For Soleia: Land of the One-eyed

Hey you,

They have this saying:  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Not sure what value there would be for a one-eyed man in a land of the blind.  Literally everything in that land would cater to blind people.  There'd be no screens, no signs.  No books to read with letters.  Not entirely sure what he'd do with that one eye other than watch sunsets.

But I wanted to comment on a moment from my present that I think can be a lesson to your future.

If you've read my book, (and you damn sure should have by now, woman!) you will remember the lesson of the 2 eyed seeing.  Its true source is of course, Aboriginal Canadian spiritual thought and the idea that there are ways of knowing that hold truths that can't be actually known and understood in other epistemological frames.  Science can't really explain art, any more than you can see music.  Apples and oranges - and as a result the moment that you start to believe that a certain frame of knowing has all the answers - an Aboriginal frame, a scientific rationalist frame, a humanistic frame, a sociological frame - that's the moment when you have to take a step back and ask if your focus is simply blinding you to the universe instead of revealing it to you.  The second eye is representative of this "taking a step back" - this broadening of your perspective to keep from singular, insular, constrained ways of knowing.

It has a near corollary in the Two Cultures critique of C.P. Snow, who posited the Western educational tradition of seeing the world in either a humanities frame or a scientific frame diminished the quality of the minds who ascend to the top of both of those respective lineages.  But at a fundamental level - what I was trying to capture in my book is the very simple analogy that our biology gives to us.  That if you are only looking at something through one eye, chance are you are only seeing it in two-dimensions.  Adding depth and sophistication to our observations and our conclusions can only come when looking at a thing from more than one perspective and from taking in a broader perspective.  Without doing at least that, you can mistake a flat picture of a staircase for a real staircase and find that your trust in your senses has led you to walk face first into a wall.

This is all preamble to an observation I made just now that may very well be a structural reality of the human political interaction:  The America of my time is the land of the one-eyed.

They all seem conspicuously happy to see things that they want to see.  This wouldn't on its own be a surprise - many humans to that.  America seems conspicuous because the things that they don't want to see are incomprehensibly proximate to the things they do want to see.  They have to jump through hoops to avoid the things they don't want to see because, through a combination of unfettered access to information and a voracious appetite for documenting things, the things they don't want to see are literally side-by-side things they do.  And yet they find ways to remain blind to them.

A new line in the sand of what we owe to each other, the laws of courtesy, was crossed at Trump's 3rd State of the Union speech.  Speaker Pelosi ripped up the copy of the speech that Trump offered after he'd finished.

Demonstrative?  Certainly.  Empty gesture or power move?  Only time will tell.

Unprovoked?

Only an hour earlier, Pelosi clearly offers to shake Trump's hand only for him to turn away.  To be clear, I don't particularly like Pelosi.  But there she is extending her hand - which means that she's already a better person than me.  I suppose if I thought being nice to Trump could put him on a path to being a solution in this world rather than a symptom and contributor to its problems, I could see myself ignoring his actions and shake his hand as a fellow human. 

Trump isn't going to be learning any new tricks.  He's the rock in your garden that you don't waste time watering.  Being a rock - totally inert to anything outside of his own self-interest - has gotten him into the Oval Office.  You aren't going to entice him to slowly or suddenly become a plant.

Now, we can argue over whether Trump missed the gesture, whether he saw the gesture and ignored it, or if he was so focused on not making a jackass of himself that he was stiff as a board and didn't want to risk being polite and erred on the side not being nice to someone he doesn't like (as he clearly appears to be).

But to try and say that the first thing is unconnected wholly to the second?   Trump not shaking Pelosi's hand had no bearing on her ripping up his speech?  America and Americans seem to be masters of this.  Of seeing only what they want to see and, in condemning themselves to being one-eyed, basically render themselves effectively blind.

I don't know if this nexus of media coverage and political alienation is the fate of all ostensibly liberal, quasi-representative, 'democracies'.   All I know is that I want you to be clear - it is okay to blind yourself so long as you know what you are doing.  It is okay to blind yourself to the truth so long as you are willing to accept the consequences that follow from them.

But if you won't be okay with the consequences of willful, comforting ignorance - of being spoonfed how to think and react to the nonsense put before you - my beloved daughter, your father implores you.  Force your eyes open, as open as you can...and practice opening them.  Practice not taking things at face value; practice the search for depth in a world where people are only too satisfied with what's on the surface, with that which is right in front of their eyes.

If you practice these things, my love, I don't doubt that you might find yourself in a world where you are surrounded by people who'll hang on your every word:  so desperate to think for themselves and so unpracticed at it and so unqualified to do so that they'll follow a thinking being like you off a cliff.  You might find that you have a measure of power over your peers that you probably shouldn't. 

And I hope you use that power responsibly.

- K