Monthly Archives: October 2021

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Scaffolds

It’s exciting to realize that, despite my age, there are so many things that I have not stopped to think about: the seemingly random encounters with anonymous people in the course of a visit to a store or waiting for a bus downtown; inconsequential interactions with strangers on a sidewalk waiting for the light to change; overheard conversations at the next table in a Food Court in an otherwise unimportant mall. They are mostly forgettable, I suppose -background noise- and yet in retrospect, they ultimately form the invisible scaffolds of our lives.

Of course, I guess it’s tempting to dismiss most of these encounters -and anyway, there are far too many of them to remember, and they are far too numerous to catalogue let alone ponder the significance of each. I would feel overwhelmed if I had to remember the details of everything that happened to me in a day; I feel blessed that no one asks; it is not a requirement for old age.

And yet, I sometimes wonder if those forgotten contacts with the world form the hidden webs that bind me to reality: Occurro ergo sum, as it were. They have obviously decreased in our pandemic lockdowns and social distancing of late, but they are all around, if you watch for them. I still have trivial conversations with those lining up the requisite three feet away in the grocery store; I still feel a compulsion to interact with flowers in the woods and I continue to follow mysterious and partially hidden trails to see where they lead. I still attempt to understand the yawp of crows scattered in the forest as they try to stay in contact with their flock; and if our eyes engage, I still smile -masked or not- when I pass a person I don’t recognize on the sidewalk to show them I also am a member of their flock. How else to honour an otherwise forgettable stranger? How else to make sense of my life?

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An elderly man (I try not to look for comparisons with my own misuse of years) apologized to me for coughing as I sat beside him on a bus a few weeks ago. He was wearing a mask above which, by chance rather than intent I suspect, his nose was almost entirely visible. He clearly had not entirely mastered the art of masking, because one ear also stuck out like Mickey Mouse from the pressure of the straps, and there was a rhythmic indentation of the fabric with each of his laboured inhalations.

“Damned thing keeps making me cough,” he ventured, as he apologized with his eyes and re-buried his nose. “But I’m double-vaccinated,” he hastened to assure me in the same muffled tone as his apology.

And that was that. Two streets later, he got off after stroking me with his eyes as he left -for tolerating him, I suppose.

*

A woman passed me carrying her tray to the drop-off box in the mall’s Food court to which I’d been travelling on the bus. I was sitting, unmasked, at a socially distanced table eating a bagel and lingering over my coffee, when she accidentally bumped into me, dropping a napkin onto my arm as she tried to avoid stepping on her little boy. Her eyes immediately registered horror -partially at the incursion into my space of course, but mainly for the fomitic napkin that had landed on my arm. I imagine the fact that she had also forgotten to don her mask after finishing her meal suddenly occurred to her as an added and unforgivable crime as well.

Ordinarily, I suppose this would have elicited no more than an embarrassed apology, but in this pandemic age, it seemed to her to have been an egregious trespass. “Oh my God, sir,” she muttered sotto voce, so as not to incur the antagonism of the otherwise uninterested patrons. “I’m so sorry!”

I smiled at her as a sign of forgiveness, and merely blew the napkin off my arm and onto the floor. I hoped she would see this as yet another sign of absolution, but she merely blushed, picked up the napkin and hurried off, while looking around the room to make sure no one else had noticed.

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Much later, I was about to enter a popular pathway leading to the trail around a local lake when a dog rounded the corner. I like dogs -no, actually I love them and stop to pet every dog who will let me, leashed or not. I walk the trail several times a week, so by now, I suspect I know every dog I pass -or is it the other way around? At any rate, the dog I met that day was one I didn’t recognize, and it was attached to an ownerless leash. It was a black Labrador, I think, and as is the custom of every lab I’ve ever met, it started wagging its tail furiously and trotted up to me to say hello.

There’s something incredibly endearing about the look in their eyes as they poke their noses into strangers as if they were long lost relatives; it’s impossible not to recognize that there is something intelligent and curious staring out at you and requesting a pat.

I, of course, can never resist, but before I could reach out and touch its head, the owner came puffing around the corner and screamed at me. “Don’t you pet that dog,” she yelled, her eyes not at all as welcoming as her dog’s.

“He came up to me wagging his tail,” I explained, not a little put off by her attitude. I didn’t recognize the wrinkles I could see on her face above her mask, either; she was obviously not a local.

Her eyes narrowed and her forehead rumpled at my explanation as she grasped the leash firmly in two hands and pulled the dog away. “Dogs can catch human diseases, you know,” she added, shaking her head irritably.

The dog glanced at her and then back at me; I could swear his eyes apologized to me for his master’s rudeness and I could almost see him shrug, as he trotted reluctantly away realizing he had no choice in the matter.

I can only hope he realized that I was left without a choice as well…

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When is Then?

