It's a shame
that the Monterey area is so expensive (and, in a completely related way, becoming overrun with wealthy retirees), because really it's one of the most beautiful places I know. Not that being there is all nature appreciation, sadly. Firstly, all this travel is wearing me down -- a week a month seemed reasonable when I said I'd do it back a few months ago, but really it's way too much travel and is completely undermining all my other travel plans (Chicago, New York, perhaps a vacation, god forbid?) and when it comes down to it, just making me tired. Probably more troubling is the research project itself, which is difficult, not just because of absurd politics and logistics that get in our way, but also because I'm interacting with people who are going to be putting their lives on the line at some point in the near future. Voluntarily. And with pride, and a sense of duty. And for what?
It puts a lot of things in perspective, and brings back all those feelings of anger and helplessness that came to the fore four years ago already every time we went and marched against this war that was so clearly coming right at us for all the wrong reasons. Feelings that I've mostly submerged but that bubble back to the surface at mostly predictable times, like when my seatmate on a plane is someone coming back from active duty in Iraq, or when I see or read the news, or deal with government idiots and watch political chicanery. I'm not sure what it takes to train rational, kind human beings to be able to reach a mind-state in which they are capable of being killers. Obviously people have been able to reach this kind of mind-state for all of recorded history, but I still find it depressing that "progress" in "civilization" appears to mean simply advances in technology but not anything resembling advances in interpersonal interaction. I mean, every time I see a picture of a woman in a bikini near (or draped around, or morphed with) a glistening beer bottle I think, "aren't we past that yet? I mean, is this still going on? for real?" And that's just embarrassing advertising, but the ability to suppress empathy for other beings to the point where you can actually kill them, that's something a bit bigger. Although at some level they're both related to testosterone, I'm sure (and I'm saying that in all sincerity, and not as an offhand remark). I'm a lot more culturally Jewy than religiously, for a giant pile of reasons (some of which led me to declare myself agnostic at age 11 and request that this get me out of both Hebrew school attendance and my impending bat mitzvah) (to no freaking avail), but one thing I like is a modern interpretation of what it might mean to be in a Messianic age. Our people, as many of you know, don't believe that the Messiah has come yet, despite majority opinion in this country. Now, the idea of waiting for a physical, human instantiation of a son of god whose coming involves all kinds of rising from the grave, rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, the return of chosen-type people to the land of Israel, etc. etc. seems, well, absurd. The idea of him (and apparently the position is only available to male descendents of King David) ruling in an era of world-wide peace, however, has always been appealing. And the modern, metaphorical interpretation that I quite like involves conceptualizing the world of human agency as feeding into a giant ocean: each good deed adds another drop into the ocean of human goodness, raising us all up communally ( I guess kind of like the trickle-down theory of morality) and the Messianic age will not come through the birth and ascension of some princely guy, but rather when the ocean of good deeds has taken us all high enough, where every person is as good as she or he can possibly be all the time, and the world of interpersonal interactions has altered to the point where peace and kindness are the norm rather than the exception. All of this emphasis on mindfulness and lovingkindness helps to explain the whole Jubu thing, I think. And has me turning to nature when humanity's got me down. I think sometimes that becoming a social scientist was maybe not the best idea. Not because of the difficulty I'm having finding a tenure track job that I want and that wants me -- although that's not nothing -- but because I feel like humanity is already so unbelievably human-centered that devoting my professional life to the study of human interactions is only feeding into the delusion that we're at the center of everything, and will be forever. And that I should have been a marine biologist, maybe, or an environmental epidemiologist, like this cool woman I met hiking at Point Lobos the other day. You know, and do some actual good for the world.
Which brings me to using nature as solace. I keep on posting all these lovely pictures of beautiful things because seeing them makes me feel better, and hopefully makes other people feel better too. I find I have no patience for kitsch these days, and just want straightforward beauty -- sure, I'm down with lightness and frivolity (who more than me?) but I'm just not up for the tawdrily ironic aesthetic these days. Am I just two steps away from Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkade (whose "national archive" was just a block away from my most recent hotel)? I certainly hope that watching baby seals body surf is different than buying a print of white kids sharing a single milkshake with two straws, but maybe not...
