Carve our name in hearts into the warhead

I watched the classic zombie movie Dawn of the Dead last night, and was somewhat surprised to discover that, far from being a horror film, it is actually a semi-utopian romance. The fact that two of the four main characters end up as zombies is somewhat immaterial. After brief purging of the slow-as-snails undead and some blockading, the characters have their own paradise in the form of a giant shopping mall stocked with everything they could ever want, including but not limited to fancy restaurants, a gun and ammo store, an ice skating rink, music, luxury items, and even electricity. Naturally, the lone female is pregnant.

Post-apocalyptic Edens propagating the continuation of the human race are alluded to by everyone from James Cameron to Josh Ritter. And in all of them, there is some hint of love more loyal, and deeper, even if more opportunistic, than what one would find in a broader world.

Perhaps, really, in this global age, we drive ourselves crazy in the obsession with our options. For truly, stuck in an entirely enclosed space with another non-enemy for an extended period of time, especially given the commonality of survival, one would quickly find a way to get along. And who among us has not momentarily wished, slowly tracing an outline in a photograph or a memory, to be thrown in some situation where the outline would trace us too, because there would be no other choice?

Fact-checking Lewis

Re-reading C.S. Lewis is always something of a trip for me, since I started reading him at such an early age; too early, in fact, to understand up to half the words he used. I remember reading his list of titles to impress one of my younger siblings, pronouncing “Nephew” like “Nep-ew,” and deciding that a Nep-ew must be like a magician’s assistant. I was 6 or 7 at the time. Perhaps I was an uncommonly pedantic 6-year-old, to be so taken with something I only partially understood, but you must remember: at 6, everything that seems worthwhile and interesting is a bit beyond your reach. I was rarely daunted by the fact that I didn’t completely understand something yet.

I just finished That Hideous Strength again, and with the experience gained in the past 23 years find myself adding my own caveats to the writing. Hmm, you’re off here; I can’t blame you, given your upbringing, but I will allow myself the luxury of contradicting you. Or Really? Do Oxford dons not fact-check?

For example, Jane on some points is a solid character, but her reluctance to show emotion to her husband on the grounds that she’s a modern/academic/intellectual is a bit cliché. It’s just what a man who has never seen a woman like this intimately might imagine. Often, it’s exactly this type who is the most willing to jump into primeval mode and jump at any offered solace from the long-unwilling male in her life, ravenously, even illogically. If you enjoy Donne, there’s a good chance the phrase “nevermore be chaste, except you ravish me” sums up your attitude. You may take a grim view of romance, but it’s still romantic (not aseptic). The “eroticism of humility” is just what she is probably dying for; she wants to be wanted. She wants to be enjoyed for more than just that, but precisely because she is intelligent and lyrical, she enjoys the application of this poetry more even than its creation. Women are usually more practical in this way than men. Men may actually be satisfied with theoretical love, kept warm by the scrawl of their own handwriting, but women of Jane’s nature never are, and they have little reason to pretend to be in the confines of their own homes. This sort of woman probably would say pointedly, as Jane says “I’m used to being alone; do what you like.” But after a shared evening of forgetting how lonely she is, she is more than likely to say it, if she says it at all, with a quaver in her voice, hopefully; pleadingly; seductively. The snarky off-putting comeback line is delivered when the man is already determined to do what he likes anyway, is already leaving, and it’s said as a reproach and to show that she isn’t quite dead yet.

The reader could easily get the impression from reading the book that Lewis preferred traditional gender roles in which women did the dishes and men did important things, but I don’t think this is particularly true. It’s really a more sympathetic picture he paints of Jane, alone at home with the dishes, while Mark is off trying to further himself by entangling himself in idiocy. At St. Anne’s-on-the hill (the good place), the company trades the menial tasks; men do the cooking and cleaning one day, women the next. At Belbury (the bad place), all is masculinized in the worst way; it’s a boys’ club built on what men are typically supposed to be good at: science, charismatic politics, brutality. Beauty, characterized as feminine throughout the book, is rooted out as being beside the point, and when Mark thinks of Jane and realizes how absurd she would find the place, it gives him pause.

