Ampersand Gazette #72

Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …  

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To Put It Bluntly

If Donald Trump ends up serving a term in prison (there’s still hope!), I’d relish the chance to refer to him as an ex-con. But the very power of that label has made it practically taboo. In its place, even federal prosecutors have adopted phrases like “justice-involved” or “justice- impacted” to describe those convicted of crimes. These terms not only avoid stigma, they also remove the implication of responsibility altogether, as if the crime were something that happened to the criminal rather than an act he committed himself.

The right euphemism not only removes blame, it also reassigns it.

One major goal of lexical reform is to humanize and dignify the person behind a simple label.

Passive descriptors can be turned into active ones, and thus more powerful. To call someone a “slaveholder” or “slave owner” implies that a person just happens to have another human being in his possession. Whereas to call that person an “enslaver” makes clear that one human being has actively subjugated and dehumanized another.

There is inarguably a power, sometimes a necessary one, in reconstituting terms, especially when they refer to human beings. As Toni Morrison once explained, “The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”

But euphemisms can inadvertently rob words of their moral force. “Enslaved person” humanizes the victim, but it also softens the indignity of what is a fundamentally dehumanizing condition.

Language has always driven and reflected societal change. But today’s vague language is more often used as a means to ward off bad things so we don’t have to deal with harsh reality. Euphemistic language becomes a kind of wish-casting, and perhaps even a way of avoiding—or covering up a lack of—more substantive reform.

But for language to remain an effective way to communicate intent and meaning, we should consider the reasons—beyond kindness or sensitivity—behind our euphemisms. Some words are brutal for a reason, and sometimes we need to deliver a pure blunt force. 

Excerpted from an Opinion Essay by Pamela Paul in The New York Times
“To Put It Bluntly”
September 12, 2024 

As anyone who has ever spent time on a school playground knows, words can hurt, and words can heal. The effects of words depend upon the intentions of those wielding them. The same is true of swords. 

Many years ago, I was a student at the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, as part of a semester-long immersion program called NTI, the National Theater Institute. The point was to eat-breathe-sleep theatre 24/7 to find out if one had mere a hobby or a calling. 

At NTI, we started each day with group exercise. It became my first exposure to a lot of things I’d never encountered before: Tai Chi, Yoga, and Epée, among them. Athleticism not being my primary language by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, imagine my astonishment to discover that I was a natural at fencing. 

A serious lefty, an apparent advantage in the sport, I took to it like I’d done it a squillion times before. I anticipated every single thing George White intended to teach us. I found I could do it effortlessly, even if it was complicated. I had a similar talent when it came to learning choreography, but that’s another story. 

Years later, as my spiritual counseling practice chose me, I had the same ability with words, and have been fascinated by them ever since. Especially with unusual turns of etymology. I even wrote a book about it called God’s Dictionary. No wonder I was drawn into Pamela Paul’s article on blunt-force words. 

I estimate that each week, in everyday ordinary conversation, my husband and I fall over some expression which has two commonalities. First, it’s cultural shorthand we both understand. Second, it’s become taboo. One or the other of us always says, “Yes, well, but you can’t say that any more …” Someone usually responds with an inquiry about how we can say it these days. We learn or groan. We move on. 

Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m not lamenting the care we are learning to take with our language. As I said, words can hurt and words can heal, but they can also obfuscate, confuse, dissemble, and mislead.  

In point of fact, no matter your voting preferences, Donald Trump is a felon. Felony is a little like pregnancy. It’s a binary. You either are or you aren’t convicted of a felony. Once you are, you remain so. 

In this day and age of fake news, alternative facts, and outright lies, plain-spoken language is a breath of fresh air. Think on this for a minute.  

Without plain-speaking, we cannot establish a personal boundary. Without plain-speaking, we cannot tell someone they’ve hurt us. Without plain-speaking, really, we can’t even ask for what we want—and I’m not talking about a Cadillac, I mean something as simple as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. 

Plain speech is a skill. One that can, and must, be taught and learned. It is the instrument of Creation itself in a culture based on Judeo-Christian mythology, like it or not.  

The next time you need to make something crystal clear, stop. Think about what you want to say, the meaning you want to convey, and how you might say it succinctly. Then do that. What’s delightful is that you’ll find that it takes a lot less time, creates much happier outcomes, and makes space for others in your life to do the same. 

Now that’s a win-win-win all the way around. 

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Are Art and Science Forever Divided?

Or Are They One and the Same?

One wet English spring morning, John Keats looked up at a rainbow and felt nothing. The colors that streaked across the sky should have awed him, as they awed people of centuries past. But by the early 19th century, all Keats could see in the rainbow were optical, verifiable facts. His countryman Isaac Newton had proved that the colors were just sunlight refracted on water droplets, each wavelength bent at a different angle.

Culture and religion, dreams and angels: for Keats, by 1819, they had all been unwoven. Their poetry had been zeroed out by the cold calculations of physics (or natural “philosophy,” to use his word). And as the modern gospel of progress and rationalization continued to “conquer all mysteries,” artists and scientists began to look at each other with a mutual incomprehension—even disdain.

