picture window in our house on a different hill, I used to imagine it as a castle, and associated it with Robin Hood.

 (In fact my mother and I had seen it from a much closer vantage point in our first home together in the late 40s, from an attic apartment on College Avenue, at the foot of that long hill.) 

Flora at 16.  On the back she'd
written "The Dreamer"
There were moments I found my mother’s dreamy talk, with its sudden associations, its quick and at times surreal changes and non sequiturs (she once referred to “the letter Pete”) much more comfortable than what I was seeing and hearing around me.  The daily incongruities, the grotesque contrasts, set to the cheerful inanities from the television; the strained conversations and hospital absurdities, were hard to take.  

But both the pain meds and the pain played havoc with her lucidity. She got to the point that she (briefly) refused to eat, because she said she didn’t want to wake up one more day and not know where she was. 

 For the roughly eight weeks I was there, I lived in the family home.  I’d been there in November and most recently at Christmas. For some reason I had recorded the meal my mother made me the night before I started back to Cambridge: a hot turkey sandwich, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn--probably made from Christmas leftovers.  It would turn out to be the last meal she made me, out of many. 

I went to the hospital every day, sometimes with my father but often on my own.  It wasn’t far: I could see it—and had seen it most of my life—from that same picture window.  Our house was on a hill just outside the city limits, and the hospital was on the next hill within the city itself.  So now I often walked to the hospital, on very familiar streets.

 I walked down along the West Newton Road to Hamilton Avenue, facing the corner where, as the first-born child, I’d waited with my mother for the green Hamilton-Stanton bus to downtown.  As I crossed Hamilton, a few blocks to my right was the building where I’d first gone to school—it was called Sacred Heart then.  It had been built when my mother was a girl, living close by, though she was already going to the nearest public school.

 If I chose to walk on Hamilton along its upward slope, I passed houses where schoolmates had lived, and the church rectory.  Down an alley was the old church where I’d had my First Communion and Confirmation, and where I’d served Mass on many early weekday mornings as well as Sundays.  This was likely the first church my grandparents and my mother had attended in their New World.

  Near the crest of the hill at Pittsburgh Street was the house where some Severini relatives still lived.  In the 1920s it was where my grandparents and mother first lived in America.  Looking ahead to where Hamilton terminated, I could see the corner that once hosted a pizza place, where as a young adolescent I played the nickel jukebox and mourned the sudden early death of Buddy Holly. 

Pittsburgh St. approach to Westmoreland Hospital
Up the steep hill of Pittsburgh Street—again passing family homes of high school classmates—was the entrance of Westmoreland Hospital, where I’d been born. But it was now connected to a newer, taller building, and was at least twice the size in 1974 as it had been in 1946.

 Or if I wanted the shorter way I might come at it from behind by walking straight up West Newton St. toward downtown, as I had countless times, carrying a baseball glove or books to return to the library, or 25 cents for the Saturday afternoon movies plus a nickel for a box of Dots or Root Beer Barrels.  But this time I would cut across on side streets to the hospital parking lot.

 I was there at all hours and often walked home late at night, reacquainting myself with a sky full of stars that had been hidden from me in Cambridge. Or seeing those old streets from the other side of dawn.  I enjoyed these walks, especially returning home.  Even if the air was cold and damp it was better than the stale florescent blankness inside the hospital. Occasionally I would escape for a few minutes outside, just to feel the rare winter sun on my face, and be assured it was still there. 

 I kept irregular hours and slept in spurts or great chunks.  Once in mid-March after falling asleep just after midnight I awoke at 2 a.m. in the silent house, and looked out the picture window into the now snowy night.  Through snowflakes I saw the white street lights, the green light down at the crossroads, the lit dome of the Court House, the Cathedral obscured by snow and trees.  I saw a township truck with sand for the roads stuck on my street, its yellow light turning and its wheels whining.

Flora at the 1939 New York World's Fair
 At first I did get away from the hospital at times, to escape the threatening tedium and persistent overload, and absorbing some sense of Greensburg now, where the late 60s I had left behind were still making waves. I recall once being in an unfamiliar bar in a familiar oddly shaped building--when it was new, it was the hip new food place eatery on Otterman Street where my father took me for hot chocolate after my Confirmation.  Now it featured drinks and a live rock band, and I remember standing too close to a guitar speaker, the music burning through me.

 Later I couldn’t stray far from my mother’s room, but I recall once feeling so stir-crazy that I called my old friend Clayton and extracted him from his family dinner to sit with me in a restaurant near the hospital. Once I escaped by myself up to Pennsylvania Avenue to a movie theatre, but alerted the manager that I might get a phone call from the hospital, and I sat at the end of the aisle at the back.  I don’t remember what was playing. 

 By early March, some remaining Cambridge and Boston Phoenix friends had learned from my housemate where I was and why, and I got a few letters.  Housemate Andrea herself wrote about house matters but also gossip.  I got Phoenix and “poetry biz” gossip from Celia Gilbert, and Janet Maslin wrote about hosting Joni Mitchell when she was in Boston for a concert.  She even went bowling with her and her traveling entourage.  Joni’s team always won, she reported: she had been on her high school bowling team and she had skills.

 As this is ostensibly a series about my reading, it is worth recording that splayed on a plastic cushioned chair in the small narrow visitors lounge, or eating countless toasted cheese and other bland sandwiches and slurping endless weak coffees at the brown counter of the hospital snack and gift shop (“The Hospitality Shop”) for those eight weeks, I was probably reading something almost constantly, but I don’t recall what.

 I remember there wasn’t a lot of choice.  The lounge (according to one of the notebooks and scraps that have survived) had a scattering of old magazines—months’ old Time, years old Sports Illustrated.  The Hospitality Shop had little of interest on its publications racks: lots of women’s magazines (“Cancer Tests That Can Save Your Life,” and 29 Spring Hairdos, plus the latest on the Kennedys and the Nixons), rifle magazines and True Detectives, gothic novels and comic books, and books of crossword puzzles.  My father bought those.  He did dozens of them in that visitors’ lounge.