However, Lewis tends to be a bit sloppy at times. He tosses in the “cut off her head for not having conceived her predestined child” remark offhandedly, but that God’s centuries-long efforts should have been frustrated by lack of sexual contact and/or use of contraceptives (one isn’t sure which) so easily, and without any malice on the part of the unwitting participants, seems poor writing. On a more academic note, Merlin speaks of “Middle Earth,” which Lewis got from Tolkien, but “Middle Earth,” though it was a phrase in vogue roughly around Merlin’s time, was a Germanic/Saxon phrase, not, indeed, a Celtic one (as far as I know, anyway, and data on ancient Celtic language is lacking). And it referred largely to Saxon England. As Merlin is supposed to have hated the Saxons, it seems unlikely that he should choose this phrase except as an indication that Lewis borrowed ideas from various people and applied them without strict examination. More on his allusions, many impressive and some problematic, may be found here.

Hell in a breadbasket

I had a dream about the scratch plow last night, the point of which was that agriculture had destroyed the world. I was watching the first man plow the first field, with a curious sense of foreboding, knowing all the evil that would befall the human race because of his ingenuity.

Our entire way of living is based on agriculture and the ideal of storing food beyond today or tomorrow or next week. We live in cities because of it. We have cliques, clubs, civilization, jails, crime rate and wars because of it. The first village was the first nation, the first challenge to the next village, the next nation. When you can store, you can steal. When you can dream of more than your daily bread, you can murder and envy. And, granted, there were murders and wars even in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribal societies. But nuclear holocaust was an impossibility, and in a tightly-knit community where everyone contributes to the survival of the group and ostracization can be fatal, I imagine murder is relatively rare.

Even for those of us who don’t participate in holocausts (as far as we know), things have progressed to the stage that we use our bodies in ways they were never intended, feeding them on pure white flour with complex chromosomes so we can work by sitting for 12 or 14 hours at a time. We get diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, even cancer, because of our sedentary lifestyles and bizarre ways of eating.

All this, and nobody would really wish that world history had not transpired, that we aren’t all hunter-gatherers, all one million of us living spread-out, short lives among the animals and the fruit trees. All one million of us, because despite the lack of birth control, every woman has only a few children who live beyond infancy. And without baby food, surviving kids aren’t weaned until age four or so, which means fewer children over the course of a woman’s natural 35 years or so anyway (and with puberty hitting at around age 15, since everyone has zero percent body fat, that leaves a smaller window of opportunity, especially when it’s so dang hard to get any privacy around here). Not all is harsh, though; we have culture and stories and oral traditions, and we learn to tell tales in great style around the fires as we cook the day’s kill. We have fashion and craftsmanship (of our leather garments, wooden spoons and flint weapons) and we take pride in our handiwork. We have macho talk, and woman’s talk, and romance and laughter. Hitler and Stalin were bratty little punks who got gored by wild pigs. The Vikings never raided anyone, because they were too busy hunting elk. The Romans never took over anywhere, any more than the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Japanese or Americans. Instead, we live like prides of lions or flocks of geese, with only as many possessions as we can carry on our own backs.

And this did not happen because we cannot live this way. We dream. Of abstractions, of intellectual impossibilities. We envy the lion his majesty and the birds their flight, and we set out to emulate them. We can no more blame agriculture for the state of our world than we can blame science or religion or capitalism or communism. We are the state of our world. Here, in our own hearts.

In northwest Iowa

I have been coming here ever since I can remember. My father worked this land, weeding beans, feeding livestock. My grandmother grew up here, in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s. Her father grew up here, in the dawn of agricultural industrialism. So when I drive up the lane, the smell of the place hits me, familiar, hazy.

Almost otherworldly, as I walk through rooms lined in portraits of dead people with hints of myself in them, hardy Scandinavian farmer stock descended illegitimately from Swedish royalty and raised with particular ideas about classy living. Determined and duty-bound, they raised this place from the virgin prairie, adding genteel flourishes like a grassy tennis court in between the ravages of prairie fires and the swarms of grasshoppers that ate everything, down to the lace curtains.

