coastlines and perspectives

NEVER ARGUE WITH A FOOL


It is best not to argue,
But if you do at all,
Never do so with a fool.
A fool can defeat all.

He does not care for the facts.
He does not know debate.
He’s a stranger to reason.
Logic he can negate.

In the end the fool will win,
His logic is so strong!
Decides what he does not like
And then it must be wrong!

It’s better to keep quiet
When challenged by a fool.
Else, to prove his own wisdom,
He will make you a tool.

It is hence my policy
To not respond to those
Who ask questions not to learn
But to be bellicose.


• Written in abcb, 7-6-7-6 syllabic format.


M C Gupta
25 October 2008

A problem I always had: "Who's the fool?" (fearful subtext: "Is it me?")

Whose demand is unreasonable? Who is selfish--the one requesting, or the one refusing? When is a request a request, and when is it a demand? When is it reasonable to 'expect' something,and when is it not?

It's a peculiar Gestalt--flipping back and forth from seeing the Vase to seeing the Face. Who am I?

Julia wrote a very thought-provoking post at Glow In the Woods last week called "Duty". She had received some implied criticism from a friend. A mutual friend in their group had been making remarks that repeatedly were "hitting my open compound fracture"--the raw wound of the loss of her child. When Julia protested she was later admonished that she should take into consideration the feelings--of the person who'd been hurting her.

It's tempting to oversimplify the question into a 'who's right/who's wrong' frame.

My historical default has been to "I'm wrong". As I began inching toward the possibility that maybe the troubles in my life weren't all due to selfishness (mine)--and if I couldn't see my fault it was because I'd so skillfully rationalized it out of view--I asked Sharon, my counselor, about this. How can I honestly evaluate where entitlement lays? What can guide my choice as to what is reasonable, my own point of view, or someone else's?

Sharon said one guide was which point of view included more perspectives.

I've just begun to read a book called The Secret Teachings of Plants/The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature by Stephen Harrod Buhner. I'm on page 25, and can't go further right now as I try to digest a rich concept. The chapter is called "The Nonlinearity of Nature."

In considering a coastline, we see where land emerges from the water. What is below is now manifest above. In mapping land masses, geographers measure this line formed at the intersection point. They calculate distance, and area from this measurement.

Where and what do they measure? As Buhner points out, "When you approach a coastline, what you encounter is a ragged edge, some portions of which protrude farther into thewater, some less. To measure this ragged line,Euclidean geometricians 'round off' the ragged-coastline in order to allow the complexity of a living coastline to fit into Euclidean space so that their model, their way of thinking, will be able to measure it. But always, it is important to remember, this is only an approximation. It is never real."

To get a more true approximation, one must shrink in size in order to enlarge perspective. If one measures a coastline from the road, then much of what's real is 'rounded off'. If one walks the coastline there is a limit to how close one can get, and how closely one can follow the twists and turns of where water and land meet. Buhner suggests taking the perspective of a mouse, in which case the curves and indentations can be more closely followed. Eventually, the mouse becomes too large to follow the real line closely enough, and perhaps an ant's perspective is still more accurate. Perhaps a microbe's. And so on.

For the convenience of measurement, the ragged edges are "smoothed off"--and those edges are important.

I remember reading a book on the theory of Chaos a few years ago. Though I mainly floundered through it, one understanding I took away was that minute differences in initial measurements translate to vast discrepancies the further downstream one moves from the initial starting point. I'm reminded of this in considering possible consequences in 'ignoring' the edges for the sake of convenience.

The 'coastline' of an ant is much longer than the coastline of a mouse, a human walking the shore, a car driving a coastal highway. What I can negotiate in one step may take an ant hours.