 There were books at home: a miscellany of my mother’s book club books, books I’d left behind and some acquired by my sister Kathy and left there.  Among my fugitives was probably a set of three F. Scott Fitzgerald novels-- a few quotes in a notebook suggests that I re-read Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night.

 The one book I associate with this time was a children’s book, but not from my own childhood (though, for example, the My Book House set was still there.)  It was a hardback with an orange cover of The New Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit.  It was evidently bought used, probably by Kathy, possibly to read to Chrissy.  I’d never heard of Nesbit, but I was completely charmed by this book.  It was a very English set of childhood adventures in the late 19th century.  The tales of the Bastable family are supposedly told by the eldest, Oswald, who suggests that when he grows up he hopes to be a pirate in his spare time. 

 Racial, ethnic and class attitudes of the times get a little squirmy now and then, though the children always have their hearts in the right place.  It’s very well written, and over the years I’ve acquired and read several more E. Nesbit children’s books.  When I first started reading the Harry Potter books, E. Nesbit was the first possible influence that came to mind, and I was pleased when J.K. Rowling said so. 

 This book did not remind me of my childhood, though I suppose you could say indirectly it did. It offered an alternative space, which I guess counts as escape. Still, as far as I recall, I did not seek or find inspiration or solace or anything profound in my reading in those weeks, partly I assume because those hours were characterized by the need to be vaguely alert amidst the tense boredom and exhaustion that mostly resulted in a persistent spaciness, with sharp moments that were emotional and yet complex and ambiguous, and very new to me.  I don’t know what this absence in my reading means.  I still don’t know what any of it meant.  I do recall that I guiltily experienced so much of it as grotesque.   

 In particular I did not read about death, though beyond poetry and philosophy there wasn’t much to read yet specifically about dealing with the situation we were in.  It was still something of a forbidden topic, which might help account for the fact that visitors didn’t really know what to say.

 Everyone knew my mother was dying, and no one said so—least of all to her. When the doctors in Pittsburgh told us but not her, I was angry.  My father followed the authority, the expert.  I somewhat self-righteously announced that if my mother ever asked me, I would tell her.

 Just after one of the doctor’s infrequent visits, probably in early March, she admitted that she almost asked him if she was ever getting out of this room, but was afraid of the answer.  So I kept quiet about it.

Flora in her back yard 1944
 When she was asleep or it was my turn to retreat to the lounge, I wrote letters (I specifically remember writing to Carol) and in notebooks. I noted the plethora of smoking in the hospital: smoke choking the few green plants; standing ashtrays full of butts under a No Smoking sign. Perhaps that’s what sent me to the public library, to look up stories on smoking in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, with an eye to eventually doing my own article.

 Generally we were a hapless and helpless lot.  We stood around, we sat around. The television in her room was a cynically cheerful counterpoint, though once I saw that it scared her—it was Nixon on the screen, and she was afraid of him.  Watergate was well underway, it had been for years; it was just five months or so from President Nixon’s resignation.

 Visitors came and went, most of them (like us) not really knowing what to say, struggling against the desire to get back to their lives, and the fear of facing sickness unto death.  I hadn’t yet read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych but by the time I did, this aspect of it would be familiar.  Years later, I taught this novella in an evening class with Margaret; the students were nurses from this very hospital.

 It struck me as hypocritical, but it was very human:the false optimism, both hollow and helpless,  with everyone playing the cheerfulness no one could actually feel: the bluebird of nothingness. It was a phrase I scribbled in my notebook at the time.

 When there were visitors in her more alert moments, I noticed my mother playing hostess, smoothing over any awkwardness with questions and conversation, calming their conflicting emotions and unease, their nervousness, their fear to get too close.

  We in the family who were there every day were so dependent on the nurses.  When one was bad, it led to alarm, anxiety and prolonged discussions of what to do.  Then she was replaced by an older nurse, who immediately took charge.  She was from “the sticks,” where she had a pet crow.  Her vocabulary and pronunciation said she lacked education and sophistication.  But she had a sure touch, physically and otherwise.  My mother told her she was worried that she couldn’t help with the family’s problems.  “You let them take care of their problems,” Gussie said, “and we’ll take care of yours.”

 Over the weeks, the pain and the fog got worse.  “A dream within a dream within a dream,” she said. When asked how the pain was, she didn’t know.  She couldn’t remember feeling it in the night.  Sometimes she couldn’t say how she felt at that moment.  She improvised, sometimes getting canny about her responses, and subtly suspicious, then sometimes abruptly frustrated because she wasn’t sure what she was being told and not told.  At times she wanted it to be over, and the next second she prayed that she could get up and walk.

 each breath was a cry

in that landscape of soft-edged

denial

but for now:

three merged

sighs of sleep

in the last hour

before dawn

and the next uncertain moment

  She found some escape.  She’d said that she’d been thinking about England, she didn’t know why. (I expect it was that view of Seton Hill.)  But it had an eerie feeling, she said.  Later she had times during several days when she believed that she was actually in England.  She had never been there but she named places she had perhaps seen in the movies or photographs or just read about, like Trafalgar Square.

Walt and Flora in 1945, year of their marriage
 Probably in mid March, my father’s father, my paternal grandfather Frank Kowinski, came to visit, and sat for some minutes at her bedside in his somber dark suit. In my life I’d seen him maybe a half dozen times outside of the home he shared with his daughter and her family in the “coal patch” town of United, the house where my father grew up, built by the United Coal Company. He probably still frequented the nearby Calumet Club, but otherwise, he seemed to spend most of his time alone in his basement.  

 Some time after he left my mother said, “When I saw that old man, I knew I had to be dying.  That’s the only thing that could get him here.”

