7 Wochen Ohne / 7 Weeks Without

7 Wochen Ohne

Several important calendar dates seem to have all come together this week; they are important for different people and for different reasons.  For the Chinese, tomorrow is the beginning of the Lunar New Year, this time, the Year of the Sheep.  For Catholics, today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a period of soul searching, fasting, and praying, which lasts till Easter Sunday.  You wonder how, and what, I know about Lent and its religious meaning; the truth is I know very little but what I found on the web.  However, I've recently picked up quite a bit of information about how German people celebrate this religious "season" -- I call it a season for it literally lasts more than three months -- for 2015, it is 19 weeks and 5 days to be exact, beginning officially from 11.11.14 at 11:11.  I have no idea how that specific date and time came about, but this is how the germanic traditions go. 

Another bit of interesting information I picked up is how the German Evangelical Christian communities have transformed this quintessential Roman Catholic tradition of fasting and penance into a popular movement for concrete actions which aim at changing one's habits, presumably those which one wishes to be rid of.  And instead of the usual 40-day fasting, they've turned this into a 7-week event of "doing without" -- a kind of self-imposed privation which can help kick start the forming of a more commendable habit.  

Every year they come up with a motto, a call to action which the German Protestants can all participate in.  For 2015, their motto is "Du bist Schön!  Sieben Wochen ohne Runtermachen", which I translate as "You are Beautiful - Seven Weeks Without Telling Somebody Off or Running Down on Somebody".  I take this to mean without bashing somebody or making disparaging remarks about someone, here, concerning someone's looks, though I presume it can extend to other aspects of a person, and that the idea of bashing can include deprecatory remarks aimed at oneself.  Maybe a more colloquial translation of "Runtermachen" would be "trash-talking," or talking somebody down.  Whether "bashing" has reached a dangerous level in German society, which calls for a collective action to readdress, is something I can only speculate about.  Taking a curious look at their mottos from previous years, I think, would be interesting for social psychologists.  For example, for 2012 the motto is, "Good enough! Seven weeks without false ambition", and for 2013, "Riskier, man!  Seven weeks without caution."  What did they mean?!

This, however, reminds me of the practical advice which William James offers to help with forming a new habit of the will in his essay called Habit .  He said: "Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.  That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test." 

Kirk and I have taken a pledge ourselves to participate in this collective consciousness of self-denial.  Our motto is "6 Wochen ohne Fleisch, ohne Völlerei!"  I'm not going to translate it here, in case we don't make it.  

Slow Movement

At the beginning of this century (it's kind of special that our lives straddle two centuries), there arose a movement towards "consciously" slowing down the frantic pace of life that carries us along whether we want it to or not.  And that was in the pre-iPhone era, mind you.  The movement started more or less simultaneously in various aspects of our modern life - there is a Slow Food Movement, a book called In Praise of Slowness, a blog called Slow Love Life, albeit that came later, and so on.  

Even in architecture, it was becoming cool, when I was studying architecture from 2001 to 2005, to draw, design, and fabricate by "hand"- molding beautiful architectural adornments painstakingly from raw material to finished products.  The design philosophy of architects of the likes of Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, and Tom Kundig were given as examples in class.  I remembered going on a field trip to see the now-no-longer-existing American Folk Art Museum on W. 53rd Street, New York, designed by the Tsien-Williams team, completed in 2001, and being awe-struck by its fractured façade, consisting of 63 individually cast, copper-bronze panels (which incidentally have been saved from demolition).  The building was torn down recently to make way for an expansion of the Museum of Modern Art.  There was a huge outcry regarding MOMA's controversial decision to demolish this unique, jewel-box-like museum (itself a work of art), whose brief, barely a decade old life span was almost unheard of in the annals of building construction. 

What has got me thinking about slowness, though it is not really relevant to the slowness movement described above, was my recent discovery of a German learning blog called Slow German, posted by someone who periodically reads in a slightly slower pace a short essay in German on various topics to aid people who are interested in learning German.  (It is amazing how many helpful and free resources one can find on-line about almost anything.) I have been frustrated by not being able to break through the barrier between understanding the grammar and vocabulary of German and speaking it spontaneously.  I'm convinced that there is a mysterious threshold which one crosses in learning a new language as an adult, when, quite unbeknownst to you, one day you become able to speak in consecutive sentences about certain subjects in that new language, like the time you came to be able to ride a bicycle.  This of course is just fuzzy thinking on my part; I know full well that nothing will happen unless I put in the time to practice and practice and practice.(But, I'll keep you posted on the day it happens for me, if it does happen at all.)

What follows is a TED talk by the author of In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honore, if you're interested -

Why do I continue to watch Downton Abbey?

