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Cry Baby

Every once in a while on my journey through the years, I stumble over something that is so commonplace it is invisible -well, not invisible maybe, but at least so common we ask the wrong questions about it, if we ask at all. Crying, for example; why do we cry? Is it a way of diverting our own attention? A catharsis? Or, to be crass, a manipulative device? Whatever the reason, it’s sufficiently universal, that I would have thought we would have discovered whether or not it serves some physiological purpose by now.

Not that everything is attended by a purpose, of course, but we do feel better when we find one… Okay, I feel better when I think something is doing it to keep me healthy, or at least has an evolutionary explanation, however atavistic. So it was with great expectations that I jumped into an essay in the Conversation by  Leah Sharman, a PhD candidate in Psychology at the University of Queensland (Australia). She, I hoped, was going to answer a question I never thought to ask before: why do we cry? https://theconversation.com/no-crying-doesnt-release-toxins-though-it-might-make-you-feel-better-if-thats-what-you-believe-106860

I mean what would prompt me to ask? I laugh, I cry -I seem to know why it happens, but do I? Or am I just extrapolating from the circumstances when it occurs -making the all too easy assumption that association is the same as cause? I entered the article with my hat in my hand and my breathing held in reverent abeyance as I might on entering a grand cathedral. Unfortunately, I heard no organ playing, and whatever echoes reverberated through the nave, were produced by disparate voices, not the stirring lower registers of majestic pipes.

For example, the rather banal observation that, ‘Studies show, on average, adult women  tend to cry two to three times in a given month, and men only once. Although research is limited, it suggests crying frequency is highly influenced by social and cultural factors, our beliefs about the value of crying and how it is evaluated.’ Followed by ‘This is particularly exaggerated in many Western countries, where women report crying more often than those from non-Western countries. And in non-Western countries the difference in crying frequency between men and women is smaller. In some instances, it’s non-existent.’ Imagine that.

Then, a hint of teleology: ‘Scientists have long speculated why we cry and what happens in our bodies when we’re doing it. Some have suggested crying may be expelling chemicals that are built up during feelings of distress, or that crying causes a  chemical change in the body that reduces stress or increases positive feelings.’ But again, a hush: ‘But we don’t actually know that much about crying and most of the studies out there are based on self-reporting.’

‘The most pervasive idea about crying is that we do it because it’s helpful in some way; perhaps it provides relief or catharsis. But the research on this is mixed, with crying sometimes showing an improvement in mood and sometimes a worsening… Despite the overwhelming perception crying is useful at a personal level, most research suggests crying is more of a social phenomenon. Crying is an extremely effective signal to others that something is wrong and that you may be in need of help and comfort.’ Not terribly surprising, I suppose, but it seemed to be getting into more of the meat of the process.

That is, until I read further: ‘But before you go crying in front of others for support, just remember other studies show doing so may actually lead to feelings of shame and embarrassment.’ Okay, then, pick your study…

But in fairness, the article did get better -did attempt some evaluative science. ‘Crying seems, at best, to do not much at all, and, at worst, to increase our physiological arousal.’ For example, in the author’s lab, they ‘attempted to test whether crying reduces or interferes with the levels of the stress hormone (cortisol), and whether it may be able provide some other physical benefit, such as numbing, which could explain why we cry when we are in either emotional and physical pain. We found crying had no effect on stress levels and people weren’t able to withstand pain more readily than those who did not cry. But those who cried were more in control of their breathing rate. This suggests people may hold their breath during crying in a bid to calm themselves down, and perhaps use the crying behaviour to initiate the calming strategy.’

For the most part, though, it strikes me that the article merely ran through a checklist of unremarkable sociological parameters that left me no further ahead than I would have been had I confined myself to the confirmation biases on my Facebook. As an example, she says, ‘Crying is a personal process. Whether you cry, and how often, may be related to your culture, gender, and emotional expressiveness.’ Uhmm… well, yes I suppose so, eh?

Now that Sharman has raised the subject, however, I would still be interested to know if other mammals -primates, say- do, or even can cry. In other words, is crying an evolutionarily derived mechanism to serve some purpose, or is it an exaptation of something else, now exclusive to homo? Sadly, I did not find out, despite my suddenly piqued interest.

Fortunately, there is Google, and after scouring -sort of- the entries on crying, I did find a naively non-academic one that seemed to cover most of the bases -a 2013 article by Amanda Smith in The Body Sphere: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/bodysphere/features/4837824 It’s titled ‘Why are humans the only animals that cry?’ I’m not sure it even answers its own question, but at any rate, it did attempt some interesting explanations of why humans cry that I hadn’t heard before. It included this rather innocent and dewy-eyed one: ‘Darwin’s own theory of tears claimed that ‘in our evolutionary past, babies would close their eyes very tightly to protect their eyes when they were screaming for their mothers,’ says Dr Thomas Dixon, director of the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. ‘The closing of the eyes very tightly would squeeze the lachrymal glands and bring out the tears,’ he says. By a process of association thereafter, any kind of pain or suffering became connected with tears.’