Ok, so Point Lobos is one of my favorite places around the Bay Area (Point Reyes being another, although I have never seen wolves or kings in either). I had been hoping to maybe go with a friend and play Edward and Charis Weston (with less public nudity), but he couldn't make it so I headed over myself on the one morning that was blessedly meeting-free. Almost immediately after reaching the parking lot, I had to stop and wait a while for a doe and fawn to decide what they were doing.
They were just ambling about unconcernedly (this was taken through my windshield) and eventually bounded off into the nearby field to the right. There were at least 4 other deer in that field, possibly more, since they're pretty hard to see.
Here's a close-up of the one in front of the sandy part of the hill:
The flowers that they're grazing on are really quite pretty,
but the view they get while grazing is just a bit nicer.
While watching the pelicans and cormorants fly by -- and not one person could explain to me why all the pelicans were going north while all the cormorants were headed south -- I kept on nearly stepping on the local lizards, who are really pretty good at the camouflage thing.
A docent had lent me binoculars for my hike (I keep swearing that I'll buy some and never do) and I used them to check out the harbor seals down below,
which felt a little Rear Window when they would raise their heads and look directly into my eyes (more frequent than you'd think). Also somewhat disturbed by my presence, but quicker to get back to normal, were the many crabs of the many tidal pools.
The kelp didn't care at all that I was there, and just lay around looking pretty and contrasting with water and reflected sun.
I knew that the kelp forests of the Monterey Bay supported all kinds of marine life, but I didn't know that they literally supported egrets. This one here landed on a sturdy-looking mass of kelp and proceeded to stand there and fish for a while, periodically engaging in what looked like an interesting conversation with the otter to its right, who seemed kind of ticked to have had its space invaded.
The interaction of water and rock does all kinds of cool things, making attractive glyph-like patterns,
and attractive non-glyph-like patterns,
and causing a stray piece of driftwood and feather to look somewhat dramatic,
and leaving behind salt encrustations that I'm wondering if I could cull and sell for $5 a bottle.
All the hiking and looking made me hungry, and I felt very clever indeed when instead of heading to an overpriced eateria in Carmel or Monterey, I picked up a salad at Trader Joe's and brought it on down to here. Sure a squirrel stole and ate some of my blown-away lettuce, but it was a small price to pay.
The next morning, my last in Monterey, I woke up early and hung out for a while on the beach behind my hotel,
along with a bunch of seagulls,
and lazy-ass seals just lying around.
Just down the road, though, the baby seals turned out to be a lot more energetic, as kids are wont to be, and entertained themselves body surfing in the waves as a small flock of Canadian geese looked on in jealousy. They seemed pretty happy, those baby seals. I hope they stay that way.
