Saturday, September 28th at 7:00 PM at Chris' house in Whitefish.
Banter 50! Wow. Quite the ongoing tradition.This is Mitch writing this up as a placeholder for Sabine who likely has better insight and her typical great introductory ruminations that provide such good fodder for discussion. The topic speaks for itself, I suppose...what are your thoughts on human interactions with other animal species?
Mitch's Submission. If I make this banter, it will be because the weather was lousy and I couldn't go to the cabin. Since there is a chance I'll miss it, I'll keep this short. My first thought was that humans are animals. When I am in the presence of other hairless monkeys, I often find that fact hard to remember (having non-human animals around, wild or tame, is a great reminder of this). I found some decent long form videos on the topic of why we consciously or subconsciously separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom, with lots of conjecture on why (fear of mortality, feeling 'dirty' or 'uncivilized' etc.). It was all pretty long and heady stuff so, instead, I am posting some short videos you can peruse of human animals artistically and with reverence mimicking other non-human animals through body paint and contortions. One could overanalyze the art to make it fit the topic but, really, I just think it's pretty cool. Link to several short videos here.
Here is a documentary that sums up his message in "Homo Deus" Homo Deus also deals with the relation of people and animals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ChHc5jhZxs _________________________________________________________________________
Sabine's contribution:
Still not fully knowing our topic (though thanks hugely Mitch for posting above!! just seeing this today 9/25/19), or whether we've even agreed on one topic or are showing up split between two topics, I've sort of just been mulling over humans, the eras we've been part of on the earth, and the one we are dragging (have dragged) the other animals into along with our various habits and neuroses, the Anthropocene. This concept seems it may kind of bridge the Homo Deus topic (which I haven't gotten a copy of yet via an awaited library hold) and the relationship with other animals topic. Greta Thunberg's emotion-laden face from her speech yesterday comes to mind too; I've spent many days since I was her age with that chest-fallen feeling & a screwed-tight face about to burst into tears for feeling viscerally what we are doing to the ice that polar bears need to continue to exist, for the most beautiful, pupil-dilating ecosystems that would be vastly intact without our continual chiseling, for snow geese that would never have to confuse a safe body of water with an unsafe one (Butte) were it not for us, and a thousand other examples that make me fold in half sometimes with a sorrow that shouldn't really be shakeable and set down to get on with one's day best one can. Go Greta; don't set it down and get on with your day (much like Jane Goodall did not, has not - thanks for incl. her pic here, Mitch!).
I sometimes (to get through the day) will weigh my whole sense of humans not having wrecked it all based on particular geese flying overhead above Whitefish that I've seen leave on the same routes this time of year again and again. I concern my poetry with ecocriticism concerns at times, such as a couple published a while back called "Comfort Food" (has a geese migration line) and "Dialogue Between Species" (wolf/human dialogue). I hang seed from my roofline for birds like it offsets the whole house I occupy like a bully (filled with cats!) in a fragile ecosystem. I watch the songbirds sit at said feeder from inside on the coldest negative days in February and worry at the way a particular one will linger, fluff himself best he can, and lean against the glass, peering in (so it seems to my anthropomorphizing mind) at the fire. I say my soul mate, should such a thing exist, was a big bouncy black Newfoundland by the name of Ladybug who I know I made incredibly happy and who made me so incredibly too, in addition to aiding me to see the point of life & the point of not being morose so many times. What do I do without these animals to make me feel better about myself and about humans not being powerful enough to wreck a whole planet of lovelier systems? So, human absorbed, even my sorrows over this!
Yammerings aside, I wish to hear from Trista, our resident geologist in the group, if this working definition of Anthropocene has any merit among actual geologists, or is merely a popular term / concept at the moment only relevant to certain echo chambers: Noun: "t
he current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Example:
"Some geologists argue that the Anthropocene began with the Industrial Revolution." Apparently it was first made popular by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2000 (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/). Also, I'd like to read this book I came across in sleuthing for podcasts or articles for this blog contribution: Wildlife in the Anthropocene by Jamie Lorimer. And I think this article is interesting, but perhaps too reassuring as to what the anthropocene actually should feel to us: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170801-the-animals-thriving-in-the-anthropocene The photo of this tiger at the head of this last article (http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2018/07/when-human-wildlife-conflict-is-about-so-much-more/), brings to mind my concern and question for the evening, do we in the Anthropocene era need to assist wildlife differently in certain situations and ecosystems than our previous wildlife policies of hands off / let nature take its course (drowning polar bears, for example; drought-laden elephant herds that die far from the old water sources, etc.). If nature cannot take its course due to our impacts, other than extinction, do we still let nature take that course to try to keep hands off from the wildness & wild genius of our fellow animals we've doomed (polar bears, penguins, ocean life, and so on)? Does this relationship we have with wild animals need to remain the same when it was created under the conditions where we presumed nature could survive us? How awful if our lesser minds (in regard to wildness and being part of a natural system) end up, even in our compassion, erasing the migration paths from the geese's minds, erasing the paths of survival through the Arctic once known for so long by bears who handed it down to other bears. Do we keep them alive by making them all more like us, and less like they had been? Or, do we let them die off, along with their lovely oldest paths that won't be followed or known any more?
