April 27, 2021
Stories of fiction provide me with a source of riches to reflect on our human condition. The other night we watch The Sound of Metal an Amazon Prime film which also won best sound and film editing oscar rewards and was in the nominationations for best film. In the movie we visit with a couple that are on the road in an airstream having gigs for their heavy metal music in smaller towns. The lead drummer suddenly becomes deaf closing himself off from playing. His girlfriend of four years and he have developed a love and loyalty to each other with both thankful to each other for creating opportunities for love, companionship, and work for the past four years. For the four years he's clean and sober with a sponsor in the background from a serious heroin addiction. His sobriety is in jeopardy now with the stress of his hearing loss so he first gets better diagnosed and he offered a cochlear implant procedure for many tens of thousands of dollars as a procedure to restore his hearing. His sponsor provides him with a opportunity to stay at a retreat for recovering addicts who are deaf. Like all such programs he is required to give up his freedom, attend groups, give service, learn meditation, and lose contact with the outside and his girlfriend. His ambivalence and resistance is well portrayed while as an audience we get the profound silence caused by his hearing loss. His sponsor guide at the retreat introduces him to meditation by requiring him to be in a room for hours every day by himself, a desk, chair, and paper to write whatever comes to mind. The film gave me an approximation of his life style as a performer in heavy metal drumming, the confusion, anger, anguish, and loss associated with hearing loss, our capacity to give and receive support from strangers and guides to navigate towards a different life with some hope for the future. Instead of more analysis of this film I'll segway to other topics that relate to these issues.
Can meditation practices give us a tool that allows us to cope with a frightening and chaotic inner world of anger, depression, anxiety, loss, and confusion? Vipassana is a form of meditation training that has been introduced into some of the prison systems in the country of India. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4633398/ Here's an article which describes some of this research. There is a great video filming how this approach was conducted in one prison in India https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxSyv5R1sg. The Dali Lama being very interested in brain research into meditation and neuroplasticity helped host a conference resulting in an number of publications on this subject (just google "neuroplasticity book with dalai lama"). We know that Alpha EEG wave training using feedback techniques can enhance this process and that meditation has some special signatures using MRI and positron emission tomography (PET). Being here and now concentrating on the now maybe using a visual or sound to focus on can allow us to be seperate from the storm of thoughts, feelings, sensations including sounds, and chatter of a part of us which we sometimes mistaken as ourselves. In any case, the movie shows us how this process may benefit one troubled person.
Well, my opening topic is related to another concern that I am presently living with. Yesterday our friends came to visit and have lunch with us. The pandemic is less frightening to us since we now are vaccinated as were our guests. Both very accomplished researchers in different fields, bright, knowledgeable, and very interesting to talk with. This July he'll be 90. He's concerned with word finding problems and thinks this pressages cognitive decline. I can relate to his concern but wow we covered so many topics with our mutual interests in physics, cosmology, rocket science, and his memories of how NASA started and its various missions. We all had some fun talking about Elon Musk and his space rocket business versus the goofy man.
The night before a good friend called with her concerns about her partners dementia. Over the past decade he has become very disabled with confusion concerning basic information about where he is, how to get back home, keeping up with his hygiene, controlling his anxiety over these losses, etc. In addition he had severe hearing loss so he can not participate in any conversations and has become more socially isolated. I have another friend who had rapidly succumbed so now he is hardly there. Our neighbour married last year in his 80's is now also very confused, hearing impaired, and sometimes hard to manage with his wife at times at her wits end. Ann when diagnosed with pancreatic cancer decided not to fight this illness impart due to her concern she'd wind up like her mother with severe dementia if she lived longer. Our good friends now moved from Hawaii to the mainland struggle since he had a stroke affecting his corpus callosum with severe impairment. He with atrial fibrillation had a bladder procedure to remove stones so they stopped his anticoagulant (in my view stupidly) and he threw a clot into his brain. My sister has lost her sight now in assisted living with many other health issues so she can barely ambulate 100 steps but she is still sharp as a tack but isolated in assisted living (I'll be visiting her in a few weeks). In summary, our mortality the fragility of our lives and the potential disabilities before our death concern me. Meditation does assist me in finding myself more centered.
I came across an article concerning Jessica Bruder's 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland and picture also an Academy award movie (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/opinion/nomadland-oscars.html?searchResultPosition=1). Our country has a number of families and individuals who have lost income, jobs, homes, and careers for various reasons now wandering the highways in their vans and vehicles. Some areas make it very hard for them with police harassing the vehicle drivers to move away or have fines, vehicles, impounded, and court appointments for local offenses violated. Most of the time they are only parking somewhere to sleep for the night. There are now some advocacy organization available to help and publicize their plight to change local ordinances. Now I read today that DeSantis Governor of Florida has passed new anti riot laws designed to severely limit free speech. ie if three people are demonstrating they can be viewed as rioting, therefore arrested, and their voting rights can be abrogated. In addition, today I read From Heather Cox Richardson Newsletter "The ridiculous idea that Biden’s climate proposals would mean that Biden was banning meat swept through the right-wing echo chamber this weekend. It appears to have originated in an entirely unrelated academic paper from 2020 that explored how changing the American diet might affect greenhouse gas emissions. Still, the Fox News Channel (FNC) claimed that Biden was cutting “90% of red meat from diet,” and restricting people to “one burger per month," and lawmakers joined the chorus.
The right seems increasingly detached from reality, but it is a detachment with a purpose.
Right-wing pundits are fantasizing about being afraid of the left. After the guilty verdict in the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) both implied that the nation’s cities are boarded up and people are cowering in fear from protesters against police brutality. They seem to be saying that imagined excesses of the left justify extreme behavior from the right. That is, in their telling, left-wing protesters are so out of control, their actions justify any sort of a crackdown they bring upon themselves.
On Twitter, lawyer and political writer Teri Kanefield did a deeper dive on the way lies serve the authoritarian government of fascism. Stories like that about meat, or about the inhabitants of the nation’s capital being afraid to go outside, or the idea that the January 6 insurrectionists were Biden supporters are not true, and those who tell them know it. But those lies illuminate what those who tell them see as a higher truth, doing so in a way that ordinary people can understand. People challenging the lie prove they do not accept the higher truth, and thus are enemies.
History suggests we’re in dangerous territory."
So again I'm at a loss my aging biology can cause severe disability and death, and my country is in disarray with nonsense reported as fact in our news media and laws are enacted to frighten people so they won't exercise their rights!
Well I cannot close like this. The other day while hiking I discovered a petrified head of a giant partly buried in the lush vegetation of the mountain.
The credits of the movie The Sound of Metal had a great song which I want to attach here for us to enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKaTJVKablE
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