I know, I know, it’s a sort of kludgey explanation, but in a touching way, it’s kind of uplifting, don’t you think? Soothing, almost…

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Love, which alters when it alteration finds

I’m not certain I understand why, but I am being led to believe that Love can be described mathematically using Bayesian Probability Theory… Okay, as a start, I have no idea what subscribing to Bayesian probability theory might entail, except maybe a club membership, and a considerably manipulated personal profile to attract some interest. But, ever alert to new (or any) social possibilities, I decided to read the essay by Suki Finn, a postdoctoral research fellow in philosophy at the University of Southampton in the UK writing in Aeon: https://aeon.co/ideas/beyond-reason-the-mathematical-equation-for-unconditional-love

It starts with the not unreasonable premise that there are two basic types of love: conditional, and unconditional. Then, she dips her toes into some background to convince me that Thomas Bayes’ probability theorem is flexible enough to improve my social life.

‘Degrees of belief are called credences. These credences can be given numerical values between 0 and 1 (where 1 is being completely certain), to demonstrate how strong that degree of belief is. Importantly, these values are not forever fixed, and can change when given reason to do so… But how do you rationally alter your credence, and figure out how strong it should be, given the information that you have? Cue Bayesian probability theory to calculate conditional credences. A credence is conditional upon information when it is evaluated with regard to that information, such that the strength of the belief is sensitive to that information and is updated on the basis of it… But what if my credence is completely irresponsive to such evidence? … This is what it is like to have credence 1, in other words, a belief of certainty, which could not be any stronger and cannot be updated. It cannot be updated in either direction – it cannot get stronger because it is already at maximum strength, and it cannot get weaker on the basis of evidence because it was not built on the basis of evidence in the first place.’ Uhmm… easy, right? And these are the rational changes to credence. ‘When your strength of feeling is sensitive to information about how things are, a philosopher would call it rational, as it develops in accordance with that information. Such is loving for a reason: with more reason comes more love, and when the reason goes, the love goes. This type of conditional love is an analogy to rational credences between 0 and 1 (not including the extremes), which change on the basis of evidence.’

Still with me…? I mean with Suki, because I’m not in any way with her…  Okay then, ‘Alternatively, unconditional love is love that will not change according to any information, as it was not built on the basis of information in the first place. This is love without reason… This type of love has an untouchable and irrational mind of its own. As with credence 1, it can change only irrationally – it does not abide by any Bayesian law and so cannot be updated… You fall in and out of unconditional love at the mercy of love itself… This is loving in spite of everything, rather than loving because of something, and so appears unaltered by reason… But this does not make the love stable. It is simply out of your control, and can literally go away for no reason!’

It seems to me that the author is saying that conditional love is probably more predictable, or maybe controllable than unconditional love, because it is not subject to random (uncaused) fluctuations. It’s not as liable to be indiscriminately, or inadvertently snatched away. Nice. But have I learned any non-obfuscatory take-home lessons? Is it readily transferrable to any situations other than amongst rhetoricians? Could I use it in the car on the way home, in other words?

Sometimes the grandest ideas fall short of the mark in actual combat… sorry, relationships. How, in practice, and when you’re just getting to know somebody, can you possibly profess conditional love? And why would you? It sounds like a sort of one-time stand thing. It is of course, but normal rules of courtship require hyperbole. Metaphors -as in: ‘My love is as constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament. The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks. They are all fire and every one doth shine, but there’s but one in all doth hold her place.’ As long as she doesn’t know you’ve cribbed the lot from Shakespeare’s Caesar, and you don’t mess up the words, everybody wins.

People are attracted to metaphors -they conjure up sincerity without linking it to unconditionality. Without requiring the intrusion of credences into an otherwise emotionally friable situation. It seems to me there’s nothing but trouble in store for anyone who decides to numerically assign emotional attachment parameters on the way home from a lovely dinner in an expensive restaurant.

Anyway, Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister, and heaven only knows what that entails in terms of the slideabilty of relationships. I mean, their Regulative principle of worship (according to Wikipedia, at least) ‘specifies that (in worship), what is not commanded is forbidden.’ I’m therefore not entirely convinced that he would approve of the commandeering of his theorems in the somewhat tottery realm of Love, whether or not it is entwined with the idea of worship.

Of course, on the other hand, I suspect he would no doubt denounce any effort to charm with untruths, or at least equivocatory declarations. I certainly admire Suki Finn’s attempt to clarify intrinsically opaque emotions, but I’m afraid it will not do. And to revert back to Philosophy -her specialty- for a moment, there are just too many perils for any practical attempt at a Kantian Categorical Imperative application here, either.

