(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . 'Solid beneath our living feet' and phase change [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-11-08 Our kids—twenty some years ago—brought to our dinner table language from school that they had never heard at home. We were first nonplussed and determined not to make a punitive knee-jerk response as both sets of our parents would have. (Each of us comes from religious and extremely conservative backgrounds.) My spouse and I finally came up with something like ‘Be thoughtful about how you use language. It can offend people whom you may not want to offend, so be careful. But, we think that obscene language can be appropriate when addressing obscene things.’ I still flinch somewhat but here I am posting a picture to make a point. If I had a photo of ovaries, I would have posted that as well. It seems to me that hormones are a good metaphor for what we need in this time and place of disinformation and deceptions that have been sold as truth to what-- horrifyingly--turns out to be a majority of voters, if not Americans as a whole. There was a moment when I realized as a preteen that I could not believe in my parents’ god as I understood that would have meant sharing eternity with them. As I desperately knew my need was to escape my abusive family, that thought was utterly intolerable. To make it official, I went out into our woods, found a little spring-green clearing and addressed the witnessing squirrels and the Almighty as a good little Canadian would, starting with (of course): ‘I’m sorry, but I can no longer believe in you. However, I can and will continue to believe in Truth and Beauty.’ My adult path has wound on holding both doubt and belief in complicated ways but that child’s commitment to truth and beauty has been consistent for all the intervening years. And that is precisely where I find the image of hormones especially helpful. I was raped, repeatedly, by a hormonal teenager, beginning when he was 14 and I was 2. Rape is far, far more complex than surging hormones, but bear with me as I make a point based on one small slice of this horror and also point towards tools that helped me survive my history. Hormones drive nearly unthinkable, seemingly impossible acts; there is a Great Pyrenees dog of my acquaintance who climbed over not just one but three 5’ chain-link fences that were topped with barbed wire and electrified to get to the breeders’ stud. Power of hormones, of ovaries, sketched bluntly and unequivocally in an unexpected litter of puppies. What I am grabbing for in these days of desperation and felt betrayal is a similar power and impetus to pour into the determination to live a life that continues to be driven by truth, by beauty. I want to be as oblivious to the challenges or the risks in the service of that life as the breeders’ beautiful bitch was to barbed wire and electrical shock, to be driven by not only ‘incandescent rage’ (although that is certainly present in our household) but also total unequivocal commitment to making a livable, living future. For years, I’ve subscribed to Maria Popova’s wonderful weekly posts, The Marginalian, where she digs into the great thought, science, literature, and art of the past and present. This week she did an ‘emergency’ post, called A Lighthouse for Dark Times. In it, she uses another hopeful and powerful metaphor drawn directly from physics, phase change: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times. Years ago I had a pivotal PTSD nightmare in which I was in a basement and heard an assailant coming down the stairs. It was too late to flee; instead, my dreamSelf grew roots down through the concrete floor and down through layer after layer after layer of ancient ancestral hearths where women and then the pre-human females of my lineage cooked food for the nourishment of their people. As the dream unfolded, that hideous assailant snapped off my twiggy digits, then my limbs and finally even my trunk broke like sticks—but those roots, those living roots, were beyond his reach. Another phase change, ‘solid beneath our living feet,’ in another layered metaphor; underscoring Popova’s reminder that entropy and chaos is not ‘the last word.’ Popova goes on to quote various artists, among them bringing one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes; she continues: Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state. We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible. “A society must assume that it is stable,” James Baldwin wrote in reckoning with the immense creative process that is humanity, “but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” In the instability, the possibility; in the chaos, the building blocks of a stronger structure. I suspect that this takes me to the end of fair use, but Popova’s post is a wonderful cry of and for hope; please read it if you need something to yank and stretch your field of vision to include a wider glimpse of reality, of our actual truthful human history beyond this tiny scrap of bitter ugliness. And yet. Part of the potential reality/truth I keep facing in hours of terrified insomnia is the likelihood that America’s precipitous entrance into the current global rightward swing will take us even faster into what now seems like inevitable ecological collapse. The