My cousin Sheri pulled a Tarot card for her Intuitive Tuesday series a couple weeks ago. In the discussion that followed she used Google Maps as a model: zoomed in (on our lives' moment-to-moments) or zoomed out (a larger context of a Life, our own). I thought of this as I was reading the coastline metaphor in "The Secret Teachings of Plants". I also saw that sometimes there is misunderstanding when two people at different scales meet. We may think we're talking about the same thing, but if I am "zoomed in", and I'm talking to someone who's "zoomed out", what I am referring to may be invisible to them. And what they're referring to may be non-existent to me. Yet we each try to find a frame of reference to fit what we're hearing from the other into the perspective we have in front of us.

Is my focus too narrow? I don't know. Does their perspective ignore too much? I don't know.

I'm thinking perhaps in Julia's case, of her friend's being offended that she, Julia was hurt and naming it, maybe the coastline analogy applies. Julia's coastline is far more ragged than that of her friends', and it's imperative that she walk each step of it; follow each convoluted turn. And, as Buhner says, when approached in this way, the 'length' of a coastline approaches infinity. This is a problem for a system of thought that seeks to impose order, to measure, and therefore arbitrarily chooses what to ignore. (And that choice reveals a bias). Julia's friends have needs too, and they have feelings that friends are invested in taking care for. When tragedy has mutilated the lives of one of our friends, we forget sometimes that while we all seem to be moving from point a to point b in our lives, that our babylost friend is traveling an infinite distance between point a and point b. We make the step without thinking about it. It's a tortured journey for our friend. Perhaps compassionate reason dictates the onus is on us to be generous. After all, if I am backpacking with a friend who is carrying 100 pounds, while I have 20, do I ask her to carry something of mine? It would certainly be cruel for me to 'smooth off' the fact that she is carrying a load 5 times greater than mine--and to expect her to act consistent with that smoothing-off--for my own convenience.

Like a coastline, I am completely intrigued by the implications of this insight. I may need to write some more about this.

Icky

Ok, now I've got to do another blog post because I just feel icky.

Since I wrote the post about 'No' which was inspired by the 'carpool' situation there have been a few developments.

I put "carpool" in quotes because it's really not a carpool--it's a favor. Recap: Scott was adamant about resisting carpooling and so I withdrew my pending participation with the group of people I'd been discussing it with. However, one of the families was in a bit of a jam with the father going to be out of town for about 6 weeks, and they had one day they needed coverage for, and so I offered to pick them up on Wednesdays. After several weeks of this the mother began to email me to ask me to do more, maybe increase my 'participation' to a couple days. I suffered angst, because there seemed to be no 'good' reason to refuse, since it's not that far out of my way to go and I go that way every day. Then I realized, that the feeling of 'no' inside--that was sufficient unto itself. Just No. And I emailed her back to tell her that for now I was just going to stick with Wednesdays. Maybe do more later if it worked for my family.

Anyway, the dad came home just before the holiday break. Last Monday, first day back at school after the break, I happened to see him and asked if he still needed me to pick up on Wednesdays. He said no.

However, on that Wed, in the afternoon, he e-mailed to ask me if my "offer still stood." Something about a car problem that "should be resolved by tomorrow, or Friday at the latest." Said they 'owed' me dinner and let's schedule a time. I picked the kids up that day, but I sensed that there might be another request for Thursday. In my email response I said specifically I wasn't available. Thursday, to my dismay I got another call from him, also in the afternoon, asking if my "offer still stood." In the first place I'd not made an offer, in the second I'd already said no. Perhaps he hadn't gotten the message? It was perplexing, and somewhat irritating and I called him back to say there was a misunderstanding: I wasn't available.

I had a feeling the issue wasn't going to die and I may be dealing with it again. And sure enough when I got home from volunteering at Connor's school this afternoon, their number showed up on caller ID. Would I bring the kids home, and let's plan a date to have dinner at their house.


