I’ve heard the quote “death ends a life, but not a relationship” attributed to several people. I first saw and spoke the line in 1993 when I played the role of Gene Garrison in a local community theater production of Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father, originally produced in 1968. My other regular exposure to this arresting yet quite sensible notion comes once every year, when the Unitarian church I belong to includes it in a liturgy in remembrance of the deceased. And though the service is intended most for those who were lost in the year just past, you can certainly remember anyone you’re inclined to remember.
My father died at the age of 86 just after Christmas last year--December 29, 2010. At this writing, that’s only about a month ago. I don’t expect the relationship to end before I join him in the way of all flesh. In a powerful sense, our own selves are made up of the influences of countless other selves, with our longest and most significant relationships asserting their presence insistently, in a variety of ways.
Robert Penn Warren first published his essay “Portrait of a Father” in 1987 in The Southern Review. His father had died about 32 years earlier, but of course the reflections and ruminations generated by that relationship didn’t end. In 1988, the University Press of Kentucky published “Portrait” as a book, including the longish poem “Mortmain.” The poem’s title refers to the ongoing influence of the dead on the living. Warren himself died in September of 1989.
Warren begins thusly: “My father, as the years since his death pass, becomes to me more and more a man of mystery. I do not mean to say that I do not know the man he was . . . . What is mysterious is the personal history from which that man emerged. This involves, of course, the mystery of his family, especially his mother and father.”
So it seems safe to say that Warren didn’t finish assimilating the business of his family history, as it came through his father, before he died. People talk of getting “closure” on their relationships with parents before the old ones die, or "closure" with other significant people before they themselves die. I personally see this “closure” as not only overrated, but far more elusive than generally believed. I don’t expect my own life to end as a neatly resolved narrative. My relationship with my father--one not ended by death--remains open to exploration and interpretation. The overarching story does not end.
I know very little about my father’s father, the only one of my grandparents who died before I was born. This grandfather owned a farm when my father was born, but in 1932, when my father was seven years old, the house on the farm burned down, so he sold the place to his brother-in-law and moved to town, working as a clerk at various times in a grocery store or hardware store. My father described him as a man of few words who commanded attention when he did speak.
My father’s mother I knew well, having spent a lot of time in her company, alone sometimes, and more often with members of the extended family. I remember her as buoyant, talkative, opinionated, energetic, and not averse to an occasional bawdy joke, as long as the joke didn’t transgress propriety too far. I was very fond of her.
Questions of where my father came from--his own origins and influences--bear on the question of the distance between him and me. While it’s certainly true that a historical continuity crosses generations and holds them together, it’s also the case that most of us, especially in times of rapid culture change, see gaps, if not gulfs, of perception and interpretation of the world open up between ourselves and our parents. So in the case of my relationship with my father, we spent part of our time together and apart working out various accommodations to the distance.
In the late sixties and early seventies, we argued. We disagreed, among other things, on politics, as he was traditional and I as a young man was excited by the novel possibilities offered up by the deliciously tumultuous cultural pageant around us. And in a way, he still was the authority and I the rebel. Good conditions for establishing the kind of relationship that requires a covenant--the kind of mutual obligation growing out of a well-known Biblical form. A natural extension of our father-child bond, one that often, but not always, follows into the son's adulthood.
My father grew up in the Great Depression, and for him, work with good pay, benefits, and job security was a great blessing and all one need hope for. For me, what I’ve always seen as problematic--a system that places what’s conventionally seen as economically efficient over the needs of the human spirit--a good job would have been one I felt more at home in, one friendly to my values and natural inclinations.
His view certainly has its advantages. I’ve come more and more to feel that mine has been too idealistic, as I’ve moved in mid-life and beyond into more pragmatic territory, somewhat reluctantly toward a clear-eyed view of the world as it is rather than what I would prefer it to be. But I’ve never wanted to accept what’s there as being just and right and simply because it is in fact there.
We worked together, my father and I, in his small manufacturing business, for fourteen years, a time that ended almost 20 years ago. During those years, we intensified the informal hermeneutic of each other we’d already begun, each trying to interpret what exactly the other one was, looking for clues that were new or at least refined versions of the ones we had. I like to believe the process itself became more refined over those years. This attempt at mutual knowing, at overlapping interpretations, stretched into his last days, as we continued the longtime habitual work of knowing each other better.
And I still had the “me” of my own earlier years, the part of my capacious, often inconsistent “self” that is certainly more varied and more malleable than I used to think it was. Memories and experience from those older regions of myself were always there to resonate in a territory of life I shared with my father.
He was good to me, and followed his lights, often if not always right, in being also good for me. As a boy I wanted what so many boys want--to be like someone who was a little farther along, allowed to do more important things. My father was in the immemorial chain of fathers who’d helped boys along that path. At one time, I’d have learned to harness a team and drive a wagon. In the time and place I lived in, I learned to drive cars. I wanted to start early, and I wanted to know not only how to drive them, but how they worked. He was helpful with both areas, as he was with bicycling and hunting. He talked seriously with me about politics, and I listened to him talk with others about it. I kept the habit of such conversations, but changed some of my allegiances.
I spoke briefly at his funeral, something I wouldn’t have thought I’d do. What came to me to talk about was what I’d learned from him about the vital importance of maintaining relationships in the presence of conflict--a vital element in the covenantal agreement. Relationships are more important than the doctrines and dogmas people cling to so desperately, as if their lives depend upon their allegiance to human constructs. Constructs must now and forever take a back seat to the fundamental need to maintain relationships. Most of us, unfortunately, aren’t very good at subordinating our ideas to the need to live with others. That’s always a shame, and often destructive. One day, it may be apocalyptically destructive.
In my remarks at the funeral service, after my father’s Baptist pastor spoke, I mentioned my own Unitarian affiliation, saying that we Unitarians are fond of quoting our 16th century European forbear Francis David, who said: “We need not think alike to love alike.” After we’d had our last conversation, it struck me that, at a deep level, my father understood this and insisted on it.
Most substantial, lasting relationships include an ongoing desire for mutual understanding. Exploring the territories of those you care about, and the territories between you, is quite possibly the most rewarding human occupation, the best thing we can do with our limited time.
Who am I? Where did I come from? That’s too complex a question for anything like a full answer. But I know some of the contributors to my identity. I feel my father’s presence among the forces telling me who I am.
