#2 - Yeah, That’ll Do It

Welcome back, y’all. Last month, I kicked off the newsletter with a willing acceptance of defeat. Projects have been hard to keep up, and much like our specially approach to lockdown in the US, there seems little we can do to encourage an end by individual will and action. When ends allude, continuity can satisfy. While the first issue was an absolute blast to write and share, this second issue has been a warm comfort of a different kind. 

That doesn’t mean it was easy to write. It has been an incredible challenge to find the time, but unlike a lot of recent challenges, these were delightful. Tired of staring at the same four walls for months, my wife and I took a road trip. I’ve been giving over a chunk of time to a professional certification and I’m nearly finished. Oh, and we bought a house.

We started our search in the before times, in the long long ago. We made so many offers, and never was one accepted outright. We had a couple of backup positions, but nothing ever came of them until just before I hit sent here last month.

While casually looking, despite a dozen promises we were done until next year, we found a cute starter home. We made an offer before lunch, despite neither of us really wanting to entertain a home we’d so quickly grow out of. The long, unsuccessful search had softened our resolve and made us consider not so much a compromise, but a different class of homes. It was a very lovely little house, but I can look back now and think maybe we wouldn’t have wanted to proceed.

A bit later, our realtor called and said he had good and unexpected news. Something had finally come of a weeks’ old backup offer when the prior buyer fell through. We were floored. Our offer, while very competitive, was at our max and we never expected to get it. As of last week, it’s ours. And next month, we’ll move 2000 miles away from where I’ve lived my whole life. 

I’m beyond thrilled to build a garden and to be free to make any modifications we wish on the house. I’m anxious and excited; this is a massive change to our lives, one we’ve wanted for a long time, and we know we must be the architects of that change. Finding our community in a new place under COVID will be a challenge, but we’re so ready to take it on.

To be determined if I’m ready to take on shoveling a drive in a place that gets 5.5 ft of snow a year…

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Conceptions of Old

I think most, if not all, of us have a different relationship to time than we did before the pandemic. Time under COVID is less a river than an ever-branching series of tributaries with waters running at different speeds and depths. It seems many of these waterways terminate at portals which redeposits swimmers at random points along the series at the whims of a random and indifferent cosmos. Put simply, time’s weird now, y’all.

Time, and the perception of it, is never static for long, and conceptions of ‘old’ are likewise inconsistent. On American East Coast, old might be thought of in terms of settlements and city establishments. That is to say 400-500 years. In the middle of the country, where I’m from, 150 years is a long time. And in San Francisco, due in part to a hugely destructive earthquake and fire in 1906, buildings approaching 100 years old are revered. All of this is laughable across Eurasia, where the boundaries of Portugal were established almost 900 years ago and an inn in Japan has been operating since 705 CE (1315 years!!).

We tend to perceive time and age through received cultural wisdom and artifacts, as evident in that examples I chose to cite above. There are exceptions, but generally speaking humans love a shared narrative. We think of time through stories and things, which are constantly being manipulated, and so the “truth” can only be approached, never reached. 

As an American of Anglo and Celtic ancestry—best I can tell—and a product of western public schooling, my concept of old is ever tied to Western Europe even as my adult life has been a pursuit of learning and regarding other cultures. In a fit of interest in English monarchical history that took me for reasons I can’t fathom some ten years ago, I learned work on Westminster Abbey commenced in 1042 under the reign of Edward the Confessor. He never got to see it consecrated, as he was ill when the rite was performed on 28 December 1065 and died a few days later. “The only traces of Edward's monastery to be seen today are in the round arches and massive supporting columns of the undercroft and the Pyx Chamber in the cloisters,” (source), as the original abbey was torn down in the 13th century under Henry III.

I have rather romantic notion of seeing Westminster Abbey for my 80th, shortly after the millennial anniversary of the consecration of the original abbey, and not before. This is in spite of the knowledge that I would in fact be looking at a ~775 year old structure built where the original stood, which tradition says has been a church site since the 7th century CE. It is only the narrative we tell that makes for a lovely big round number on which to hang meaning. 

I recently learned that there is a portion of Westminster Abbey that has been closed off from the public for virtually the entire life of the structure build in the 13th century. “The triforium, a walled interior space located 52 feet above the cathedral floor, was closed off to the public for some 700 years” (source).

For much the past 7 centuries, the triforium has acted as storage, but it was rechristened 2 years ago for Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee and is now a national gallery. 

As a brief aside, it seems this gallery (unlike the British Museum) contains artifacts of historical significance which actually belong the the British people. (Yes, I do believe items pilfered from around the world during colonization should be repatriated, and no I don’t limit that belief to England).

The area is accessible now via the first addition to the Abbey in 300 years, the gorgeous new Weston Tower:

If I manage to make it to Westminster in 2066, I quite look forward to seeing all manner of old things, be they 1000, 821, or 48 years old.

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Measuring Distance in Liters

The pandemic has been a whirlwind for many dogs, and I’d like to focus on the obvious positive: many of us are suddenly around all the time. Dog adoption has gone way up as well, as those without pets at home suddenly feel the need. There is some anecdotal evidence that dogs are a bit disoriented by all the precautions we’re taking to keep ourselves and each other safe, but largely they seem to be having a good run in 2020.