Dinner. I've been thinking about this. If I'd had my insight about 'no' (No) before I'd withdrawn from the carpool, I wouldn't have offered Wednesdays. I only offered because I couldn't think of a reason not to ("Just" 'No', of course, didn't seem sufficient to me then.). It seemed they were in a jam, and I had the means, so I 'should' do it, because I could. However, if someone was providing me with peace of mind--that I could remain at work secure in the knowledge that my kids' transportation was being taken care of--I would be offering something to reciprocate. I would be eager that they know that I intend to respond in kind, even if circumstances weren't allowing me to at the moment. I wasn't hearing this from them. The fact that I was getting thanks, but no offers, made it clear to me that this wasn't really a reciprocal arrangement. I was ok with that; I'd kind of been aware that this was what I was signing on for, but this was different from the 'it'll-all-come-out-in-the-wash" understanding that people who do favors for each other have. After 8 weeks of transporting their kids to afterschool care 'dinner' just doesn't seem to be an in-kind reciprocation. But still, I thought, maybe I'd accept the invitation. Perhaps a bit of time with them in their home would give me a better sense of who they are. Then I'd see if I even want to be partners with them in a carpool when the point arrives that works for Scott and me. But even the invitation's a little odd. There are two other members of my family. Is the invite for dinner just for Scott and me? That's kind of weird, for me to leave Gary and Connor at dinnertime and go to dinner with Scott somewhere else. But they haven't said anyone else is invited. Intuitively it feels strange, as a guest, to ask if I can bring 2 more guests.

It's just kind of a messy situation. I guess what's not clean is the context in which this is taking place. Is it an assistance situation, or is it a reciprocal situation. Since I'm not benefiting from the 'carpool', it's a favor, assistance. Yet, in a way, in asking me to increase my commitment, they're kind of treating it like a reciprocal arrangement. Is there something I said or did that gave them the impression that I'm open to take the kids every day if necessary for them? (Technically I can, but I don't really want to.)

So I just called the dad. I decided I was going to have to just say it while we were communicating directly so I'd know that he'd heard it. I told him that today wouldn't work for me. I told him that I wanted to clarify where I was at with the carpool thing, which was that I'd essentially pulled out of it when it was clear it wouldn't work for Scott. I told him that I'd seen that he was going to be away and there was a need for Wednesdays, so I made the offer, but I didn't want to do more at this time.

He said, "Fair enough." He apologized. Said he was just 'checking out their options'. Said they were having trouble with car registration at the DMV, and so they only had one vehicle available...something about his not having a license to drive. Said he'd also called some friends who had helped out before. Said he was just now putting on his shoes to walk over to the school--at least 2 miles. Said his wife had taken off that morning with his wallet in the car so he didn't even have money for the bus. Said he had not intended to impose on me and apologized.

I guess he read me right; there's no way I could say his request wasn't an imposition, but I'd tried to stay clear of that and just state the facts: I wasn't available today, and my participation in the 'carpool' is limited to the Wednesdays I'd agreed to. I kept my tone neutral, because I didn't want to imply an accusation. So it was awkward that he seemed to hear it as one anyway. I told him that I hadn't meant it that way, that I'd let his wife know that I was wanting to stick with the Wednesday schedule until later; he'd been away so I wasn't sure if he was aware of how I was conceiving of my role in this carpool. I told him I'd wanted to let him know how things stood with me.

I had visions of driving past him and his three kids, walking home because I refused to drive them. I had the power to make their lives easier, and I was refusing to do it.

Fact: there is a something inside of me that feels trapped and entangled in regards to the adults in this family. Something that yells, "Make tracks! Run!"

Fact: refusing to help someone so resembles Scrooge's "are there no workhouses?" that I feel uneasy. Because I can't quite distinguish between myself and a "not-my-brother's-keeper" stance in a credible way. Besides, aren't there times when I need help, too? Aren't there times when my requests might be an imposition on someone else? Wouldn't I hope for kindness if I was in a jam, not a refusal? A refusal based on "I don't feel like it", rather than, "I just can't"? (Is there really a difference between the two?)

I just needed to write out the ickies. To get an idea of their contours. There is a very strange boundary between what is someone else's problem and when it becomes mine. It's an uneasy place, when I have the power to make someone's life easier--in fact it's a choice of mine that someone else's comfort rests on.

Cleaning up, or As Above, So Below

Connor had a couple friends spend the night on Saturday. I very foolishly cleaned house before they came. It's been wet here lately, and the ground soft and gushy. "Take off your shoes", or the shorthand "Shoes" I'd yell every time I'd hear a door to the outside open. They're all 11, and I'm exasperated when I hear the sound of shoes walking around, well inside the house (on floors I'd just vacuumed).

I've been reflecting a lot on Whole vs Parts. I've noticed that the world we rely on, the one that our senses are able to read, often gives the impression of solidity. We treat it as if it has a life of its own, and it exists to serve us.

I'm fooled by the apparent reality of my car. It's more than a car; it's a tool. It's the means by which I get my kids to school. It's a solid object in the world I don't even think about.

But I did get started considering it, when I had a thought about all of the parts, all of the details that make it up. Then I thought about what we ask from these materials--the kinds of forces and temperatures we subject them to. And I realized that even something as insignificant as a nut might be crucial to some vital component of my car's safety. I then realized that while I treat my car as an abstraction, there are thousands and maybe tens of thousands of details that compose it, each needing a certain amount of care.

So many things potentially to go wrong. It seems hard for me to believe that fallible human beings could have built something so intricate so reliably. (I hope)

I've lived in the world with an assumption I didn't realize I had: Adults are in charge of things and the details are taken care of. And the details will take care of themselves,

I think Hurricane Katrina, and the failures of the response systems were the beginning of my loss of innocence. And I think that George W. Bush was a victim of the deception of apparency. My guess is he too believed that the Adults would take care of it, that the Adults had Things in place, and furthermore Things would take care of themselves. There have been other hurricanes and Things were taken care of then too (at least there weren't the glaring failures that everyone in the world could see). Why shouldn't things take care of themselves this time, too?

He forgot, as I'm frequently guilty of doing--that the functioning of a Whole--all the agencies and systems that have performed well in the past--function because someone was paying attention to the details. The Whole works because all of the moving parts required, and the integration of the moving parts are details that are maintained and attended to. We saw the results of what happens when systems don't work together seamlessly. One can't rely on the appearance of the Whole--one has to understand that its apparent solidity obscures the many components that make it up.

I have a feeling that some similar kind of delusion may have been at work in the failures of Iraq, and Afghanistan: a belief that the Adults were in charge and it was all going to work out.

The trouble is, We are the Adults.

Realizing this has made me feel rather vulnerable.

So I've got 3 11 year old boys and one 7 year old in my house. They came up to raid the kitchen and left behind a trail of counters smeared with jam and littered with crumbs. This along with the jars they'd taken from the refrigerator, none returned to their place. Next morning I make Connor clean it up. When he protests that he 'didn't do it', his friends did, I tell him he needs to get his friends to come clean up. I tell him he's responsible for his friends and if he doesn't want to ask them to do it then he has to. An angry response, leaving me perplexed. Why should someone be angry when being held accountable for their own mess?

As I watched him clean I could see the level of details that accomplish the goal of 'clean up after yourself'. I want the boys to clean up after themselves to a certain standard. But there is incredible detail in accomplishing this. and I feel tired at the thought of taking them through every step. It comes as second nature to me; apparently it doesn’t to them. When laid out, every detail of what it takes for them to meet that standard is overwhelming for them. It overwhelms me: put the lid back on the peanut butter jar. Find a cloth. Wipe off what you’ve smeared on the side of the jar before you put it away. No, no, not THAT cloth—that cloth has been on the floor—use THIS cloth which is for counters. Wet the cloth. No, that’s TOO wet—wring it out. Wring it out more. Get it to just the right level of dampness that you can use it to clean up without making a sloppy mess. As you wipe the counter, sweep the crumbs that are there because of the sandwich you made into your hand—not the floor! Now, go wash your hands. Dry off on the kitchen towel—no, the kitchen towel is not what you use to wipe the counter! It’s too long, more difficult to control its level of wetness and besides I want to use it to dry hands on. Now look at the counter. You call that clean? Look at those crumbs there. Look at the way the light reflects off of spots there. You have to clean those off too. You already put the dishrag in the sink, in a bowl of soggy cereal that you left? Now you have to rinse it again—rinse all that stuff out of there, otherwise you just smear it on the counter…