 But it was also probably in mid-March that Debbie and her boyfriend Jerry talked to her alone, to tell her they were engaged to be married. 

 At times my mother still spoke from a different realm. I wrote down what she said to me late at night on Saturday, March 16.  At this remove I can only guess where I might have embellished a bit, but this is the essence of it, including most of the words:

 “One hundred years, one hundred years, one hundred years, to sleep, you’re sleepy, go ahead.  You’re sleepy, aren’t you?  Go ahead and sleep.  Go ahead and sleep.

It’s too late.  There. It’s gone.  It’s gone.  Now I want you to go.  Put on your coat and get your things and go away and forget.  Forget everything.  And then write it all down on paper, as something you have forgotten for a long time and then suddenly remembered.  Now don’t move.  Don’t get up or you will die.  Promise me, promise me that you’ll lie back, lie back and sleep and never get up.  And write it all down on paper, remember that your mother told you, think of other worlds…Now go, please, promise me that you’ll go now.”

 And yet soon she seemed much better. That week she even sat up in a chair for the first time in awhile.  We wondered at it, but the nurse cautioned us.  She’d seen this before, just ahead of the end.

  The room became more cheerful.  Debbie repositioned some of Chrissie’s painting high on the glass window of the door.  Near the bed was a ceramic goldfinch I’d purchased from the Hospitality Shop, when my mother wished for a bird to perch on the window ledge. It’s now on a shelf looking over my left shoulder.

 On Sunday, March 17, she sat up in bed and looked out on a bright day. She watched a clear blue sunny sky, and white clouds passing by slowly, slowly moving in one direction, some slowly breaking up, with pieces floating upward, and she listened to the wind blowing.

  Sunday evening she was visited by a priest and I believe made her confession, though I don’t remember being around at the time. By then she believed she was dying. Sunday night she had the whole family gathered around her and she said her final goodbye to everyone.  

 But when the moment was over, life resumed as if it hadn’t happened.  She asked for the television to be turned on.  It was a Peanuts special, which nobody watched.  She hadn’t been eating much, even with her mother and her children feeding her.  But now she ate one of the Girl Scout cookies someone had bought, a chocolate one.   Everyone else also had one, like a communion. Then she napped, and awoke to ask if the bills had been paid.

 Later she called me to her.  “ A long time ago, there was something I wanted to do.  I almost did it one night a long time ago, but I didn’t.  Everything sounds melodramatic coming out of this mouth, but now I guess it’s ok, I’m getting things straight in my mind bit by bit.  But today I did it, and I’m so glad.  I’m so glad I did it and it’s done.”

 “What did you do?”

 “I can’t tell you.  It was a little thing but it was the world and life and religion, you know.  I don’t know why I want to tell you these things but I do.  And now everything that I do, I’ll start and finish, start and finish, and the past is past, with nothing to do with the past.”

By then her sister Antoinette was there, my Aunt Toni, who my mother called Ant.  Once my mother was talking in spontaneous rhyme.  “She used to write poetry,” Ant said, and asked her, “Do you still write poetry?”  “Yes,” she said.  “Where is it? Where is your poetry?”  “Billy has it.”  I didn’t, or maybe I did.

 On the following Monday she was feeling worse.  “Something is wrong.  I don’t know what it is.  I try to get through but nobody understands.  I can’t tell what it is, because I don’t know what it is.”

 “I told you before, that I wanted to be pretty.  I didn’t want everyone to have to see me when I wasn’t pretty.  I’m sorry for that.  I wanted to make it easier.  But I couldn’t make it easier.”

 The last conversation I had with her was short and convoluted.  I don’t remember what it was about, something to do with how she was feeling at the moment, and finding the nurse. I don’t recall what I said.   But I do remember that she said: “If I trust anybody, I trust you.”  I still wonder if I earned that trust, or how.  But that’s the last conversation we had, and possibly the last words she spoke, except perhaps to the nurse.

 By then we knew the end was very close, and we were  there all the time, however bleary and nearly numb.  On Friday night, March 22, my aunt came into the visitors’ lounge and quietly told us all to come into the room.  When we got there my mother was breathing long throaty breaths.  I remember I was standing on her left side, at or near the head of the bed.  We stood without a word as she took those long heaving breaths until after an exhalation suddenly no inhalation came, just a long silence, a true absence of any sound.  Only my grandmother cried. None of the rest of us moved, we just looked down at my mother.  Eventually Aunt Toni standing across from me told us all we could touch her.

My mother and I making a snowman in front
of our first home together on College Ave.

 I certainly had been closer to my mother than I was with my father, and I once overheard him telling his father that I had taken her death harder than anyone.  I wasn’t aware of that at the time.  At this remove, I see myself then as a self-absorbed 27 year old, immersed in the world of contemporaries in the contemporary world, with only a vague sense of the past and an anxious purchase on the present, which was elsewhere.

 We had always written letters back and forth, talked on the phone as much as long distance rates permitted, and we talked when I visited home.  At the time I still felt, as I had since college, or perhaps since adolescence, that she and I inhabited different worlds. The whole generation gap thing didn’t help.  That distance and my defensiveness might well have faded in time. In any case, I felt the deprivation, the absence of her presence in subsequent years. I missed the conversations we might have had as we both got older, comparing memories and sharing observations.   She was only 54.

 But any process at that moment leading to any realization, even any real grief, had to be withheld, to first confront what to me were the bizarre protocols of the funeral, as they were in that time and place.   

 I was a relative innocent to these. This was only the second death in my close family.  Although I was home from college the summer my grandfather died, and I called some relatives to tell them, wrote his obituary for the newspaper and served as a pallbearer, that was the extent of my involvement with “the arrangements.” 

But now I suffered for the first time the (to me) absurd rituals: reviewing the long rows of coffins to select one, listening to discussions on the decision of a dress, of how to deal with relatives who felt snubbed, while privacy was suddenly gone as people trooped through the house with obscene amounts of food and solemn sentimentality.  The loud incongruity of it—which I experienced as indignity akin to cruelty—was too much for me. I erupted in violence against several innocent objects in the storage garage.