A stanza from Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Whatever You Now Are” suggests the difficulty of trying to reach some, well, closure about an answer:
Is it you that flows from distance, to distance,
With the tune of time and blood intertwined forever?
Or does the dark stream of log-ripple and stone-chance
Define the pattern of your whole life’s endeavor?
What elements, shadowy, in that dream interlace
In a region past categories of Time and Space?
The poem ends with the question open even wider:
. . . music drifts to your shadowy cave
Of consciousness, whoever you now are--
But dawn breaks soon, and that self will have fled away.
Will a more strange one yet inhabit the precinct of day?
Will a more strange self yet emerge as a “you” (or me) in that forever-entwined “tune of time and blood”? It’s altogether likely. But the blood will have its say along with, and probably over and above, the shadowy elements. Time and blood together shape distinctive people who interact with each other from different vantage points.
We are shaped first by biology, then by the human history running through a very specific--unique, actually--time and place. And chance has its say as well. We have little control over most of these things, but at least some control over the ways we relate to each other. We should remember this, take care in it, and take joy in it.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Thursday, December 23, 2010
From Nothing?
In the course of human urges to learn the origins of things--the earth, water, trees that shed their leaves and trees that don’t, animals with fur and animals that live underwater, and of course the humans looking in wonder at all of it--we have spawned countless stories of creation. Scholars of comparative religion sort them into various categories, among which are world-parent myths, creation from a primordial chaos, and creation of humans as the spawn of Mother Earth.
Creatio ex nihilo, literally “creation from nothing,” is familiar to most of us in the Western world with the first of two creation stories in Genesis, the one that has God simply speaking man and woman into existence, as he does the rest of creation, rather than making the man from earth and the woman from the man’s rib. The first story--the one that in English translations repeats the phrase “and God said, let there be”-- has much more recent origins than the one in Genesis 2. It’s also similar to creation-from-chaos myths in some places (“the earth was without form, and void”). It’s hard to find purity of form in human categories.
A lot of books have been written on the topic of creation myths. One, Charles H. Long’s Alpha: The Myths of Creation was first published in 1963 and is still in print.
We have a curiosity, maybe out of psychological need, to know where things come from. It helps us carve out an understanding of our place in the universe. We do this now mostly with the tools of science--astrophysics, geology, evolutionary biology. And modern cosmology speculates about whether the universe even had a beginning.
Along with our curiosity about where we came from, we ponder the origins of our own creations--ideas, works of art, inventions. I have a friend, an artist who lives in Santa Fe, who is considering a series of works on creation ex nihilo--from nothing. When she told me this, I became curious myself about the wide range of this notion that something can come from what we think of as “nothing.”
People can be relentlessly inquisitive about where ideas come from, and delighted with stories about flashes of insight. In science, Mendeleev is said to have arranged the elements of the periodic table along the lines of the way playing cards are organized in solitaire. Michael Faraday’s discovery of the ring structure of benzene involved a kind of waking dream in which he saw the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros--the image of a snake swallowing its own tail.
Certainly it’s reassuring to hear of the ability of people to solve complex problems through the power of an informed intuition. Or to write a story that seems to be without an external source. P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books, tells of an interviewer who visited her once, insistent upon ferreting out the source of this preposterous character who slides up bannisters. Travers recounts part of the conversation in the Spring 1988 issue of Parabola, a magazine she contributed to for many years as an editor and writer:
“The Interviewer” (the title of the article) is looking for an Answer, one definitive locus for the source of a tale, an Answer with none of the nebulous, contingent character of so much human experience. He wants to banish uncertainty.
Near the article’s end, Travers sums up:
Still, we want explanations. We don’t want to have to rely on any mysterious source. We’d rather have a formula or a recipe or an algorithm. So equipped, we could summon at will our power to bring something new to the world. Having to wait for some mysterious entity to bestow “a sudden shaft of light” is anathema to busy creatures like ourselves who don’t like to wait for things.
For Travers, a story coming “from nowhere” seems to mean coming from an unknown source or sources. What’s needed is a receptive mind, which may imply a kind of meditative emptiness, a mind that’s at least relatively free of the usual mundane clutter and concern. Such a mind has, at least for a moment, set aside its role as the center of the universe. It says it can’t know where it can get anything it wants, but it knows valuable things sometimes come unbidden. And such a mind likes play.
An insight or idea from nowhere may have sources. My guess is that it’s almost certain there’s not one source, but an interplay of images, abstractions, experiences, and expressions that coalesce long enough to become something surprisingly new, and coherent enough to make sense to others. With science, such an intuition might stand up to empirical scrutiny. With art, it would resonate in the inner lives of others who see it, hear it, or read it, and say yes, I recognize that, I’ve felt its presence somehow before and couldn’t describe it.
The nothing from which something can be created is, perhaps, more an absence of the thing created, a kind of void where an almost infinite array of potentials exists, and the force of human intuition and action assembles elements in a new form. We all do this in some way as we make meaning in life. Some of us, not content with copies of constructs or received wisdom, make meaning more consciously than others.
On the other hand, some, like Travers’ interlocutor, cannot seem to accept that a physics-defying character could simply appear in the mind of a writer’s playful imagination, in spite of the rich heritage of stories in human history from Homer to Garcia-Marquez whose magical narratives not only appear, but manage to convey something deeply moving about what it’s like to be human.
Writing is a form of thinking, and I write personal essays in part to find out more about what I think about one topic or another. I still don’t have a firm position to argue for one way or another on creating from nothing. What I do find is that it’s interesting to put the notion into play, bounce it around a bit, and see if it opens any new perspectives. For the time being I’m comfortable with my agnosticism, my lack of knowledge about the sources of inspiration, and content to keep my varying thoughts in play with each other.
Creatio ex nihilo, literally “creation from nothing,” is familiar to most of us in the Western world with the first of two creation stories in Genesis, the one that has God simply speaking man and woman into existence, as he does the rest of creation, rather than making the man from earth and the woman from the man’s rib. The first story--the one that in English translations repeats the phrase “and God said, let there be”-- has much more recent origins than the one in Genesis 2. It’s also similar to creation-from-chaos myths in some places (“the earth was without form, and void”). It’s hard to find purity of form in human categories.
A lot of books have been written on the topic of creation myths. One, Charles H. Long’s Alpha: The Myths of Creation was first published in 1963 and is still in print.
