Darkness on the Edge of Town - Bruce Springsteen -

Darkness on the Edge of Town

- Bruce Springsteen -

Well, they're still racing out at the Trestles,

But that blood it never burned in her veins, 

Now I hear she's got a house up in Fairview, 

In a style she's trying to maintain.

Well, if she wants to see me, 

You can tell her that I'm easily found, 

Tell her there's a spot out 'neath Abram's Bridge, 

And tell her, there's a darkness on the edge of town. 

There's a darkness on the edge of town.

Well, everybody's got a secret, Sonny,

Something that they just can't face, 

Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it, 

They carry it with them every step that they take. 

Till some day they'll just cut it loose

Cut it loose or let it drag 'em down, 

Where no one asks any questions, 

or looks too long in your face, 

In the darkness on the edge of town. 

In the darkness on the edge of town. 

Well now some folks are born into a good life,

And other folks get it anyway, anyhow,

Well now I lost my money and I lost my wife,

Them things don't seem to matter much to me now. 

Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop, 

I'll be on that hill with everything I got, 

With lives on the line where dreams are found and lost,

I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost, 

For wanting things that can only be found 

In the darkness on the edge of town.

In the darkness on the edge of town.

Review : THE STUFF OF THOUGHT -Pinker-

"The nature of reality does not dictate the way that reality is represented in people's minds."

-Steven Pinker-

The Double Thinker
By WILLIAM SALETANSEPT. 23, 2007

A Review of Steven Pinker's :

"THE STUFF OF THOUGHT"
Language as a Window Into Human Nature.

There are two ways to look at anything. That’s what I learned from reading Steven Pinker. Actually, I learned it from two Steven Pinkers. One is a theorist of human nature, the author of “How the Mind Works” and “The Blank Slate.” The other is a word fetishist, the author of “The Language Instinct” and “Words and Rules.” One minute, he’s explaining the ascent of man; the next, he’s fondling irregular verbs the way other people savor stamps or Civil War memorabilia.

In “The Stuff of Thought,” Pinker says his new book is part of both his gigs. Hence its subtitle: “Language as a Window Into Human Nature.” It sounds as though he’s finally going to pull together his life’s work under one big idea, but he doesn’t. That’s what makes him so edifying and infuriating to read: he sees duality everywhere.

It’s not that Pinker thinks the world can be neatly divided. That would be dualism. In “The Blank Slate,” he trashed the most famous such distinction, the one between mind and matter. Pinker’s duality is of the opposite kind. Categories intersect like dimensions. The mind is what the brain does. Evolution shaped psychology, but in the process psychology evolved its own laws.

“The Stuff of Thought” explores the duality of human cognition: the modesty of its construction and the majesty of its constructive power. Pinker weaves this paradox from a series of opposing theories. Philosophical realists, for instance, think perception comes from reality. Idealists think it’s all in our heads. Pinker says it comes from reality but is organized and reorganized by the mind. That’s why you can look at the same thing in different ways.

Then there’s the clash between ancient and modern science. Aristotle thought projectiles continued through space because a force propelled them. He thought they eventually fell because Earth was their natural home. Modern science rejects both ideas. Pinker says Aristotle was right, not about projectiles but about how we understand them. We think in terms of force and purpose because our minds evolved in a biological world of force and purpose, not in an abstract world of vacuums and multiple gravities. Aristotle’s bad physics was actually good psychology.

How can we be sure the mind works this way? By studying its chief manifestation: language. Variations among verbs reflect our distinctions among physical processes. Nuances among nouns illustrate the alternate interpretations built into our most basic perceptions.

Metaphor turns out to be our crucial talent. It parlays crude animal knowledge into human advancement. From physical destinations, we extrapolate a conception of goals. From physical journeys, we build an understanding of relationships. Metaphors structure even our most advanced ideas: heat works like fluid, atoms like solar systems, genes like code, evolution like design. In each case, language has fossilized the construction process: “heat flow,” “genetic code,” “natural selection.”

Some thinkers worry that this power to frame perceptions can run away with us. In politics, the linguist George Lakoff has warned, “frames trump facts.” In this view, taxes can be depicted as burdens or as membership fees, driving public opinion this way or that. Pinker rejects Lakoff’s ideas, which have become fashionable among Democratic strategists. “Metaphors are generalizations,” he argues. Their implications can be tested against reality. Lakoff’s proposal to reframe taxes as membership fees flunks the test: if you don’t pay your membership fees, you lose your benefits; but if you don’t pay your taxes, you go to jail.



