Ampersand Gazette #9
“People have become willfully ignorant of things like context and nuance. I can’t tell if they sincerely don’t recognize them, simply don’t have time for them, or if it just feels sexier to be self-righteous, but comedy—satire in particular—is indeed an endangered artform.
Randy Rainbow
from his new memoir Playing with Myself
I am a definite fan of Randy Rainbow. How could I not be? Musicals and political parody lyrics? What’s not to like? I was glad when I learned he had a memoir coming out.
One of the things I liked about the book was how seriously he discussed comedy. His phrase in the quote above “willfully ignorant” struck me. Usually, we use the word ignorant to mean a form of intellectual innocence. How can a person know what they don’t know?
Except Randy modified it with “willfully” and that was the clincher for me. We’ve learned, because of the inundation of information, to ignore both “context and nuance.” But, Beloved, in life, in all lives, context and nuance are everything!
Let me prove it to you with just one word. Imagine this: we’re crossing the street together, and I see a bus you can’t. Of course I’ll speak, “Don’t!” harshly, urgently, adamantly. And you will have been prevented from being flattened by a bus.
On the other hand, imagine this: we’re sitting in a bar, sipping martinis, and having a lovely time. You decide that’s the moment to bring up an argument we had that morning. So if I speak, “Don’t,” gently, quietly, kindly, as in let’s-not-revisit-what-was-unpleasant-when-it’s-so-pleasant-now tone … it’s the same word.
Context and nuance are what give flavor to life. They’re spices and spaces that make a difference to our experience. We ignore them to our sad detriment.
Oh, and Randy’s book is lovely. I recommend it.
&
“But look, none of this is a mystery. … When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate.
“And history tells us that this tactic often works.”
from an Opinion essay “Republicans Say: ‘Let Them Eat Hate’” by Paul Krugman
in The New York Times
April 19, 2022
You’ve probably heard me reference this story before, but it’s worth repeating. I had a beau once who, every time someone said they hated something, anything, he’d say, “Ouch.” Quietly. Gently. Nothing in-your-face about it. But he made his point.
Common enemy is an excellent uniting point. What seems to have lost some of its lustre is its antithesis—the common good. Now, the common good is nowhere near as glamourous or sexy as any common enemy. Think of that for a moment. Isn’t that sad?
Eating hate is as bad for you as eating antifreeze, Beloved. It rots you from the inside out. What to do?
Have a serious ponder on what you consider to be the common good. And common means we want whatever that is for everyone without exception. The good isn’t common unless it has no exceptions.
If it were up to me, I’d rephrase Marie Antoinette yet again: Let us eat love. All of us. All the time. Everywhere. Every time we add to hate in the world, Beloved, if we’ll pause a moment, we’ll hear someone somewhere quietly saying, “Ouch.”
Let’s see if we can obliterate this particular ouch from the whole wide world, shall we?
&
“We must prioritize human health, not corporate wealth. The health of all of us is at stake: patients, doctors and nurses.
Nancy Bermon
Nyack, N.Y.
The writer is a family physician and assistant professor at the Center for Family and Community Medicine, Columbia University.”
from a Letter to the Editor about a nurse who made a fatal mistake in The New York Times
April 21, 2022
One of the things that has popped up off and on during the ongoing Covid Saga on Planet Earth is the health of our healthcare workers. They’ve been working under extraordinary pressure that has waned, but then waxed, again and again.
Being a nurse or a doctor or an orderly or a nurses’ aide or a food service worker or any other job in the healthcare world these days is a hefty responsibility. More than it already was.
This story in The Times of a nurse who gave a patient the wrong medication broke my heart. Yes, of course, for the patient and their family, but also for the nurse. There’s no room for error in a job of this nature, and humans, like it or not, do make errors sometimes.
A lot of the reaction was holier-than-thou, and frankly, I thought it mean. Mistakes are made in hospitals all the time. It’s just that we don’t hear about them. They’re handled by internal systems and committees that work day in and day out to perfect human-created systems, ideally, and make them error-proof. They’re not. They can’t be.