We have a curiosity, maybe out of psychological need, to know where things come from. It helps us carve out an understanding of our place in the universe. We do this now mostly with the tools of science--astrophysics, geology, evolutionary biology. And modern cosmology speculates about whether the universe even had a beginning.
Along with our curiosity about where we came from, we ponder the origins of our own creations--ideas, works of art, inventions. I have a friend, an artist who lives in Santa Fe, who is considering a series of works on creation ex nihilo--from nothing. When she told me this, I became curious myself about the wide range of this notion that something can come from what we think of as “nothing.”
People can be relentlessly inquisitive about where ideas come from, and delighted with stories about flashes of insight. In science, Mendeleev is said to have arranged the elements of the periodic table along the lines of the way playing cards are organized in solitaire. Michael Faraday’s discovery of the ring structure of benzene involved a kind of waking dream in which he saw the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros--the image of a snake swallowing its own tail.
Certainly it’s reassuring to hear of the ability of people to solve complex problems through the power of an informed intuition. Or to write a story that seems to be without an external source. P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books, tells of an interviewer who visited her once, insistent upon ferreting out the source of this preposterous character who slides up bannisters. Travers recounts part of the conversation in the Spring 1988 issue of Parabola, a magazine she contributed to for many years as an editor and writer:
“So tell me,” he said eagerly . . . “Where did you get the idea?”
“Where does anyone get an idea?”
“But it must--it can’t help it--come from somewhere.”
“Why not from nowhere?” I suggested.
“The Interviewer” (the title of the article) is looking for an Answer, one definitive locus for the source of a tale, an Answer with none of the nebulous, contingent character of so much human experience. He wants to banish uncertainty.
Near the article’s end, Travers sums up:
But let us admit it. With that word “creative,” when applied to any human endeavor, we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light--by grace one feels, rather than deserving--for it always comes as something given, free, unsought, unexpected. It is useless, possibly even profane, to ask for explanations.
Still, we want explanations. We don’t want to have to rely on any mysterious source. We’d rather have a formula or a recipe or an algorithm. So equipped, we could summon at will our power to bring something new to the world. Having to wait for some mysterious entity to bestow “a sudden shaft of light” is anathema to busy creatures like ourselves who don’t like to wait for things.
For Travers, a story coming “from nowhere” seems to mean coming from an unknown source or sources. What’s needed is a receptive mind, which may imply a kind of meditative emptiness, a mind that’s at least relatively free of the usual mundane clutter and concern. Such a mind has, at least for a moment, set aside its role as the center of the universe. It says it can’t know where it can get anything it wants, but it knows valuable things sometimes come unbidden. And such a mind likes play.
An insight or idea from nowhere may have sources. My guess is that it’s almost certain there’s not one source, but an interplay of images, abstractions, experiences, and expressions that coalesce long enough to become something surprisingly new, and coherent enough to make sense to others. With science, such an intuition might stand up to empirical scrutiny. With art, it would resonate in the inner lives of others who see it, hear it, or read it, and say yes, I recognize that, I’ve felt its presence somehow before and couldn’t describe it.
The nothing from which something can be created is, perhaps, more an absence of the thing created, a kind of void where an almost infinite array of potentials exists, and the force of human intuition and action assembles elements in a new form. We all do this in some way as we make meaning in life. Some of us, not content with copies of constructs or received wisdom, make meaning more consciously than others.
On the other hand, some, like Travers’ interlocutor, cannot seem to accept that a physics-defying character could simply appear in the mind of a writer’s playful imagination, in spite of the rich heritage of stories in human history from Homer to Garcia-Marquez whose magical narratives not only appear, but manage to convey something deeply moving about what it’s like to be human.
Writing is a form of thinking, and I write personal essays in part to find out more about what I think about one topic or another. I still don’t have a firm position to argue for one way or another on creating from nothing. What I do find is that it’s interesting to put the notion into play, bounce it around a bit, and see if it opens any new perspectives. For the time being I’m comfortable with my agnosticism, my lack of knowledge about the sources of inspiration, and content to keep my varying thoughts in play with each other.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Eyes of the Wild
One morning a few days ago I walked out to my car to leave for work, opened the door and then looked out from the garage about seventy feet away to a low hill at the border of my lawn where some shrubs grow and where day lilies bloom in June. Red oaks and a few birches shade the little raised bed, and stones form a border with the lawn. A creek bed lies behind it. On some ground cover between shrubs and lawn, a doe was lying down in an alert but relaxed posture, her head up and eyes toward the house where the noise of the motor, gears, and chain that raised the garage door had just caught her attention. Despite the mechanical rumbling, the deer didn’t bolt or even stand up. I walked to the rear of the garage, a few feet closer, but stopped short of walking onto the driveway. The doe and I locked eyes for a long moment, both of us unmoving, curious about the other. I felt calm in that surprising space, glad the deer remained and held my gaze.
Then I walked back to the car, started the engine, backed out, and closed the garage door from my car with the remote control. The doe remained still, while still watching. I drove slowly out of the driveway, glanced into her eyes again briefly, and drove away. I wondered that she was so relaxed. Was she hurt? Or just accustomed to human activity from living in a neighborhood where cars and garage door mechanisms make their noises, and two-legged creatures scurry busily about?
In another incident, closer to fifteen years ago, my wife and I were driving at a pace that allowed us to watch for birds on a gravel road in the National Wildlife Refuge at Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee. I stopped on the road in the low-lying bald cypress woods on the lake’s northern boundary when I got a clear view of a barred owl. I slowly stepped out of the car to try for a closer look at the owl. I stopped, stood, and stared. The owl looked back, watching me cautiously, then flew away a few yards while remaining in sight, and perching in a tree where he could keep an eye on me. I walked down the road a little further and stopped where I could engage the owl again in a mutual gaze. We repeated this a couple of times, the owl and I, until the bird flew deeper into the woods and out of sight.
What did I want from the deer and the owl? The favor of their momentary attention? If so, why? My first thought is that I’m drawn to the wildness, the health and vitality, the fragility and uncertainty, of creatures that do not need to live within structures (literal or figurative) other than those dictated by their nature. I won’t speculate on whether they’re confined to their nature and unable to transcend it--they simply have the freedom to be entirely what they are. No one is asking them to be anything else.