 I was particularly appalled by the so-called “viewing” at the funeral home.  My mother’s body and barely recognizable face in an open casket behind us and mostly ignored as the family stood in a placid line facing the other way to chat amiably with people we might not know well or hadn’t seen in years.  Even the nun who had most made my high school life miserable and who my mother despised, evidently showed up, although only Kathy saw her entrance, now habitless (thanks to those late 60s reforms.)  Even the Darvon or whatever I’d been given to take to cope with these hours didn’t insulate me, and I quietly sailed for the men’s room.  Whereupon, my sister said, the nun left in a huff. And the next day we did it again. 

I was however calm enough to appreciate the sincerity of the women from the hospital who had worked in my mother’s department, and who wanted us to know how much they admired her, how fair she was with everyone.  They wanted to tell their story.  Still, the venue freaked me out. 

We gathered for the funeral Mass at the relatively new St. Paul’s Church, just up to the next street from ours and across the Carbon Road.  The church had originally been designed to eventually become a gymnasium for the adjacent new school, but funds (and a large enough congregation) for a proper new church never materialized.  On this morning, before the service could begin and while the organist was played the preliminaries, a young altar boy in his cassock and surplus suddenly ran out to the altar and began crying “Fire!”  Eventually we saw wisps of smoke coming from the sacristy and cooler heads had everyone file out.

 Of the many people who attended, at this remove I remember only my cousins on my mother’s side. We stood around the parking lot and sat in cars as fire trucks arrived and departed, until we were told to go on to the Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, a large, tall gray stone building with turrets and spires, at the northern peak of Main Street in Greensburg.  The funeral would take place there.  Later the priest told the local newspaper that if this service hadn’t been scheduled, the fire at St. Paul’s might not have been discovered until much greater damage was done.  Meanwhile, my mother got a funeral Mass in the largest church in the county.    

 Shortly after the funeral I returned to Cambridge.  I would not be back to Greensburg for awhile, even missing the next Christmas.

Monday, March 11, 2024

The Lack of Repose

 

A young man seated at his table
 Holds in his hand a book you have never written
Staring at the secretions of the words as
They reveal themselves.

 It is not midnight. It is mid-day,
The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,
Andrew Jackson Something. But this book
Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.

It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,
 But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal
And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,
With an understanding compounded by death.

 And the associations beyond death, even if only
Time. What a thing it is to believe that
One understands, in the intense disclosures
Of a parent in the French sense. 

 And not yet to have written a book in which
One is already a grandfather and to have put there
A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end
To the complication, is good, is a good.

--Wallace Stevens

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Who's Afraid...?

 

"Fear" by Jean-Baptist Greuze

Fear, says a John Cale lyric, is a man’s best friend. In certain situations it must be, or it would not have survived evolution’s editing.  Fear protects us from present danger by igniting the instantaneous flight or fight response.  When it wells up more slowly, it responds to unconscious perceptions related to hidden danger, or the near prospect of it: darkness and thrashing sounds, for example.

Fear can give us an adrenalin buzz, which seems to be why some people enjoy scary movies. But more generally, over time, fear is a distinctly unpleasant feeling.  It can be paralyzing, all-encompassing, stressful and painful.  We avoid fear whenever possible. One way of avoiding fear is by denying that there’s something to be afraid of.

 Denial in this sense, like fear, can also be a survival tool.  The most fearful thing in our lives is our death, and yet the possibility of death exists every moment we are alive.  We can most easily escape the paralysis or obsession of fear by ignoring this.  And we do, or we couldn’t function.  In this sense, it is healthy.  Carl Jung told an interviewer that among the old people who were his patients, the healthier ones simply didn’t think much about their impending deaths, and just got on with it.

 But when fear is a response to a threat distant in time and place, but still very real, it becomes more complicated and perhaps perverted.  The fear of a distant enemy can become disproportionate, and abstracted into prejudice against all outsiders, all others. 

Nagasaki 1945
 With the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945, each which wiped out a city and left lingering effects that slowly killed many more than died from the initial blast and fire, something awful entered civilized life. World War II itself saw the final erosion of the distinction between combatants and civilians in war, and massive airpower threatened sudden death to anyone, anywhere. 

 With thousands of guided missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads by the early 1960s, the world had firmly entered an age of permanent anxiety. Most everyone in the world, and civilization itself, could be destroyed in an hour, any hour of any day.  Life could be normal, and the next second plunged into the horrors imagined as hell.

 Such is the prehistory of the politics of our moment. Though for too many the horrors of war still exist, the interplay of fear and denial in individuals and groups now goes beyond just that situation. It applies as well to other cases of huge threats, including potential threats, which people are or believe themselves to be powerless to stop or prevent.

 What are the responses to danger and the fear it evokes?  To run away from it, if that is possible.  To fight it—that is, to address its effects, learn its causes and devise ways to end or neutralize them.  Or if the threat is not immediately visible or loudly audible, simply to deny there is anything to be afraid of.

 We all feel this impulse.  But today this denial has become a bonding mechanism in our politics.  Afraid of the effects of the climate crisis?  Deny that the climate crisis exists.  Afraid of the effects of Covid-19 and epidemics in general?  Deny that they exist, or are anything to be afraid of.  Facts to the contrary are just lies.

 Deny with another product of fear: anger.  Anger is one way humans channel the adrenalin of fear.  There are arguably other sources or kinds of anger.  But most can be traced back ultimately to fear.  And in many cases, there’s little distance between fear and anger.

 Anger is energizing.  It probably evolved to quickly hype the body’s forces to fight an imminent danger. These days, anger is a major means of political bonding.  As it grows in power, anger leads to a more general and undifferentiated hostility to everyone who doesn’t share it.  It occurs on both the so-called left and right. But it is especially important to those whose binding creed includes denial of the climate crisis, and of Covid.

