The Last Word On Nothing

Grief is a persistent little bugger. It never really goes away, just changes shape. Well after my last book came out without the fanfare I’d hoped for, I’m revisiting a version of grief that I hadn’t known existed, and that’s still with me. It’s no long a dart; I’d say it’s more a smattering of dust motes. But there it is, still hanging around.

This is how I thought about it when it first hit me.

My dad died last year at age 94, his death a blessing for him and, while immensely sad, a relief for me. My grief felt over too soon, but I realized it was because I’d been grieving him for years. I looked back thinking about those so-called stages of grief we learned about in Psych 101: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These five were originally proposed by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, and while they were derived unscientifically and are clearly massively oversimplified, I have found truth in them. As my father was declining, I’d first denied his trajectory by posing unrealistic plans that required him to have a future (e.g., turning my husband’s workshop into a little apartment for dad, never mind all the nursing care he required). I experienced deep anger at people who didn’t see worth in healing his various ailments, and I begged any higher power who was listening to keep him whole until I could find solutions to unsolvable problems. Eventually, I sat in darkness knowing there was nothing I could do to adjust his heading. I slid in and out of each of these feelings, in various orders, numerous times as he lay dying. By the end, acceptance was all that was left.

Continue reading →

Your average frog loves a good meaty fly. But to this amphibian predator, a stationary fly might not register as something worth nabbing, if it is seen at all. “[A frog] will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving,” wrote the authors of a 1959 paper in Proceedings of the IRE [Institute of Radio Engineers]. Only when the fly takes off does the frog’s eye-brain messaging system kick on and suggest tongue action. The movement itself (actually, the resulting change in the intensity of light) transforms fly into food. Or really, nothing into something.

Wild how that works. I highly recommend you read through the paper linked above for a detailed explanation of the frog’s eye-brain connection. It’s delightful reading (minus the part about what the frog went through).

Now. I’m looking for an analogy here; I’m sure there must be one. Is it this? That we, like the frog, can be blind to things that aren’t making a fuss, that aren’t yelling at the top of their lungs like the Whos down in Whoville, “We are here! We are here!” Even things that are crucial to our own survival? I mean, if the frog registered the un-moving fly, the frog would feed freely. But no movement, no nothing.

Or there’s this: Are we the fly, hiding in plain sight, knowing that being noticed is risky? That it’s best to stay quiet and still no matter how important the message is we’d like to project? And that, at just the right moment, rather than fight the best move is to flee?

I’m thinking this is not an either-or situation.

We can be the frog when our brains refuse to acknowledge what’s happening around us (or perhaps more at a distance in our case—war, poverty, disasters far afield, cruelty to dogs—TO DOGS!!). We can’t take it, our brains are overloaded, so we see nothing at all unless it comes into fashion to care about that thing (the fly flies), and suddenly we all want to focus on that thing, to take it down and make it stop. At least until we’re sated again.

And we’re the fly when we refuse to speak up for fear of being smacked down by the sticky tongues of our own kind. Shhhhhh. Sit tight, someone else will deal with the problem.

I mean, I get it that sometimes there is no fight in us, that fleeing is the only recourse. That’s why it’s called fight OR flight, people. (It’s hard to look cool fighting while fleeing. Think about it.) Big frog with sticky tongue, small fly with no weapon. Know when you’re beat.

WTF, evolution, the fly might ask? Why hasn’t the fly evolved a toxin or nasty taste to thwart take down? What are the fly’s chances without any option but to dash into the sky? Immobility is a defense, but that can’t be enough.

Clearly the fly registers the un-moving flog, with some deep understanding that there is a piece of soft sticky flesh marinating in that thing’s foul mouth that is apt to do serious damage. Poor fly.

Then there’s this: Does the fly that flees the frog (phew!) feel free in flight just before feeling the phlegm of the frog? And what if the frog (the fly’s foe) fumbles the fly and the fly flies far, free? Face facts: Flies are everywhere. Frogs are fumbling every day.

With apologies to everyone: Flee Fly! Frogs Fumble.