My affinity for these fellow creatures grows from no desire to be a deer or an owl, but from a need to enlarge my sense of the scope of the world. I reach for a connection with their otherness and with their wildness. I reach for that out of curiosity, itself a form of desire, and yes, a need. What do the animals “want”? Maybe just to be vigilant in the presence of a creature they don’t understand, that often-threatening bipedal animal that takes up so much space in the world. And somewhere in the vigilance is also a kind of curiosity, a need to learn anything that might help with survival. Other animals may have no interest in probing our consciousness, but they can benefit from any knowledge of our behavior that might lead to predictions of what we’re likely to do, what we’re capable of.
We the wise (sapiens) no longer need to know only how to hunt the ones that might feed us. We can study them now, make whole academic disciplines out of knowledge about owls for the sake of knowledge about owls. We study the world, the universe, this way--objectifying it as if we weren’t part of it, distancing and detaching ourselves, divorcing ourselves from the rest of reality in order to understand it better. Stepping back this way often serves a goal of effective inquiry, but it dilutes the direct character of our experience in the world. We miss the unmediated moment.
The natural history of homo sapiens goes back in time to common ancestors of owl and deer as well as to much earlier creatures. And our eyes and theirs are very much alike. I have looked into the eyes of deer and owls and seen the spark of something I faintly recognize but can probably never name.
I see just the spark because I don’t have the sensual capacity to take in the flame behind it. But the spark, nevertheless, opens me. I feel more capacious for having the brief but timeless moments I had with the deer and the owl. It could be, though, that what I feel as new inner space is not so much extra capacity as it is different inner-space allocation. What created the feeling of new space was a relegation of my ego to the sidelines. I was absorbed enough in the wild eyes to get out of the way and let in something larger.
Getting one’s ego out of the way, even for a brief moment, is not easy, and in modern life, so full of structure, so full of navigational challenges, we may simply need to have that concern for our safety--physical and emotional integrity--out front, never far from awareness. What’s more, the myriad demands on our attention are unrelenting, ceaselessly clamoring for all our sensual space, congesting our senses with trivia of the moment, or messages about buying and selling, or information we need to guide our moving conveyances through traffic safely.
So it’s hard to stop and listen--to notice things we don’t regard as immediately essential, to feel how warm the sun is or the direction the wind is blowing, to notice whether the air smells dusty or moist, to hear birdsong over the song on the radio. Or maybe even appreciate the taste of minerals deep within a bite of fruit, brought to us by the ongoing, everyday transformation of earth, air, fire and water processed through something like an apple tree.
The eyes of wild animals have provided me with a window into the place I live but fail to notice most of the time. With my human community I share a culture, a way of seeing things, which can become so much a part of my identity that I may forget humanity isn’t the whole of reality. With the deer and the owl I share membership in the natural order of things, the air I breathe, a skeletal structure, the land I live on, DNA, eyes, optic nerves, and curiosity about what other creatures are like. And, in the most fortunate moments, respite from the demands of my ego. Something in me is still a little wild, and that unnameable portion lives in an unnameable immensity. I will probably never understand much of it, but I can experience it, and that’s even better.
Then I walked back to the car, started the engine, backed out, and closed the garage door from my car with the remote control. The doe remained still, while still watching. I drove slowly out of the driveway, glanced into her eyes again briefly, and drove away. I wondered that she was so relaxed. Was she hurt? Or just accustomed to human activity from living in a neighborhood where cars and garage door mechanisms make their noises, and two-legged creatures scurry busily about?
In another incident, closer to fifteen years ago, my wife and I were driving at a pace that allowed us to watch for birds on a gravel road in the National Wildlife Refuge at Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee. I stopped on the road in the low-lying bald cypress woods on the lake’s northern boundary when I got a clear view of a barred owl. I slowly stepped out of the car to try for a closer look at the owl. I stopped, stood, and stared. The owl looked back, watching me cautiously, then flew away a few yards while remaining in sight, and perching in a tree where he could keep an eye on me. I walked down the road a little further and stopped where I could engage the owl again in a mutual gaze. We repeated this a couple of times, the owl and I, until the bird flew deeper into the woods and out of sight.
What did I want from the deer and the owl? The favor of their momentary attention? If so, why? My first thought is that I’m drawn to the wildness, the health and vitality, the fragility and uncertainty, of creatures that do not need to live within structures (literal or figurative) other than those dictated by their nature. I won’t speculate on whether they’re confined to their nature and unable to transcend it--they simply have the freedom to be entirely what they are. No one is asking them to be anything else.
My affinity for these fellow creatures grows from no desire to be a deer or an owl, but from a need to enlarge my sense of the scope of the world. I reach for a connection with their otherness and with their wildness. I reach for that out of curiosity, itself a form of desire, and yes, a need. What do the animals “want”? Maybe just to be vigilant in the presence of a creature they don’t understand, that often-threatening bipedal animal that takes up so much space in the world. And somewhere in the vigilance is also a kind of curiosity, a need to learn anything that might help with survival. Other animals may have no interest in probing our consciousness, but they can benefit from any knowledge of our behavior that might lead to predictions of what we’re likely to do, what we’re capable of.
We the wise (sapiens) no longer need to know only how to hunt the ones that might feed us. We can study them now, make whole academic disciplines out of knowledge about owls for the sake of knowledge about owls. We study the world, the universe, this way--objectifying it as if we weren’t part of it, distancing and detaching ourselves, divorcing ourselves from the rest of reality in order to understand it better. Stepping back this way often serves a goal of effective inquiry, but it dilutes the direct character of our experience in the world. We miss the unmediated moment.
The natural history of homo sapiens goes back in time to common ancestors of owl and deer as well as to much earlier creatures. And our eyes and theirs are very much alike. I have looked into the eyes of deer and owls and seen the spark of something I faintly recognize but can probably never name.
I see just the spark because I don’t have the sensual capacity to take in the flame behind it. But the spark, nevertheless, opens me. I feel more capacious for having the brief but timeless moments I had with the deer and the owl. It could be, though, that what I feel as new inner space is not so much extra capacity as it is different inner-space allocation. What created the feeling of new space was a relegation of my ego to the sidelines. I was absorbed enough in the wild eyes to get out of the way and let in something larger.
Getting one’s ego out of the way, even for a brief moment, is not easy, and in modern life, so full of structure, so full of navigational challenges, we may simply need to have that concern for our safety--physical and emotional integrity--out front, never far from awareness. What’s more, the myriad demands on our attention are unrelenting, ceaselessly clamoring for all our sensual space, congesting our senses with trivia of the moment, or messages about buying and selling, or information we need to guide our moving conveyances through traffic safely.