It puts a lot of things in perspective, and brings back all those feelings of anger and helplessness that came to the fore four years ago already every time we went and marched against this war that was so clearly coming right at us for all the wrong reasons. Feelings that I've mostly submerged but that bubble back to the surface at mostly predictable times, like when my seatmate on a plane is someone coming back from active duty in Iraq, or when I see or read the news, or deal with government idiots and watch political chicanery. I'm not sure what it takes to train rational, kind human beings to be able to reach a mind-state in which they are capable of being killers. Obviously people have been able to reach this kind of mind-state for all of recorded history, but I still find it depressing that "progress" in "civilization" appears to mean simply advances in technology but not anything resembling advances in interpersonal interaction. I mean, every time I see a picture of a woman in a bikini near (or draped around, or morphed with) a glistening beer bottle I think, "aren't we past that yet? I mean, is this still going on? for real?" And that's just embarrassing advertising, but the ability to suppress empathy for other beings to the point where you can actually kill them, that's something a bit bigger. Although at some level they're both related to testosterone, I'm sure (and I'm saying that in all sincerity, and not as an offhand remark). I'm a lot more culturally Jewy than religiously, for a giant pile of reasons (some of which led me to declare myself agnostic at age 11 and request that this get me out of both Hebrew school attendance and my impending bat mitzvah) (to no freaking avail), but one thing I like is a modern interpretation of what it might mean to be in a Messianic age. Our people, as many of you know, don't believe that the Messiah has come yet, despite majority opinion in this country. Now, the idea of waiting for a physical, human instantiation of a son of god whose coming involves all kinds of rising from the grave, rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, the return of chosen-type people to the land of Israel, etc. etc. seems, well, absurd. The idea of him (and apparently the position is only available to male descendents of King David) ruling in an era of world-wide peace, however, has always been appealing. And the modern, metaphorical interpretation that I quite like involves conceptualizing the world of human agency as feeding into a giant ocean: each good deed adds another drop into the ocean of human goodness, raising us all up communally ( I guess kind of like the trickle-down theory of morality) and the Messianic age will not come through the birth and ascension of some princely guy, but rather when the ocean of good deeds has taken us all high enough, where every person is as good as she or he can possibly be all the time, and the world of interpersonal interactions has altered to the point where peace and kindness are the norm rather than the exception. All of this emphasis on mindfulness and lovingkindness helps to explain the whole Jubu thing, I think. And has me turning to nature when humanity's got me down. I think sometimes that becoming a social scientist was maybe not the best idea. Not because of the difficulty I'm having finding a tenure track job that I want and that wants me -- although that's not nothing -- but because I feel like humanity is already so unbelievably human-centered that devoting my professional life to the study of human interactions is only feeding into the delusion that we're at the center of everything, and will be forever. And that I should have been a marine biologist, maybe, or an environmental epidemiologist, like this cool woman I met hiking at Point Lobos the other day. You know, and do some actual good for the world.
Which brings me to using nature as solace. I keep on posting all these lovely pictures of beautiful things because seeing them makes me feel better, and hopefully makes other people feel better too. I find I have no patience for kitsch these days, and just want straightforward beauty -- sure, I'm down with lightness and frivolity (who more than me?) but I'm just not up for the tawdrily ironic aesthetic these days. Am I just two steps away from Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkade (whose "national archive" was just a block away from my most recent hotel)? I certainly hope that watching baby seals body surf is different than buying a print of white kids sharing a single milkshake with two straws, but maybe not...
Ok, so Point Lobos is one of my favorite places around the Bay Area (Point Reyes being another, although I have never seen wolves or kings in either). I had been hoping to maybe go with a friend and play Edward and Charis Weston (with less public nudity), but he couldn't make it so I headed over myself on the one morning that was blessedly meeting-free. Almost immediately after reaching the parking lot, I had to stop and wait a while for a doe and fawn to decide what they were doing.
They were just ambling about unconcernedly (this was taken through my windshield) and eventually bounded off into the nearby field to the right. There were at least 4 other deer in that field, possibly more, since they're pretty hard to see.
Here's a close-up of the one in front of the sandy part of the hill:
The flowers that they're grazing on are really quite pretty,
but the view they get while grazing is just a bit nicer.
While watching the pelicans and cormorants fly by -- and not one person could explain to me why all the pelicans were going north while all the cormorants were headed south -- I kept on nearly stepping on the local lizards, who are really pretty good at the camouflage thing. 
A docent had lent me binoculars for my hike (I keep swearing that I'll buy some and never do) and I used them to check out the harbor seals down below,
which felt a little Rear Window when they would raise their heads and look directly into my eyes (more frequent than you'd think). Also somewhat disturbed by my presence, but quicker to get back to normal, were the many crabs of the many tidal pools.
The kelp didn't care at all that I was there, and just lay around looking pretty and contrasting with water and reflected sun.
I knew that the kelp forests of the Monterey Bay supported all kinds of marine life, but I didn't know that they literally supported egrets. This one here landed on a sturdy-looking mass of kelp and proceeded to stand there and fish for a while, periodically engaging in what looked like an interesting conversation with the otter to its right, who seemed kind of ticked to have had its space invaded.