I realize that I've had some 40-odd years of practice at cleaning up after myself. In those years I've been able to streamline the details so I don't even think about them--wiping a counter takes all of 5 seconds.

I'm still going to make them clean up, but I realize it's not realistic to expect them to do it to the same level of detail I do so easily. They've not yet had 40 years to learn. This is a classic example of them not being able to see the forest for the trees, and me missing the trees for the forest. So I guess for a while longer I'll be cleaning behind them, at least to get it back to my own standard of order.

A situation, a microcosm?

Sometimes it's useful to construct a small-scale model to observe its workings and gain some insights about a larger system.

I may have been presented an opportunity to do just this, in the guise of what may be a disagreement between me and my dear longtime friend M. I'm not certain yet if this is a serious disagreement or not...it depends on whatever happens next. Will she respond to me? Or not? And if she does, how will she? If it's a serious disagreement, it will be our first.

Her son, D has babysat for me for the past couple years. He is 16, and recently got his driver's license.

Earlier this summer when he was watching the boys he used Connor's mountain board (kind of an off-road skateboard) and broke it. He told Connor he would replace it.

I knew from what M had told me at one of our regular breakfasts that he had no cash and was behind in a few situations money-wise.

I figured D. and I could handle this between the two of us. I didn't want to upset M by saying he'd broken something and so was beholden to yet another person.

I resigned myself to a process that I really don't like: tracking down the warranty , making calls, getting information. Turns out Connor's board has a weight limit of 100#. So the warranty did not cover this break. I opted to buy a replacement deck from the company. It cost $60. I suggested to D that he reimburse me for half that amount, and do the labor to transfer the hardware from the broken deck onto the new one. Since I knew he didn't have cash I suggested he work it off in babysitting and figured 5-6 hours at $5/hr would take care of it. He agreed to this. I didn't ask for a full reimbursement since there wasn't anything obvious on the mountain board that warned that there was a weight maximum.

The process of all this was slow, because of my own foot-dragging to make the calls I needed to make, times where I needed to wait for return calls, and some problems with D's cell phone. At one point I wondered if maybe I should let his mom know what was going on. So I did, and she said that D had told her about it. She was fine with him working it off.

We scheduled a weekend day when Gary was going on a ski trip. However, that was the w/e that Connor got injured skateboarding and so I canceled. (Regretfully; I'd really looked forward to having that day. But some things you just can't hand off to a teenager.)

In late August Connor started football which has practice on the evenings that I see my counselor. I leave before Gary gets home from work. Connor's been able to babysit Scott for the duration of the gap before Gary arrives but with him gone, I need someone to watch Scott. I asked D if he'd want to do this regularly on Wednesdays until the end of the football season. He said he would.

So, two Wednesdays ago he came to work. I told him it might be an evening when Gary got off work early, so it could be a short night. I told him we'd just keep track of his hours and when he got to 5-6 I'd call us even and start paying him again.

So that first Wed was only an hour's work for him. After this Wed Gary said he thought D had expected to be paid. I was surprised, because I thought we'd had it understood and agreed that he not be paid til he'd put in 5 or so hours. Something made me a little uneasy about this, and so this Saturday when M & I had breakfast I told her I'd start paying him again this Wednesday. She said something that gave me a strange feeling, something about it being hard for him to have 'driven over there for just an hour.' I meant to follow it up with her there, but we got talking about other things and I forgot. So once home I sent her this message:

Hi. I'm looking around for some good links to send you.