 We do seem to be witnessing another case of what Eric Hoffer described in his 1951 book The True Believer as a mass movement: a cult grown large. He suggests that people who are disappointed in their lives, and may have real grievances and are the victims of real and widespread injustices, deal with their perceived powerlessness by banding together behind an authoritarian leader who purports to identify their enemies and promises to smite them, and to restore the world they expect and want.  You know, make America great again.

 While radio was the technological innovation that powered authoritarian leaders of the 1930s, social media and the Internet power group bonding behind a leader or symbol.  In order to be accepted by the group and to identify with it, there are articles of faith that must be repeated and even made more extreme.  Real grievances tend to get exaggerated or even falsified. Most importantly, the group also defines itself by the people they aren't--those who are defined as outside it, as part of the group that’s the real problem.  Individuals don’t matter—only group allegiances. Other considerations don't matter--only the attitudes that bind the group. Again, much of this is not restricted to so-called right wing groups.  But it is with these groups that denial as integral is most prominent.  (Similarly, they do use fear as a binding mechanism--often projecting threatening qualities onto the groups they define as enemies. Although not all their fears are without foundation, they tend to be twisted products of their continuously nurtured and never examined collective unconscious.)

Denying the climate crisis, denying the realities of Covid, with anger and hostility, are articles of their faith.  Now there’s a comparatively new wrinkle. The effects of anxiety over nuclear Armageddon, and the unconscious effects of our general daily denial of that danger, dominated the history of post-World War II generations. Now as the culture has largely forgotten the existence of nuclear weapons at the ready, or downgraded their power, elements of the political right are busily denying that Russia constitutes any threat at all.  As if they didn’t still have enough missiles pointed at the US with nuclear and thermonuclear bombs to devastate their lives in a moment. 

 In order for the political right to deny that there’s anything to be afraid of, the authority of those who say there is must be questioned and ultimately denied.  In the case of climate and the case of Covid, the authorities are scientists, their institutions, and the political institutions that support and listen to them. These political and cultural institutions are conveniently the same ones that are seen as enemies in general, and not without reason.  America’s educated elites that benefited from today’s economy have largely ignored the devastation suffered by others as a byproduct of that economy. 

 These institutions and elites make things worse by exploiting this anger and simultaneously by giving in to it.  For a crisis that might end the future of civilization and most forms of life currently on the planet, their response to climate distortion continues to be timid and—because of the economic powers and interests involved—dishonest.  In Covid, even the CDC is now supporting the fiction that this is just another respiratory disease on a par with flu, while evidence mounts of its major effects on the heart and on the brain in a significant number of patients. Denying Covid also denies future pandemics and epidemics, and weakens the institutions that could (or could have) addressed them.  Denial can kill, now and later.

 For some, denial and our temptations to denial are handy tools to ensure profits and not rock the boat that’s working for them.  For all of us, denial is convenient.  Nobody wants to think about this stuff. Some denial may also be necessary for our mental health.  But denial also raises anxiety because we all know what happens, sooner or later, when we act as if danger isn’t out there.  The irony is that our lives would be infused with so much more meaning if we just addressed ourselves as a whole society to the dangers we are right to fear.  

Friday, February 23, 2024

This North Coast Place: It Began Here


 In the San Francisco Chronicle Wednesday, Kurtis Alexander reported on "the nation's largest dam-removal project"--the dismantling of four dams on the Klamath River in far northern California and southern Oregon.  One of the dams is gone, and the other three are due to be erased by autumn this year.  

The article also focuses on the Shasta tribe, exiled from their land along the Klamath more than 100 years ago,  when a dam and reservoir were being built.  Now the remaining members are eager to return, especially as land is reclaimed after the dam is gone.  The article mentions that some 12,000 acres in California had been returned to Native tribes by the state and conservation groups.  

It brings to mind that both of these actions--the removal of the dams, and the return of Native lands, began in some significant way on the North Coast.

The basic reason for the removal of these dams is the sharp decline in salmon in the Klamath River.  Several surviving tribes along the river have centuries' old cultures with the salmon at their center.  These tribes, including the Yurok, Karuk, Klamath and Hupa, have been a driving force in this and other efforts to restore healthy conditions in the Klamath and other rivers (like the Trinity) so that the salmon can return.  

This focused activity goes back to the traumatic salmon kill in 2002, when some 34,000 salmon died before the astonished eyes of tribal members.  A few years later, Humboldt State University theatre professor Teresa May convened a group of tribal members and other interested parties to begin discussions that would eventually result in a play dramatizing the issue, entitled Salmon Is Everything.  It was first produced at HSU in 2006, and traveled to a few other venues.  A new production was mounted in Oregon in 2011.  By 2015, these productions resulted in a book on the process and the issue.  

HSU made it the university's book of the year, and a reading of the play was produced in August 2015.  Several participants in the original process spoke, and all lauded the process and the play as a milestone in defining issues, spreading awareness and gathering crucial support that ultimately led to the decision to destroy the dams and allow the Klamath to flow freely again.  Of course, years of painstaking and detailed negotiations made this accomplishment possible, which included the leadership of the tribes such as the Yurok.  But this effort played a part.  

As for the return of Native land, the precedent was set in 2004 in Eureka.  Indian Island in Humboldt Bay was the site of a notorious massacre in 1860 that nearly wiped out the Wiyot tribe.  The Wiyots and members of other local tribes were participating in their World Renewal Ceremony at the village site on the island the Wiyot called Tuluwat.  In 1992, tribal chair Cheryl Seidner, direct descendant of the only known survivor of that massacre, began the annual candlelight vigil in Eureka to commemorate the ancestors.  Two non-Natives from Eureka also cosponsored the vigil, for part of its intent from the beginning was to heal the whole community.  This was only two years after the Wiyot had finally regained federal recognition as a tribe.