So it’s hard to stop and listen--to notice things we don’t regard as immediately essential, to feel how warm the sun is or the direction the wind is blowing, to notice whether the air smells dusty or moist, to hear birdsong over the song on the radio. Or maybe even appreciate the taste of minerals deep within a bite of fruit, brought to us by the ongoing, everyday transformation of earth, air, fire and water processed through something like an apple tree.
The eyes of wild animals have provided me with a window into the place I live but fail to notice most of the time. With my human community I share a culture, a way of seeing things, which can become so much a part of my identity that I may forget humanity isn’t the whole of reality. With the deer and the owl I share membership in the natural order of things, the air I breathe, a skeletal structure, the land I live on, DNA, eyes, optic nerves, and curiosity about what other creatures are like. And, in the most fortunate moments, respite from the demands of my ego. Something in me is still a little wild, and that unnameable portion lives in an unnameable immensity. I will probably never understand much of it, but I can experience it, and that’s even better.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Such People in the Brave New World
Heraclitus was wrong when he said you can’t step in the same river twice. You can’t even step in the same river once, except for a microsecond.
--Jim Harrison, from Returning to Earth
Even the microsecond in the quote from one of my favorite fiction writers is a fiction. Everything is in motion, in process. Some processes operate at speeds observable by us, and some are too fast or too slow for us to notice. The motion goes on, indifferent to human reaction.
I spent nine of my first eighteen years in small towns that had, in most ways, been the same for decades. But even then people were building bomb shelters against a possible change of temperature in the Cold War, and drugstore soda fountains were dismantled and hauled away after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. At the onset of the polarization that would characterize the sixties, however, most of the people around us still looked like us, or at least familiar to us, and that familiarity may have been reassuring.
A 2008 projection from the U. S. Census Bureau shows white Americans projected to make up less than half the population around 2042, should current trends continue. Almost 310 million people live here now, so what does it mean when people say they want “their” country back? It may, at a fundamental level, mean that the current in the Heraclitean river is speeding up at a perceptible rate, and that people are uncomfortable with that.
The idea of “my country,” or “our country,” is just that—an idea. The reality on the ground is that a large and growing number of people can use the term “my” in reference to their national home, and what people have typically meant is that they identify themselves with the nation. The use of “my” in the want-mine-back sense is possessive. It carries the presumption of ownership, and of the privilege of defining what the country is. This is not only presumptuous, but absurd. And it insists that things should stay the same, when things never have and never can.
At the moment, a controversy of the building of a mosque in New York City near the 9/11 Ground Zero has apparently stirred up protests around the country against plans for construction of other mosques. The direst predictions from mosque opponents say the Muslims are out to replace the U. S. Constitution with Islamic Shariah law. In the August 7, 2010 New York Times an article by Laurie Goodstein (“Across the Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition”) gives examples from Tennessee, Wisconsin, and California. In Temecula, California, one of the Muslims’ outspoken defenders is a Mormon who sits on the local interfaith council, so the business isn't simple.
It may be the case that some Muslims believe Shariah law is appropriate for everyone, just as there are Christians, particularly conservative evangelicals, who see the conversion of the rest of the world as something desirable, and who believe that God Himself is planning a grisly eternity for those who are outside their circle. But a lot of mosques exist in the U. S., with most of their members being here primarily for economic reasons, and building their mosques as places to preserve the culture that has nurtured them, the culture that continues to provide them with community bonds and identity.
Proliferation of mosques isn’t the only development that Tea Partiers and others find unsettling. The President’s name isn’t George or Bill or Ronald or Jimmy or Richard or even Lyndon. And he’s black, being half of African descent and half of European descent, which equates to black as we define it. The economic times are tough for a lot of people, with unemployment rates remaining high and length of unemployment at extremely high levels, and troubled economies always influence the national mood.
People who oppose rapid social change usually see themselves as conservatives. Yet it’s not as easy as one might think to define conservatism. Witness the political primary season we’ve just gone through, where battles raged in several races over which candidate was the “real” conservative. In 1971, a political scientist named Ronald Lora published his study titled Conservative Minds in America. Lora posits three foundations or primary varieties in American conservatism—psychological, possessive, and philosophical. He writes: “Since its roots lie deep in all organic life, psychological conservatism undergirds all other varieties. Its primary cause is fear; its basic objective is security.” That doesn’t necessarily mean the impulse to security represented here is dishonorable. We all want security. But how conscious are we of the attitudes we develop to preserve it? Possessive conservatism seems pretty clear. You or your class has enjoyed wealth and power you don’t want to see displaced by others. Philosophical conservatism isn’t simply about resisting change—these thoughtful types recognize the river’s unceasing current. They simply like to keep change incremental and rooted in a tradition that has what they regard as proven reliability.
A mixture of these three elements probably characterizes American conservatism, and all three may exist to a greater or lesser degree in many individuals. But it seems the philosophical element may be least prevalent. Psychological conservatism, where it’s most strident, seems to me more or less to be made of up people who are unceasingly angry because it’s not 1955 anymore. (To be fair, some strident liberals seem to have a belief, probably rooted in the Enlightenment and the positivism of Auguste Comte, that human societies are perfectible and that if we could all be reasonable and realize their ideas—the pictures of the world in their heads—then suffering would cease. That’s equally unrealistic.)
We’re still left with the problem of how to live together. It’s not a new issue; it’s as old as humanity, even older. And the problem of how to live together is much complicated by the pace of change. It’s fast enough right now, this pace, to disorient a lot of people and have them looking for scapegoats. With the increase in the sheer volume of “otherness,” mostly in the form of people who look different, believe different things, and even have the nerve to speak different languages, there’s no shortage of scapegoats.
Humans are tribalistic, and for the most part oblivious of the fact. So instead of talking about our tribalism we talk in terms that assume it’s as useful as it might have been when tribes didn’t encounter each other often, and may have had to fight to maintain a hunting and gathering territory. The talk we have too often comes out in accusations and self-justifications. What was once perhaps adaptive is now in some respects maladaptive.
