Personal Style of Singer Susan Boyle Derided

About Susan Boyle I've seen, read and heard condescending remarks about her "frumpy" style.

What kinds of human beings are we in our various societies that we focus instantly with such harsh judgement on the appearance of this talented person? Beginning with the audience and the panel, all felt comfortable with mocking and laughing when she appeared on stage.

Consider what was seen: She was not young...she was well groomed, clean, neat, polite, spirited in a quirky way, wearing a dated "best" dress and no makeup except a bit of lipstick. If it is a given that such a condition brings mockery and condescension I suppose we may soon identify another group of people who are not a minority but a kind of majority: women not young, mushy in the middle, not fashionable. There are millions of them (us). If Susan Boyle sang in a church or a community center in that outfit no one would mock her. If she appears at Carnegie Hall -- even if she is not "made over" and poured into a sleek dress -- no one would condescend to her.

Imagine a Stanley Boyle in the same situation: outdated suit, barber-shop haircut, mushy in the middle, clean... and so on. I'm pretty sure he would be thought interesting, quirky, individualistic, his own man, a personality, an un-found star.

Everyone did a flip when her remarkable voice -- and her spirit -- resounded in that plastic over-produced television show. Is there a chance -- along with the surprise and pleasure she brought -- that we might all think for awhile of looking differently upon the often-deviating appearances of the people all around us? Not only them, but us -- so often talented, decent, honorable, worthwhile in ways we don't instantly see.

What can the city do in these times?

A candidate for mayor of Boston asked for suggestions. Androcles said:
One -- The salary of every department head, including that of the mayor, is cut across the board by 10%.
Two -- City cars for department heads are eliminated. They use taxis, the T or their private cars.
Three -- The T should be put into receivership, all the top echelon replaced. Among all entities connected to the city this is the most poorly run.
Four -- Two new city agencies are established, using professionals not political appointees. The first oversees and reports monthly on all budgets to the public, media and all city government entities. The second evaluates and rewards citizen volunteering in the city by giving percentage real estate cuts. If citizens own no real estate coupons for food are awarded.
Five -- Increase teachers salaries.
Six -- Stop all new construction for 3 years, evaluate whether to extend the moratorium. What about the outcry from construction companies? Put all available money into repairs, priorities to be determined by citizen use, safety and quality of life.

Consciousness

I’m having an argument with a book. It’s really with the author Peter Russell (degrees in physics, experimental psychology, computer science) who wrote From Science to God -- 129 pages, capacious type. This is the kind of thought-provoking book I like to read at breakfast.

As it’s propped in front of my plate I read a few paragraphs and then seize my ballpoint to write WRONG at this place or that. He will never know I do it. Over against his degrees I can only put one, though I’ve lived a lot of life and I love to tussle with things that are hard to understand. Reading this book is fun. It’s like hearing an end-of-term lecture by a congenial and brilliant teacher who was thinking “Oh well, let’s throw this out there.”

Russell struggles with the concept of consciousness, quoting widely from west and east in distance and from centuries in time. What is it? Where does it come from? For instance, part of what we think of as our consciousness tells us the grass is green. No.The idea of the color we label as “green” comes from properties of light and the electrical impulses transmitted from the eye to the brain…” the green we see is a quality created in consciousness.”

Does the tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is there to hear? No, he happily says. Ah-ha. I seize my pen to make a huge question mark. He is speaking entirely from the vantage of whether a “human” hears it. In the human-less forest, even if there were no larger animals nearby it’s almost impossible that there would not be ants, bugs, birds, turtles -- all of whom can hear. You get the point.

So that persistent question could be more appropriately rewritten, I think, this way: Is it possible for a tree, falling or not, to be in a forest that has no other life whatsoever except the tree? My answer to my question: No. Not even after a global nuclear explosion can there be a forest and a falling tree that makes no sound. Back to the original question: does the tree falling in the forest make a sound? Of course it does. Though humans may not be there to hear it, the motion of its falling will still emit waves which are a physical action.

One of the problems we all have, including Professor Russell (whom I like quite a bit), is that we are limited by placing ourselves at the center of everything there is. We used to do that with our globe, the earth. Now we do it with ourselves.

I love finding out about words. So here we go with “hubris.” From the Greek, hubris is hard to translate into English because it refers both to excessive self-pride and “hamartia,”a term Greek tragedy adopted from archery (meaning literally to miss the mark) and transformed in “hubris” to mean missing the mark because of a lack of some important perception or insight due to one’s pride.

Full disclosure: I have as much hubris as the professor. I like to dream that some of us may get a greater distance from hubris. Evolutionarily it probably was absolutely necessary. But could it not be that we are outgrowing it? Let he/she who is without hubris think of a new way to live?