In the late 1990s, Seidner began a campaign to raise money to buy back the 1.5 acres of Tuluwat, so the World Renewal Ceremony could be revived.  In 2000, she announced the sale was about to happen, though more funds would be needed for the site's restoration.  In February of 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle published my article about the 1860 massacre, the candlelight vigils (which I had been attending) and efforts to revive the Wiyot cultural identity, and the reacquiring of the Tuluwat land--something that at the time seemed without precedent.  Seidner had expressed the desire to see all of Indian Island back in Wiyot hands--while a few parcels were in private hands, most of it was owned by the city of Eureka.  

After months of negotiation, the Eureka City Council voted in May 2004 to deed all of its land on the island to the Wiyot.  The ceremony of transfer of 40 acres (with 60 acres more added later) was held in June.  No one knew of another voluntary transfer of land by a municipality back to the tribe that held it sacred.  Not in California, and probably not anywhere in North America.  After extensive cleanup of toxic industrial waste, the site was restored, and the first 10 day World Renewal Ceremony in more than a century was held in 2014. 

Another major contributor to what has become a trend of returning Native land and especially recognizing Native tribes as environmental administrators of ancestral lands, as well as fostering grassroots cultural revival, has for long been the Seventh Generation Fund, headquartered for years in Arcata and now in nearby McKinleyville.  I'm proud to have worked with this group shortly after I came to the North Coast. 

The efforts of Cheryl Seidner and others in the Wiyot vigils and subsequent activities also set a template for other efforts, in involving both tribal and non-Native communities in a common process.  The Salmon Is Everything project also included voices of concerned parties beyond the tribes, like farmers.  One possible result is that, while the dam removal project was very controversial when proposed, it seems now mostly accepted. So more and more are the partnerships with tribes.  For example, the Siskiyou County board of supervisors, who long opposed the dam removal, recently endorsed the transfer of property that will result from the dam removal to the Shasta tribe, because they would make "good neighbors."

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Dreaming Up Daily Quote

by Kiowa artist Stephen Mopope 1937

 “My grandmother was a storyteller; she knew her way around words…She had learned that in words and in language, and there only, she could have whole and consummate being….You see, for her words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold….”

N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024)

 House Made of Dawn


Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Origins: Valentine's Day


As is often true, the ultimate origin of Valentine's Day is unknown, though there are plenty of juicy legends repeated as fact, all disputed by at least some scholars.  But the one makes the most sense to me is this: its roots are in the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, held on the Ides of February (February 15.) 

 Lupercalia was an early spring fertility festival, ostensibly in honor of a god of agriculture but also of Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus.  According to that origin legend, they were twin boys abandoned in a cave and raised by a wolf (Latin and Harry Potter scholars will recognize that the"lupa" in Lupercalia means a she-wolf.)  The festival traditionally began with a rite at that legendary cave.

But the rest of Lupercalia was dedicated to different sorts of fertility, with naked drunks running through the streets (some suggest the day also honored the god Pan), past married women who hoped they would become pregnant or have an easy delivery if they were touched by the goat's hide strips the men brandished. 

Yet another custom--more related to today's holiday-- was a lottery in which unmarried women dropped their names into an urn for unmarried men to randomly extract.  The two would become a couple, presumably including sexual favors, either for the course of the festival or (according to other sources) the entire year.  This even speedier variation on speed dating often (it is said) resulted in marriage. 

All of this went on for centuries, until the Catholic Church finally predominated.  In the fifth century, the Pope banned Lupercalia, and replaced it with St. Valentine's Day.  Some sources claim that the choice of St. Valentine was simply because he was officially martyred on that date.  Maybe.  But whenever the Church replaced a pagan feast day, or built a church over a pre-Christian sacred site, the replacement is often related to the earlier intent-- especially since Indigenous and other pre-Christian special days were related to natural cycles of the calendar, such as when birds and other animals begin mating in the early spring.

Besides, there are stories of at least three St. Valentines, all supposedly martyred, and none proven to have existed.  But by the Middle Ages the Church had a great cover story that related Valentine to the date, without saying so.  According to this legend, it all started when the third century Roman emperor Claudius II banned marriage.

Claudius had risen through the military (the first Emperor to have done so, and the first to be of "barbarian" birth) and thought marriage made soldiers weak and fretful, distracted by wives and children at home. And Claudius was often at war.

 But a Christian prelate in Rome called Valentine continued to secretly marry couples, until he came to the attention of Claudius.  During Valentine's imprisonment, he and Claudius had lively discussions, each trying to convert the other to their religion.  But only one of them was the emperor, so Valentine was executed.

Did any of this happen?  Outlawing marriage was not entirely unknown in Rome, but the encyclopedia entry that Wikipedia uses doesn't mention Claudius II (also known as Claudius Gothicus) doing so.  There is a further addition to the legend that says while he was imprisoned, Valentine had some sort of relationship--perhaps even fell in love with--his jailer's daughter.  Before his execution, he left her a note, "from your Valentine."  Right--at least a degree of cuteness too far.  

But by the Middle Ages, Valentine was a popular saint across Europe, and St. Valentine's Day became a day for celebrating early love, a sanitized--or at least euphemistic-- version of the Roman holiday.  The tradition of the card now called the valentine may have also derived from the age-old traditions of  Lupercalia.  Denied their lottery, it's said that young Roman men sent handwritten greetings to women they admired on the mid-February date.

But the first documented (and still existing) valentine card was sent by Charles, duke of Orleans in 1415.  He sent it to his wife, who happened to be a prisoner in the Tower of London at the time. 

 Handmade cards began to bear the image of Cupid (also related to Roman love customs) and to include amorous verses.  The printing press made the "mechanical valentine" a thing, and lower postal rates in 19th century England meant they didn't need to be hand-delivered, and could even be sent anonymously.  This led to more explicit imagery and racy verses, to the extent that in 19th century Chicago, some 25,000 valentines were deemed too obscene to deliver.  