But I also wanted to be sure that we're square about D's unpaid work. I'd just hate to think you might think we're taking advantage of him. (You probably don't, but I'd still feel better if I knew we're both on the same page about it.)

The replacement deck cost $60. I figured that it didn't make sense to make D pay for all of that because he didn't know, and anyone might have thought it was ok to use. So I figured half would settle it, and to transfer the hardware to the new deck.

I figured that would be roughly 6 hours of babysitting at $5/hr.

Then the first week Gary came home after D had only been here an hour. I was expecting this and told D we'd keep track of his hours and after 5-6 start paying him again.

D was here 3 and a half hours this last time, so he's worked 4.5 hours. I figure since he has been driving over that I'd factor that in and call us good. So I'll start paying him again this week.

I hope there weren't any misunderstandings, or D didn't feel badly about not being paid this last week.

So I'll look around for some links that I think are good places to start in looking into narcissism and get back to you on that.

Love,

Last night I got her response:

Yes, the babysitting situation is kind of delicate.  I think that board is a very bad design and is extremely vulnerable to breaking. I couldn't believe it when D brought home the broken board and I saw the design of the axel positioning.   It's a horrible design and is so prone to breaking. I guess I feel  like D has definitely done his pennance.
It was especially hard to see him having to go over for just one hour.  I wondered if the entire sentence would be served out that way.

Looking at the bigger picture...D has  felt uncomfortable about his rate for a while and we've done some research on the internet. Considering that he is providing his own transportation he wants to change his rate to $7 an hour, or $6 if you pick him up.  I think this is fair.

I respect  your wishes in whatever your choice is. And I know you respect D's need too.



My heart sank.  There was something in her tone that gave me a message that she thought I'd been unreasonable.  I felt a hole at the pit of my stomach, and thought some more about it.

I responded:

M,

Did you think it was unreasonable for me to have D reimburse me for
the board?


The board has a weight limit; I'm not sure if you knew that.  Its
maximum is 100#.  So I think the design is probably ok within that
limit.  It didn't state the limit on the board, and that's why I wasn't
going to make D pay for full price for replacing it.  It never
occurred to me that he might use it, and that's why I didn't warn him
about it beforehand.


I guess I feel  like D has definitely done his pennance.


I wasn't trying to punish D.  He broke something, and it seemed fair
to ask him to pay for it.  At the time he'd told Conrad he'd replace
it.  And since he didn't have the cash it seemed having him babysit was
a good solution.  In a way it was as if I'd advanced him some money and
he was working to earn that advance.


It was especially hard to see him having to go over for just one hour.  I wondered if the entire sentence would be served out that way. 


That particular night Gary got off early.  Some nights Gary might only be
an hour before he gets home.  Does D not want to babysit for just an
hour?  Other nights might be longer.  But D and I had agreed on 5-6
hours before we'd call the broken board good and then I'd resume paying
him.  Did it really make any difference if he did it all at once, or
over a couple times?  Did you think that was excessive and punitive in
some way?  To me 5 hours is 5 hours whether it's all at once or broken
up.


Anyway, I had been thinking it was probably time to give D a raise,
especially, like you say, when he's driving himself over.  And I also
think that $7/hr is fair, so we'll do that from now on, if he still
wants to babysit for me.  Sometimes it might just be an hour, though,
and I don't know if that's a problem.  This particular gig is just
while Conrad's in football, so it goes to the end of Oct.


More than anything else, I want you and I to be ok about this.  Your
friendship means very much to me and I don't want any shadows on it.


And I still owe you some links.


Love,




I was still perplexed over why it was so "hard" to see him come over for just an hour.  If Connor had not had the injury and D had worked it off back in July so I was paying him, he'd still have only been here an hour.  It doesn't add up that somehow this is an 'insult to injury', and that it was making him suffer unnecessarily.  I told her this in another message and suggested that if they wanted I could pay him for these past 2 Wednesdays and then have him babysit free some other time in a lump of 5 hours.


