I cannot yet bring myself to watch video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. 

On the one hand, I feel an obligation to bear witness, as a citizen, as a scientist, as a person. How can I hold a political stance without viewing what millions of Americans have seen? How can I claim to have knowledge while declining the opportunity to review hard visual and auditory evidence? How can I fully empathize with my fellow human beings and embrace solidarity with them without observing, even from a fully safe distance, the pain and and death and mourning and frustration that they experience first-hand every day?

Because I have not watched the video, I don’t know how often or how much Floyd gasped to breathe. I haven’t heard the outcries of the bystanders telling Chauvin to stop. I don’t know if Chauvin displayed rage or the cool calmness of the entitled. I don’t know what his fellow police officers were doing for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

8 minutes and 46 seconds.

And yet I do not feel obligated to watch the video.

Because we have seen it all before.

We have witnessed systemic racism and violent acts against black people for years. For my entire life I have witnessed police brutality in the headlines, overt racism in our communities, and more subtle and insidious derogatory remarks in the stores where we shop and the places where we work.

We have seen racism before and it grows everywhere. Like a weed? No, not like a weed, like a subdivision of perfectly manicured lawns, smothering the ground in their uniformed uniformity, poison sprayed on anything that had the audacity to look distinctive, a mocking display of monocultural perfection masking the demons of intolerance and indifference.

I do not want to say that people who mind their yards are racist! This is a metaphor. I am observing that racism in America is deeply embedded in our history and our contemporary way of life. We had might as well ask people who have lawns to give up their lawns.

Or ask people who are breathing not to breathe.

59 years ago today, Alan Shepard became the first astronaut, less than one month after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin ascended into space.

Shepard’s vehicle was the Mercury-Redstone. The first rocket in this series of modified ballistic missiles traveled four inches before the mission was aborted. The third carried Ham, the first hominid in space, who returned to Earth and lived until 1983. Shepard was flying on the fifth.

Reporters later asked him what he was thinking while waiting for liftoff. He responded, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”

I love this answer.

It’s cool and brash. He has a proper sense of the mortal risk involved, and has rationally analyzed what someone might fear in this situation. It’s funny, and it’s funny because it’s true. Shepard is bluntly honest, uncensored. He speaks both as a trained professional and as a free American.

He didn’t say that he was thinking about the space race with the Russians, or the importance of this historical moment. He didn’t say that he was praying to God, looking back at his childhood, or thinking about his family. He is focused on the moment.

He understands that engineers and designers work within economic constraints. He knows that he sits atop a tall cylinder that is about to direct all of its explosive power to hurl him against the force of gravity beyond the reaches of the sky. He recognizes that his country bears the financial cost of this, that he is at the apex of an entire capitalistic system that is struggling to prove it can overtake a rival country that so far has outpaced us at every milestone.

He accepts the hazards because he is an astronaut.

For more than a decade, I have used a slight variation of ISO 8601 for date and time stamps. Yesterday was 2020-02-01 and tomorrow will be 2020-02-03. Sorting chronologically is easy with this format, because it is the same as sorting by alphanumeric character. That’s true even in my modified system, where I sometimes include the day of the week in English, especially as a separator when writing the date and time together (e.g., 2020-02-02 Sun 22:35).

Two palindromic dates have occurred since I adopted this system: 2010-01-02 and 2011-11-02.

Today is 2020-02-02 — a beautiful palindrome with only two characters. I expect to be alive for the next palindrome (2021-12-02) but then that’s it. The next one after that is 2101-10-12. All things must pass.

As my daughter winds down to sleep tonight, she said that she often thinks about when her mic was briefly turned on even though she was backstage, broadcasting her words to the entire audience of the musical.

I told her it is a sad and liberating truth of life that most people don’t think about others most of the time. If we are directly affecting each other or are present with each other, yes. But otherwise: we are ignored, unwatched, neglected, unknown — poignantly alone, pointedly free.

There is no shortage of video entertainment available in our household, even without ever subscribing to cable. First, there is YouTube, where I can lose myself in so many ways: watching Felix Immler in Switzerland present creative uses of the Swiss Army Knife, Galeazzo Frudua in Italy replicate the harmonies of the Beatles; Rick Beato in California teach music theory through popular music; Brett Yang and Eddy Chan in Australia share their humorous takes on contemporary entertainment as classically trained violinists; Tim Rowett in England demonstrate curious and cleverly designed novelties, etc.

Second, we can watch shows on our streaming services: Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix. I also watch programs such as South Park and some videos suggested by Apple News.

Third, we have rabbit ears that allow us to watch broadcast TV. We are “21st-century spoiled” with our ability to watch programs on demand — it’s not like last century, when we had to wait for a small number of channels to parse out their shows at specific times. Nowadays I mostly watch TV just for Steelers games.

Fourth, we borrow DVDs from the public library. This afternoon from the New Releases section I picked out Yesterday, Midsommar, Red Sparrow, and Life of the Party on the strength of the actors and half-remembered reviews. Rotten Tomatoes does suggest that not all of these will be worth watching.

With so many free and inexpensive options at hand, we rarely watch a movie in a theater. Besides the financial expense, there’s also the time involved in finding out where and when a film is being shown, plus the trouble of organizing ourselves to leave together, driving to the theater, and parking there. As a consequence, we sometimes can only understand cultural references weeks or months after a film release, and need to be careful to avoid spoilers.