Among the rude cards of the 19th and early 20th centuries were "vinegar valentines," that expressed insults--doubly so, since it often was the receiver and not the sender who had to pay the postage. Meanwhile, erotic valentines--intended as humorous or maybe not--survive into the 21st century.







The first printed valentines in America were pricey, but when greeting card companies produced less expensive versions, the practice of sending them became almost obligatory, rivaling only Christmas for predominance.  Through the 20th century at least, many faced Valentine's Day with anxiety and dread, counting the cards they got from fellow fifth graders, or mourning the first February 14 that their mailbox was bereft.  

As for the Xs denoting kisses on valentines and other written notes--which likely makes it the first emoji--they seem to be a remnant from illiterate times when many could sign their name only with an X, and sealed it with a kiss. If present trends continue, those days may not be gone forever.       

Monday, February 12, 2024

At The Same Time


While we talk
 thousands of languages are listening
 saying nothing

 while we close a door
 flocks of birds are flying through winters
 of endless light

while we sign our names
more of us
 lets go

 and will never answer

 --W.S. Merwin

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

Snyder For The Day #2

 



"Now [past] the end of the twentieth century, most societies are not even halfway functioning.  What does poetry do then?  For at least a century and a half, the socially engaged writers of the developed world have taken their role to be one of resistance and subversion.  Poetry can disclose the misuse of language by holders of power, it can attack dangerous archetypes employed to oppress, and it can expose the flimsiness of shabby made-up mythologies."

Gary Snyder

A Place in Space 

Friday, February 02, 2024

Happy Birthday, JJ

 

"This race and this country and this life produced me, he said.  I shall express myself as I am."

A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce.  Born February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland.

Thursday, February 01, 2024

Our Foolish World

 "The iPhone 12 runs on a chip with 11.8 billion transistors etched into its silicon. Only one company in the world can make that chip. That company relies, in turn, on machines and materials that are also made only by singular firms. Those machines and materials rely on similarly complex and fragile supply chains. If any node in this supply chain breaks, so too will much of the global economy break. If a country or alliance of countries can control these advanced supply chains, locking others out, they will have a powerful advantage in both war and commerce."

Ezra Klein summarizing a point made in the book Chip Wars by Chris Miller

Friday, January 26, 2024

Snyder for the Day


 "Civilization is part of nature--our egos play in the fields of the unconscious--history takes place in the Holocene--human culture is rooted in the primitive and the paleolithic--our body is a vertebrate mammal being--and our souls are out in the wilderness."

--Gary Snyder

The Practice of the Wild

Monday, January 22, 2024

To The Rain

 

You reach me out of the age of the air 
 clear
 falling toward me
 each one new
 if any of you has a name
 it is unknown

 but waited for you here
 that long
 for you to fall through it knowing nothing

 hem of the garment
do not wait
 until I can love all that I am to know
 for maybe that will never be

 touch me this time
 let me love what I cannot know
 as the man born blind may love color
 until all that he loves
 fills him with color

--W.S Merwin

Generally when Merwin writes a poem "to" something or someone, the "I" in the poem is talking "to" that "person."  So he is addressing the rain (and, the raindrops.)  That seems clear enough in the first stanza.  But there are some tricky tenses and referents in the second.  Perhaps what waited was the unknown name:"rain."  Something perhaps is suggested about individuality and what they are in common, as well as the difference between the physical drops and their name.  The "it" could be the rain again, but it more likely seems to be the air the rain falls through. 

  In the next stanza, "hem of the garment" is addressed, often interpreted as a Biblical reference, an instrument of revelation perhaps, but it may still be (at the same time) the rain.  The imploring "touch me this time" would still be the rain but as a kind of revelation?  In any case, the final lines are very powerful.  The repetition of word sounds in the otherwise awkward  "maybe that will never be" sets up this powerful repetition of "color," partly through the music of the lines.  Another repetition in sound and sense is the word "know" (or "knowing") that appears three times in this short poem, each time in some way incomplete.  What lies beyond it can only be expressed in the final lines and what they suggest to us.

Friday, January 12, 2024

Year of Dread?


 The most obvious cause for dread is the 2024 election campaign and the elections themselves.  As 2023 ended, the polls showed President Biden with low approval ratings, and several polls showed Trump ahead in preference for November's voting.  But politically, November is a long time in the future.  Nobody really knows what polls measure these days, except whatever it is they measure is in the present, not that future.  A lot will happen between now and then--and I suppose that's as much reason for dread as the possible outcome.

I've called him Homegrown Hitler on this blog since 2016, and so I am not surprised that Trump has become so obvious about it that even major media has noticed.  His election would be a defining tragedy for this country, as it is likely to complete the destruction of constitutional government he and his cronies and minions have begun. I don't think he will be elected, but the institutions of government and law, as well as the Constitution itself  have already been seriously weakened, perhaps fatally in the long run, with the pressure that the future is highly likely to bring.  

Regardless of the election outcome, it's all but assured that the coming year of news will relentlessly and copiously be about Trump. Even worse that last year.  The media can't shake its addiction to him (even the progressive British paper the Guardian features his photo on every online front page, sometimes several of them), since he is for many the ultimate in clickbait.  President Biden has so far signaled that he will make Trump and his threat to democracy the primary issue of his campaign, which may only be acknowledging reality. (But my few readers be forewarned: you'll need to get your Trump fix elsewhere this year.)  

There's almost inevitably going to be a lot of related drama this year: trials for 91 felonies, Supreme Court decisions, the campaign, the election, probably extending into 2025.  Just dreading the drama has to head the list.  


For me, another cause for public dread in 2024 is that, partly because Trump is likely to be the major campaign issue, once again this year we are no going to get the clear, forthright and vocal leadership on the climate crisis that we need.