We’re a dog household, but even for us, COVID has been an opportunity to think more deeply about our dog’s internal lives. What’s going on in there? Why do some dogs seem inherently to understand pointing, while others only sniff at a proffered finger? Why do dogs that once responded well to commands seem to switch at the drop of a hat into floppy idiots? Are dogs smart, and if so how smart?

Humans love to think about intelligence, and we tend to be myopic in consideration. Intelligence is why we have risen to the top of the food chain. Intelligence is why our mothers endure an incredible trial in childbirth, and why we need so much care from infancy through adolescence. Intelligence is the seat of our humanity, but intelligence is not human. Damned if we don’t spend way to much time thinking it is.

So let us dispense with the hubris and compare our dogs to wolves and other canines, and not to ourselves. The ‘domestication hypothesis’ indicates we radically changed canine intellect in domestication and breeding. We are imperfect stewards of our world (bold and broad statement, to be sure, but I think we can find some evidence to back this up), so dogs aren’t dumb but neither are they the perfect result of our breeding designs. They exist somewhere in the middle, and this is especially true given the proliferation of breeds with specifically intended vocations and their resulting variations in competence. Generally speaking, what are dogs good at, and are these markers of intellect?

Dogs can’t recognize themselves in the mirror

More often, they ignore the reflection or perceive other dogs. But dogs are scent-focused, and they can pick themselves out of a pee line-up. Can you do that, human?

Dogs can connect words to objects and places

They largely rely on paralinguistic communications, like tone and posture. (Not to compare to humans again, but so do we.) Dogs can follow human gestures, often with a bit of training, while their modern ancestors (wolves) cannot.

Dogs may be less emotionally complex than we think

There’s reason to believe that when showing guilt and contrition, they are likely trying to appease rather than feeling guilty. This one is bittersweet, as I would honestly prefer to believe my Corgi felt guilty for tearing into my coffee table all those years ago

We make dogs poor problem solvers

Dogs are worse at solving problems than wolves as a result of their dependent relationship with people. Where wolves need to fend for themselves, even in a pack, dogs can readily look to humans for help. We’re quite good at complex problem solving, but we aren’t alone. Crows and other corvids are great at this as well. What is missing may not be lost, however; if you want a dog that is better at self-solving problems, you should probably visit a shelter. Shelter dogs have often had to learn they can’t simply rely on humans to solve things for them. So if you needed another reason to adopt a shelter dog, well there you go.

Dogs may have a theory of mind

They can be pretty good at deception. Well, they attempt deception.

One interesting caveat to the “you can’t compare dog and human intelligence” assertion is dog adolescence. While it comes on at different ages depending on breed and size, well behaved and trained dogs eventually show a willful refusal to listen to their owners while seeming happy to listen to others. They often become moody and unpredictable like human teenagers, but with this behavior also comes a need to strike out on their own, looking to their humans less for security, again much like human teens.

So, back to our compromised and unfair question: are dogs smart? Yeah, are you?

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An Info Diet of Wholesome Snacks

Sketchspanations is a great weekly visual newsletter. Jonathan Hey explains a concept with a simple sketch and minimal text. It’s charming and I love factoids. Some of my favorites include forcing functions, the Transparency Paradox, and a scientific explanation of the changing of autumn leaves which is suddenly much more relevant to my life.  

Imagine my surprise when just days after posting my first issue last month, I saw this in my inbox:

It isn’t exactly a hügelkultur (see here or last month’s newsletter), but the concepts are related in so far as they make possible life where none was possible.

Nurse logs are natural phenomena, though we humans have observed and often copied (or at least not undone) the Earth’s good work. Proper observation and reverence for good practices are so often a better approach than INNOVATION. 

Newsletters are making a resurgence and it isn’t hard to see why. Information sources good, bad, and indifferent have proliferated over the past 30 some years as more and more of the world has come online. Distribution lists and forums have had their day, as have blogs and vlogs, and while none of these have ever fully disappeared, their popularity waxes and wanes. There are no doubt endless factors behind the various trajectories, and while I have some opinions about why newsletters are “back,” I’ll save them for another time. Suffice it to say I’m along for the ride.

Single author email-delivered newsletters had a strong moment in the ‘90s. Then came the ascendancy of the business newsletter. Trade-focused, directed at a niche audiences, and promotional, these kinds of newsletters are not, by and large, a joy to read. They can be useful, but there is a clear reason for a dearth of excitement about the medium for some time. But as blogs has fallen from their former primacy, and media consolidation makes so much news and assorted information both bland and extravagantly negative, the single author newsletter is on the rise and I and very much along for the ride. 

I recently subscribed to The Mail, a Vice-sponsored effort about the unfolding fabricated debacle at the USPS, and a digest of Mark Frauenfelder’s favorite newsletters, among other things. I may already have subscribed to too many to give them all the time they deserve, but I’m on something of a journey in my information diet, and learning new habits takes time, discipline, and kindness. I’ll leave you with one final sketch summing up an ethos I try always to keep in mind: