Autumn

 C.S. Lewis once said about autumn:

"Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life. But of course, like autumn, it doesn't last."

It's autumn now. It's simply been a part of a repeating cycle of the changing season in the past, but it's different this year. I'm much more aware of the impending winter. The pandemic has been a factor, but I'd have to say that the passing of my mother a few weeks ago has been the catalyst for the season I'm currently experiencing. 

The relationship I had with my mother was complex, enough so that I elected to not to make any effort towards attending her funeral which was held a couple of time zones away. My previous blog post was an attempt to create some sort of statement I could use as my attempt towards a eulogy without touching on any of the issues that came out of the relationship I had (or didn't have) with my mother. I'm not going to get into any details of that here, except to say that I did grieve the loss of any chance to achieve whatever closure might have been possible had there been a chance for meaningful communication. But that grieving process began a long time ago when my mother began to display symptoms of Parkinson's as well as dementia. But there was still an infinitely small chance for that closure as long as my mother was alive and now it's gone. 

Other than my monthly session with my mentor, I really haven't done any in-depth digging/analysis of what the actual loss is that I'm still grieving. I guess some of it will happen as I compose this. But it's not necessarily going to expressed within this post. 

My birthday was yesterday. In years past I've scheduled a number of meal/dance outings that took up the better part of a week. This year, I had one meal with a friend with whom I'd only recently renewed our friendship that had otherwise been dormant for several decades and he'd gotten married and moved to Taiwan. The pandemic was a factor, but I also seem to be fighting a sinus infection that wants to become full-blown so I've slept a lot more than I normally do, and rather than go out, I've read a lot as many of my favorite authors have all had new novels come out in the last four weeks or so.

Two of those authors are crime fiction novelists Ian Rankin & Michael Connelly, who both have written a detective series featuring the career of a detective over decades and whose main characters have reached retirement age but have still found ways to be involved in police investigations. It turns out that these last novels end in ways that suggest that the next novel will be the last for each character. Even literary characters are dying. And it's not just these two literary characters. I also was a big fan of Jack Higgins, who penned a series of novels featuring a former IRA hitman turned government operative named Sean Dillon. The last Sean Dillon novel was written in 2017, and I've patiently waited for the next novel. That novel isn't coming; I discovered Higgins died earlier this year. And I find myself mourning the passing of these imaginary literary characters much more deeply than I did the passing of my mother. And it's their passing that makes me more aware of my own impending mortality.

Mom

My mother passed away a number of days ago. It was a long time coming. She'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's and dementia a bit of time ago, and those conditions had taken their toll; my mother was placed in hospice care months ago when her weight dropped to seventy-eight lbs and she was under regular sedation during this time. In many ways it was a relief to see her get her wish to be reunited with my father.

My mother was a lot braver and a lot more resilient than she ever gave herself credit for.  

Born February 10th, 1932, she grew up during WWII. I know little about her childhood except that her father was the village schoolteacher and that he suddenly died of some unknown ailment when my mother was around the age of ten. I presume her schooling stopped at that time. The only other thing I learned about my mother's childhood was that she learned to carry her food within her clothing and bring it out one bite sized piece at a time. If she tried to take a bite of whatever she was eating, that risked having someone bigger than her grab the food out of her hand and eat it themselves. 

She had an arranged marriage into a relatively well-to-do family in her village and she married my father and moved in with her in-laws. As far as I can tell, the entire family fled China after the communist revolution and moved to Hong Kong, where my sister was born. In the late 1950's my father left Hong Kong and went to the U.S. where he worked in a restaurant owned by relatives while my mother and sister remained in Hong Kong. My father had been adopted, and from the little I've been able to learn, they were emotionally abusive, and that behavior was extended to my mother while she stayed with her in-laws in Hong Kong. 

Eventually my father came back to Hong Kong and brought my mother and sister to the U.S. on a tourist visa - and they never returned to Hong Kong. Instead, they settled in Cleveland, Ohio; it may appear to be a seemingly odd choice, but at the time, Cleveland was still the sixth largest city in the U.S. and my father's adoptive family had opened a Chinese restaurant there and my father returned to work for them.

A few years later, shortly after I was born, my mother enrolled in an English as a Second language course for three months. As an adult I learned that my mother had been terrified at the prospect of leaving me in someone else's care, and every time during the class she heard a passing siren she would become frantic that something had happened to me. 

Taking that class allowed my mother to find work as a seamstress for a company that made parochial school uniforms. She did piecework; each worker was assigned a different piece of the clothing pattern and they were paid for each piece completed. Each piece was assigned a different rate, and over time the company assigned the more lucrative pieces to other workers in order to prompt them to be more productive. My mother never complained, and she responded by working harder doing more piecework so that she still got paid the same amount. Years later, a bookkeeper in the company showed the owners the records of how my mother had never complained each time they assigned her less lucrative piecework and instead had increased her productivity to earn the same amount, and the company rewarded her by eliminating her share of the medical insurance payment so that she got free medical insurance. I did the math on that and calculated that she'd earned about a 40% raise as a consequence including the non-taxable benefit. 

While my father had completed school and had received training as a car mechanic, my mother handled the family finances. Despite the equivalent of what I estimate to have been about a fourth grade education, she dutifully educated herself about banks and saving accounts and carefully compared interest rates to try and maximize the growth on the family savings to grow a down payment allowing the family to buy the home they lived in for 48 years before relocating to Milwaukee in 2018.

In the mid 1960's, our family had begun attending a Chinese Christian fellowship meeting started by some American missionaries who'd spent time in China. The fellowship, comprised of Cantonese/Toisan speaking Chinese, eventually become a church, merging with a Chinese church whose congregation was comprised of Mandarin speaking Chinese who'd emigrated from Taiwan. While the Cantonese immigrants were all blue collar workers, the Mandarin congregation was almost exclusively white collar, either with graduate degrees or in Cleveland studying for a graduate degree at Case Western Reserve University. My mother was very aware of these differences and she once confided to me that initially she was too intimidated to even speak with the Mandarin speakers in the church. She eventually overcame that fear.

My mother liked music, and she encouraged my passion for music; at one time I was taking three different music lessons a week and she bought a piano (for which there really wasn't enough room in the living room for it) for me to practice on. I suppose in some ways she was living vicariously through me, but I can hardly fault her for that.

My mother and father had problems in their marriage like all couples do, but when all was said and done, in their final days together, my mother was devoted to taking care of my father. Unfortunately, she developed stenosis and that limited her mobility and that resulted in her having a bad fall resulting in a broken tailbone. But instead of seeking medical care, she lay in bed in pain for weeks, knowing that if she went to the hospital, there would be no one to take care of my father. Eventually she was taken to the hospital, and when her condition was diagnosed, the state stepped in and mandated that my mother go directly into assisted living. So my mother never saw the home she'd lived in for 48 years ever again. 

It became clear that my father was not capable of looking after himself living alone, and both he and my mother were relocated from Cleveland to Milwaukee where my sister administrated their assisted living care until they both passed. 

Dance Dance Dance

Those who know a bit about me will be surprised to discover that the title has absolutely nothing to do with my passion for partner dancing. The title is actually the title of a book by Haruki Murakami, who happens to be one of my favorite authors and I'm now a couple of books closer to my goal of reading all of his works. In the past week I was trying to decide which book to read next, and the title Dance Dance Dance naturally appealed to me. I decided to read a few reviews first to get an idea of what the work was about, and it came out that Dance Dance Dance was described as being a sequel to the book A Wild Sheep Chase. So I read that one first earlier in the week before just having finished Dance Dance Dance (hereafter referred to as DDD to save myself some typing) earlier today.

I've read a lot throughout my life. It started the summer when I was about 6 or so when my older sister got a summer job working at the library, and I spent every day in the library because I couldn't be left home alone. All I had to do was read, and I've been reading a lot ever since. The reality of it is that I starting doing it primarily just to occupy myself. I'd read the sides of the cereal box at breakfast or the side of a Lysol can while doing my business in the bathroom. I read a lot of science fiction into my 20's: Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster (I've kept up with his Flinx series), Asimov, Pournelle, Niven, Harrison a lot of Star Trek novels, among others. I tried Clarke, but just couldn't get into his stuff despite the popularity of 2001 as a movie. Heinlein also didn't do much for me. I tried Bradbury, but he mainly wrote about the human condition and happened to set the surroundings in space. Surprisingly, I found Douglas Adams boring. I wasn't so crazy about McCaffrey Dragon series, but I really got into Damia series. Not surprisingly I also got into the psi aspects of Marion Zimmer Bradley Darkover series. Looking back now, I could see that I was drawn more into possibility of different realities, and this interest is now evinced by my evolution into more of a surrealistic approach by authors like Murakami. It's ironic that Murakami is one of the most celebrated Japanese authors of his time yet his work is often criticized for being "too western" because I can now see that it's the clash between Japanese & western culture that drives a lot of Murakami's plots that has drawn me to his work.  

On the flip side of a coin in this literary currency is another author I greatly admire, Kazuo Ishiguro, who is obviously genetically Japanese, but identifies as British, having emigrated from Japan during his childhood. Still, he clearly acknowledges that his experience growing up in a Japanese family in Britain has been crucial in his writing, allowing him to see things from a perspective different from that of many of his peers. Rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel, I will borrow the following phrase used when Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature: he 

"has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" 

though I might then continue by suggesting that he's explored how we lie/deny things about how and what we feel and believe. 