It seems to me that I blundered into a more satisfactory solution to the declaration of Love: metaphor. It does not require any numerical assignations that might confuse or even spoil the moment; it does not even require positioning the feeling along a Bell curve for comparison with other loves you might have had. Nope, at the party -after you muster up the courage to ask her to dance- you merely say: ‘When you do dance, I wish you a wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do nothing but that’, or in the car on the way home, you just have to come up with something like, ‘O, how this spring of love resembleth the uncertain glory of an April day which now shows all the beauty of the sun…’ and let it go at that.

 

 

 

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In sweet music is such art

I like to think I have had a long history of music, although I’m fairly certain my mother didn’t play Mozart to me in her womb -a lot of yelling maybe, but nothing with staves. And yet, even in those early proto-Holocene days, there was a general recognition that, at a minimum, music was probably helpful for calming down young children. So in pre-Flood Winnipeg, we all had to take piano lessons and all my friends complained about having to practice. Mrs. Burns was the piano teacher in our neighbourhood, and she was a stickler for scales, I remember. We all tried to fool her with our mastery of C major because it didn’t involve any tricky black keys, but if we caught her in a bad mood, she’d assign us a difficult minor one -C# minor comes to mind. Sometimes childhood can be fraught, although in truth, I’ve never regretted the music.

There has been a fair amount of research into the value of learning it in childhood, and I recently came across an article discussing that in the Conversation.com -an app on my phone: https://theconversation.com/learning-music-early-can-make-your-child-a-better-reader-106066  It was written by two Australians, Anita Collins, adjunct assistant professor, and Misty Adoniou, an associate professor in Language, Literacy and TESL, both at the University of Canberra.

‘Music processing and language development share an overlapping network in the brain. From an evolutionary perspective, the human brain developed music processing well before language and then used that processing to create and learn language. At birth, babies understand language as if it was music. They respond to the rhythm and melody of language before they understand what the words mean. Babies and young children mimic the language they hear using those elements of rhythm and melody, and this is the sing-song style of speech we know and love in toddlers.’

It makes sense when you put it all in context, although I worry that it’s a bit facile. Still, ‘Fluency includes the ability to adjust the patterns of stress and intonation of a phrase, such as from angry to happy and the ability the choose the correct inflection, such as a question or an exclamation. These highly developed auditory processing skills are enhanced by musical training.’ -I left in the link as an attempt to exculpate my tentative credulity…

Oh, and ‘Children should also be taught to read musical notation and symbols when learning music. This reinforces the symbol to sound connection which is also crucial in reading words.’ I mention this, because although very few of us went on to sterling careers in academia, and I can’t name even one of us in the neighbourhood who ended up as a famous novelist, most of us that made it through Riverview Public School were at least able to read, so that’s got to count for something.

But in those days, we all had music classes in school, no matter whether or not we had to go home and practice scales for Mrs. Burns. In fact, I think the lessons she taught had far reaching tentacles. Remember her C# minor scale -the Punishment Scale? I suspect I must have been subject to more than my fair share of extracurricular discipline in those days, because I remember practicing the scale with my fingers on any flat surface -garbage can lids, fence posts, and garage doors in the lane on my way to her house- just in case. I got so I could recognize the scale anywhere, anytime, but especially on the piano.

Years later, when my family moved out to Quebec, I suddenly came face to face with Mrs. Burns’ prescience. I was in a music class at an Anglo High School in Lachine when the teacher decided his class was getting a bid rowdy and needed some retributive justice: a shaming.

The class was thoroughly bilingual, whereas I, the foreigner-from-away,  could barely hold my own. Fortunately -or maybe because of me- M. Honneur decided to put us down musically and after glaring at the class menacingly through truly startlingly unkempt eyebrows, sat down at the piano, turning his head only slightly to smirk at us.

“We’re going to play a little game,” he said, his eyes twinkling mischievously. I want you to name the piece…”

The first three notes -the A, then G# and finally the C#- gave it away, however. He didn’t need to play the rest, although I remember he worked his way through several bars to help us further.

Then he stopped and looked at the now totally engaged class. Apparently he had done this before -well, before my time there, at any rate.

They tried various names, and his smile grew. “Sounds… Slavic, or something,” someone said, as Honneur’s head shook triumphantly.

“It’s in a minor key…” This from a rather smug girl in the very front by the piano.

“How about Beethoven,” another person piped up, but everyone groaned at that, and it quickly slipped into the anonymity granted a voice hidden in the middle of a crowd.

I could hardly believe it. Honneur was playing a kind of Rumpelstiltskin game with them and nobody could guess. I suddenly felt embarrassed -was I the only one in the class who knew the answer?

Honneur’s grin was becoming unbearable, though, and I realized I needed to make my move before he surrendered the answer, so I timidly held up my hand. Everybody went silent and stared at me.

“It’s obviously the Prelude in C# minor,” I blurted out before he could acknowledge my gently waving arm.

He stared at me, in disbelief, and it took a second or so before he said, “By…?” Honneur seemed a bit miffed that I had called it out, and his tone of voice suggested I had cheated, somehow.