Nature isn’t the only external standard by which we can evaluate and revise frames and claims. Social behavior can test them, too. If frames overpower rational criticism, Pinker asks, then why do Lakoff and other quasi-relativists write books rationally criticizing frames? The medium belies the message. The medium isn’t just reason; it’s language — and language isn’t the manifestation of one mind; it’s the joint manifestation of millions. The reason language works is that it reflects the world as we jointly experience it.

That doesn’t mean we always use language to convey reality. Language is a social medium with social purposes. Sometimes, we use it not to communicate facts about the world but to filter them. We euphemize bribes as “contributions” to preserve the dignity of lobbyists and legislators. We phrase treaties vaguely because if they were clear, nobody would sign them. We invent subtle sexual overtures to avoid a confrontation if the other guy turns out not to be gay. We complain about doublespeak but rely on double meanings.

These are the aspects of our duality: brain and mind, matter and metaphor, fact and frame, science and politics, information and implication. Even their common lesson has two sides. On the one hand, we must face the limits of our mental construction. We have trouble understanding intellectual property because our ideas of possession and theft are based on physical objects. We have trouble with evolution because we think of adaptation as something that individuals do in their lifetimes, not something a species does over generations. We confuse differences in group averages with claims of group superiority. We’re prone to cronyism because our notions of community arose from family and tribe. In criminal trials, we resist objective explanations of subjective behavior. In sum, Pinker warns, “the machinery of conceptual semantics makes us permanently vulnerable to fallacies in reasoning.”

On the other hand, we are not imprisoned by them. The dialectic of creativity and reality-testing has taken us far beyond other animals and can take us farther. The next step is to dump our most natural and mistaken metaphor — education as the filling of empty minds — and recognize that we learn by extrapolating, testing, modifying and recombining mental models of the world.

That’s the two-faceted human nature Pinker wants to show us through the window of language. But as he does so, one more face appears in the glass: the reflection of the man looking into it.

Being a scientist is hard. You’re supposed to keep your personality out of the way, justifying every topic of interest by some larger theoretical goal. Pinker tries. “I like to think I have a better reason to introduce you to my little friends,” he pleads, referring to verbs and his infatuation with them. But as Pinker’s little friends consume the book, it becomes clear that he’s a geek.

It starts on the first page. The book is pegged to the anniversary of Sept. 11, and that’s the first topic Pinker addresses. Here is Pinker’s angle: Was it one “event” or two? This question makes a $3.5 billion difference to the World Trade Center’s owner and his insurance company, but you’d be hard pressed to think up a more pointy-headed question about the murder of nearly 3,000 people. The riffs continue: verb taxonomies, the nuances of “politeness theory,” the comparative languages of South American tribes. At one point, Pinker draws up a game-theoretic matrix for the question “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” Etchings, of course, are code for sex. But in Pinker’s case, you get the feeling that this guy actually would prefer to show you his etchings. That’s his kink. He’s interested in the stuff of life, but he’s even more interested in how we depict it.

There’s plenty of sex and scatology in Pinker’s etchings. Some of it is shrouded in Nerdish, like the “gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance.” But most of it is brutally explicit. He catalogs scores of terms for genitals, sex acts and excrement. From them, he spins delightful theories about people. He pokes fun at Congressional censors for botching the grammar of words they’re trying to ban. Foul language turns out to be an excellent window not only into human nature but into Pinker’s nature: curious, inventive, fearless, naughty.

And Pinker’s nature turns out to be the book’s organizing principle. The linguistic arcana, the academic squabbles, the Tom Lehrer songs, the Lenny Bruce quotations — they’re all part of the tale of one man’s journey to understanding human nature. The majesty of Pinker’s theories is only one side of the story. The other side is the modesty of how he built them. It all makes sense, when you look at it the right way.

Are You Listening? By Gordon Marino , NYT , "The Stone"

Are You Listening?
By Gordon Marino Dec. 17, 2019


Ernest Hemingway put it bluntly: “Most people never listen.”

Given that meaningful relationships are crucial to human thriving, it is unfortunate that the ability to listen should be so underestimated, and so rare.

The importance of listening was apparently a concern in the earliest days of Western philosophy. Zeno of Citium (334-262 B.C.), the founder of Stoicism, proclaimed, “We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.” A few centuries later, his philosophical descendant Epictetus taught, “Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs considerable practice in listening.”