To defer gratification in this way is a minor burden — we’re watching the same things as everyone else, just on time delay. Anyhow, the entire world is split into small ecosystems these days; entertainment is tailored for niche audiences. It’s not like when I was a child, when my classmates had a common culture around TV, talking excitedly after the series finale of M*A*S*H, or every week about the latest episode of Happy Days. Even back then, I did march to my own drummer. I was instead fascinated by the Watergate hearings, understanding they were important enough that I tried to take still photographs of the broadcasts.

During this winter season, I am interested in several movies enough to want to see them in the theater. Last weekend A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood opened (along with Frozen 2). Next month there is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which I will certainly watch within a few days of its release, even though J.J. Abrams failed at concluding Lost, ruined the spirit of Star Trek in the film reboot, wrote the nonsensical tripe of Super 8, and produced completely unlikable characters in Cloverfield. He knows how to produce visual candy, but I can’t recall a time when he’s brought a story to a satisfactory close.

I am most excited to see 63 Up. I recognize the theaters where it is playing in New York, Chicago, Berkeley, and Santa Fe, places where I have lived. Maybe I will have to make a trip to Cleveland on January 26. While it is already available in Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray formats, I wonder how I can see it. The films come out only every seven years, and this may be the last one.

 

 

Fourteen years ago today I put my best friend out of his pain. My familiar, my zeroth born, my companion.

He did not give up easy. Weak as the rest of his body had become, his breath labored hard for what seemed like eternity. He wanted always to be there for me. His heart was so strong, for running and playing and going wherever I would go.

For a long time afterwards, when I was driving alone in the car I would play this on CD, singing along as best I could with Ray Davies:

Here’s wishing you the bluest sky
And hoping something better comes tomorrow
Hoping all the verses rhyme
And the very best of choruses to
Follow all the doubt and sadness
I know that better things are on the way

Here’s hoping all the days ahead
Won’t be as bitter as the ones behind you
Be an optimist instead
And somehow happiness will find you
Forget what happened yesterday
I know that better things are on the way

Last week Helen-Faye spoke on the panel that I arranged for class, to answer students’ questions they asked of their future selves fifty years from now. She reminded us grief comes on its own schedule, there is no right or wrong to it.

My friend continues to be with me wherever I am.

This morning I sang “Better Things” while strumming on the guilele.

Of the 141 human language families, I know only two: Indo-European and Austronesian. I have traveled, but only to places where three other families are spoken: Japonic, Uralic, and Sino-Tibetan.

Within Indo-European, I can communicate to some degree in Classical and Koine Greek; French and Spanish; and English — twigs within the Hellenic, Italic, and Germanic branches of that family tree. I have forgotten more Classical Latin and Russian than I learned in classrooms, and have a tourist’s knowledge of Italian, Icelandic, and Standard German.

This map and this family tree display the vastness of my ignorance. Except for Tagalog, my ability to communicate is entirely confined to the Indo-European family. Even within that tree, I completely lack knowledge of the extensive Indo-Iranian branch, as well as of Celtic, Armenian, and Albanian. While I can often infer the meaning of a word when I travel in Italy, that is more difficult for me in Iceland or the Czech Republic, and impossible in Wales.

Meanwhile, human languages are only a small part of knowledge! There will always be something I do not comprehend. But consider the alternative: to be omniscient, to know everything, to be unable to learn. How boring that kind of life would be, that life would be death.

I have been reading The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which I had read soon after its release in 1985. Although 34 years have passed between the publication of these two novels, within the dystopian universe of Gilead it has been only 15 years. Initially I thought Margaret Atwood made this temporal choice in order to provide both herself and the showrunners of the Hulu television series a specific degree of creative breathing room as the seasons continue to unfold. However, I soon realized the narratives for at least two of the main characters demand a time gap of less than a generation. Atwood has been handling the separate threads deftly for the reader. I am at the point in the story when the three primary characters are beginning to converge.

In The Histories, Herodotus relates when Croesus and Solon met. Croesus is the wealthy and powerful king of Lydia, while Solon helped establish Athenian democracy and is now considered one of the Seven Sages. Croesus asks Solon: Who is the happiest man in the world? However, much like the mirror, mirror, on the wall, Solon does not respond that his questioner is the finest. Instead, Solon eventually informs Croesus that no one can judge the happiness of a life until after it has ended. Under this view, I cannot provide a proper review of The Testaments until after I have finished the book, nor can we consider the happiness (or any other condition) of its characters until we reflect on their lives well after they have died.

As a counterpoint to Herodotus, when I taught my course Revolutions of Circularity, on the second of the three days that we discussed Plato’s Meno, I asked the students to consider the dialogue in medias res — in the middle of things — and to predict the flow of the conversation based upon what they had read so far. I reminded them that we are always in the middle of our lives, yet we are called upon to make decisions and judgments.

(Decisions and judgments, testaments and secrets: these are central themes in the novel.)

So while I cannot provide a comprehensive review of The Testaments because I have not yet finished the book, I would still recommend it to anyone who has read The Handmaid’s Tale and seen all three seasons of the Hulu series. And if you have not yet read and seen those, of course you must, and you must start there.

And while we perhaps cannot fully judge the happiness (or any other condition) of the characters until after their deaths, as with the the first novel, the very existence of these testaments suggests that the reader inhabits a far-flung future, more enlightened at last and at least in some ways, than the misogynistic theocracy of Gilead.