horrors of what lie ahead for our kids, our beautiful 20-year-old granddaughter, our 30-year-old housemate...this has haunted my nights since long before this election. I’m old. I’m 69 which in my long-lived family is quite young. However, I have had multiple brushes with death. I’ve flat-lined repeatedly. I have a genetic disease; my tricuspid valve is regurgitating at level 3 out of 4 which will probably lead to another essential heart surgery; I have a small brain tumor; I found out yesterday that I may need a problematic inner ear surgically removed--and I still have a raft of yet more medical issues. If Medicare goes away (as it will if drumpf enables Musk to successfully cut his threatened 2 trillion dollars out of the annual budget) I don’t anticipate living into my 90s as my parents did, or into my 100s as several uncles in two generations have. We’ve stared down medical bankruptcy three times and are living in a level of poverty we did not anticipate after both getting masters’ degrees and working our whole adult lives. Today, surprising myself, I find this all somewhat liberating. I will die, as have all of my human and pre-human ancestors. Years ago I was teaching a group of junior high kids and shocked them by saying, ‘Death is the price we pay for sex.’ Yes, it was verbal clickbait, but it got their attention and made them think which was my whole purpose; we are not clones that can subdivide and live forever. It is in our hormone-driven sexuality that we have a metaphor which makes vivid our human ability to deeply and intimately connect with each other and bring forth a future with life; I see that as a profoundly powerful image for all humans regardless of sexual orientation or ability to generate offspring. We can allow ourselves to be driven to commit atrocities or we can be driven by similar forces to serve life. This is facile of course, but we can propagate the macro litter of malice and heedless destruction or we can foster life, even if it is only at the micro-level of a literal litter of puppies. We have choice. I have the agency, right here, right now to still decide how I will live this last bit of my life. Decades ago as a young adult first confronting the abyss of my childhood abuse, Viktor Frankl gave me an image of the grim but powerful truth he wrested from Auschwitz and the three other death camps in which he was incarcerated over several years and during which he had multiple family members die: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. That image was salvific. That, the hormone-strong power and drive of choice, along with the passion for truth and beauty, has saved my life in multiple ways, repeatedly. Phase change! During the years of ictal syncope, when that rare seizure disorder was stopping my heart, I had another dream with another image that is still compelling. I dreamed that I saw my skeleton, all white bones and grinning skull, spread out on vividly green grass. As I hovered overhead, watching, I could see my battered heart still imprisoned within that ghastly cage of ribs. It pulsed, began to stir, then suddenly sprouted like a seed, sending up a green tendril that shot out between the clutching bones, climbing up into the light and spreading out verdant leaves. I woke, feeling hopeful, encouraged, heartened. Phase change. In these past dreadful days, contemplating the sudden blast of images of a more immediately grim future than anticipated, we have reached out to friends and safe family, with rapid shifts between blank numbness, hopelessness, and that steaming incandescent rage. Today, I think about how water in all three of its common phases is a relentlessly powerful force, from frozen glaciers that grind rock into powder and give Lake Louise its stunning blue, to liquid streams that have carved out the Grand Canyon, to steam and water vapor that fuel both the micro (engines) and the macro (hurricanes). I think that the incandescent rage I felt earlier, that power of steam, may be beginning to shift into another phase change, tapping into the visceral determination to live well—right here, right now, solidifying from vapor into ground beneath my still-living feet, ground layered with the nurturing hearths of all the millennia of our human history. This feels true, even beautiful, despite all my liabilities and impending thoughts and threats of death. Perhaps my micro shift—along with all of yours, all of us who harness our powers of truth, of beauty, of imagination and choice--may contribute to move into the macro shift that this country (and this eco-sphere, our fellow humans, our leafy or four-legged or no-legged siblings) needs to continue to foster life in its many astonishing forms. On that dismal morning of the 6th, my spouse and I looked drop-jawed at each other and asked, ‘What now?’ After an hour of sharing our dumbfounded disbelief and rage, my wise spouse said, ‘So, what am I going to do? I will go right on continuing to make my corner of this country, this world, as much better as I can.’ Yes. Make that steam work and become a driving force. Let it solidify and transform the ground, the layered ground beneath us. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2024/11/8/2284389/-Solid-beneath-our-living-feet-and-phase-change?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/