And yet even now there are reasons to assert our own cultural territory. The mosque builders understandably want to keep their culture alive in the new places they live. It’s the source of their identity, their sense of self, their community. Their opponents, in turn, feel their own identity threatened by what they regard as an alien presence. Does it have to be like this? The opposition to the assertion of Muslim identity would have people assimilate to American ways, just as the opponents to bilingual accommodations would tell Hispanics and others to speak English if they want to be here.
But the push for assimilation recalls what we did to so many native tribes all over North America, packing their children off to schools to learn Euro-American ways, banning their religious expressions, outlawing their languages. We couldn't simply be content with taking their land and sustenance. We demanded they also yield their identity.
Certain groups can be a danger to others—there’s no denying this. But groups may be gripped by fears and enthusiasms of the moments. The Germans of today are manifestly not the Germans of the Nazi years. So it isn’t just the group that generates threat and conflict, but attitudes held by groups. Sometimes a tribe will come together under any banner. Some individuals will commandeer a religious tradition to serve their agendas of toxic tribalism. We may at some point get conscious enough as a species to dampen this tendency better than we now do, though I’m skeptical that it will ever go away completely.
We are who we are, and it’s unlikely we’ll see breakthroughs in our nature that solve all our conflicts. Can we accept that for what it is, and think about moving toward a way of being in the world that makes more sense in this world? If we can’t step in the same river twice, can we at least think about the implications of where we’re stepping?
--Jim Harrison, from Returning to Earth
Even the microsecond in the quote from one of my favorite fiction writers is a fiction. Everything is in motion, in process. Some processes operate at speeds observable by us, and some are too fast or too slow for us to notice. The motion goes on, indifferent to human reaction.
I spent nine of my first eighteen years in small towns that had, in most ways, been the same for decades. But even then people were building bomb shelters against a possible change of temperature in the Cold War, and drugstore soda fountains were dismantled and hauled away after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. At the onset of the polarization that would characterize the sixties, however, most of the people around us still looked like us, or at least familiar to us, and that familiarity may have been reassuring.
A 2008 projection from the U. S. Census Bureau shows white Americans projected to make up less than half the population around 2042, should current trends continue. Almost 310 million people live here now, so what does it mean when people say they want “their” country back? It may, at a fundamental level, mean that the current in the Heraclitean river is speeding up at a perceptible rate, and that people are uncomfortable with that.
The idea of “my country,” or “our country,” is just that—an idea. The reality on the ground is that a large and growing number of people can use the term “my” in reference to their national home, and what people have typically meant is that they identify themselves with the nation. The use of “my” in the want-mine-back sense is possessive. It carries the presumption of ownership, and of the privilege of defining what the country is. This is not only presumptuous, but absurd. And it insists that things should stay the same, when things never have and never can.
At the moment, a controversy of the building of a mosque in New York City near the 9/11 Ground Zero has apparently stirred up protests around the country against plans for construction of other mosques. The direst predictions from mosque opponents say the Muslims are out to replace the U. S. Constitution with Islamic Shariah law. In the August 7, 2010 New York Times an article by Laurie Goodstein (“Across the Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition”) gives examples from Tennessee, Wisconsin, and California. In Temecula, California, one of the Muslims’ outspoken defenders is a Mormon who sits on the local interfaith council, so the business isn't simple.
It may be the case that some Muslims believe Shariah law is appropriate for everyone, just as there are Christians, particularly conservative evangelicals, who see the conversion of the rest of the world as something desirable, and who believe that God Himself is planning a grisly eternity for those who are outside their circle. But a lot of mosques exist in the U. S., with most of their members being here primarily for economic reasons, and building their mosques as places to preserve the culture that has nurtured them, the culture that continues to provide them with community bonds and identity.
Proliferation of mosques isn’t the only development that Tea Partiers and others find unsettling. The President’s name isn’t George or Bill or Ronald or Jimmy or Richard or even Lyndon. And he’s black, being half of African descent and half of European descent, which equates to black as we define it. The economic times are tough for a lot of people, with unemployment rates remaining high and length of unemployment at extremely high levels, and troubled economies always influence the national mood.
People who oppose rapid social change usually see themselves as conservatives. Yet it’s not as easy as one might think to define conservatism. Witness the political primary season we’ve just gone through, where battles raged in several races over which candidate was the “real” conservative. In 1971, a political scientist named Ronald Lora published his study titled Conservative Minds in America. Lora posits three foundations or primary varieties in American conservatism—psychological, possessive, and philosophical. He writes: “Since its roots lie deep in all organic life, psychological conservatism undergirds all other varieties. Its primary cause is fear; its basic objective is security.” That doesn’t necessarily mean the impulse to security represented here is dishonorable. We all want security. But how conscious are we of the attitudes we develop to preserve it? Possessive conservatism seems pretty clear. You or your class has enjoyed wealth and power you don’t want to see displaced by others. Philosophical conservatism isn’t simply about resisting change—these thoughtful types recognize the river’s unceasing current. They simply like to keep change incremental and rooted in a tradition that has what they regard as proven reliability.
A mixture of these three elements probably characterizes American conservatism, and all three may exist to a greater or lesser degree in many individuals. But it seems the philosophical element may be least prevalent. Psychological conservatism, where it’s most strident, seems to me more or less to be made of up people who are unceasingly angry because it’s not 1955 anymore. (To be fair, some strident liberals seem to have a belief, probably rooted in the Enlightenment and the positivism of Auguste Comte, that human societies are perfectible and that if we could all be reasonable and realize their ideas—the pictures of the world in their heads—then suffering would cease. That’s equally unrealistic.)
We’re still left with the problem of how to live together. It’s not a new issue; it’s as old as humanity, even older. And the problem of how to live together is much complicated by the pace of change. It’s fast enough right now, this pace, to disorient a lot of people and have them looking for scapegoats. With the increase in the sheer volume of “otherness,” mostly in the form of people who look different, believe different things, and even have the nerve to speak different languages, there’s no shortage of scapegoats.
Humans are tribalistic, and for the most part oblivious of the fact. So instead of talking about our tribalism we talk in terms that assume it’s as useful as it might have been when tribes didn’t encounter each other often, and may have had to fight to maintain a hunting and gathering territory. The talk we have too often comes out in accusations and self-justifications. What was once perhaps adaptive is now in some respects maladaptive.