Downton Abbey Cast Season 4

Dynasty Cast Season 6

Maybe the question to myself should be posed in another way, by appending, "And nothing else?"  The New York Times today tried to treat the American fascination with Downton Abbey as a pop cultural phenomenon, a veiled look at the life of contemporary America through the lens of a period British romance spun out of the mind of Julian Fellowes - the writer and creator of the series.  It suddenly occurs to me that this BBC Masterpiece series is not much different from Dynasty, the # 1 American soap opera of the 90s.  That TV series ran for 9 seasons with 220 episodes from 1981 to 1989, while Downton Abbey with its fourth season debuting in the U.S. this Sunday, may be, for all we know, geared to catch up in its longevity and popularity with the vintage American TV drama.

I'm not at all sure, as I write, where this query is going to lead to or what my answer will be at the end of this post.  My take on this is strictly personal; I'm certainly not qualified to speak about contemporary American pop culture, though my life is unavoidably immersed in it, nor to discuss the social significance embedded in D.A.  What especially disqualifies me to speak like a social or cultural critic is the fact that I do not watch, aside from Downton Abbey, any TV dramas--the large array of hip dramatized stories of modern life on TV that supposedly reflect the American Zeitgeist and are often discussed on Fresh Air by Terry Gross.  The cause of this aversion is complicated, visceral rather than rational, like avoiding looking at blood.  I also don't read popular fiction, those appearing on the Time's Best Sellers list or Oprah Winfrey's Book Club reading list or what have you.  In fact the fictions I read are mostly from the late 18th to early 20th century, by authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and the like.  Somehow I feel more at home in those bygone eras.  But why the anachronism?  What is it about those times which speaks to me more than the here and now?  Perhaps I'm an Anglophile; that will explain why Downton Abbey is my cup of tea!  However, with the exception of having the tendency to a stiff upper lip, I can't say that I feel especially akin to the Anglo-Saxon race.

Nor can I say that I'm hooked by the plot lines in the ever-developing saga.  They are more potboilers than great literature, written in a haphazard fashion, dictated by contingencies sometimes (such as Mathew Crawley's untimely death) than the internal logic of the storyline.  What about the characters?  Are they more special than the general human lot?  It is probably fair to say that these people are no better nor worse than the average Joe, then or now, though somewhat glamorized, both those living upstairs and downstairs.

Maybe--here is the anti-climax--what attracts me most is the depiction of the tenor of life in the late 19th, and early 20th century, in both the novels from that period and the period dramas which BBC excels at.  There is a certain quality to it, like strolling in a green field, of taking in life in a calm and orderly way, a certain nicety of speech or manner, which seems to be missing in our lives.  At any rate, life seen at a distance seems to me more palatable than seen in close-up.  

Tronies

There is probably no face more universally recognizable, with the exception perhaps of Mona Lisa's, than that of the "Girl with a Pearl Earring," by Vermeer.  On our recent trip to San Francisco, that anonymous face with the blue and gold turban seemed to peep out at us on every street corner -- one gets a fleeting glimpse of her on passing buses and trolley cars, on banners and posters at every tourist destination. The painting is currently being exhibited at the De Young Museum.  It has drawn an unprecedented number of visitors to the museum and its likeness has been slapped onto every conceivable type of merchandise the marketing department of the museum could think of. 

One of the interesting things we learned at the exhibition is the distinction between tronies and portraits. Tronies, an old Dutch word for "faces", in art world parlance refers to Dutch paintings from the 17th Century, usually in the portrait format of heads or busts, which are studies of facial expressions (character studies) of unidentified sitters -- to use a condensed version of the definition culled from Wikipedia and other sources.
     
What exactly is so fascinating about this painting, or more specifically, about the young woman's face?  Unlike the forward-facing Mona Lisa, with her placid expression and half smile, Vermeer's model seems to be casting a backward glance at us questioningly through the veil of time.  The 1999 novel of the same title and the 2003 film based on it starring Scarlett Johansson seems to me to rob her of the many other possible readings of the face that a viewer can conjure up when standing face to face with it.

But what interests me most about the painting, is not figuring out what the facial expression--her imploring gaze and parted lips, as some might describe them--of the girl is trying to say, but the painter's ability to make palpable the sense of an arrested motion, perhaps of the girl's slow pacing movement being halted by a summons from behind, conveyed by the just-so turn of the shoulder and the tilt of the head.  

At any rate this is a painting which any budding artist would want to copy, even I.  Below is a picture of my girl with a pearl earring in the intermediate stage of its becoming, next to the original.  I chose to show this here because it seems still to possess the potential of becoming a good copy, while my finished product was completely hard and sterile, incapable of producing any mystery or poetry.        