I think the teaching to take from this is: let’s let our hearts go out to the healthcare workers who risk making just such a mistake every time they go to work so that you, or I, or our loved ones are cared for when we need it. Her mistake asks for compassion, not cruelty.
Surely you’ve made your fair share of mistakes in this life. I know I have. And if, when I did, someone was unkind to me about it, it hurt. The nurse was already hurting.
If you’re a praying type, add healthcare and its workers onto your permanent prayer list please. They need it. And so do we.
&
“The mind is a relentless meaning-making machine.”
from an Opinion Essay on how unprepared we are to grieve by David Brooks “Some People Turn Suffering
Into Wisdom” in The New York Times
April 22,2022
This is what the mind is meant to do, Beloved. Make meaning. Not the brain. The brain is designed to run systems autonomically so we don’t have to spend any time thinking about making bone marrow or growing eyelashes. Those things just happen.
But the mind? Oh, the mind is a playground of meaning. One of the things few of us with minds understand—innocently, because we’re not taught this—is that we get to choose what meaning we give to experience. I’ll write that again.
We GET TO CHOOSE what meaning we give to experience.
Really. We do. But we’ve lost sight of a lot of the power inherent in that, haven’t we? We forget that assigning meaning is part of Free Will. Like this:
Let’s say you went to a lab for blood tests. You’re expecting the results when the phone rings and you’re told that the lab has lost the samples, and you need to come in to give blood again.
What’s the immediate meaning you assigned to that? I know I would have been angry that they lost the samples, that I had to waste my time again going to the lab, parking, waiting for my turn, giving even more blood, and having to wait longer for the results. Do you hear the dudgeon I’ve assigned to the experience? I’m mad.
Okay, so now, imagine this: when you get to the lab, the manager comes out immediately upon your arrival, apologizes profusely, says the company will cover the costs of both sets of tests, and she just wants you to know that because your labs were lost, they’re changing their national protocol so this doesn’t happen ever again to any of their patients. Can you feel my anger dissipating? Oh, well, when you put it that way … you say to the manager.
What did the manager do? She rewrote your mad meaning to positive purposeful meaning. Now when you follow-up with your friends, you’ll tell a very different story, won’t you?
The next time you don’t like the meaning you’ve given something, stop. Your mind is a relentless meaning-making machine. Take a moment to change the meaning you’ve put upon your experience. You’re looking for positive and purposeful.
&
“Perhaps some of the problem is the passion for categorical thinking or rather for categories as an alternative to thinking. Some people evolve and change as dramatically as caterpillars turning into butterflies. Some might as well be carved from granite, carrying whatever beliefs and values they were launched with throughout their life. Some get better, some worse, some stay the same. Some shift as a result of societal changes, some for individual reasons and through individual effort. Recognizing this means having to think about each case and also means recognizing that sometimes we don’t know enough to render judgment.”
from a Guest Essay by Rebecca Solnit “How We Stopped Believing That People Can Change” in The New York Times
April 22,2022
You can imagine, I’m sure, that I love Rebecca Solnit. She’s brilliant, and her politics match mine perfectly most of the time. This Guest Essay was a powerful challenge truly to examine our belief systems. Do you believe people can change?
I do. But I also believe that God is still in the business of revelation, that sometimes I can see the fairies behind the sofa like I did with my daddy when I was four, and that there really are real witches, J. K. Rowling notwithstanding.
I think this is why I liked her trenchant analysis that we’ve started to prefer “categories as an alternative to thinking.” Whoa. If that doesn’t encapsulate our zeroes and ones reductionism since the advent of the personal computer, I don’t know what does.
Albert Einstein spent some of his prodigious brain time on this, too. He said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I agree, and I also think we have egregiously veered over the line of simple to simpler in recent years.
Beloved, life is complicated on the level of lived-out detail. There are logistics, and plans, and dreams, and mechanics, and all sorts of details that can make things seem extremely complex, and yet … simplifying is good thinking … as long as we don’t career into simpler territory.