And yet even now there are reasons to assert our own cultural territory. The mosque builders understandably want to keep their culture alive in the new places they live. It’s the source of their identity, their sense of self, their community. Their opponents, in turn, feel their own identity threatened by what they regard as an alien presence. Does it have to be like this? The opposition to the assertion of Muslim identity would have people assimilate to American ways, just as the opponents to bilingual accommodations would tell Hispanics and others to speak English if they want to be here.
But the push for assimilation recalls what we did to so many native tribes all over North America, packing their children off to schools to learn Euro-American ways, banning their religious expressions, outlawing their languages. We couldn't simply be content with taking their land and sustenance. We demanded they also yield their identity.
Certain groups can be a danger to others—there’s no denying this. But groups may be gripped by fears and enthusiasms of the moments. The Germans of today are manifestly not the Germans of the Nazi years. So it isn’t just the group that generates threat and conflict, but attitudes held by groups. Sometimes a tribe will come together under any banner. Some individuals will commandeer a religious tradition to serve their agendas of toxic tribalism. We may at some point get conscious enough as a species to dampen this tendency better than we now do, though I’m skeptical that it will ever go away completely.
We are who we are, and it’s unlikely we’ll see breakthroughs in our nature that solve all our conflicts. Can we accept that for what it is, and think about moving toward a way of being in the world that makes more sense in this world? If we can’t step in the same river twice, can we at least think about the implications of where we’re stepping?
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Weather and Meteorology
Weather gets our attention like nothing else in nature, with the possible exception of more unusual and often more destructive forces like serious disease and earthquakes. We like the weather when it strikes a balance that pleases us--not too hot or cold, not too wet or dry. Soft breezes are fine, but strong winds are unwelcome, bringing with them everything from expressions of dismay to destruction of our dwellings.
Today the streams in my watershed, both large and small, natural and artificial, were momentarily overwhelmed. Heavy thunderstorms began last night, and by the early morning hours, the ground was saturated and a lot of water was following gravity down all the channels. An especially strong storm in the early afternoon overloaded the drainage systems. Water flowed over the streets, unleashing flash flooding here and there. The creek in my backyard, dry in summer except when the rain is heavy, swelled with surging currents.
Storms take us out of ourselves a little, and if they don't inconvenience us too much, they provide some welcome drama. We find ourselves in a suspenseful narrative that builds from moment to moment. Will the power go out? Will a tree fall on my house? Will tornadoes form? Will anyone die?* Local TV stations often preempt all other programming to follow the progress of severe thunderstorms, especially in tornado season. They keep saying the same or similar things over and over, and in their droning repetition overreach for their center-stage prominence as expert interpreters alerting us all to the possible dangers in the unfolding events. Yet some of their frequent updates hold crucial information, particularly when tornadoes loom, as they do at certain times and places.
Often, though, you really don't need a meteorologist to know which way the wind blows. Outside when the weather changes, you know that the air feels different, and the color of the world changes.
We live in a time when many of us get our "nature" from documentaries. Or nature may only capture our interest when an arresting image is selected for us, perhaps artfully composed by a talented and patient photographer, and printed on the glossy paper of a calendar intended to celebrate beauty in the wild. I enjoy these photos myself, and enjoy many of the images from my own camera. But I recognize the second-hand character of carefully selected images, and similarly, I admire the willingness and ability to observe closely in the one who chose the images directly. The greater satisfaction lies in cultivating and applying the habit of observation that notices the scenes with the kind of immediacy that comes from being present to one's surroundings.
Late yesterday, before the storms came in, they were foreshadowed by the cooling air and the rising wind. In the night, thunder cracked with a raucous insistence, the kind of thunder that probably made some of our distant ancestors sit up in alarm and wonder at what the gods might be up to. The early morning, usually bright, was dark with heavy clouds and the dense downward rush of raindrops. After a few hours of intermittent sun, the afternoon's brief but intense deluge literally changed the atmosphere again. At the end of the heaviest downpour, with the last raindrops still gently falling into a liminal space, the sun emerged from somewhere around the west as the storm blew on its eastward course.
So weather is hard to ignore. It doesn't allow us to pass so much of the experience to other observers. If we're in it, close to it at all, we simply can't take it vicariously. The heat on our faces in the summer sun, the cooling breezes across bare arms, the smell of dry leaves accumulating in fall, the sometimes cloying perfume of greenery and flowers in midsummer fields, the shock of cold winter wind, and the first thunderstorms of spring all press themselves into our senses. We feel them, see them, hear them, and smell them. We even taste them in rain and sweat and blowing dust. All our senses are involved.
We will hear the wind and the rain over the weatherman's observations on the radar, but the weather reports still claim a lot, if not most, of our attention. If we think about it, we understand too that even the radar, the barometers, and the maps are extensions of our own senses, tools we've cleverly contrived to help us see what's coming our way a little earlier, a little more clearly. We constantly work on increasing our ability to control our environment, and when we can't control it, we apply our efforts to predicting it. Such efforts have deep roots in human history, encompassing burnt offerings to gods as well as more practical innovations, like the growing powers of observation that eventually, long before radar and weather faxes, allowed expert mariners who could interpret signs in changing winds and skies to run for sheltered coves when such havens were available.
The direct, unmediated experience that once dominated the human condition, though, is less prominent now. Intimate contact with the elements is still unavoidable, but we nevertheless have a different experience of our world. The words that we use are different. The list of terms we use to describe being in the open air--wind, cold, heat, rain, sleet, hail, storm--all have Germanic roots. They've been in English a long time. The term "weather" is Germanic in origin; "meteorology" is Greek. The word "radar" is among the first commonly used words to have entered the language as an acronym (for "radio detection and ranging"). In my grandparents' generation, no one needed the conceptual compression such acronyms make possible.
In the world we live in today, the public trust goes most readily to approaches regarded as best able to offer a measure of control. But we are old creatures. We still need to explore our experience from our own particular vantage points. Meteorologists know about atmospheric thermodynamics, and can use their understanding of natural movements of energy in the heat engine of the atmosphere to help us figure out when we might need an umbrella. Even having the umbrella, though, won't stop us from feeling like we're walking through rain.
After the day's early-afternoon storm, the electricity has gone out, as it sometimes does on stormy days. I sit with my back to a window on the west side of the house in the last hour or two of daylight. The light on the pages of the book I'm reading is the light from the low sun streaming through wind-tossed leaves in the trees between the sun and the paper leaves of the novel in my hand. The light dances around in moving, mottled patterns for a while, against the static patterns of print on white space. Then the sun moves below the trees behind me, and the pages I'm reading are lit by dimmer, duller light. Twilight has begun. I'll read for a few more minutes, then I'll have to wait for the repair crews to get the lights back on.