Now that I had everybody’s attention, I think I blushed. “By Rachmaninoff, of course…” I’m not sure why I added the ‘of course’, except that it had been one of my favourite, albeit unplayable pieces, from my Winnipeg days.

His eyes retracted a little with my ‘of course’ and then his expression turned playful, teasing. “Very good, young man…” he said, drawing his acknowledgement out slowly, “But can you spell it?” He thought he had me -and so did the class. The silence was electric.

I stood up, and spelled it out slowly, carefully, so I’d get it right: R-A-C-H… M-A-N…” The next part was tricky, I knew: “I-N-O-F-F… although it’s sometimes spelled with a V instead of the two F’s, at the end… To account for the Russian spelling, or something, I guess,” I added triumphantly.

The class and Honneur actually applauded, I remember.

So, despite my initial suspicions about the value of early music training as outlined in the Conversation article, perhaps it did do me some good. If nothing else, it helped cement together les deux solitudes -as Quebec and the rest of anglophone Canada were beginning to be referred to around that time. Mrs. Burns was ahead of her time; maybe she should have run for political office… Of course, since everybody in the neighbourhood knew her, maybe she did.

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All That Glitters

“My uncle wants to come,” Jasmin announced as she sat in the hard wooden chair by my desk, looking worried. She was almost due, and as her obstetrician, I was seeing her for what she hoped might be her final prenatal visit. She wanted to know how many people could be present in the delivery room at the hospital for the birth.

I nodded encouragingly -so far, only her husband and mother were expected to be present.

“Uncle Jonathan used to be one of my favourites when I was younger.” She smiled at the memory. “He was so smart!” She sighed and looked down at her lap. “He was –is,” she corrected herself, “a professor of Philosophy at the university.” She stared at something behind me for a moment. “I was so impressed that he had even published a book… I remember trying to read it,” she added, rolling her eyes for effect, “but it was too abstruse for me in those days.”

I smiled at the idea of anything being too difficult for her -she was a PhD candidate herself, although not in Philosophy like her uncle. “You seem a bit concerned that he wants to be present for the birth, Jasmin.”

She shrugged and glanced nervously at her lap again. “I haven’t seen him for a while,” she admitted. “We… we kind of fell out a few years ago.”

I sat quietly and waited to see if she wanted to explain.

“He… I mean, I don’t like the way he treats his wife –treated…” she qualified her tenses again. Then she sent her eyes over to explore my face to see if she should explain further. “Even Mom was upset with her brother…”

I tried to keep my expression neutral, but I suppose she could see my curiosity.

“He expected her to have a meal ready for him when he came home…” Her eyes never left my face, but had perched on my cheeks as if they were resting. Waiting. “She had to do all the work around the house, you know. He always said he was exhausted from lecturing and writing at work.”

I nodded again, but she could sense I was trying not to judge.

“Mom said it was abusive…” she said in answer to my unasked question. “I… I refused to believe her at first. I always knew he was arrogant, but if anybody deserved to be arrogant, it was him. He was such a brilliant thinker… is, I mean…”

Jasmin seemed genuinely conflicted. I could see it was difficult for her to accept what she saw as imperfections in a childhood hero.

And yet, any hero-worshipping can be fraught, can’t it? I discussed some of the ramifications of this in a previous essay entitled Life’s Fitful Fever https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/?p=10396 , but I continue to be intrigued by the subject…

We all have subsurface faults that could weaken our glossy reputations if exposed. After all, each of us is a book of stories, only some of which we prefer to read -even those exemplary figures we choose to pedestalize.

None of this is a surprise, of course, but it is sometimes important that it be reconsidered in times like this when we are busy tearing down statues of people whose past is not as monolithic as we once assumed -or, at least, not as we wanted to remember it. An essay by the British philosopher Julian Baggini in Aeon provided an interesting counterbalance to our resurgent iconoclasm: https://aeon.co/ideas/why-sexist-and-racist-philosophers-might-still-be-admirable

‘Praise Immanuel Kant, and you might be reminded that he believed that ‘Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites,’ and ‘the yellow Indians do have a meagre talent’. Laud Aristotle, and you’ll have to explain how a genuine sage could have thought that ‘the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject’.

‘We seem to be caught in a dilemma. We can’t just dismiss the unacceptable prejudices of the past as unimportant. But if we think that holding morally objectionable views disqualifies anyone from being considered a great thinker or a political leader, then there’s hardly anyone from history left… However, the idea that racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted views automatically disqualify a historical figure from admiration is misguided. Anyone who cannot bring themselves to admire such a historical figure betrays a profound lack of understanding about just how socially conditioned all our minds are.’

Historical revisionism is an interesting phenomenon: the belief -no, the assumption– that our present day ethos is, by default, the gold standard against which to compare all other eras, and all other societies. But, ‘why do so many find it impossible to believe that any so-called genius could fail to see that their prejudices were irrational and immoral? One reason is that our culture has its own deep-seated and mistaken assumption: that the individual is an autonomous human intellect independent from the social environment… The enlightenment ideal that we can and should all think for ourselves should not be confused with the hyper-enlightenment fantasy that we can think all by ourselves. Our thinking is shaped by our environment in profound ways that we often aren’t even aware of.’