I've not heard back from her and I'm apprehensive.

I'll write more later about how this little vignette between my friend and me is a sort of microcosm of a pattern that's manifested throughout my life.

MAD

Suzy said, "There are no accidents" in reply to a post of Doug's.

I have been worrying, off and on about the activity of blogging. I've been writing less in my diary; sometimes I'll be writing there and feel an impulse break off and take the theme I'm writing here. I've not been sure if that's a good thing--if blogging represents a distraction from more "important" work. Often I feel restless inside, with the result that I simply have not been drilling as deeply in my journaling. And I miss the feelings of warmth and pleasure as I did so. I continue to wonder if some of the restlessness has to do with no longer augmenting my explorations, and if blogging has been the default distraction.

But now I'm getting a hint that blogging may be expanding and enriching the search. Today I realized that some themes that have come up in blogging have been informing some fruitful movement in my counseling.

The approach of the type of counseling I've been doing, Archetypal Pattern Analysis looks at patterns, how they influence and perhaps ensnare us. Thoughts and feelings that we may believe arise from within us may instead be part of a larger pattern of energy whose influence we're unaware of in shaping us.

Last week in my counseling session I told Sharon about a dream I could only remember the smallest bit from: my father had tickets to Olympic events in the Soviet Union. It was snowing and he was driving us in a car on winter roads. It was very slippery. Perhaps this is what initiated the talk about my father having been a bombadier aboard one of the planes that circled the globe, carrying a payload of nuclear weapons.

A direct result of this conversation with Sharon was my mentioning it in my blog to Doug, who reminded me of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). I did a little reading at Wikipedia this morning about MAD, and entered the world of tortured logic of nuclear deterrence. I see that my father was part of the doctrine of "Second Strike", which was the deterrence part. He was to be the 'consequence/punishment' of a Soviet "First Strike"--which was meant to keep a First Strike from happening. If my reasoning is correct the logic of 'second strike' required that a certain tonnage of bombs that had been calculated to 'assure' destruction had to be in the air at all times. (This must have been wild logistically to coordinate.)

I think this is the first time I've come to grips with the fact that my father was trained to drop a nuclear weapon and was prepared to do it. I think I'd had an idea somewhere that his planes carried conventional bombs.

I've in my conscious mind felt very separate from my father's profession. I see now the contradiction in this: it put food in my mouth and put me through college. It's an illusion that it had nothing to do with me.

Years ago I asked my father if he'd felt any personal repugnance at some of the CIA personnel he must have had some contact with. This was in the 80's when it was becoming public the role that the CIA had played in South America, in propping up dictatorships that had resulted in the 'disappearing', torture, and murder of thousands, tens of thousands. I don't remember how his reply led to his disclosure that he, by himself, in one of the planes he crewed on, could have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and he was fully prepared to do this--and was convinced that this was not immoral. Even then I did not connect nuclear weapons to him.

I was a weird kid. I felt connected to living things like animals, to plants, even to inanimate objects. I felt nagged by a sense of responsibility for suffering, and it was a very heavy weight. Turning away from suffering I think was the crux of this. I could be reading a book, and remember that there were plants outside that hadn't been watered for a while. I would feel nagged by this, the personal feeling that these plants were thirsty and I could not rest until I'd (unwillingly) gone to them and watered them.

I suppose this is why the whole issue of 'collateral damage' has been looming so large for me. It's the idea of acceptance that some suffering is inevitable and must be turned away from in order to accomplish a greater objective (while ignoring that it is someone else who is paying the price for this greater objective) that I'm stuck on.