But listening has gotten short shrift in philosophy over the years. While attempts to break down moral character into a list of virtues — like courage, honesty, self-control and so on — go back at least to Aristotle, the ability to listen never made the list. Philosophy is mostly silent on the moral importance of being a good listener.

Good listening is not a matter of technique but of having the willingness to enter into another person’s life. Many bad listeners can’t be there for someone else because they are too locked into themselves. For them, everything has to be filtered through their own experience and concerns.

Psychoanalysts train for years to master the art of listening carefully. Most importantly, they labor at learning to decipher their “countertransference,” that is, at detecting experiences and desires that might filter and so distort the revelations of their clients. For example, an analyst who understands that she harbors red-hot anger toward her father would need to be careful of unconsciously and mistakenly hearing resonances of her dad in words coming from the person on the couch.

“How do you listen?” the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti asked his audience in a 1953 talk. “Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.” Which is of course to say, you aren’t listening at all.

When my philosophy students put together their own table of virtues, they invariably include empathy. But empathy requires a willingness to listen, and listening demands wiping the slate of your mind clean. Tell someone you are battling through a marital breakup and in a few ticks most folks will quickly relate it to themselves, perhaps saying, “I went through the same thing a few years back.”

Raw-edged awkwardness, the feeling of not knowing what to say, is one of the most daunting impediments to being present for someone else — but that very feeling is the result of mistakenly thinking that the person reaching out to you is asking for something akin to an explanation. Once, a teenage neighbor confided to me that her best friend had recently hanged himself. Weeping she said, “Maybe this sounds selfish, but I feel like he was the only person who ever really listened to me, who ever understood me.”

In those few moments together, this distraught 18-year-old was not expecting me to explain the place of her friend’s untimely death in the grand scheme of the universe. She just wanted me to be there with her in her howling pain. She was yearning for the comfort of feeling that she was not alone, that at least someone grasped what she was feeling.

But I’m not just trying to describe the virtue of being a good listener. I also want to suggest that people who have not been listened to often find it hard to listen to themselves.

A few years ago, I had a student come to me in dire academic straits. This was a shock since this 20-year old had always been a brilliant and impassioned learner. I knew his family background: a single mother working two low wage jobs to support him and his siblings. For all his mom’s grit and loving resolve to nurture her children, growing up there was not much space for him to complain to his exhausted mom about slurs in school or being cut from the soccer team.

As he was perched on a chair in my office, slumped shoulders and head hanging low, I kept trying different tacks to get a sense of what was going on behind his furrowed brows. He couldn’t cough it up. He was a mystery to himself. A week before our conversation, he made the leap of talking with a counselor. In those sessions, he had heard some clinical terms tossed about, and during our meeting he obsessively circled around the question of whether or not he was suffering from anxiety or depression. “It is not an either/or; anxiety and depression are common partners,” I assured him, insisting that what we needed to do was concentrate on how he was feeling now and more urgently, on getting him to pull out of his academic crash pattern.

Ironically enough, this student is a highly valued volunteer mentor and tutor in the local public schools. There is no doubt that he can take heed of the travails of struggling kids, but when it came to listening to himself, he had a hearing problem. He could not make sense of his inner world. I could not help but think that his inner confusion owed much to the absence in his life of caring and attentive listeners.

There are hordes of people who have never had anyone to listen to them. Sometimes the isolation is the debris of external conditions: poverty, family illness, unemployment, war. Still, just as often, the inability to listen has nothing to do with socio-economic or political circumstances.

Many young people keep troubling thoughts inside because their parents iced up when their Jack or Jill vented feelings that made mom and dad feel helpless or guilty. Friends have confided to me that as youngsters they couldn’t go to their parents when they were on the razor’s edge because they felt their folks were too fragile and would just fall apart or withdraw. I suppose it is straightforward, but my hypothesis is that people forced to muffle their feelings and thoughts are in peril of burying those inner perturbations so deeply that they can’t unearth them anymore.

At the risk of breaking my own rule about not relating everything to oneself, I was a borderline criminal adolescent. But I benefited and was perhaps even saved by a brace of quiet blessings — a level of basic trust and a cadre of kindhearted people who would listen to me as I spilled my roiling heart and mind. These generous individuals who could put themselves aside enough to listen to a daft teenager would also give me feedback. Because they listened to me, I learned to listen to myself. By effectively holding my hand, they helped me develop into a bird watcher of my inner life and so gain some much needed sway over my moods and emotions.