In the basement are evening gowns made of silk, dolls, baby clothes, quilts, boxes of papers and books, all raided, no doubt, by decades of mice. There are the bushes I carved into a playhouse one idyllic summer when I was nine.

And in the humid afternoon I fall asleep in the house my grandmother and great-grandfather were born in, lulled by the cicadas, the morning doves. I wander over to the big house, built in 1955, and find my grandmother holding my niece and a very small glass of beer, which she sips, savoring the treat and the fresh, limp infant in her arms. This baby is our sixth generation. Her great-great-great-grandfather wrote a stack of letters, in Swedish, describing this land and his children to his in-laws, in the 1880s. We got the letters back after distant cousins in Sweden found them in an attic and tracked us down. Not that any of us can read Swedish.

This is a family reunion and more than not, we separate, swimming in a near-embryonic sea of vague memory, hearing the pulse we have not heard in so long.

Legal theories and medical crises

The American medical system is suffering from two epistemological errors: the idea that to get any medical treatment you must get a certified doctor’s sign-off, and the idea that if you don’t, you can sue somebody for millions. You can talk all you want about evil insurance companies, but the cost of medical care in the US is the highest in the world, and last time I checked, the average US hospital was breaking even. And I know how much they charge. What’s going on here?

It really boils down to our country’s ethos in matters of money and independence. First: We are not going to be told what to do unless it’s by an expert, and if the expert turns out to be wrong, we will make them pay. Second: The right job will provide riches, though this may require some up-front investment.

We want money. We believe we deserve it. We deserve to live a certain lifestyle. In an economic downturn, this becomes all the more obvious. Many people drop out of the workforce, resenting the idea that they’ll have to take a lesser job, and…

Go to law school. The law schools, meanwhile, have churned out so many graduates that there is no room at the Inn, no positions at big firms, not even for Ivy League graduates. And yet the schools fool these dupes, their supposed students, into believing that riches cost a mere $100,000-plus and three years of study on how to glean money from conflict and vague wording.

Result: a gigantic unemployed workforce with massive debt and a sense of entitlement. More than often, these people also emerge with a malleable view of truth (truth is adhering to certain rules, though these do not apply when I myself find a loophole, which is always). What are they going to do with their time?

Certainly, not every lawyer is, shall we say, an arrogant bloodsucker. At best, law school can attract those wanting to champion social justice. At worst, however, it can attract high-conflict personalities with a devious streak whose ideas about how to get what they want (do anything to get information, double-cross, deny anything not on the record, do not reveal your hand until the time is ripe to strike, research with a pre-determined outcome in mind) only become further entrenched and encouraged. As one lawyer said: “Nobody listened to my crazy ideas until I went to law school. Then they were forced to listen.”

In order for civil attorneys to make a living, they need to encourage other people to disagree. This applies even to the wills and contracts they write. Why would you need a lawyer to draft your will or a contract unless you suspected your preference wouldn’t be enough?

Civil lawyering has ballooned into a monster that touches everything we do, impedes our ability to make decisions, makes us overly cautious and suspicious. You can’t start a business without worrying about all the legal red tape first, even if you’re pretty sure you won’t turn a profit for two years and can’t afford any extra expense. You can’t let acquaintances borrow a bike without the potential that they could hold you legally responsible for the fact that they crashed. You really can’t make a wrong decision or leave something undone if you’re somebody who’s supposed to be rich. Lawyers don’t sue the poor. It just doesn’t pay as well.

You may chalk all this up to exaggeration, but currently, for example, there is no legal way to practice midwifery in New York City because the hospital that backed the midwives with malpractice insurance and the stamp of approval went bankrupt. Yes, hospitals go bankrupt. Especially if they cover professions like midwifery, classified as high-risk from a legal standpoint. Nobody else in NYC wants to take the midwives on for the same reason.

But imagine, if you will, a world in which you didn’t need such backing in order to choose a home birth. Imagine, too, a world in which if you knew concretely what was wrong with you, you could get a pharmacist technician type to look at you and your records and prescribe the appropriate medicine. You have a UTI; you know you do, because you get them often enough. It’s been a week and it’s only gotten worse. It’s agonizing to pee. You know you need antibiotics, stat. Or you’ve developed circular rashes on your body; it looks like classic ringworm, and the herbal remedies haven’t helped. Or you have a migraine and your Imitrex prescription just ran out. Or your kid has strep; you suspect it’s strep, it looks like strep, it smells like strep. You know there’s a simple culture to prove it’s strep, but the visit to the doctor is going to be at least $50, even with co-pay.