Thursday, July 25th at 7pm at Chris' house in Whitefish (on the deck)
At the end of the Woolf "On Being Ill" discussion, we sat around Mitch's kitchen tossing out next topic ideas, and came up with a hefty list (Homo Deus, Factfulness, Shelley's Frankenstein, a follow up reading related to V. Woolf or the Bloomsbury group, extroverts vs. introverts, enneagrams & people's fascination with...). But then we thought of summer and being out on Chris' deck for the next session, and the idea of some mutual amusement and quasi-lighheartedness seemed appealing, so a few of us fell upon The Paranormal. As we sat trying to define it amongst ourselves, as well as admitting the various ways a group of atheists/skeptics have some gray areas with reason when running up certain basement stairs, etc., then we felt this must be our July summer deck topic. So we'll table the others for now for a future Doodle poll vote (& also bring other ideas at the next banter) for an upcoming August/September banter night.
So, our topic:
Where do you lose your sense of skepticism and find yourself butting up against the paranormal/preternatural?
Mull this over. Track some of your present irrational (or perhaps not so irrational) behavior/actions/thoughts/feelings that are related to the paranormal or preternatural. This could bring up something as silly as fleeing from basement stairs or something as fascinating as your personal hopes for quantum entanglement (not to say that actual spooky action at a distance is paranormal). Find an associated bit of material and email that to me to post on the blog - a podcast, an article, a lecture, a documentary, a chapter, creepy photographs, a field trip to some spooky basement stairs or perhaps to the Ferry Steps!, an old Ouija board, a personal narrative, and so on. Also, please send a sentence or two describing your gray areas with the paranormal (i.e. when your general reason seems to crack slightly). Please email me your materials a week before we meet so we all have time to spend with them before the 25th. NPR's take on the topic: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/549547848/snap-judgment-presents-spooked
(Wikipedia: "The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright (1901–1988) and Frances Griffiths (1907–1986), two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, others believed that they had been faked.
Interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually declined after 1921. Both girls married and lived abroad for a time after they grew up, yet the photographs continued to hold the public imagination. In 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who had by then returned to the UK. Elsie left open the possibility that she believed she had photographed her thoughts, and the media once again became interested in the story.
In the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked, using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular children's book of the time, but Frances maintained that the fifth and final photograph was genuine. The photographs and two of the cameras used are on display in the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England.
In a 1985 interview on Yorkshire Television's Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes: "Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet." In the same interview Frances said: "I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.")
Some basic Wikipedia definitions to start us off:
Paranormal:Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as beyond normal experience or scientific explanation. Proposals regarding the paranormal are different from scientific hypotheses or speculations extrapolated from scientific evidence because scientific ideas are grounded in empirical observations and experimental data gained through the scientific method. In contrast, those who argue for the existence of the paranormal explicitly do not base their arguments on empirical evidence but rather on anecdote, testimony, and suspicion.
Preternatural:beyond what is normal or natural. In Catholic theology, preternatural refers to properties of creatures like angels, while supernatural refers to properties of God alone. It is "suspended between the mundane and the miraculous". In theology, the term is often used to distinguish marvels or deceptive trickery, often attributed to witchcraft or demons, from the purely divine power of the genuinely supernatural to violate the laws of nature. In the early modern period, the term was used by scientists to refer to abnormalities and strange phenomena of various kinds that seemed to depart from the norms of nature.
(actual water funnel cloud in Florida)
Parapsychology: the study of paranormal and psychic phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, synchronicity, reincarnation, apparitional experiences, and other paranormal claims. It is considered to be pseudoscience by a vast majority of mainstream scientists.
(seriously tangled hair)
Quantum entanglement: Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.
(Andy Goldsworthy)
(Brooklyn-based artist Caledonia Curry, better known as Swoon, who focuses on a near death experience she had via her art.)
From Mitch:
Wow! Sabine covered a lot of good ground there.
I’m not going to post any external reading or video material…just a few thoughts.
I searched around, online, and happily found out that there are many, many skeptics that don’t see any evidence for the supernatural, but that kind of want to believe in it (well, some of it).
The skeptic journey is relatively knew to me. Overall, I am happy with how it has helped me to mature and learn, but I do miss many of my old superstitions. I like mysteries and find it, oddly, nice that some supernatural claims are unfalsifiable. As frustrating as those kind of ‘Russell’s teapot' fallacies can be, they do make for fun stories.
