Ampersand Gazette #2
“Fortunately, taking ownership of your whole story, even the messy parts, might actually be rewarding.”
from Capricorn horoscope by Rick Levine on beliefnet.com
1.9.22
So, here’s the thing: unless we take ownership of our whole story, the parts we disown have the potential to hurt us, haunt us, hinder us—mightily. When I first told my favorite ex-husband about metaphysics, his response to me was, “Oh, you mean, take responsibility for your own life.”
Yes. Exactly. It’s an inner acknowledgment that means, essentially, Yes, part of my story, I see you. I will deal with you when I can. I will not exile you from my soul or my life. Once that is affirmed, you can relax, knowing that the resources you need to deal with whatever part of your story has drawn your attention will come to you when you need them. Without exception.
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Anu Garg is the founder and editor of A.Word.A.Day, one of the best beloved emails I receive each weekday. Every week he writes a pithy introduction to the week’s theme for the words he’s chosen. This was in my inbox a couple Mondays ago; it made me laugh out loud.
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg
Covid deniers tell me it’s all made up. A reader in France often emails me random YouTube videos and other conspiracy links suggesting that Covid is a hoax.
I finally asked him: Are you aware of any other instance in which all governments in all countries, doctors, scientists, journalists, nearly everyone (even people who run funeral homes) went along with a conspiracy? It was only left to some guys on YouTube and Fox News to tell the truth?
What do you know, this reader has an answer for everything. He asks me to find the FACTS (Important note: FACTS are more factual than mere facts or even Facts).
We respectfully disagree with the reality-deniers, but there’s something we all can agree on: Birds aren’t real.
As the brave people behind the above website explain:
“The Birds Aren’t Real movement exists to spread awareness that the US Government genocided over 12 billion birds from 1959-2001, and replaced these birds with surveillance drone replicas, which still watch us every day.”
At any other time we would have commented upon the verbing of the word genocide, but this is a grave matter and we don’t want to be flighty. We thank the people behind this movement for uncaging the truth and not parroting the government lies.
I hope the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers now realize the real reason the rest of us have been diligently putting our masks on: so our faces are partially covered and the government can’t easily ID us with the face-recognition algorithms in these “birds”. We don’t want to be sitting ducks with our faces exposed.
Also, now you know the real reason I have been recommending not keeping birds in our homes.
When the birds were real, they were integral to our lives and they continue to be a part of the language. This week we’ll feature five such words.
PS: It’s about time I exposed the real etymology of the word “bird” that the dictionary publishers have been hiding from the general public—such a conspiracy! It’s actually an acronym.
BIRD: Biotronic Intelligence Reconnaissance Drone
There’s really not a whole lot more to say, is there? Hilarious.
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“To live in the subjunctive is a manner of seeing the past not as a fixed story but as one that the present continuously acts upon. The present is what determines the past, not the other way around. I can write it any way I choose, at my own pace. That’s another thing about the subjunctive: There’s always enough time there. All the time you could want, and need.
Jean Chen Ho
from The New York Times Magazine
“Every Year He Texts Me ‘I Love You’”
1.12.22
In recent days, I have been known to complain to my spouse that too much of the news is written in the subjunctive. Jean Chen Ho’s observations about the subjunctive support my irritation. What I had meant to be noting by my carping was that too much news isn’t really news at all—it’s speculation about what the actual news means. That’s a whole different bottle of wine as my friend Anne has always said.
Isn’t the news supposed to be about what’s new in the world? I think so. Long-form speculation is the purview of the interpreters of our world not the reporters on our world. The confusion of these quite disparate things is part of what’s maintaining all the misinformation (see above: BIRDS.)
Let’s let the interpreters do their jobs and the reporters do theirs, and not conflate the two, shall we? I think the world would be a better place.
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“The search for meaning and direction, it seems, has never gone out of style and feels especially urgent at present. …
“One group consistently and particularly taken with tarot is artists. The decks are a sort of art object, after all, and artists are themselves in the business of making meaning.“
from The New York Times Style Magazine
“The Artists & Designers Making Tarot Decks Today”
1.19.22
I loved this! All sorts of people are creating tarot decks—artists included—just take a gander at Kickstarter if you don’t believe me. I’m a fan of the late psychologist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, who maintained that humans can live without a lot of things, except meaning. I agree. Unless our experience has meaning to us, we lose our hope, and if we lose hope, we, ultimately, lose our desire to live.