‘Accepting this does not mean glossing over the prejudices of the past. Becoming aware that even the likes of Kant and Hume were products of their times is a humbling reminder that the greatest minds can still be blind to mistakes and evils, if they are widespread enough. It should also prompt us to question whether the prejudices that rudely erupt to the surface in their most infamous remarks might also be lurking in the background elsewhere in their thinking.’ And yet, ‘Many blindspots are remarkably local, leaving the general field of vision perfectly clear. The classicist Edith Hall’s defence of Aristotle’s misogyny is a paradigm of how to save a philosopher from his worst self. Rather than judge him by today’s standards, she argues that a better test is to ask whether the fundamentals of his way of thinking would lead him to be prejudiced today… But there is a very important difference between the living and the dead. The living can come to see how their actions were wrong, acknowledge that, and show remorse. When their acts were crimes, they can also face justice.’

But, as Baggini summarizes in his essay, ‘The dead do not have such an opportunity, and so to waste anger chastising them is pointless. We are right to lament the iniquities of the past, but to blame individuals for things they did in less enlightened times using the standards of today is too harsh.’

Memories of that visit with Jasmin re-surfaced after I read the article.

“Is Jonathan’s wife going to come to the birth as well?” I remember asking.

She stared at her lap briefly. “No, unfortunately she passed away last year.”

I could see it really bothered her, but I sat in silence for a moment. “Were you two… close?”

She nodded and then sighed as she looked at me again. “I just don’t understand, though,” she suddenly blurted out. “The two of them seemed happy, you know… Happy. Content with each other…” She took a deep breath as she tried to expunge the thought. “I suppose he was just a man of his time –is, I mean: his attitude is fairly typical of that era, I think…” Then, after she considered it briefly, she added “But I don’t know how she could stand it: being a slave in the house, I mean.”

She kept scanning my face to see if I agreed -after all, I was probably the same age as Jonathan. Subject to the same biases, the same unrealistic expectations of a wife.

It was my turn to sigh. “You said the two of them seemed happy…”

She nodded. “They loved each other.”

I smiled. “Then perhaps she, too, was a woman of her time, Jasmin.”

She thought about that for a while and then her whole demeanour changed. “I… I hadn’t thought of it that way.” She smiled and sent her eyes to my face to thank me. “I’ll introduce you two in the delivery room. I think you’ll like him,” she said and winked at me as she stood to leave.

 

 

 

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More than kin, and less than kind

 

Puberty is seldom easy nowadays, although in fairness, I suppose it never really was. From the Latin pubertas -adulthood- it is a time of eventful and often embarrassing change as children pass through a bewildering array of morphological and psychological alterations on their way to the adults they are programmed to become.

For boys, I think they are largely awkward times -the voice changes, and the soft and downy facial hair that seems to take forever to coarsen enough to become a beard: the apparently interminable and disconcerting interregna between child adult.

For girls, I think, it can be more than merely embarrassing, because amongst other things, they may begin to develop adult contours before their brain has matured enough to fully understand the effects that might have on others.

A few years ago, when my dog was just a puppy, I remember sitting on a park bench trying to read after taking him for a walk. The dog, with his large puppy eyes and waggy tail, was attempting to befriend everything that walked past, however, so I put the book away and was about to leave, when I saw a woman and a younger girl further along the trail glancing our way. The woman pointed at the puppy, but the girl seemed reluctant to approach any closer, although she was clearly interested.

I assumed the girl might be frightened of dogs, but puppies have a way of overcoming that, so I smiled at the two of them and asked if they wanted to pet him. They talked about it for a while, and then the woman gently grasped the young girl’s hand and led her over to the puppy.

“Suzie’s sometimes a bit shy,” she said, smiling at me and sat beside me on the bench while her daughter patted the squirming and delighted dog. Suzie, dressed in a grey sweatshirt, jeans, and a baseball cap, was the mirror image of her mother. Perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age, she did seem unusually shy, however, especially since her mother had no difficulty striking up a conversation with me.

Rolling around on the grass with the dog, Suzie seemed completely at ease with the puppy, and I thought she might enjoy taking it for a little walk in the field in front of the bench. I offered her the leash, but I could see her eyes change with the gesture. Suddenly suspicious, she glanced at her mother, like an uneasy child.

He mother chuckled, took the proffered leash from my hand and gave it to Suzie. “By the way, my name is Martha,” she said, extending her hand, as we introduced each other. “I’m afraid Suzie’s really shy around strangers -unlike her mother,” she explained, once her daughter had run off with the dog. “And especially around men,” she added, studying my face for a reaction. Then, just as suddenly, her expression softened. “She’s only 11, even though she looks 13 or 14, so I suspect she’ll outgrow her fear…”

“Fear…?” I said, instantly regretting my question, but there was something in her eyes that made me need to ask.