And now we've reached the crux of the matter. I've maintained that Asian & Western cultures/world views have qualities/characteristics/values that are mutually exclusive, so that it's not possible to fuse the cultures. The reality is that at any given moment one value has to dominate any other mutually exclusive value. So fusion is not possible. But now I am coming to a point of believing that the attempt must be made - and the process of choosing which mutually exclusive value will dominate is necessary, because the process forces one to deal with any sort of lies/denial of truths that the other culture allows. And here I come full circle: the title DDD refers to how the protagonist has described his life of just repeating the same dance steps to the same beat over and over again. I could describe most of my existence the same way. But now I have to come to grips that I need to continue my process of self examination and face up to truths, emotional or otherwise, that I've been denying up to this point. It's scary as anything, but it's exciting to consider the idea that the process might lead to something as influential as Ishiguro & Murakami have accomplished in their explorations.  

South Of The Border

West of the Sun is the title of a novel by Haruki Murakami. Many consider this novel to be his finest work. I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as I would say that the novel definitely tapped into emotional wells of pus of mine that needed draining. I'm not sure they've been drained entirely, but at least I now know that they're there. 

The novel covers the life of the protagonist from adolescence to middle age. The protagonist is an only child and has a childhood sweetheart (also an only child) with whom he loses contact when his family moves during junior high and the loss of that connection has a profound impact on him. The protagonist goes on to have a high school sweetheart and his behavior has a profound impact on her - in a bad way, and the damage appears to have been irreparable. The knowledge of this fills the protagonist with an extreme amount of guilt when he discovers this. At this point he is married - to someone who is carrying her own burden of pain and hurt which resulted in her attempting suicide and was just beginning to recover when she meets the protagonist and eventually marries him. While he struggles with learning about his high school sweetheart, he reunites with his childhood sweetheart who has become an exceptionally beautiful woman and clearly has secrets of her own that we never learn - other than that she lost a child, though it can be inferred that she is a woman kept by a very powerful man. The two take a road trip to allow the sweetheart to dispose of the child's ashes - and they finally consummate their relationship physically - and in the morning, she's gone, and the protagonist never sees her again. This throws the protagonist into emotional despair and the wife is now distraught that she is going to lose him.  At the end of the novel, the husband and wife move towards embracing the idea that they are capable of hurting as well as being hurt, but the only choice is to change as best they can and move forward.

Murakami has never communicated the idea that his novels have any sort of underlying messages or morals/agendas so I'm not going to ascribe any, but a running motif seems to be that relationships fail and that that can't be recreated as much as rebuilt, from the ashes as it were. Also, the women: the childhood sweetheart, the high school sweetheart and the wife have carried emotional hurt from prior relationships, and they all responded in different ways.

Personally, I was able to look back and see that I still carry some negative emotion about failed relationships, as well as relationships that never came to be. In the cases of failed relationships due in large part to my behavior resulting in hurting my partner, I found myself wishing I could get some reassurance that the other person was doing OK, especially for the ones who never got married. And there seem to have been quite a few. Intellectually, I know that I am not responsible for another person's emotional healing, but the negative emotion I still carry has hampered me from moving forward with other opportunities that have presented themselves. I need to embrace the truth that all I can do is change myself as best I can, and to move forward from where I stand now. 

Wallender

I have this thing for detective novels. I think it started with Michael Connelly's "Bosch" series. What set these novels apart from many American detective series is that Bosch was damaged by emotional trauma, including the murder of his mother, but that damage was what made him a successful detective. But the struggle achieve closure is a vital part of the plots.  I've discovered that I prefer detective series written by non-Americans, as these authors also tend to create damaged heroes but also (intentionally or otherwise)  provide insights into their country's society. And so I read Ian Rankin's "Rebus" series set in Scotland, along with other series such as Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen series set in Shanghai (and it didn't hurt that Chen was a gourmand and there were a lot of descriptions of his meals). I had high hopes for Camerilli's Inspector Montalbano series, as Montalbano is also a gourmand, but since his novels were written in Italian for an Italian audience, the dishes are mainly just listed as it was expected that Italians would know what these dishes were, and unfortunately the character hasn't changed much over the series. And then there's Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender. 