A face that speaks
a thousand words

My attempt at copy

56 Up

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," thus boldly proclaims by an old-fashion, Sci-Fi- movies-kind of voice at the end of the latest - the 8th - installment of the British documentary series, the Up Series.  The films follow the lives of 14 British children, of varied backgrounds, every 7 years from the age of 7.  The first of this series, "Seven Up!", aired in 1964, which makes the subjects of these documentaries exactly of the same age as I, though I don't think I was aware of the fact when I watched the series of films at different time in the past.  It was with considerable interest that I went to see the latest entry "56 Up" last weekend. The fact that this film is, in a sense, also a documentary of the time of my life and that these people are my contemporaries did not come home to me until then.  

What struck me most this time around was how candid, reflective, and articulate all the participants have been, even when they were quite young, and how even-keeled and nonjudgmental, though not everybody thought so, the interviewer and director, Michael Apted, 16 years their senior, who has only been represented by his voice, has been through 49 long years.  As children, these 14 participants of the documentaries could not have had a very clear idea what they were getting into for the first couple of episodes, but their continued participation, with a few abstentions, was undertaken voluntarily in the ensuing years.  I certainly admire their courage for allowing themselves be seen, even scrutinized, however briefly, at the different stages of their lives. And, despite the ups and downs in their lives, through numerous marriages, divorces, children and grand children, and the various economic circumstance each ends up in, they still appear, in their 50's, to be a bunch of contented individuals in their own spheres of family and work lives.  None of them has displayed, at least not so on screen, any trace of envy of their fellow participants of the documentary series, and not all that much curiosity (with a few exceptions) about the others. 

At this time, 49 years later, I'm not sure if the original thesis of the series, that one can get a glimpse of someone's future from what he or she is like when seven, has been borne out.  At seven, all of them, it seems to me, were more or less upbeat, cheerful, confident, and full of hope for the future.  However, most of them seem to have followed the paths which their social and economic backgrounds laid out for them - the kids from wealthy and higher social class background became barristers, those from working class background became construction workers, taxi drivers, and the like.  (Though one boy, Nick, raised on a farm, but not to the manor born, went to Oxford and is now the chair of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin.  Education is the big equalizer, which seems to have been borne out here.)  The same can be said by and large of the gender expectations which these children have grown up with - all the girls (only 4 of the original 14 were females) got married and had children early, none got an university-level education, and some have had administrative-type of careers at one time or other.  (Here is a quick synopsis of what has become to each of the participants.)  The only exception is Neil, whose life did not go as scripted in the conventional way and could hardly have been predicted from what one can tell by his smiley 7-year-old self.  He has endured considerable hardship from his 20's through early 40's.  Now, in his 50's, with stooped shoulders and much weathered mien, he has managed to transform himself into an active church and political figure in the small town where he lives.  Are the outcomes of their lives till now pre-determined, whether by the socio-cultural forces in operation or their views, skewed in part by those forces above-mentioned, of their place in life?  Anyone with a little self-respect would, I think, find it hard to agree with that conclusion, since it would seem to generalize, but there are the facts. 

I cannot say that I have anything in common with these fellows, other than the journey through time which we've all made concurrently.  The trajectory of my life is a bit more unpredictable than theirs, as a result, mainly, of my having transplanted myself from Taiwan to the U.S. when I was 23.  Could anyone, my parents included, have anticipated this when I was a puny little girl in first grade in a tiny fishing village in the south of Taiwan?  It is difficult to speculate what my life might have been like if I had remained in Taiwan; staying, though, did not occur to me to be even possible.  I had never doubted I would leave; the resolve, not out of any privation or unhappiness, was probably made by the time I was in high school. 

Who is that person (aged I guess about seventeen) in the bell-bottoms, tinted glasses, platform shoes, and loud patterned outfit in the picture to the right peering at me across time and from the other side of the world?  Well, she somehow turned into me, and though she didn't know she would find herself in Bloomington, Indiana, she was determined to get there.    

Here are links to a couple of reviews of the film, if you're interested - from the New York Times, and the NewYorker magazine

YOLO

'YOLO', an acronym for "You Only Live Once", a slang term which had a meteoric rise and fall in the youth culture earlier this year, has in time trickled down to the general consciousness of the over-50s crowd, except that in its cross-generational evolution the term has acquired a more heightened sense of urgency.  No matter how rash the impulse is, for the young, to live dangerously, the notion that they may not live forever seldom enters their consciousness.  It's quite different for those over-the-hill, for whom death is no longer a possibility in the distant future but a foreseeable certainty which each one of us has to come to terms with.  As 2012 draws to a close, it seems appropriate to reflect a bit on what 'yolo-ing' may mean for some of us, though I feel rather terrified to do so for fear of sounding trite, which, I'm afraid, is unavoidable as the subject has been very thoroughly treated in both high and low-brow literature.

Holstee Manifesto

You all probably have seen this poster somewhere on the web before.  It expresses the YOLO sentiment, for the not quite die-hard cynic, pretty well, I think.  Make of it what you will, I keep the poster nearby my desk to remind me that my time is rapidly running out and I must not twiddle-twaddle it away.  In addition, I  also think that I need somehow to turn my attention more outward, outside of my own concerns, that is, and step out of my comfort zone, so to speak.  These are a couple of my year-end resolutions anyways.  Thinking about taking stock of one's life, I recently came across a TED talk called "A kinder, gentler philosophy of success" by Alain de Botton, a pop culture "philosopher", which I think may help reduce anxiety for some of us.  Here is another TED talk about doing something one loves by a female Palestinian architect, Suad Amiry, which is fun to listen to.

Here is to you "A More Adventurous Year, YOLO!" 
     

Encore!

Proof of Early Voting

After months' of agonizing uncertainty, the day of reckoning has finally arrived, or has it?  About half of the nation's population of voting age will finally, at the end of today, heaves a collective sigh of relief for the outcome they have been hoping for. Gone also will be the compulsive habit of checking the 538 forecast every 30 minutes hoping to spot the tiniest uptick in its inexorable prediction graph for your candidate and the no less compulsive shelling out of 10, 15 dollars every other day, it seems, in the hope that your modest monetary contribution will help tilt the trend to your side.  But, perhaps it will be safer to hold your breath for a couple of days longer, until, heaven help us, one of the Presidential candidates gracefully concedes defeat.

Obama in acrylic

You can tell from the picture on the left where our hearts lay four years ago; we, Anne, Judy, Greg, Kirk, and I, devoted one of our Art Sundays, on the final weekend before the 2008 General Election, to copying the iconic Hope portrait of Obama.  A lot has changed since that day, both globally and personally -- the most dramatic of which in the latter category was our move away from the town where we lived for over twenty years; and in the former, there are the many natural and man-made disasters around the world and the political turmoils in the middle east.  "Are we better off now than then?" There is no easy answer to this question, but the silliest sort of answer is to lay all the blame or praise at the feet of one person, other than yourself.  

I'm mildly hopeful that my candidate will win this election and plan to be glued to the telly this evening to the bitter end to have the hope confirmed and translated into more than wishful thinking.

   

"Life Edited"

Recently I came across a video called Less Stuff, More Happiness by Graham Hill, from one of the TED talks.  Hill advocates for an edited life -- whittling the inessentials from one's life, living in smaller space with the aid of multi-functional design, reducing one's carbon footprint, etc.  He conducted a competition to design a 420 S.F. apartment in New York City to house his choice possessions.  Though one can be cynical, as many commentators were, about Hill's design desiderata -- his possessions which, though few, are an array of embarrassment of riches, I'm intrigued by the idea of editing one's life.  The verb, edit, brings to mind the arduous process of refining a piece of writing by repeatedly paring down the superfluous material until it expresses the author's intention in the most succinct fashion possible, if one considers succinctness and brevity a virtue.  As who you are is partly expressed by the stuff you own, it stands to reason that one needs to be selective and mindful about acquiring and accumulating personal effects; also, by not owing a lot of stuff, one avoids encumbering those who have to sort through one's stuff after one dies, which no doubt is an unpleasant thought.


The desire to simplify one's life occurs to most people about once or twice a year -- at the end and/or beginning of the year.  Just about now, I've been thinking about rounding up clothes and things to take to Goodwill.  I remember landing in the United States some thirty years ago with two suitcases in my hands which held the totality of my belongings; now it takes a semi-trailer truck to move all my and Kirk's stuff.  I have always been attracted by the simple, self-sufficient way of life, in Thoreau's Walden.  Here is a passage from the book about the 10 ft by 15 ft (150 S.F.) cabin he built for himself.  Maybe that is not a realistic model for me, but someday I'd like to build a smallish house, no more than 1,000 S.F., and hope by then I will have whittled down my possessions to feel totally at home in it.  Graham Hill probably can get some inspiration from Christopher Alexander's pattern #78, House for One Person and Frank Lloyd Wright's designs of Usonian Houses, a beautiful example of which is the 1,340 S.F. Jacob's House. 

A commentator on Hill's talk posted a link to a video, called Stuff, of the comedian, George Carlin, talking about American's infatuation with stuff.  It's hilarious.