If you got past the war news, the front page lifestyle features and celebrity controversies, you may have noticed that 2023 was officially the hottest year in history, and not this time by a little.  By a lot.  Human civilization is perhaps ten or twelve thousand years old, but the Earth's temperature hasn't been this high in 100,000 years, at least.  The jump far exceeded predictions and scientists' expectations.

For the past decade, the clarion cry for climate action has been fixed on keeping the world's temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Centigrade on average.  2023 hit 1.48 and some scientists believe it is likely that sometime in 2024 or shortly afterwards, it will be official that the 1.5C has been breached as the average.  This is the number that the nations of the world said in the Paris Agreement of 2015 that they wanted to avoid.  "Above that threshold," said a CNN report, "many of Earth's ecosystems will struggle to adapt and summertime heat will approach the limits of human survivability is some places."  That's the minimal impact.  If it pushes the planet past various tipping points, it will be much worse, especially in the long term.  

There was positive news during the year on addressing climate distortion, and the Guardian (the most reliable daily news source for climate issues) published dueling year-end evaluations: "World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientist says" vs. "I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis.  I was wrong."

The title of that second one is disingenuous--nobody expected most "of us", i.e. people now alive to die from the climate crisis. Just when in the future that might be a real possibility depends on a lot of other things as well.  It's an annoying simplistic way to talk about the real concerns. (On the other hand, some thousands of people will likely die of effects of climate distortion effects this very year.)

 The author of this piece and the book it comes from, Hannah Ritchie, bases her optimism chiefly on statistics about the growth and prospects of renewable energy, especially as it becomes cheaper than coal and oil. She pushes these conclusions to the point where she accuses anyone with doomsday warnings as aiding climate crisis denialists.  

The title of the first one, on the other hand, fails to mention that the scientist in question is not just any scientist--it is James Hansen, formerly of NASA, the scientist who brought the news of the climate crisis to Congress and the world--in 1988.  

While I don't dispute the numbers that Ritchie and some other climate writers use and apply to temperature rises (she believes the rise could be stopped at 2C or a fraction more) due to the phenomenal growth of renewables, the climate crisis is not just about balance sheets, it doesn't just go by the numbers.


The dangers of the climate crisis to the natural world and to civilization, even in the rest of this century, are not about absolute numbers.  They are also about what the effects of climate distortion in the real world can do to push at vulnerable situations, and make already dangerous matters catastrophically worse.  That includes exacerbating threats to the natural world on which we depend, from species extinction to the now fragile life of the oceans.  But it also includes threats to vulnerable institutions and to the now fragile global civilization, and these may well become more dangerous sooner than later.

Some of the direct effects of climate distortion are evident now--we don't even have to wait for the spring and summer fires and heatwaves of 2024--we're about to see climate distortion-fed and energized storms and coldwaves in much of America, with attendant direct and indirect damage, including flooding.  We're seeing coastal flooding on the increase as well.  Meanwhile, a quarter of the world's population is living in drought, and huge parts of the world are drying up to a lethal extent.

These begin cascades of consequences.  Even in America there are mounting costs of addressing multiple disasters, with communities slow to recover.  The danger of disease and epidemics increases.  Worldwide, we are especially seeing probably the most proximate cause of danger for the rest of this century: large scale migration; that is, large numbers of refugees.  Sometimes it is caused directly by climate effects, sometimes by warfare and political turmoil that is in part caused by climate effects.  

But we don't talk about migration that way.  We don't see it that way.  Many take no thought as to the reasons, and have no empathy for the refugees--something we haven't seen for awhile in the global north, but with dangerous potential for the stability of governments and public institutions.  This is one obvious problem related to climate that increases the dangers of violence and warfare, including the eventual use of nuclear weapons.  (Speaking of dread, I worry the dread of nuclear bombs has weakened, and their use against people is likely to happen again.)

Refugees and the reaction to them is only one issue that needs to be addressed in the context of the climate crisis.  The world dearly needs the leadership to spell it out clearly: to talk about causes and effects, and to outline action to address each.  But there is no such leader, even on the horizon.  There really isn't one I see in the US.  The only possibility I know of is Vice-President Kamala Harris, who seems to have some grasp of the problems, and who I once heard speak in terms of the causes and effects of the climate crisis--which is possibly the only terms that can organize the information in a form people at large can immediately grasp.

Here are the causes, here is what we need to do, and here is what we're doing about them.  Here are effects, here is what we need to do, and here is what are doing about them.  There is a plan, and I will keep updating you on our progress.  This is what we need, and what--in 2024--we are once again unlikely to get.

While Republicans continue their delusional and self-serving rants, Democratic politicians are afraid to name the crisis and its components.  Everything is obscured, disorganized, coded.  Electric cars alone aren't going to do it.  Saying that the climate crisis is about jobs is not enough.  It's just more hiding from really confronting the crisis and its dimensions.

The United Nations had another climate meeting in 2023, another COP.  This year's much lauded outcome was to declare that the age of fossil fuels is over, we're going to end them.  Excuse me if I see this as akin to an alcoholic declaring an end to drinking, and celebrating that with another round.  Meanwhile the US is pumping more oil than any nation in the world, and any nation in history.

Most of the COPs beginning with the Paris Agreement have been about promises.  They set goals for reducing carbon output.  They never meet them.  They set up a fund for rich nations to help the poor nations most affected, especially by rising tides.  They failed to put any money in it, and then they contributed too little.  It's been mostly about promises. Similarly, there are lots of ideas for technologies and things to do; some of the oldest have been known for years but still nothing is done. And others will require decades more of refinement, when it will likely be too late to apply them effectively.  Yes, people and nations are trying, and showing some progress.  But not enough to keep the promises from becoming lies we tell ourselves.

Until we dread the lies more than the work that needs to be done, every year will be a year of dread.  That's all I've got to say.  Captain Future, over and out.