Art imagines, science answers: and the answer is final. But go ask Aristotle: Art and science were not always opposites. The Renaissance was an art/science crossover.

When it comes to science, art can go to extremes: It is either too credulous or too skeptical. In one corner are the hustlers who keep promising “an intersection of art and technology.” In the other are the mystics who caricature the scientific method as an instrument of oppression, and celebrate art as the province of alternative facts. These are twin problems with a common derivation—one that Keats, looking up at his rainbow, would have recognized.  

Art and science have become bare synonyms for imagination and reasoning. But both modes of inquiry require both modes of thinking. 

What if we set aside the aim of reconciling two supposed domains of art and science, and tried to reconceive the theories of knowledge that govern both? The rainbows in Keats’s poetry and the rainbows in Newton’s laboratory are in their way ideal representations. They are all models that spotlight what waking life leaves in shadow. 

Excerpted from a Design article by Jason Farago in The New York Times
“Are Art and Science Forever Divided? Or Are They One and the Same?”
September 10, 2024 

If you have ever been in my house, you know that there is a representation of a rainbow in every room. Mind you, never meant to be a rainbow in itself, but instead an ideal, tangible representation of the chakra system. I have made a lifelong study of it, and to this day, remain fascinated by it. 

The chakra system, actually the human energy system which is the one that powers all the other standard ones, is both art and science. Perhaps that’s why I’m still fascinated. To put it in simplistic terms borrowed from quantum physics, chakras are waves and particles, art and science. 

At this point in our species’ evolution, I believe it’s time we all learned about our chakras, were trained in how to tune into them, how to manage them, and how to use them to foster our highest potentials. What that means is that it’s time we all learned about energy leaks, and how to fix them.  

Now some chakra teachers will tell you that you have one chakra that’s completely blocked. I promise you, that’s impossible. You may have one that chronically under-functions, yes, but if you actually had a completely blocked chakra, you’d be dead. 

So let’s look at one art/science energy leak, a common one, and have a look at how to use the chakra system to fix it: An overflowing email inbox. 

The reason I say this is an energy leak is … don’t you cringe every time you open your email? And don’t you feel … pressured or burdened or angry or guilty or some other, let us be adult about this, icky feeling?  That’s an energy leak. 

The first thing on your agenda needs to be that you want to heal the energy leak. Which means: dealing with the email. Plain and simple. Once and for all. Set aside a specific amount of time. It can be fifteen minutes every day until your inbox is at zero, or two hours right now. It doesn’t matter. Now tune in to your body, which is where the chakras live. 

Where do you sense the bad feeling about your email lives in you? It will be different in all of us depending upon how we encode it energetically. Someone who wants to scream because of it might feel it in their 5th Chakra. Someone who wants to cry, the 6th chakra. Someone who feels guilty, the 1st or 2nd. Or maybe you feel it in two chakras? 

Wherever you find that icky feeling, use the color of that chakra to bolster your energy. If it’s the 5th, surround yourself in turquoise light, saturate the room with it, and your computer, and your hands, and your inbox, and your email program.  

Then get to work. Without the feeling, it ought to be easy to clear out your overflowing email. Then make a commitment to check it, say, the first of every month, and clear it again. That’s one energy leak handled. 

That chakras are art and science is fascinating. Only you, or a skilled chakra healer, can figure out how you have things coded in your system, which means that you already know the art of chakra healing. The science is thousands of years of writings about chakras in cultures all over the world. 

The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, or over-tired, or over-stressed, or over a barrel, stop. Have a gander at your chakras. Which one needs some help? Why? Where’s the energy leak? Fix that, and the outer manifestation is much easier to fix, promise. Then you too will be chugging along doing both art and science. 

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Here’s a universal affirmation. It works every time, for everyone, always and forever …  

Mike Dooley 

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And in publishing news … I am thrilled to be able to show you my new banners for fiction and nonfiction 

If you haven’t read Oklahoma! Hex, or Jezebel Rising, or Attending Physician—the three permafree books that start three of my fiction series, would you please? Go on Amazon, “purchase” a freebie, and post a review sentence or two.  

Reviews really are the engine that powers the career of an indie author. 

Here’s another magical 5-star review for The Subversive Lovelies … 

historical fiction with a twist - the women control the narrative
Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2024 

After their beloved father passes away, Jezebel and her three sisters conjure a dream of “What would you do if you inherited a fortune” into a reality based on the desire to help those in need, not with a handout, but with literacy, social and professional skills, personal care, adequate clothing and the childcare every mother needs to fulfill her dreams. Women living under the oppressive rules of the Victorian era had few options other than to marry, bear and raise children. Jobs, if they had them, were limited to being a midwife/nurse, teacher, domestic servant or merchant (think market stalls.) Most were illiterate. Susan Corso wraps the social expectations and living conditions of the time around each character and brings this era to life. In language rich with emotion and detail, she captures the settings of the upper, middle, and working classes. With a privileged upbringing and unencumbered wealth, the four sisters draw on their talents and the independence fostered by their progressive parents to take on women’s and men’s roles, too. Jezebel is the CEO and CFO, Jasmine a mirror of empathy, Gemma the organizer and fashion diva, and Jaq the perspective of a man and a woman. The characters' thinking and planning on the page is so well conceived that every adventure is believable. 