Why? Because we’ll leave someone or something out. That’s why Rebecca Solnit’s implicit belief-system challenge is so pertinent right now. Do you believe people can change? Let’s start at home. Can you change? I can. I do.
And because I do, I leave a whole lot of unclaimed possibility space in my life for you to change. Change usually shifts your categories, Beloved. That’s why thinking is so very needed.
&
My husband sent this to me from a Twitter repost on Facebook.
I LOVE new words!
Don’t you?
&
“Culture is a conversation, not a monologue.
“The outsider’s take, whether it comes from a journalist, historian, writer or director, can offer its own equally valid perspective. There is almost never just one side to a story. Or even just two. Think about the great art that would be lost if we loyally carried out this rigid identitarian mandate. If a man can’t write about a woman, then Tolstoy doesn’t get to conjure Anna Karenina.…
“In an essay adapted for the Book Review last year, Henry Louis Gates Jr. warned, “whenever we treat an identity as something to be fenced off from those of another identity, we sell short the human imagination.” People can successfully project themselves into the lives of others. That is what art is meant to do—cross boundaries, engender empathy with other people, bridge the differences between author and reader, one human and another.
“Taken to its logical conclusion, the belief that ‘lived experience’ trumps all other considerations would lead to a world in which we would create stories only about people like ourselves, in stories to be illustrated by people who looked like ourselves, to be reviewed and read only by people who resembled ourselves. If we all wrote only from our personal experience, our films, performances and literature would be reduced to memoir and transcription.
“What an impoverished culture that would be.”
Pamela Paul
from a Guest Essay on the authenticity police in
The New York Times Opinion pages “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’”
April 24, 2022
I for one do not live in such an impoverished culture, nor do I want to. Yes, yes, I know. We authors are supposed to write what we know. Except … wait.
I just finished a first edit on my newest novel. It’s called Jezebel Rising, and it’s part of a series of historical and speculative fiction combined called The Subversive Lovelies. The book takes place in 1897.
According to the lived experience police, I can’t write this book. I can’t prove that I lived in 1897. I’m not Irish. I’m not related to the Bailey who was part of Barnum & Bailey. I don’t have three sisters. I’ve never been a fence for luxury goods, nor run a saloon or an ice cream parlor.
Dang, I really can’t write this book. Except … I did.
You see, I did live in Chelsea where it takes place. I’ve been in the buildings it’s based on. I am a metaphysician and so’s Jezebel herself. I do hold progressive ideas for my time, and so do she and her sisters. I have studied human beings and their motivations for forty years, and that’s a point throughout the book. I did go to dancing school. I did and have done a lot of the things in the novel—except in my own time.
So of course I, like all other authors, use my lived experience to the degree that it’s applicable, but I also research and learn and use ideas that I’ve never experienced. It’s called education where I live, and I’ve yet to miss a day of this life where I don’t learn something.
And that’s why we all need to honor our lived experience, yes, but also we need to live as those who value ampersand—that inclusive of everyone way of living that blesses us all.
&
The upload of Jezebel Rising into ebook format will be this week. I’ll get ARCs to my beta readers as soon as Amazon can print the paperbacks. Tony and I will proofread it by reading it aloud to one another—it’s amazing what you catch in an out loud reading that you miss reading it silently.
The official launch of the Energy Integrity workbooks should be this week, too. Then, my plan is to begin booking podcast guest appearances. If you happen to know podcast hosts who might like to hear a refreshing take on rejuvenating your own energy system, please have them email me.
I’m also gearing up to do some beta testing of a new divination deck I created based on the chakras. I’ll be making four matching prototypes and sending them to some friends who’ll participate in the first Chakra Detective Cohort to help me work out any kinks. Exciting!
I’m wrapping up the research for the second Subversive Lovelies novel; it will be entitled Jasmine Increscent. She’s one of Jezebel’s older sisters. I can’t wait to get started, but I won’t start till I feel that interior click that says, “Go!”
For now, it’s a goal, and isn’t it nice that goal starts with go?
Be ampersand, Beloved,
S.