In ancient Athens, the sacred words “Know thyself” were inscribed at the Oracle of Delphi. Knowing yourself is a hard, perpetual labor. But it is one made infinitely more challenging for those living among people with the ears to hear, but not to listen.

Gordon Marino is the author of “The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age,” a professor of philosophy and the director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College.

My Heart: An Emotional Intelligence Primer

My Heart: An Emotional Intelligence Primer in the Form of an Uncommonly Tender Illustrated Poem About Our Capacity for Love

“My heart is a shadow, a light and a guide. Closed or open… I get to decide.”

By Maria Popova

“How is your heart?” I recently asked a friend going through a trying period of overwork and romantic tumult, circling the event horizon of burnout while trying to bring a colossal labor of love to life. His answer, beautiful and heartbreaking, came swiftly, unreservedly, the way words leave children’s lips simple, sincere, and poetic, before adulthood has learned to complicate them out of the poetry and the sincerity with considerations of reason and self-consciousness: “My heart is too busy to be a heart,” he replied.

How does the human heart — that ancient beast, whose roars and purrs have inspired sonnets and ballads and wars, defied myriad labels too small to hold its pulses, and laid lovers and empires at its altar — unbusy itself from self-consciousness and learn to be a heart? That is what artist and illustrator Corinna Luyken explores in the lyrical and lovely My Heart (public library) — an emotional intelligence primer in the form of an uncommonly tender illustrated poem about the tessellated capacities of the heart, about love as a practice rather than a state, about how it can frustrate us, brighten us, frighten us, and ultimately expand us.

My heart is a window,

My heart is a slide.

My heart can be closed

or opened up wide.

Some days it’s a puddle.

Some days it’s a stain.

Some days it is cloudy

and heavy with rain.

Across the splendid spare verses, against the deliberate creative limitation of a greyscale-and-yellow color palette, a sweeping richness of emotional hues unfolds. What emerges is one of those rare, miraculous “children’s” books, in the tradition of The Little Prince, teaching kids about some elemental aspect of being human while inviting grownups to unlearn what we have learned in order to rediscover and reinhabit the purest, most innocent truths of our humanity.

Some days it is tiny,

but tiny can grow…

and grow…

and grow.

There are days it’s a fence

between me and the world,

days it’s a whisper

that can barely be heard.

There are days it is broken,

but broken can mend,

and a heart that is closed

can still open again.

My heart is a shadow,

a light and a guide.

Closed or open…

I get to decide.

Invictus , BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

Invictus

- William Ernest Henley -

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

To waste a moment on the yesterdays. -Ralph Waldo Emerson -

Ralph Waldo Emerson was quoted as saying :

"This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays."

In response to Waldo :

 

"This new year, it is too sad when we realize and are overtaken by the feeling that We regret wasting every single one of the moments "with" and "On" those “Yesterdays”.

**

I Like You: An Almost Unbearably Lovely Vintage Illustrated Ode to Friendship

I Like You: 

An Almost Unbearably Lovely Vintage Illustrated Ode to Friendship.

A touching serenade to the little things that add up to the bigness of a true platonic love.

By Maria Popova

“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship,” Seneca counseled two millennia ago in his timeless meditation on true and false friendship, “but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.”

I often ponder friendship — that crowning glory of life — and the strain of protecting its sanctity from the commodification of the word “friend”in this age of social media. Adrienne Rich exposed the naked heart of it in her bittersweet assertion that “we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.” I side with astronomer Maria Mitchell in that the few who do accompany us intimately along the walk of life shape who we become, and with poet and philosopher David Whyte in that “all friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness.”

But what, really, is the meaning and measure of friendship? Like most things of beauty, it is slippery to define yet deeply felt. Paradoxically, devastatingly, it is often recognized most acutely through its sudden loss. It lives most intimately not in the grand gestures but in the littlest things that add up, in the final calculus of life, to the bigness of any true bond.

That is what children’s book author Sandol Stoddard and illustrator Jacqueline Chwast explore with immense sweetness and sensitivity in the 1965 gem I Like You (public library) — one of the tenderest and most touching presents I’ve ever gotten, from one of my dearest friends, and the platonic-love counterpart to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s classic romantic-love sonnet “How Do I Love Thee?”