It’s a common accusation against skeptics that they are dour and unhappy, with nothing to believe in and no magic in their lives. Admitting to wishing that I could believe in some supernatural things seems traitorous.
What I hope to hear from this banter is stories and answers from the group on some of the following questions:
1) What supernatural things do you truly believe in (or, at least, that science cannot explain)? No judgement.
2) What is your best story of an unexplained phenomenon that you, personally, experienced.
3) What aspects of the supernatural do you know can be explained away by science, but that you you wish you could believe in? Why?
4) Conversely, what supernatural beliefs have you lost that you are glad to no longer have?
5) What has changed about how you felt about the supernatural as a child until now and why do you think it has?
6) Do you hold on to any supernatural beliefs that you experienced personally, because the debunking explanation comes down to hallucinations, ideomotor effects or something that makes you feel like you’d have to admit to being crazy, disingenuous or naive?
7) When someone you are close to believes in something supernatural that you don’t, how do respond to the conversation? How does the response change by person, topic or situation?
Since the supernatural is anything that cannot be explained, this is a very big topic. Below is a short list of a few supernatural things that I believed in, at some point in my life…a few of which I still do believe (or really, really want to for various reasons) and, most, which I am glad to be rid of.
Listen to the above NPR story or read; then find a way for us to watch Both/And by Patrick Gabridge, pretty please? I've been wanting to watch it on stage or a film of the staged production of for a couple of years now. How lovely to watch it with our collective.
I'll address Mitch's other great questions at the banter night itself, but I will chime in on his #1/#3 which are much the same to me in regard to my example: I admire the Christian surety (as well as other religious surety) that assures an afterlife complete with reuniting with loved ones. I admire it like I admire Edel's tender letter writing to Santa. I don't want it to be something that is ever burst for either of them, and I wish I had that too without any doubt arising in my head sometimes. Atheist or Christian or Buddhist or..., the wishing not to ever be separated from a beloved is a fundamental part of loving and attaching. Translating this wishing to surety is not a big leap really, and I understand it, though I can't make the leap into a concrete bridge as they seem to, and the pain of that upon parting from a beloved who ceases to exist is so exquisite as to again make me glad for those who have a comfie blankie or concrete bridge of surety to wrap themselves in. However, I blur some lines in regard to love & entanglement, telling myself we don't really know how atoms disperse/recombine/impact those atoms most attached; I do this to the point of not quite believing that I'll never ever never be near my Oma Brunhilde again, nor near Naya's dad Joe again, nor near my beloved Ladybug again, nor near my children after we part, nor near those I've held or hold now with truest affection and pure pupil-dilating fascination that they could possibly exist and possibly cross my path at all in this huge place we hang amid vastness in. I feel that I might somehow not be free of them or wholly separate right now (as in where I begin and they end feels a bit less defined than my sense of our physical forms), and that I might therefore not be free of them indefinitely after their or my breathing stops. I hope for this, but the hope gives way to really wanting it sometimes, and I most notice that in the long shadow of their absence of course (such as this whole year since Ladybug died), but also when I stumble across entanglement concepts or plays or poems that blur lines about time/love/etc.
At most logical, I reason out that they don't cease so long as love and pining for / joy for continue on in my body/heart/mind/attachment for them. At my least logical, I imagine we are quantumly entangled in some way, and so surely have not just lucked out the one time in crossing paths in this massive place, but will luck out indefinitely. I love them so incredibly that my reason can't/won't imagine this not to be true, or doesn't wish to give way to a type of love that doesn't allow for that at least. I also have to fight the worried sense at times that Ladybug feels lost somewhere out in that vast universe, and wonders where I am; this is an awful trick of my mind to play on me, and I wish it would stop. I have done similar things with other loved ones who've died, mostly through repetitive dreams. I can also get very gray about the gills over it all too, and start thinking very flatly, "you're going to die, and you're going to die, and we're all going to die" as a dark cautionary to myself to stop attaching and loving - this happened most acutely after Naya's dad died when he was 29 and I was 24. Interestingly, the day or two before I fell into that mode, I was at my most irrational when I had to write his obituary one night, and 1-yr old Naya was asleep in her crib in the next room, and the people who'd been hanging around me since he drowned had all gone home. I kept picking up the pen to write words about him onto a paper, and then collapsing into a heap on top of the paper in the chair I was in. I simply felt I couldn't do this act, shouldn't have to, and so could not. Then, like a clear inner voice in my head, paired with a sensation like two hands sliding down my arms, his voice seemed to say, "Pick up the pen, we're going to write this together." Then I picked up the pen and I wrote it in one session, no need for editing later, as it came out nicely written & how it needed to. I soon knew (within a day or two) that this was a really great coping mechanism my mind/emotions/body had allowed me to experience to get through that. Yet, it remains hard still (despite not believing a bit about intact spirits, non-disbursed atoms/energy after death) to fully discount how that felt in that chair, and how much it helped. I know he didn't help me pick up a pen, but letting myself quasi entertain that maybe some particles of his impacted some particles of mine or so on, well, I like letting myself quasi entertain that, and not be so concretely sure his particles had absolutely nothing to do with that. So, since then I've been much more tolerant and apt to kindly look upon those who are in such a desperate state as to need that kind of comfort to that extent, or to the extent of people who feel 100% sure that those they loved who died first will be waiting around the death bed to take you into their spirity, loving arms. It is hard stuff to do without that; it is hard stuff to do with it. I don't necessarily see the good in being cold and clinical about it, even if much of my mind is in fact cold and clinical about it; when my mind doesn't want to be, and wants quantum entanglement (i.e., wants to misuse the term "quantum entanglement" to have to do with love), I let it.