Asymmetry

I heard a segment of a radio program, radiolab, on our local NPR station last weekend.  It was called Mirror, Mirror, part of a three-part episode called Desperately Seeking Symmetry, first aired in April this year at WNYC.  (The segment is a lot of fun to listen to.) It calls attention to a curious fact about ourselves which we are seldom conscious of, i.e., that the faces we see of ourselves in the mirror are not how others see us.  The face which I am accustomed to identify as being my own in the mirror does not, in fact, exist in reality.  This fact, however, does not prevent us from picking out our own images in photographs, for we assume that the features of our faces are symmetrical and have learned to overlook the differences between our mirrored-self and our real-self (how we appear in photographs and how we appear to other people), so that we no longer notice the differences.  But if one is presented with a photograph of oneself and another photograph of one's mirrored image, chances are one will be taken aback by how different they look. This experience brings to the fore the fact that, contrary to our common belief, most living things are asymmetric (chiral) in nature. It also makes one wonder how similar or dissimilar one's perception of oneself is from other people's perception of oneself.  Some people don't like their faces in the mirrors, while others don't like their faces in photographs.  Either way, there are differences, however subtle, in the two.  

To demonstrate the differences, I used Photoshop to flip a picture of myself, Kirk, and President Obama horizontally.  For me it is easy to tell the differences for there is a noticeable asymmetry in my face--there is a large mole under my left eye while there is none under my right eye.  (But unlike the people in the story, I change my hair-part almost daily, so that is not a reliable predictor of whether it is the I you see or the one I see.  Also, it disproves the theory of one of the interviewers in the story - my popularity, generally subdued, does not appreciatively increase or decrease depending on which side my hair is parted.) 

How you see me

How I see myself

Kirk as he appears to us

Kirk as he appears to himself

Obama to us

Obama to himself

  

Swept under the rug

I recently discovered a website called "Over 50 and Out of Work" which is devoted to documenting stories of people in that particular affliction.  It's not a topic of conversation in polite society but it's almost unavoidable in today's economic reality.  So instead of sweeping it under the rug, I thought I would bring the subject up in sotto voce, of course, and see if I can get some conversation going.  I contributed a piece to their blog recently, prompted by a remark made to me by somebody at the gym after she learned that I did not work.  I was concerned that my piece might not fit the story lines of the website so I sent a copy of it to the editor to have it "vetted".  I was quite surprised when she e-mailed me back to tell me that my writing was beautiful and powerful and asked me to post it on their blog!  So far I've not received any cyber missiles and I thought I'd share it with y'all as well.  

Tiger Mothers

Squatting Tiger Poster

Apropos the furor over Amy Chua's book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother", I've noticed a curious fact that her book and most of the commentaries on her book are about the bringing up of daughters, not sons.  This may be a result of mere coincidence.  Or maybe more female writers feel obliged, as it were, to put their oars in the public debate, when they have daughters, reflecting on their own upbringing. Having been only a daughter but never a mother myself, I was wondering if it would be far-fetched to say that there is slightly more anxiety on the part of parents in raising daughters than sons; there seem to be more pitfalls to guard them against (hence more restrictions), more virtues, the likes of patience, modesty, compassion, and so on, in addition to those championed for boys, to extol and instill in their young minds, and for the competitive-minded mothers, toughness and fearlessness to boot, all meant to be in preparation for what they deem to be a happy and successful life for a woman.  As for the boys, "boys will be boys", a certain risk and laxity is tolerated; after all, they are expected to fend for themselves and, as it were, forge their own destiny out in the wild.  

Cloth Tigers

In contrast, in his lengthy discourse on the education of children, Montaigne aims his advice mainly at the upbringing of boys, sons of noble families in particular, though he himself only had a surviving daughter.  (Unfortunately, he delegated the education for his only daughter to the care of the feminine contingent of his household, who admonished her for things which he did not find objectionable.)  To him, the goal of education is to bring the child up to become a person of character and understanding, a far cry from the concerns and obsessions of all the "tiger" moms and "dragon" dads of the present day.  (I've attached a scanned copy of part of the essay, Of the education of children, for your reading pleasure.) 


To me, there seems to be a fundamental problem with general discussions on parenting, especially on the part of the mothers, and that is that it is difficult for the parents to 'disassociate' themselves from their offspring when they are old enough to develop a distinct person-hood; there is a sense of "proprietorship" that is hard to shake off, so much of the expectation and anxiety exhibited towards offspring is tied up with the desire of the parents to project or extend themselves into the lives of their children, to mold them into what they wish they had become but didn't.