The Wallender series is a bit different, because it was Henning Mankell's intent to depict how Swedish society was changing - and not for the better - and the topic of Mankell's first novel Faceless Killers was immigration/racism in Swedish society. Mankell died about seven years ago, and the Wallender series had ended in 2009, but I recently discovered that a novella An Evening in Autumn had been written and so I acquired a copy and read it today. There's an epilogue in which Mankell described the thought process that led to the creation of the Kurt Wallender character. It began with the idea that the natural path would be to write a crime novel, as "racist acts are criminal outrages. A logical consequence of this was that I would need an investigator, a crime expert, a police officer.". He went on:

"It seemed to me that the police officer I shall describe must realize how difficult it is to be a good police officer. Crime changes in the same way that a society changes. If he is going to be able to do his work properly, he must understand what is going on in the society he lives in."

Crime changes in the same way that a society changes.

While I disagree vehemently with Mankell's politics (he was an ardent Communist) his observation on this was dead on. And it behooves us to look at the crimes that seem to outrage us the most nowadays. For many it's an increase in gun violence. But instead of looking at how the changes in society have prompted this, many have been led to believe that this will be curtailed by the banning of guns. 

It's always amused me that certain people have embraced the idea that the country of Sweden is some sort of utopia to be emulated. Some of these same people have enjoyed the Wallender series oblivious to the fact that each novel addressed different negative aspects of the result of trying to incorporate a welfare state into a democracy.  The results have also been depicted in Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. Perhaps people might have paid more attention if they'd used Larsson's original title: "Men Who Hate Women". Now it fills me with dismay that a lot of what was depicted in these novels describes a lot of what I see in American society today.

Condor

 "...you were born with an intellect that makes you unique. You process things faster than other people, and that's good, but it can also create an illusion in your mind that you understand things that you don't understand, and you have to learn how to feel things. And it doesn't matter how smart you really are, you'll never really understand what it means to be human..."

This quote is taken from the dialogue of a TV series called "Condor".  It may not be prescriptive, but I wish someone had said this to me a long time ago. My mind works a bit more quickly at most, and people seem to notice this even though I subscribe to the idea that certain things about themselves should be observed rather than announced.  I was labeled as 'gifted' in kindergarten after one of the teachers put a college textbook in front of me and made me read it out loud to all the other teachers. 

The thing is, my 'gift' has been as much a burden for most of my life. The following quote comes from Psychology Today:

"According to the Davidson Institute, PG people exhibit the following tendencies: rapid comprehension, intuitive understanding of the basics, a tendency toward complexity, the need for precision, high expectations, divergent interests—and a quirky sense of humor." 

The quirky sense of humor is a given - and yeah, some folks just don't get it. But for me, the inherent need for precision has been a major factor in not connecting with people; my proclivity for precision shows up in everyday conversation when my choice of vocabulary expresses a level of nuance that most people don't seem to get. Or someone else will use a word in a context that to me is inaccurate or even inappropriate. And that's been a major source of frustration in my life. I still look for and treasure moments and people with whom I can just sit around with in what I describe as my "mental underwear" and speak my mind with the confidence that what I say can be understood without my having to resort to a 'dumbing down' process I've learned to employ 24/7.

This leads me back to the original quote. As bright as I might be based on conventional measurements like an IQ score, I'm much more gratified by the level of emotional awareness I believe I've reached. And it's not just my own emotions; it's an understanding that our most significant life choices are driven by emotion, not by intellect. Moreover, there seems to be a stigma attached to that, so people are motivated to rationalize their choices. Because of this, people have attempted rational discourse to resolve conflicts, and these attempts are generally unsuccessful to a significant degree. 

If I were to say something prescriptive about this, I'd probably put it this way:

1) Most every important choice we make is based on emotion, not intellect/facts. This especially applies to things like ideology, because ideology represents the world the way we'd *like* it to be;

2) Whenever a choice is driven by fear, the use of reason to effect a change is ineffectual. The first thing that should be attempted is to identify the source/cause of that fear, and then attempt to help the other person feel safe enough so that rational discourse can ensue. Unfortunately, many attempts will be driven by a reliance on rationale, and these attempts will prove to be ineffectual as well. Any suggestions I might offer would not be prescriptive, because every individual is unique. But I will suggest that it starts with trust, which is something that is built over time;

3) You can't need to be right if you hope to resolve conflicts.

Contempt

is the topic of this particular post. I imagine everyone has a general idea of what it means. I'll summarize it how I see it displayed most often nowadays, and I expect that most people will agree: it is the feeling that some individual or group is somehow inferior to themselves in some horrific way. The unwritten part of that definition is this inferiority makes it morally viable to impose on the personal rights of that inferior individual/group. 

The Wikipedia entry for the concept suggests that contempt can serve a useful purpose in a moral society. This might be true, but the problem is that we no longer live in a moral society. The rise of secular humanism has resulted in morality becoming the result of an ideology. And ideologies are driven by opinions, not facts. While contempt has always been a part of this culture, it has never been displayed as openly as it is currently in how some are imposing of the rights of others based solely on ideology. This does not bode well for the future.