Today the streams in my watershed, both large and small, natural and artificial, were momentarily overwhelmed. Heavy thunderstorms began last night, and by the early morning hours, the ground was saturated and a lot of water was following gravity down all the channels. An especially strong storm in the early afternoon overloaded the drainage systems. Water flowed over the streets, unleashing flash flooding here and there. The creek in my backyard, dry in summer except when the rain is heavy, swelled with surging currents.
Storms take us out of ourselves a little, and if they don't inconvenience us too much, they provide some welcome drama. We find ourselves in a suspenseful narrative that builds from moment to moment. Will the power go out? Will a tree fall on my house? Will tornadoes form? Will anyone die?* Local TV stations often preempt all other programming to follow the progress of severe thunderstorms, especially in tornado season. They keep saying the same or similar things over and over, and in their droning repetition overreach for their center-stage prominence as expert interpreters alerting us all to the possible dangers in the unfolding events. Yet some of their frequent updates hold crucial information, particularly when tornadoes loom, as they do at certain times and places.
Often, though, you really don't need a meteorologist to know which way the wind blows. Outside when the weather changes, you know that the air feels different, and the color of the world changes.
We live in a time when many of us get our "nature" from documentaries. Or nature may only capture our interest when an arresting image is selected for us, perhaps artfully composed by a talented and patient photographer, and printed on the glossy paper of a calendar intended to celebrate beauty in the wild. I enjoy these photos myself, and enjoy many of the images from my own camera. But I recognize the second-hand character of carefully selected images, and similarly, I admire the willingness and ability to observe closely in the one who chose the images directly. The greater satisfaction lies in cultivating and applying the habit of observation that notices the scenes with the kind of immediacy that comes from being present to one's surroundings.
Late yesterday, before the storms came in, they were foreshadowed by the cooling air and the rising wind. In the night, thunder cracked with a raucous insistence, the kind of thunder that probably made some of our distant ancestors sit up in alarm and wonder at what the gods might be up to. The early morning, usually bright, was dark with heavy clouds and the dense downward rush of raindrops. After a few hours of intermittent sun, the afternoon's brief but intense deluge literally changed the atmosphere again. At the end of the heaviest downpour, with the last raindrops still gently falling into a liminal space, the sun emerged from somewhere around the west as the storm blew on its eastward course.
So weather is hard to ignore. It doesn't allow us to pass so much of the experience to other observers. If we're in it, close to it at all, we simply can't take it vicariously. The heat on our faces in the summer sun, the cooling breezes across bare arms, the smell of dry leaves accumulating in fall, the sometimes cloying perfume of greenery and flowers in midsummer fields, the shock of cold winter wind, and the first thunderstorms of spring all press themselves into our senses. We feel them, see them, hear them, and smell them. We even taste them in rain and sweat and blowing dust. All our senses are involved.
We will hear the wind and the rain over the weatherman's observations on the radar, but the weather reports still claim a lot, if not most, of our attention. If we think about it, we understand too that even the radar, the barometers, and the maps are extensions of our own senses, tools we've cleverly contrived to help us see what's coming our way a little earlier, a little more clearly. We constantly work on increasing our ability to control our environment, and when we can't control it, we apply our efforts to predicting it. Such efforts have deep roots in human history, encompassing burnt offerings to gods as well as more practical innovations, like the growing powers of observation that eventually, long before radar and weather faxes, allowed expert mariners who could interpret signs in changing winds and skies to run for sheltered coves when such havens were available.
The direct, unmediated experience that once dominated the human condition, though, is less prominent now. Intimate contact with the elements is still unavoidable, but we nevertheless have a different experience of our world. The words that we use are different. The list of terms we use to describe being in the open air--wind, cold, heat, rain, sleet, hail, storm--all have Germanic roots. They've been in English a long time. The term "weather" is Germanic in origin; "meteorology" is Greek. The word "radar" is among the first commonly used words to have entered the language as an acronym (for "radio detection and ranging"). In my grandparents' generation, no one needed the conceptual compression such acronyms make possible.
In the world we live in today, the public trust goes most readily to approaches regarded as best able to offer a measure of control. But we are old creatures. We still need to explore our experience from our own particular vantage points. Meteorologists know about atmospheric thermodynamics, and can use their understanding of natural movements of energy in the heat engine of the atmosphere to help us figure out when we might need an umbrella. Even having the umbrella, though, won't stop us from feeling like we're walking through rain.
After the day's early-afternoon storm, the electricity has gone out, as it sometimes does on stormy days. I sit with my back to a window on the west side of the house in the last hour or two of daylight. The light on the pages of the book I'm reading is the light from the low sun streaming through wind-tossed leaves in the trees between the sun and the paper leaves of the novel in my hand. The light dances around in moving, mottled patterns for a while, against the static patterns of print on white space. Then the sun moves below the trees behind me, and the pages I'm reading are lit by dimmer, duller light. Twilight has begun. I'll read for a few more minutes, then I'll have to wait for the repair crews to get the lights back on.
When the lights have been off for two and a half hours, power is restored. If I'm curious about the weather for tomorrow and the days ahead, I'll be able to get expert meteorological advice, delivered by one electronic device or another. The world I'm confronted with wants me to open the psychic space to accommodate both weather and meteorology. I'm curious enough to try.
*Note written the morning after the storm: I woke up to learn that ten people died in tornadoes in central Mississippi, 150-200 miles or so south of where I live. The twisters ran along a northwesterly line from Vicksburg to Yazoo City. Weather forecasts, for those who hear them in time, can provide early warnings that give people opportunity to take shelter. But tornadoes born from severe thunderstorms form quickly and move in unpredictable ways. For those in vulnerable places, they're sometimes nearly impossible to avoid.
*Note written the morning after the storm: I woke up to learn that ten people died in tornadoes in central Mississippi, 150-200 miles or so south of where I live. The twisters ran along a northwesterly line from Vicksburg to Yazoo City. Weather forecasts, for those who hear them in time, can provide early warnings that give people opportunity to take shelter. But tornadoes born from severe thunderstorms form quickly and move in unpredictable ways. For those in vulnerable places, they're sometimes nearly impossible to avoid.
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