Hm m m m. If a human being were ever able to regard “what-there-is” without hubris, the person probably would be killed or considered mad.

Return to “consciousness” for a moment. Russell said “As far as this world is concerned, everything is structured in consciousness.” Ah. He is both assuming as an entity and anthropomorphizing “world!” The word world is peculiarly a construct of language. Since every living being probably has a different concept of it, how can it ever accumulate enough consistency to be a useful word?

But if the concept world could exist how could it have the human faculty of “concern?” I know, I know. Cut the writer some slack. But MY point, if I were clever enough to make it, is that the very language we humans use is so muddled with archaic, incorrect, whimsical, comical, ridiculous, ruinous and absurd sub-contexts and layers that it is almost impossible to write or say a “free” or clear sentence. Yet what wonderful fun to play with sentences! What can ever be as much fun as the impossible?

Our language is so much closer than we think to the glyphs or pictograms that seem so quaint to us. Every single word is -- or can be -- a story. And in my own particular world stories are the gold -- and perhaps the goal -- of life. (Elie Wiesel said “God made human beings because he loves stories.”)

Stories teach, enchant, mislead, tantalize, captivate, enrich, condescend, lie, amuse…and so on. Ah, stories.

Let’s make a leap. I know from knowing that stories do not belong just to humanity. As even science -- ah, science -- is beginning to know: consciousness also does not belong only to humanity.

So, what about a meta-consciousness? Is that god? Well, wait a minute. These words are a runaway chariot. So far we can only conceive of a god who looks exactly like us but bigger and maybe see-through, a panoply of gods that look like us, an “animal” god (coyote?), or an unknowable mystery. If there is meta-consciousness doen't it make sense that we will have to go beyond ancient and present concepts to even see in the distance a direction that would point toward it? As yet we cannot begin to perceive, see, recognize, analyze, feel, comprehend or define it. If somehow we get a glimmering I hope we know. I hope we won't be misled, as in the past, by hubris.

Which brings me to another human trait I love. In spite of all we continue to learn about evolution we tend to act as if our human brains are now finished, that they have arrived at some evolutionary apex. Ha. We never even speculate about the idea our brains may still be evolving. Of course the respective scales of human life and evolutionary time make it highly unlikely if not impossible for us to evaluate or analyze the ongoing or future evolution of the human brain. But couldn't we dream, speculate? Could we consider that maybe our brains are now at a random point in climbing a mountain we don’t know the size of, that we’ve never seen the top of, that we don’t know if it’s a mountain? Is there a chance we could entertain the idea that we may not know where we are? Can we consider what that means? Surely that would help us with hubris?

Of course, our culture and our stories tell us we have always been seeking to know more. While on the way we say again and again that we are there, like when we announced the molecule was absolutely the smallest thing. But is there a possibility we can start beyond -- far beyond -- the restriction of what we think we absolutely know?

A friend writes what she calls jukejoint haiku. Here’s one of my favorites:

Good news: there is a god.

Bad news: he is you.

There was no screaming

From a report on the Binghamton shooting: “As the shooting began '…some people hide in closets, some people under table — everywhere you can hide,' said Than Huynh, 45, a high school teacher from Vietnam who translated for some of the Vietnamese survivors when they were interviewed by the police after they fled.
There was no screaming, Huynh said. ‘They told me they tried to be quiet and run away.’ ”
----
It is affecting that the Vietnamese were silent. Even if some of them were too young to have experienced the Vietnam war, the survival tactic they used is part of Vietnamese culture and lore, maybe for generations into the future. Hiding and running, watching others being killed, watching villages and homes burn -- the terrible war brought and re-enforced this pattern for years that must have seemed as if they would never end. Who can be the counselor for an entire country suffering from Post Traumatic Shock Disorder? Here in the U.S. we finally have begun to treat some of the PTSD veterans, usually with medicines and therapy. How do you do that with a whole country?
Binghamton and the other shootings are shocking and sad to us. We keep looking at these as random events. Is there a possibility these events are symptoms of a culture, ours, that has reached a state of disease -- or, at least, intolerable un-ease?
We were mostly silent -- perhaps too afraid? -- while many of the elements of our government were stolen during the past eight years. Mostly silent too when our government started another war that brought death to hundreds of thousands. Some of us were frustrated and confused and some of us didn’t know anything about it when mainstream media declined to proportionately cover the largest planetary anti-war protest in the history of the world.

Emperor-minded men and large corporations have played fast and loose with us, demoting us to consumers and unrespected cogs, those who can be manipulated infinitely and at will.

Of course we shouldn’t open fire on one another. But who is looking, analytically and compassionately, at how much we are being hurt by where we are, where we have arrived after the last eight years.