JEZEBEL RISING Book 1 is a lens into the mechanics of running a 19th century household and eventually a community of women and children. It’s also a romp through New York City’s upper-crust society and dark underground. This book is the first in a series of four. It builds the foundation with ever-increasing layers of excitement of the four sisters’ enterprise of social change for the betterment of women, and tangentially, men—a wish fulfilled where women turn from passive into active participants of their own lives. It reads and feels like a dream come true. 

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My top secret series now has a name that I can reveal to you here. It’s called: 

It’s an alternative retelling of the AIDS crisis with one major historical revision, that being that humanity, instead of doing what it actually did, which was a tsunami of devastation to a whole generation of creative people, chose to do the right thing. I’m already over 100,000 words into Book One of the eight-book series, and I think I’m approaching the end of the first book. 

Who knows what I’ll write next … will it be … Jaq Direct, the final book of The Subversive Lovelies? Or Impending Decision, the fifth book of The Boots & Boas Romances? Or Shrew This!, book eleven of The Mex Mysteries?  

I keep thinking the day is coming when I’ll be writing two books at one time. I sure hope so, because Spirit tells me I have one whole hell of a lot more to say. 

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I am always amazed at the variety of work that clients bring to my husband, Tony Amato, book editor, book coach, or, as he calls himself, bookhusband, and here I’ll add (because he never would,) extraordinaire.  

We’re reading Jacqueline Retrograde aloud on a trajectory, hopefully, of finishing it in time to publish on my birthday, October 12th. Will we make it? Who knows? A lot can happen in that brief amount of time. BTW, I’m not the only author Tony’s helped this way … just sayin’. 

Do you have need of someone to partner with to help you with your book ideas? In all seriousness, I know a guy. He’s edited my books for twenty years, and counting. Tony Amato is a singularly outstanding (and much sought after) book coach and editor.  

May I encourage you to reach out if you need book-husbanding? He’s worked on fiction, micro-fiction, memoir, science fiction, metaphysical fiction, young adult fiction, erotica, singles, series, audio scripts, and nonfiction in realms from business to the spiritual, and everything in between. Really, you name it, he’s done it. Like I said, if you need anything in your writing life, Tony Amato is the person. Find him here.  

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I very rarely recommend books whilst I am still reading them, but in this case, I had to make an exception. Here’s the blurb from Amazon (which I also could not resist—can you blame me?): 

“Who Cooked the Last Supper? overturns the phallusy of history and gives voice to the untold history of the world: the contributions of millions of unsung women.

“Men dominate history because men write history. There have been many heroes, but no heroines. Here, in Who Cooked the Last Supper?, is the history you never learned—but should have!

“Without politics or polemics, this brilliant and witty book overturns centuries of preconceptions to restore women to their rightful place at the center of culture, revolution, empire, war, and peace. Spiced with tales of individual women who have shaped civilization, celebrating the work and lives of women around the world, and distinguished by a wealth of research, Who Cooked the Last Supper? redefines our concept of historical reality.”  

Yes, it does, and … when I read Gerda Lerner’s great treatise, The Creation of Patriarchy, one thing that left me stammering was that we women don’t know our own history because it was deemed too unimportant to record it. As a result, we have had to reinvent the wheel over and over and over and over again. Did I say over and over again? 

That’s not totally so for women my age and younger, but it hit me hard in the gut when I read it. No wonder we have constantly felt the need to overexplain, justify, and defend our choices.

This book is rollicking fun, yes, but also a sober witness to all that has not been recorded of half the history of more than half the human race. 

I had to repeat this review … the book is only getting better the more and more I read it. In fact, I’m thinking about buying a paper copy and rereading it, that’s how good it is. 

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Are you waiting for a sign?
How about this one? 

Isn’t he beautiful?
I’ve had a ‘thing’ for peacocks forever.
Wildly, I learned not too long ago that they’re the only
creatures that can neutralize rattlesnake venom.
A singular skill that. 

It made me think of how toxic the world can feel sometimes.
If you feel that way,
you’re not alone, but what if you had
an inner peacock superpower
that could neutralize any toxicity it met by its very existence? 

I know that sounds fanciful, but being able
to meet toxicity and let it fall away like,
as Jinkx Monsoon would say,
‘water off a duck’s back,’
is a superpower worth cultivating,
don’t you think? 

Try it.
You’ll be delighted at how easy it is. 

I am, without doubt, certain that And is the secret to all we desire.
Let’s commit to practicing And ever more diligently, shall we?
Until next time,
Be Ampersand.  

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