The woman stared at me for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not to answer,  and then shrugged. “She’s going through puberty a lot earlier than I did…” She blushed, as much at the word, as in disclosing it to a total stranger on a park bench. “So she’s beginning to develop… “ She paused for a moment to find a better word. “She’s beginning to look older than her age, let’s say…” Then she looked down at her lap, and clasped her hands for a second. “And now older boys -and men as well- look at her… differently.” Her eyes suddenly walked across my face before they settled on the field where Suzie was running. “I don’t think her mind has caught up with her body yet, and it confuses her.” I sensed that Martha was more worried than she was willing to let on, though.

When Suzie returned, flushed and breathless from her romp in the field, she seemed more relaxed and thanked me for letting her play with the puppy, but a few minutes after the two of them left, I almost forgot about the incident -it was only one of many encounters I had with the new puppy- and yet I have to admit to a lingering concern about the occasion. Many years later, I came across an article in a BBC Future series that started me wondering again: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180611-the-health-risks-of-girls-maturing-early

‘[S]exual harassment of minors remains a less common topic of discussion – though it’s one that may have increasing urgency, as puberty seems to be coming earlier for increasing numbers of girls across the globe. While the average age of puberty onset, defined by breast development, for US girls  was almost 12 years old in the 1970s, it fell to nine years by 2011… ‘Girls who reach puberty earlier are sexually harassed more than their peers, regardless of whether they’re engaging in sexual behaviours earlier.’

‘Enduring unwanted comments and stares may seem minor compared to other types of sexual violence. Still, studies have shown they can be particularly distressing for a child,  putting them at risk of psychological problems that can reverberate throughout their life.’

‘Although puberty presents challenges for all adolescents, girls who mature ahead of their peers are particularly vulnerable. One recent study, which tracked more than 7,000 women over a period of 14 years, found that early menarche (the first menstrual bleeding) was associated with  elevated rates of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, and antisocial behaviours in adulthood.’ Also, ‘In the UK, one recent BBC investigation found that children as young as six years old have been sexually assaulted on trains or in train stations.’

‘The important thing about puberty is that it’s visible to others. But a young girl with breasts is no less of a child, or better able to handle such a situation, than one who hasn’t yet developed… Sexualisation of girls is especially problematic in cultures where puberty automatically tags a girl as ready for marriage.’ In fact, closer to home, ‘Unchained at a Glance, a nonprofit dedicated to helping women and girls in the US escape forced marriages, has estimated that 248,000 children as young as 12 were married in the US between 2000-2010.’

Of course not all girls are traumatized by precocious development, and ‘Researchers agree that it’s important not to catastrophise about early sexual development in and of itself. The problem isn’t that a girl’s body is changing. It’s society’s response to it. As a result, they say we should think about how we might support girls and their families best.’

Looking back, I wonder now if Martha had just been gauging my reaction? Curious how I had judged her daughter. I hope she saw me as a man merely watching a child playing happily with a puppy. That’s how I saw me, at any rate…

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The Pleasure of Impermanence

Don’t you sometimes think things are changing too fast? Moving past you so rapidly it’s all a blur? Even mistakes are corrected with other mistakes so quickly it’s hard to know whether it’s all a game. It’s hard to know which is supposed to be the pentimento. And, perhaps more to the point, does it really matter?

When I was a child, I remember being intrigued by a set of bone china dishes that we only used on special occasions, and then only after dire warnings to be careful with our knives and forks on the plates for fear of cracking them in the headlong rush to dissect and ingest our dinners. I don’t know how many different patterns of Royal Crown Derby there are, but ours were decorated with Japanese figures in garden settings, all in rich blue colours. Even the mention of its construction out of bone china made my brother and I sit up straighter at the table -it sounded so fragile and expensive we were both on our best behaviour.

And yet, using sterling silver dinnerware, carried a special risk -cutting with the unusually heavy knives on such a fragile surface often led to excessive force on my part. Then, one Christmas when I was about seven or eight years old, the unthinkable happened: I cracked one of the dinner plates holding an unexpectedly tough piece of turkey. I was mortified and immediately ran from the table in tears.

My mother, far from being angry, followed me up to my room where I intended to hide for ever, and sat on my bed. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” I still remember her saying. “It’s only a plate. Things happen sometimes…” She kissed me on the cheek, led me back downstairs to the table, and carried on as if nothing had happened. And my dinner reappeared, undiminished, on another plate.

That same night, when I saw the broken plate that she was going to throw away, I asked if I could keep it. I spent most of the next day trying to glue it together without success, and only the following summer did my father help me to find the correct glue and cobble together a patch.

And every Christmas for years to come, it became a family tradition that I was served my dinner on that mended plate. It felt special: it was my plate.