The brilliant and engaging young strategist has moved into the White House. We are quick to criticize him about his budget while we were silent as plane loads of newly printed money went over the ocean every day since the Iran invasion began. We look to Obama with yearning and hope but I wonder if we have another and deeper fear now -- a fear that maybe no one, no matter how talented and honorable, can heal our society now. We are an impatient people -- other nations stress how young we are. We don’t adjust easily to a dilemma so large it has to be solved in years, not weeks and months. While catastrophe can bring out the best in us it seems in the dailiness of life as if the diagnosis hasn’t been adequately delivered. Or if it has we can't hear it. We're like the patient who denies the dreadful diagnosis, who weeps and pleads for the doctor to "fix it"so we can get on with our lives. Maybe if we can see and learn, even become one of those who helps analyze and gather information about our societal illness we can rally to the treatment plans, gather our patience and our decency for a long struggle. Beyond national concerns, maybe we'll see that, as the apex predator on the planet, it is not wise or safe to commit continual assaults upon the co-inhabitants, the lands and waters of earth, our only home.

Where are the culture doctors? The shamen for society? The acupuncturists for corporations? The healers who can help us, even if timidly, even if afraid, even if hurt, to walk into a new history?

They are probably us. We have a lot to learn. And a lot to do.

Sewing, Ancestors and Shame

Today as I was hand-sewing on a small but meaningful project I felt again as if my hands were echoing those of women back through time, not just my mother's and her mother's but women back through centuries, sitting near a window to get the best light. A particular feeling unique to hand-sewing comes over me: I am so glad to be from a line of sewing women. They seem to stay with me while I'm sewing. A long time ago in my life I kept it secret that I sewed. Why? I did a so-called man's work, journalism, and while I stubbornly remained a dignified -- even graceful -- female, focused, venturesome, secure in myself, there was a line drawn. If I mentioned I sewed or loved a cat the men competing with me at that time would see it as a fissure leading to the "real" me who was yearning -- they thought -- to find the right man and wear an apron.

So it was quite a way into life during my 30s -- when I began making almost all the clothing I wore -- that I would say in reply to a compliment on a garment: I made it. I said it quietly. I let them have the astonishment and the emotion.

In childhood our mother made all the clothing we wore, even for us girls our little white cotton slips and all the shirts and pants for the boys. We yearned sometimes for store-bought clothing such as worn by children from another part of town. But even so we had the wit to know that the dresses she made were absolutely beautiful. One of the aunts said much later: Your mother had a fine hand for sewing. And so she did. And yes, some of our most beautiful dresses were made from feed sacks, which weren't marked with X's such as seen in hillbilly movies but were of a fine cotton broadcloth sprigged with flowers. She chose the feed sack -- as many women did then -- for its pattern. The decent companies had their name printed so it came out in the first washing, or put their names only on the tags.

If I were asked to choose from a roomful of designer garments and one of those dresses my mother made for me, it would be no choice. None remain because in that time, clothing had many uses. Sometimes our dresses wore out to beyond mending or we outgrew them. Then they were meant for other things, maybe as scraps so useful in sewing, or as part of a curtain, and eventually as rags.

My mother would not teach me how to sew clothing; she taught her two girls only embroidery. Because she wanted us to be women who did not "have" to sew. In my late 20s I bought a small sewing machine and a book entitled "How to Sew." As I studied it intently and began making starter garments, that's when the women came to me, my mother and the others. I found my hands doing things that it seemed came from a mystery, things not in the book. Often times in sewing I just "know."

The sewing women have always come to me when I am sewing. I reflect on how poor culture has been in denigrating these women, the unknown ones who sewed in cold basements for the royal families, the ones who sewed in hovels, the ones who put away their sewing baskets -- except for embroidery -- when they married "up," the ones who sewed for the women now gone "up," the women in millions of rooms with their favorite needle, or "needles" if they were lucky.

When I worked in the Kress's dime store after my high school days I was assigned for a brief time to the sewing counter, shaped like a long buttonhole with me in the middle. Once I became aware of a very small boy trying to get my attention although his head did not rise above the mahoghany counter. I leaned forward and over. "Can I buy a needle?" he said. I looked around for an adult who would be with him. No one near. In those days you could be absorbed in one part of the store and your children would be safe. Everyone automatically looked after them. Now the little boy held up three pennies, repeated his request and I began to understand. No doubt he had heard his mother ask herself many times, anxiously, "Now where is that needle."

I looked around to make sure no supervisors were near, chose a very good packet of needles, put them into a bag, carefully took his pennies, and counted them into the register. He said Thank You and walked away as if he held gold. When I got my small purse in the back at the end of shift I told the boss I had forgotten something and went back to put the missing amount into the register.

Few things have ever made me happier. From time to time, all my life, I think about that little boy.