But tarot! How amazing. The tarot cards are a 72-image journey of one human soul. They begin with The Fool, The Everyman, The Everywoman and go on through life experiences until they reach the Princess or Page of Disks or Pentacles—usually depicted as a pregnant girl. From innocent all the way to creative fecundity. I’ve read the Aleister Crowley deck for decades, and before you go all wonky about the Bad Boy of the Spiritual Set Aleister, yes, he was naughty, but there are several reasons his deck is mine.
First, the cards are gorgeous. Second, their artist was a woman, Lady Frieda Harris. She painted each image according to letters she received from Aleister, which I think is an awesome process! Third, Aleister Crowley and I are birthday siblings. He was born October 12, 1875. I was born the same date in 1957. It was meant to be.
I think the tarot is always worth exploring especially when we are seeking meaning for events in our lives. It’s a mirror, not a predictor of the future. Looking into mirrors is how we learn about ourselves. Learning about ourselves is how we grow.
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“Selfish interest invoked action.”
Charles M. Blow
from The New York Times Opinion Page
“For Black Voters, A Flashback to the 1890s”
1.20.22
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, selfish interest always invokes action. Look at what’s going on all around us in the United States at the moment. Unless we can find a self-interested reason for everyone to mask up and vaccinate, we’re destined to let the virus do what viruses do, which is mutate.
To be honest, I’ve wracked my brain repeatedly to figure out a self-interested reason anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers might change their minds. I can’t find one. Even their own deaths isn’t self-interested enough. And that’s saying something.
Allegedly, Meatloaf refused to quarantine from his wife and children when they got Covid, and now he’s dead. A man in his seventies, not particularly healthy, who didn’t even value his own life enough not to protect himself so he’d be around for his children’s futures.
What seems to be missing, or at least, this is as far as my metaphysical brain has gotten is: a sense of the value of life itself. There seems to me to be an undertow of what’s the use or why bother. It’s a deep-down disappointment in life that’s hard to shake off.
Self-interest is always what’s motivated humans best. Maybe if a bunch of us think about this, meditate about this, pray about this together, we’ll come up with some inspiration that will blow the lid off their sad disappointment and give meaning back to the folks who just aren’t playing nice with the human race.
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“Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, which traces the rates of usage of words and expressions in a massive corpus of books (and newspapers such as this one), the paper’s authors conclude that since around 1980, English speakers have been more given to writing about feelings than writing from a more scientific perspective. From around 1850 on, they found, the frequency of words such as “technology,” “result,” “assuming,” “pressure,” “math,” “medicine,” “percent,” “unit” and “fact” has gone down while the frequency of words such as “spirit,” “imagine,” “hunch,” “smell,” “soul,” “believe,” “feel,” “fear” and “sense” has gone up.
“The authors associate their observations with what Daniel Kahneman has labeled the intuition-reliant “thinking fast” as opposed to the more deliberative “thinking slow.” In a parallel development, the authors show that the use of plural pronouns such as “we” and “they” has dropped somewhat since 1980 while the use of singular pronouns has gone up. They see this as evidence that more of us are about ourselves and how we feel as individuals—the subjective—than having the more collective orientation that earlier English seemed to reflect.
“They conclude: ‘The universal and robust shift that we observe does suggest a historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and—inextricably linked—between the rational and the emotional.’”
from the delectable linguist John McWhorter
in The New York Times “Don’t, Like, Overanalyze Language”
1.22.22
More writing about feelings than thinking? Ya think? Oy. More I than we? Ya think? Um, yeah. So, is the esteemed linguist saying … collectivism is connected with the rational … and individualism is connected with the emotional? Maybe.
What interests me is that the rugged individualism for which America and Americans are so celebrated has ripened past its expiration date, and is now toxic. Witness the droves who are leaving Facebook, shutting down social media accounts (me, included), and turning off both their televisions and their phones.
I don’t think the solution is an absolute snapback to collectivism or rationality, but I do think we’ve reached a tipping point. This is how humans must learn to work with polarity instead of against it. We need collectivism and individualism, and we need rationality and emotionality.
Beloved, until we all learn and use that tiny word and, the struggle will continue. That’s why I’ve said for years and years and years, “The most important word in every language is And.” Consider a visit to the website for my spiritual work: iAmpersand.org
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Enjoy your fortnight, until we meet again, (Oooh, that reminds me, it’s become obvious that these posts will happen every other week, not weekly … I meant to tell you!)
S.