The interaction of water and rock does all kinds of cool things, making attractive glyph-like patterns,
and attractive non-glyph-like patterns,
and causing a stray piece of driftwood and feather to look somewhat dramatic,
and leaving behind salt encrustations that I'm wondering if I could cull and sell for $5 a bottle.
All the hiking and looking made me hungry, and I felt very clever indeed when instead of heading to an overpriced eateria in Carmel or Monterey, I picked up a salad at Trader Joe's and brought it on down to here. Sure a squirrel stole and ate some of my blown-away lettuce, but it was a small price to pay.
The next morning, my last in Monterey, I woke up early and hung out for a while on the beach behind my hotel,
along with a bunch of seagulls,
and lazy-ass seals just lying around. 
Just down the road, though, the baby seals turned out to be a lot more energetic, as kids are wont to be, and entertained themselves body surfing in the waves as a small flock of Canadian geese looked on in jealousy. They seemed pretty happy, those baby seals. I hope they stay that way.
posted by Pangea at 7:36 PM
3 Comments:
...well said. To expand a bit on your thoughts with my own ideosyncratic twist: at the bottom line, the trickle-down of morality, the ocean of good deeds... it's all about occasionally using one's head to give the odd thought to the people, to the world around us. It's about using one's head. It's about overcoming the easy lazy path of not-thinking. Using a years-old-slogan of German weekly Die Zeit, I like to call it "Kampf gegen die Dummheit", the battle against stupidity. (The martial metaphor might haul me in that bit better because I'm male, or vice versa. Aaanyway.)
Which is the sole *real* use of all studies of human interactions IMHO. Which is my Why of humanities, the reason why people like you or me are doing what we're doing. And we even may get the impression that we entered the game at too high a level, and it can't be won anymore, but then - perhaps it's just our locally restricted perspective, who knows... always better to try than give up. So... addingg drops to the ocean, piling pebbles to a mountain... if things have turned just a tiny little bit better in a 1000 years, we won't have wasted our time.
So Phil (short for Philosopher?), are you talking about enlightening the self? Or enlightening others? Or maybe both? In terms of others, that's one of the things I like best about teaching. Not just passing along knowledge for knowledge's sake, or attempting to train the kids to think critically, but also I get to do tolerance training and cultural relativity disguised as intro to my field. These upcoming winter and spring quarters I'll have 250 at a time to mold and subvert with my liberal agenda. Which I think will have me feeling a bit more useful/effective again and like I'm doing something at least semi-worthwhile.
Meanwhile, I am now officially a giant fan of the word "Dummheit." The last paper I bought in Germany was the Judische Zeitung, did I manage to show it to you? They didn't have any slogan at all as far as I could tell, but one incorporating Dummheit would be sure to be a winner...
[OT]Actually the name is taken straight out of a spoof crime series on Swiss Radio... [/OT]
Enlightenment, i believe i know fizz-all about... as for "self", I believe it shares with many other the desirable things the quality of being like a soap in a bathtub, i.e. the more likely to evade from you the more you try to grab & hold it. And for "others"... I'm not so certain if that really works, just from self-observation: sometimes, every now & so often, somebody tried to make me see/understand something, and it simply didn't work, no way. (Where was that old observation from? People will never really understand what you're trying to convey unless they're already more than halfway to agreeing with you anyway. If not, they'll ever only be able to massively misconstrue what you're trying to convey, and if they do, they would have got to the same point eventually anyway, even without you, just a bit later.) Vice versa, i've had a number of hugely insightful moments from observing somebody do or say something - and when I told them, they were, "Who? How? What? Me? What did i do? What's so special about...?"
So: for myself: quintessential stupid would be to believe i'd be somebody that i am not, e.g. more (self-importance) or less (compromising): and for others: so maybe we cannot light the flame of reason deliberately, but i don't see why it should be a bad thing if people arrive sooner where they almost already are anyway, instead of "a bit later"...
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