Well, unless we rest for a while along its bank, we may never even see the river that is sweeping us all along. We may never appreciate the ‘transient and imperfect beauty’ of something like the fleeting splendour of the cherry blossom in our desperate journey along the shore. The Japanese have an expression for this ability to appreciate impermanence and imperfection: wabi-sabi.

Although I’ve touched upon the concept before in an essay entitled Words, Like the Wind (https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2017/10/15/words-like-the-wind/) I was captivated by an article in the BBC on travel where it was treated more thoroughly: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181021-japans-unusual-way-to-view-the-world

‘Originating in Taoism during China’s Song dynasty (960-1279) before being passed onto Zen Buddhism, wabi-sabi was originally seen as an austere, restrained form of appreciation. Today it encapsulates a more relaxed acceptance of transience, nature and melancholy, favouring the imperfect and incomplete in everything, from architecture to pottery to flower arranging. Wabi, which roughly means ‘the elegant beauty of humble simplicity’, and sabi, which means ‘the passing of time and subsequent deterioration’

‘As to why they sought imperfect, rustic pieces, Prof Otabe [professor at Tokyo University’s Institute of Aesthetics] explained that “wabi-sabi leaves something unfinished or incomplete for the play of imagination”. This opportunity to actively engage with something considered to be wabi-sabi achieves three things: an awareness of the natural forces involved in the creation of the piece; an acceptance of the power of nature; and an abandonment of dualism – the belief that we are separate from our surroundings.

‘Combined, these experiences allow the viewer to see themselves as part of the natural world, no longer separated by societal constructs and instead at the mercy of natural timelines. Rather than seeing dents or uneven shapes as mistakes, they are viewed as a creation of nature – much as moss would grow on an uneven wall or a tree would curve in the wind… Rather than casting nature solely as a dangerous and destructive force, it helps frame it as a source of beauty, to be appreciated on the smallest of levels. It becomes a provider of colours, designs and patterns, a source of inspiration, and a force to work alongside, rather than against… Alone, natural patterns are merely pretty, but in understanding their context as transient items that highlight our own awareness of impermanence and death, they become profound.’

As my adult Christmases wore on through the years, I wasn’t always able to spend them with my parents, but the mended plate was a story I told every year to my children, and then to my grandchild.

At first they would ask me if I was being punished each year by having to use the broken plate.

“But I’d fixed the plate,” I would explain as part of the story. “So it wasn’t broken anymore was it? Just special.”

They would look at each other and then at me. “But…”

It was difficult for them to understand when they were really young. They knew I wouldn’t serve them with a broken plate, or a cracked cup, so why would my mother do that? As they got older, though, they merely accepted the story as one of the tapestries every family weaves around special occasions, and their questions dwindled to patient grins and shared winks as I began to recite the story for yet another year.

It was only when I told it to my grandchild, Kaz, one Christmas, that the magic rekindled itself. By then, I was in possession of the family Royal Crown Derby set, although because of its increasing fragility, had decided to keep the mended plate separate from the other dishes on the table.

It was the first family dinner together since my grandchild had been born four or five years before. They’d all lived in a different city from me, and I was pretty sure my son hadn’t told his child about it -it was my plate, after all. It was for me to weave the chiaroscuro on the family quilt.

We were all seated at the table, and just before we started to eat, I smiled at my son to let him know I was about to tell the story. He nodded with a delighted smile on his face and nudged Kaz to make sure he was listening.

I told the story in the by then traditional fashion, but I didn’t think it had made any impression on Kaz. I saw him occasionally moving the food around on his plate, maybe to see if his was broken, and then looking somewhat disappointed when he couldn’t see the crack. He was also paying close attention to my own plate with saucer-sized eyes that followed my knife through every cut.

When I explained that the plate was now just too fragile to use after all these years, he smiled and nodded, wise beyond his years.

“You don’t want to have to fix it again, do you grandpa?” He stared at me for a moment, his eyes reading the wrinkles on my face. “It wouldn’t be the same beautiful old plate then, would it?”

Sometimes adults think they have a monopoly on wisdom, but maybe we merely enable something the children already possess. Wabi-sabi may be like that, I think.

by

Oh, true apothecary

That we would do we should do when we would, for this ‘would’ changes, says Shakespeare’s Claudius. In other words, do what you think you should when you think of it, or you may never do it…

It seems to me that Medicine has changed a fair amount since I retired. Not only has science advanced, but so has our way of looking at the world. Our way of framing a problem has expanded, and no longer totally excludes extra-Magisterial endeavours.