At 12 and 13 I was tortured by the feeling that insects might be in pain. Along any sidewalk I might travel would be bugs that had turned onto their backs and their legs were flailing. I couldn't turn away and I often felt paralyzed by this responsibility. I felt I had to kneel beside them and gently (so patiently and carefully) turn them back over onto their legs so they could go on. But then sometimes they'd flip back over onto their backs. Generally by now there were people calling to me impatiently: "Come on!" "We're waiting for you!" This was a very anxious time. I couldn't stay, my sense of responsibility wouldn't let me go. I might give the bug another chance, and if that failed my final responsibility was to euthanize it. I'd place a leaf over it and step on it as quickly as I could to give it an instant death. I hated this. I hated the feeling of the exoskeleton crunching underfoot.

To anyone who may have been off observing I probably appeared to be cruel and cold-blooded.

I think it was this part of me that resonated in reading McCarthy's The Road.

Some weeks ago I told Sharon about some family folklore. My mother laughs and tells the story of when she nearly divorced my father. I don't remember in the story if I was newborn or a few months old, but she said my days and nights "had gotten turned around". I slept in the day and cried at night. This was during the times my father worked on the flight crew holding the threat aloft. I suppose his hours may have been punishing, and he needed his sleep. My cries must have been very frustrating for him. It's so sad that there was no flexibility in those days to the rules that a child must shape his/her behavior to the convenience of the adults around. It's so sad that there was no place for exception in the belief that a "child must sleep in his own bed". Mom said one night my father got up and came into my room and spanked me. Later she amended the story to say that he 'patted' me, once, through the diaper on my butt. She said she was so furious she wanted to leave (which is saying a lot because my mother has always adored my father and has always been very dependent on him). The caveat of the story is that I "never cried at night again"--what's implied is that he was vindicated and she was a fool to have been so angry.

That story was part of family lore and would be told spontaneously. For me to ask for it to be told now would have to be approached carefully--my family has learned to be wary of my 'excavating', even though I try to exclude intimations of blame. The point is, I never really thought much of this story, besides the merits of it: how would a baby know to not cry again? Surely a baby wouldn't have the wherewithal to realize cause and effect in such a sophisticated way?

A week after I told Sharon about this she said she was still trying to 'get her mind around' the idea of someone spanking a baby--for crying. That's when I thought some more about my experience with my children. I was very lucky to not be challenged with colicky infants; my guys soothed pretty easily. I think this is because going in our favor was a relaxation of some of those 'rules' I referenced above. They slept in our bed so I hardly had to awaken for feedings; I never felt sleep deprived. There was a lot of peace that we wouldn't have had had the old rules been in force. There was also a general cultural awareness that there were certain expectations of baby behavior that were unrealistic and cruel.

That said, I still can't blame a parent who might want to spank a baby. I had plenty of friends who did have colicky babies. One friend of mine, a psychologist said she'd had a fantasy flash before her eyes on yet another night of needing to walk a wailing Nathan, of dashing his head against the wall. Another talked about wee-hours walking around and around four floors above a motel courtyard that surrounded a pool, looking down at the pool, and then at her son's screaming face, back down at the pool.

They thought it, they didn't do it. They got support, they redoubled their efforts to give this baby what it needed.

With that in mind I looked at the family folktale with a different eye. And it's hard to imagine a circumstance where it would make sense to apply a doctrine of punishing a behavior in order to shape it, to an infant. How cruel that would be, to not only leave an infant with the pain of an unmet need, but to punish the expression of need.

My father was very young, 23 when I was born. He probably needed the precious few hours of sleep he could get, because he was expected to wake up in the wee hours and get on a jet that was going to circle the world with a monstrous payload that he'd already rationalized to himself its use. Perhaps whatever it took to reconcile this to himself, denial, compartmentalization, rationalization, minimization (of whether or not the suffering of the 'enemy' even mattered), disabled the moral sense that might have kept him from hitting a baby. Results were enough.

And to get back to the idea of patterns, and energy behind patterns, is it possible that his pushing his responsibility to other living beings into his unconsciousness pushed that same responsibility onto me? Or, is it like a child wandering into a room and finding some adult material there--a gun, perhaps, or pornography--and picking it up?

Perhaps I've been wondering what to do with it ever since.