My skepticism has lately been sealing its cracks, but one remains. I see our brains as a translation matrix between our spirits and our bodies, and brain damage interferes with the spirit's ability to manifest in the physical world. I haven't found anything else that bridges that divide.
"Let's see. I seem to recall that you wanted us to just send a paragraph or two about our personal spooky experience.
I remember magnets were pretty darn neat to me when I was young...
And then hearing about that there were people walking around on the other side of the world and that was kind of weird and hard to imagine ... Maybe it's just a matter of having to imagine the size of the Earth to make it work.
At some point I thought about whether the right hemisphere was kind of having its own whole separate Consciousness and just not telling me about it.
At some point I began to notice parts of myself physically rebelling against my intended course of action , that was interesting, maybe spooky...
The idea that purely causal Universe might mean that we were trapped and forced to do with the chain of cause-and-effect demanded felt a little suffocated... Until I silence that I wasn't trapped in the chain, but rather a active part of the chain... Will I still get trapped with it but also an active agent which makes it different dot-dot-dot without having to be the ultimate originator of anything.
Julian Jaynes' whole idea of Consciousness itself being essentially a type of hallucination that makes other hallucinations something other than hallucination was kind of spooky."
_______________________________________________________________
From Annette:
"Hello! This topic is loaded for me. I still, though having moved away from many beliefs and the structure of those beliefs, experience an element of surprise when encountering this topic all the myriad interpretations. The word paranormal has historically invoked thoughts of ghosts and almost silliness to me. Most definitely it had invoked a feeling of not-quite-right-ness. I was raised, not in my family alone (and definitely not to the degree of my church) to believe that the spiritual world was something very real and serious and not to be thought of lightly. It was hardly even noted as "supernatural" but more as "the spiritual realm". In my life the world unseen was almost given more weight than the physical one. It is hard to parse out was was taught to me and how I interpreted those teachings. Life with the spirit world had to do with a very real and constant battle for the soul of every person. My experience was scary and meaningful and frought and never, ever, silly or fun. The thought of a horror movie or "messing around" with a ouija board was not entertained or entertaining. The explanation of that fear was that my life had big purpose, therefore big wars waged. I include this link as a small window, though fictional, into the midst of those around me. In the mid eighties there was a thing called "the Satanic Panic" that not only was prevalent in church but also in the secular realm. Back-masking was spoken of frequently and angels and demons were an ever-present part of conversation. I find this topic difficult because I still don't even know the difference (thank you Webster and Sabine) between all the definitions so closely related to the "spirit world". It is difficult to condense my thoughts on it, because it was absolutely integral to my daily life, to its core, for more than 25 years and still creeps in in disturbing and difficult ways. When life is described and experienced as ONE WAY for so long, making those changes takes more than time. I am very much looking forward to other people's interpretations of this topic and beg patience for mine. A window- When This Present Darkness came out, I was 11 years old and read it front to back while being the main cook at my dad's logging job on McGregor Lake. I was super into all the alternative music of the time (and even in that I did not like to get into the too too dark of it) and a bit averse to the sun. Hanging out in my cabin (super luxurious for a logging job, mind you) and soaking in the supernatural world AS FICTION something that I dealt with every day. Lost many years of sleep over, both prior and for years to come. I hate that indoctrination and fiction fed the grotesque when maybe, maybe, someone was trying to say "Look! Isn't it great that God triumphs over all of this darkness?". You are important, therefor, you should be afraid and also confident. Purposeful. I have so many things to say about this, but will adhere to the rules (thank goodness!! ha!), in keeping my thoughts concise at Banter and listening very openly. My thoughts and experiences with mental health education and diagnosis have shed great light and given room to many questions regarding the world unseen. Of course the world, our own individual worlds, are not only flesh and bone and brain and matter, but how that is explained is still a vast mystery and one I am glad is not so dripping with fear to me as it once was.
Also an important note-when asked at Junior Miss (the only competition of it's sort I was ever involved in) what I wanted to see in the world, my answer was "a real, live fairy". I would still very much like that."