I am sometimes amazed with the outlook that Age affords. Maybe it was there all along, and I was too busy to give it much attention, or maybe as the years wore thin and the leaves began to fall away, there was a better view of things around me, but whatever the cause, I started to realize just how tiny now really is -how small a space in time I actually occupy. It’s a perspective that didn’t seem terribly applicable until recently. And yet, the more I think about it, the more I wonder how I could not have noticed it’s relative size before.

It’s interesting to think about temporal, as well as spatial awareness in Art, for example. The first known picture to use geometrically fashioned perspective, and its famous ‘vanishing point’ is usually thought of  as being created by an architect from Florence, Fillipo Brunelleschi in 1415. In fact, however, perspective was apparently tried for theatrical scenery around the 5th century B.C.E in Greece, and then much later in various frescoes in Rome and even in a Villa in Pompeii, although with apparently little awareness of the value of a so-called vanishing point. What I’m saying, however, is that once it re-emerged in art all those centuries later, it became an essential ingredient for a realistic portrayal of reality. Something that would be missed if it were absent or done incorrectly.

So can we think of Time as, in a way, analogous to Art? And is there a way of projecting ourselves into the future towards a similar vanishing point to envision how the present should look? I mean, we do it to the Past all the time: we criticize decisions made long ago for problems we now have to try and solve. Think of both the advantages the petrochemical industry offered its citizens and the current problems it has created for us and our climate as the years have unfolded. So we were, in fact, colonized by a past thinking no further ahead than its needs at the time.

As it occasionally happens in the leisure time imposed by retirement, I discovered an essay by the public philosopher Roman Krznaric, apparently a research fellow of the Long Now Foundation, that seemed to address some of my questions. His opening sentence immediately captured my attention: ‘Humankind has colonised the future,’ he writes. ‘We treat it like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk and nuclear waste – as if nobody will be there.’ It is a  perspective that invites -no demands– further consideration. https://psyche.co/ideas/future-generations-deserve-good-ancestors-will-you-be-one

Interestingly, he goes on to compare the British colonization of Australia, ‘which was based on a legal doctrine today known as terra nullius or ‘nobody’s land’, in which the continent was treated as if there were no indigenous people there when they arrived,’ with what seems to be the current societal attitude of what he calls ‘tempus nullius’. ‘The future is seen as ‘nobody’s time’, an unclaimed territory that is equally devoid of inhabitants… ours for the taking.’

I have to admit that I hadn’t thought of the future like that, but merely as a ‘then’ where I did not live, and where might never take more than a few hesitant steps. It remained for me more of a terra incognita, free entry into which was forever barred by the present. And yet, as Krznaric points out, ‘our political systems disenfranchise future generations in the same way that slaves and women were disenfranchised in the past… Future generations are granted no political rights or representation. Their interests have no influence at the ballot box or in the marketplace. This leaves them vulnerable to multiple long-term threats, from rising sea levels and AI-controlled lethal autonomous weapons to the next pandemic that lies on the horizon, whether naturally occurring or genetically engineered.’

But, with political systems that concentrate on short-termism, how can we ever hope to convince those in power -not to mention those who put them there- to change? Were they to come up with a plan for the next day -after a fire, say- yes of course we would think that was reasonable; a plan for next year -a new school perhaps- well, that would probably be a good idea, too. But how far ahead are we willing to plan? Most people have trouble saving enough for their retirement a few years away, so how (and why) would they plan for even further afield? Should we be willing to sacrifice anything for unknown generations to come? Things are difficult enough now aren’t they? Let them deal with it, just as we are forced to do now.

Krznaric has come up with ‘three compelling reasons why we should commit ourselves to protecting and promoting the interests of future generations far more than we do now. The first has to do with ‘Scales’ -comparing the number who have ever lived on earth, with the number who will do so over the next 50,000 years: ‘around 100 billion people have lived and died in the past 50,000 years. But they, together with the 7.8 billion people currently alive, are far outweighed by the estimated 6.75 trillion people who will be born over the next 50,000 years… Even in just the next millennium, more than 135 billion people will be born. How could we possibly ignore their wellbeing, and think that our own is of such greater value?’ Something to think about, for sure.

He calls his second argument the ‘Arrow’. If you shot an arrow (or a bullet) into the air and it injured someone far away, are you not still responsible? Think of the same issue with our attempted disposal of radioactive waste…

And then the ‘Baton’ -a rewording of the Golden Rule reminding us that ‘we have a duty not to impose harm or dangerous risks on future people that we wouldn’t be willing to accept ourselves… a Golden Rule passed on from one generation to another – a golden baton.’

I like that idea, if only because I know my parents sacrificed for me; they’re my example of why caring for the future should be important to us all. It’s not a distant neighbourhood, just an unoccupied house right next door. And our children, and their children will be living there. The future is not really ‘then’ is it? Its roots are buried here; neither now nor then are empty…