***

Frog face by Felix Rottmann from Unsplash

I’m not getting any less mad about this, didn’t you hear me the first time? The New World, when the Old World was full of all kinds of people, had nobody. NOBODY WAS HERE. THEY ALL CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. Everybody here was at some point AN IMMIGRANT. And yes, I’m shouting, why can’t we get this into our tiny brains? This first ran Feb. 26, 2024, and I learned it because I was working on the profile of one of the scientists figuring out where we all came from, for a magazine, Hakai, that has since died and that makes me mad too.

I don’t know how I managed to not know this for my whole life, but here it is: the Americas were the last continents (except for Antarctica which still doesn’t have any people) to have people on them. By around 30,000 years ago, all the other continents had people on them. We didn’t have any people. Nobody. Empty of people.

Why not? How do continents gets their people anyway? Well, in the beginning people evolved. They evolved in Africa, and later maybe some kind of evolution refinements were going on in Europe and Asia and Australia. But not here, not in the New World. I asked a couple of anthropologists why not. And they said “Nope, before 20,000 years ago, no evidence of people whatever. They just didn’t evolve here.”

“Well why not?” I said. “Wrong monkeys,” they said, and I’m paraphrasing. The great apes with the capacity for evolving into humans didn’t live here. We had only miscellaneous little monkeys — the New World monkeys which, granted, evolved from Old World monkeys but neither one evolved into humans. No, I don’t know why they didn’t.

So if people didn’t evolve here, they must have come in from the outside, from the other continents, immigrated in like immigrants, right? Right you are. Once homo sapiens — Latin for “wise humans,” somebody’s sense of humor I guess — evolved in Africa, they headed out on all directions. By 40,000 years ago, they’d moved over into Asia, down into Southeast Asia, up into Siberia, even to Australia, and up to Europe. They didn’t get to the Americas until about 20,000 years ago. The Siberian Asians must have gotten curious about the stretch of land crossing the ocean to the east and trekked across it.

These people, the Asians, came in waves: an early, maybe the first, wave went straight south along the west coast, and by 14,500 years ago was at the tip of South America. Other waves, maybe around the same time, maybe later, came inland into North America, down an open corridor between glaciers, then skirted the bottom of the glaciers and headed south and east — though the archeological evidence is indirect at best and inevitably hit-or-miss.

The Asians also circulated in South America and everywhere began the business of civilizing themselves. They first settled somewhere, built houses, learned to grow their own food, found the commonalities — the languages and religions and meeting places — that let them form tribes, communities, villages, cities, states, and in a few cases — Aztec, Maya, Inka — create civilizations as impressive as those in the Old World. In general, it’s kind of a pretty story, people doing great things by making communities.

The story gets less pretty once the Old World — you know this already — became aware of the new one. The first people to come over were the Vikings and one Italian; then Spanish, Portuguese, English, Scots/Irish, French, Russians, and later, Germans, Scandanavians, Irish, Italians. Each one settled in its own communities and declared that the next immigrants were not really humans. Later, those immigrants declared that the new next immigrants were not really humans. And of course the special case is the Africans who immigrated, not because they wanted to but because Europeans had already decided they weren’t really humans — which is rich considering that the Africans were the first humans. We’re still doing it, running around like dumb monkeys declaring immigrants not humans.

I’m beginning to piss myself off, talking about this. And you certainly see what I’m getting at: nobody, NOBODY was in this New World. Plenty of animals and plants, no humans. Every single one of us, we all came here. Every variegated one of us is an immigrant.

I’m not saying waves of immigrants don’t cause problems or that dehumanizing them isn’t as human as walking upright. I’m saying the problems and the dehumanization have solutions that aren’t rocket science. Like, believe the National Academy of Sciences when it says that compared to current residents, immigrants are more law-abiding, their families are more stable, they’re more likely to have jobs; and their children are better educated and speak English like they were born here which they were. Like, every religion on earth mandates that we treat other people like ourselves. Like, THEY’RE THE SAME AS US, WE ARE ALL IMMIGRANTS HERE.

I’m getting pissed off again, I sometimes wish the Siberians had looked at the Bering land bridge and said, “Nah. Leave it empty.”

________

Pictures: New and Unknown World by Arnold Montanus, 1671; Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White,1585. Both from the splendidly intriguing Public Domain Review