You’re going to have to go see a highly trained professional in order to get access to what you already know you need. Because nobody is going to give it to you otherwise… the risk of getting sued is just too great. You pay for a litigious system two ways: with malpractice insurance and with the years and years of expensive training physicians receive in order to rubber-stamp your request.

You want the cost of health care to drop? Shut down the law schools for a couple of years, and send half the lawyers to gut fish in Alaska for 12 hours a day. We have the highest number of lawyers per capita to match our highest cost of health care. I doubt this is a coincidence. We live shorter lives than those with lower costs, after all.

The Danes

This morning I got dressed in black leggings, relatively short casual skirt, black boots, black shirt, baggy rainproof coat. Took myself out to the streets of Copenhagen and discovered that 90 percent or more of the female population was wearing at least one of these items… and my expression.

Semi-gaunt chicks with slightly rumpled hair who distance themselves until they have reason to smile. And this against the backdrop of all of Denmark. It occurred to me, hauling my rolling suitcase over the cobblestones, that Shakespeare was sort of genius to have set Hamlet here. Hans Christian Andersen couldn’t have written anything but tragic fairy tales and Soren Keirkegaard couldn’t have been anything but an existentialist. It’s June, and it rains and rains, over the gray town, into the faintly-colored lingering sunset. Pale Scandinavians in dark colors dot the landscape, more spread out and alone than in anyplace further south. In a thriving underground world, the disillusioned revel in their disillusionment at places like Club Faust.

There’s a sunnier side to the place, of course, and the children, blond-headed and angelic, cling cheerfully to each other in symbolic fraternity. At the airport, I spotted two girls of about 9 with their heads on one another, dozing hand in hand. The design seems good everywhere. McDonald’s looks like it got its furniture from Ikea (though that would not be a compliment in Europe, where Ikea is somewhat low-class).

All in all I have to say that I’m totally uninspired to do any tourism whatsoever, other than in-depth people watching and wandering at will, because this city already seems familiar (also, I’m getting a cold). I booked a trip to Sweden tomorrow, birthplace of my ancestors… the forecast says it may actually be better weather.

Courting sleep

I just napped for four hours or more here in a hostel in Copenhagen, with the rain falling and birds chirping and children yelping outside the open window … I needed the rest. Oddly enough, I’ve had trouble sleeping all my time so far in Europe, in part because I was in higher-end hotels with their fat fluffy pillows and too-thick duvets and inorganic feel and invitation to take oneself and the silence so seriously that mental quiet was difficult.

After a week of insomnia and a hectic schedule, and staying up until 2 a.m., I still could not sleep last night… slept maybe ten or twenty minutes of the two hours I was attempting to. Got up at 4 and hauled myself to the metro station so I could catch the plane on time.

After I got to the Copenhagen airport I decided that before I tried to figure out this new world I needed to rest. So I found a plush bench seat in a posh part of the airport and slept for about two hours, the buzz of unknown language a safety net in the background. Woke up, felt relatively human, and figured out where my hostel was using a combination of travel-savvy strategies since the directions on their website left much to be desired. Checked in. Slept more.

Maybe it’s the comfort of being unknown, safe in the embrace of collective, congenial aloneness, that makes it easier to sleep in a hostel. People court fame, but anonymity is much to be desired, particularly after any brush with notoriety, and an unexplored northern European city is a good place to disappear. Pull up your tall black boots, stomp the pavement rat-tat-tat in a straight line with a straight face, and nobody will question you. And sleep will come.

This just in: food hazardous to health

You can find schools of thought touting reasons to give up red meat (it causes colon cancer, heart attacks, mad cow disease) or really meat or animal products of any kind (you could get bird flu, for one thing, and it’s just all around bad), gluten (a high risk of death in those with undiagnosed sensitivity), sugar and carbohydrates (they feed cancer and diabetes), a variety of fruits and nuts (if you’re sensitive, you could get sick and not even know why), another variety of fruits and veggies (causes inflammation), cooked food, uncooked food, etc etc etc.