Boundaries, are dissolving -or at least being redrawn. Who would have thought that we might look to, well, spirit, as an aide de camp? Or exercise as a legitimate medication? I have written about the latter in an essay I published in 2015 about Quebec doctors’ ability to write prescriptions for exercise: (https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2015/09/12/the-uber-obvious-in-medicine/) but I am pleased to see that the tradition continues -in Montreal, at any rate: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/canadian-doctors-will-soon-be-able-prescribe-museum-visits-180970599

‘[A] select group of local physicians will be able to prescribe museum visits as treatment for an array of ailments… “We know that art stimulates neural activity,” MMFA [Montreal Museum of Fine Arts] director Nathalie Bondil tells CBC News. “What we see is that the fact that you are in contact with culture, with art, can really help your well-being… members of the Montreal-based medical association Mèdecins francophones du Canada (MdFC) can hand out up to 50 museum prescriptions enabling patients and a limited number of friends, family and caregivers to tour the MMFA for free…  MdFC vice president Hélène Boyer explains that museum visits have been shown to increase levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter colloquially known as the “happy chemical” due to its mood-boosting properties. But creativity’s healing powers aren’t limited to tackling mental health issues; art therapy can also help those undergoing palliative care for severely life-threatening diseases or conditions, like cancer, or suffering from diabetes and chronic illness.

‘According to Boyer, the uptick in hormones associated with enjoying an afternoon of art is similar to that offered by exercise, making museum prescriptions ideal for the elderly and individuals experiencing chronic pain that prevents them from regularly engaging in physical activity.’ Of course, there is the usual exculpatory caveat ‘that the museum visits are designed to complement, not supplant, more traditional methods.’ But still, a step forward, don’t you think? It’s a recognition that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, if I may slightly paraphrase Hamlet.

“Why do you always want to drag me along to these things, Julie?” I was sitting in the warm and welcoming sunshine on the magnificent array of stone steps of Vancouver’s Art Gallery when the elderly couple hesitated near the bottom. The man looked the worse for wear and was leaning on his cane, already out of breath. Both of them were bedecked in grey hair, but while the woman sported a cool red cotton print dress, the man seemed dressed for church -he was wearing a heavily creased brown woolen suit, a white shirt, and red tie.

She stroked the lapel of his suit, trying to smooth out some of the wrinkles perhaps, but more likely trying to get him to smile. “You need to get out of the house once in a while, Edward,” she said, and then gently touched his cheek. “Ever since you broke your hip, you’ve just been sitting on the couch…”

“It’s hard to get around, Julie,” he said, somewhat irritably. “And I don’t fancy letting everybody in the neighbourhood see me with a cane.”

Even from several steps above, I could see her roll her eyes. “Do you really think they care, dear? They’re not exactly glued to their windows waiting for you to come on stage, for heaven’s sake.”

He stared at her angrily for a moment and then shrugged when she failed to react. “I get tired easily nowadays, Julie,” he said in a husky sort of whine.

She reached out and grasped his hand. “You get grumpy easily, nowadays, sweetheart.” I could see her squeeze his hand reassuringly. “You haven’t been yourself since the operation, you know. And it’s not like you to be tired all the time.”

She seemed so earnest and caring, I could see his expression soften. Clearly, they’d been married for a long time. “Well, I…”

“Come on, Eddie we’re almost there,” she whispered loudly and winked at me when she saw me watching them.

“Well, I guess since we’ve already come all this way…” He shrugged and allowed her to lead him slowly up the steps past where I was sitting. “I just hope there’s some place to sit in there…” was the last thing I heard him say as they inched their way ever upwards.

I promptly forgot all about them as the sun warmed my face while I read the pamphlet about the exhibition on current display. I was looking forward to a lazy afternoon of wandering through whatever was on offer this time. I hadn’t visited since the Musqueam artist, Susan Point’s Spindle Whorl exhibition and I remembered standing transfixed, in front of the hypnotic, wheeled patterns of her Coast Salish art.

But the sun coaxed me into staying on the steps and watching the world amble past -on a warm day, the people outside are sometimes as intriguing as the art inside. I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually the need for a coffee and a muffin roused me from my aerie on the steps, and I sauntered into the Gallery Café to see what I could find.

There was a table emptying inside, so I carried my tray over to it and sat down. I was just tucking into the muffin when I heard a familiar voice at the next table and recognized the two who’d been standing below me on the steps.

But Edward didn’t seem as grumpy now, and Julie was smiling from ear to ear. “Well, dear, what did I tell you?” she said, stirring some milk into her tea.

“You didn’t tell me I’d see the original painting of that reproduction we have hanging in the living room wall, sweetheart…” He gazed fondly at her for a moment. “It’s my favourite painting, you know…”

Her smile grew even wider, as if, of course she knew. “Surprise, eh?”

“I’ll say,” he said, his eyes alive and twinkling. “Maybe we could look around for some other paintings by him.” He reached across the table and fondled her hand.

“Well, there’s that place on Granville -you know, the one up near the hospital? They may have some reproductions,” she said, leaning over the table and stroking his cheek with her free hand. “Want to have a look tomorrow?”

“That’s a great idea, Julie.” He stared at his cane for a moment. “Maybe we could walk -it’s not that far, is it…?”

“No it’s not, sweetheart,” she whispered, and touched his cheek again. “No, it’s not…”