Lesson learned: if you eat food, you will have health problems. And if you stress out about your diet, you will have health problems.

Hence, we should all become anorexic. Forswear food. Subsist on pure oxygen.

I have these two warring factions within me: the self-improving side, and the self-deprecating side. The experimental side and the skeptical side. The side that wants to be healthy, and the side that says healthy is eating whatever you want as long as you don’t totally pig out. The side that suspects there’s something wrong, and the side that says it will definitely be wrong if I become the person who asks “does this contain ….?” at every party or restaurant or dinner. The side that suspects if I change my diet, I will have more energy, and gain weight, and the side that suspects if I stop eating even one thing I may disappear entirely.

Scent of a woman

Men and women may not agree on what the epitome of female beauty is, but generally their tastes are fairly similar (higher hip-to-waist ratio, hourglass shape without too much excess, fine nose and bone structure, and so on). However, there are certainly exceptions to this rule. We all know girls whom men find attractive and many other girls (at least those their age) find annoying, pretentious and physically mundane. It’s actually surprising how strongly other women can react when these girls’ names get brought up… and these are people who aren’t even that well acquainted and have no personal reason to dislike each other. Something about the girls rings false to other females, but it’s impossible to put a finger on it.

Men will probably chalk this up to envy, but this is not at all the same thing as envy. If a woman is genuinely beautiful, females can admit it; they may be envious, but envy is not the same as puzzled annoyance.

However, I have a theory about this. I would bet you they’re wearing Victoria’s Secret body products with pheromones or similar chemical enhancers; the men sense it as well as the women without knowing what’s going on; the men drool, the other women roll their eyes and wonder what the heck is wrong with the world.

Why would anyone stoop to this? Simple: these girls may really like male attention, they may need it to close a business deal or two, or maybe they know that without it, they’re just not that sexy. Flattery, even self-flattery, will get you a long way in many circles.

Of course, this theory only works if chemical pheromones work, and there don’t appear to be many clinical studies on this. Anecdotal evidence, on the other hand, appears to suggest there’s something to it. I can assure you based on an experiment I conducted recently that I personally am convinced.

On two consecutive nights, I went with one female friend to hang out with her friends in mixed company, not having met anyone else before on both occasions. Both occasions were festive and late at night; both involved alcohol and a freeform environment where social mixing was encouraged. In scenario 1, I wore pheromones (borrowed, FYI); in scenario 2, I did not. On both occasions, I kept more or less to myself, speaking when spoken to and making a point to be easily distracted and even grumpy. If anything, I was more amiable and better-dressed in scenario 2.

At the end of scenario 1, I’d been surreptitiously asked out twice and gotten stares from just about every male in the room. Again, this was not due to my charm. Sample conversation:

Guy: hey, by the way, thanks for the intelligent conversation.

Me: (in a tone hanging between amusement and sarcasm) we haven’t actually talked about anything.

Guy: Well… yeah… I mean… you’re not like some stupid girl who’s just trying to talk to you.

Me: mmm (says nothing, drinks and starts talking to girl on right)

At the end of scenario 2, on the other hand, I’m pretty sure I was still more or less invisible. Nobody initiated conversation except when they noticed they were being rude and I had nothing to drink. After playing host, they went back to talking among themselves without so much as blinking in my direction.

I am so convinced by this little experiment that I am tempted to think every woman with a certain mysterious sexual charm has doused herself with bottled pheromones. If you men find this unsettling and begin to suspect that every woman you’re attracted to is taking advantage of your baser instincts, don’t panic. Just don’t date women that make other women want to puke. If you’re convinced a certain amount of dislike is based on envy, ask science. Upload your sweetie’s current photo (no high school glamor shots, please) into some sort of face comparison to see if she looks more like J.R.R. Tolkien than Angelina Jolie. If she looks like C.S.Lewis in earrings, and you still think she’s drop-dead, chances are, she’s not telling you everything.

On the other hand, maybe she’s just really lucky to have someone who judges her for her inner beauty.