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Daily Prompt: Reading People

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The woman next to me on the plane was in acute distress. She did not tell me this herself, but she appeared to me to be bearing a weight of grief and/or worry. I did not know what the source of upset was. She checked and re-checked her watch, and kept shifting her weight in her seat but kept herself leaning forward like an intense talk show host. She picked up the Airfone (this was in 2000) and considered doing something with it but returned it to its cradle. She picked it up again. She put the mandatory flight nuts in her handbag and did not accept a soda or water.

I am a dunderhead when it comes to feelings. With some experience in public speaking, I find that I can read a room more accurately than I can read an individual. Furthermore, I can tell when someone is ticked off at me far more capably than I can tell if a person is happy about something I have done or said or even if they are happy I am in their life. I need a lot of positive reinforcement.

On the plane, I knew that my ego wanted me to be this woman’s white knight and to be an attractive shoulder for her to lean against, but because I knew that this was what my ego wanted (or believed it wanted—what if she had leaned against me and actually wanted to talk and cry?), I knew I should simply keep reading my magazine. I did.

Anyone in a relationship knows their partner well enough that they can tell from a “Hello” text message with no other words or punctuation whether their partner is happy, upset, or confused by something. Or all of the above at the same time. Usually, not always, but usually, my girlfriend and I avoid the confusion that texting or other quick modes of communication can bring, and, when one of us detects something is off, we turn it into a phone call. We keep matters open and clear. I am grateful that we have not had many fights, but our worst fights have come when one of us did not phone and the communications got snarled and then so did we.

Was the woman beside me trying to get my attention with all her huffing and not-quiet sobbing? Anyone’s attention? Was she with the people across the aisle? They appeared to be a couple. Was she with them? No. Definitely no. There are ways to have a private moment in public spaces and then there are ways to have private moments in ways that may earn, well, the legitimate sympathy—and even empathy—of strangers. I do not profess to know that I can identify the difference between these two types of moment, in the moment. This fellow passenger on a flight from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Newburgh, New York, was proving to be a test of my ability to read a human being.

If I do not know my own emotions very well, which is something I started to write about recently (“For Crying Out Loud!“), I am not going to be able to correctly interpret another complicated human being’s complicated emotional displays. And I did not know my emotional inner life very well back in 2000; I did not know how complex the palette of emotions on display can be.

It may be that the woman beside me on the plane had brief moments of wanting to pour her heart out to me separated by moments of unapproachable grief or whatever she was suffering, but my default facial expression resides somewhere between poker-faced and perturbed by a distant sound that only I hear. (Look at my portrait accompanying this web site.) I probably looked as unwelcoming as possible, and then confused things when I would attempt to look welcoming, “just in case” she wanted to talk. I asked, “Are you okay?” and her shoulders replied with a surprised shudder and nothing else, no look in my direction, no words.

The landing was suspenseful, which is to say that technically it was uneventful but each sound from outside the plane, each bump of turbulence as our plane dropped into the thicker air, was audibly registered by the passenger beside me. Perhaps she was merely a nervous flyer? No. On the ground she took or placed (I do not remember which) a call on her cell phone to get a hospital address. She rushed to the front of the plane with no words to me or anyone, without waiting for the go-ahead from the air stewards.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 17 asks, “Are you a good judge of other people’s happiness? Tell us about a time you were spot on despite external hints to the contrary (or, alternatively, about a time you were dead wrong).”

There will be no column from The Gad About Town tomorrow, September 18, as I will be attending a television show taping in NYC. Yay, me.

Daily Prompt: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty …’

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

(Some thought-fragments about art with a small a and Beauty with a capital B.) (Or vice versa.)

The title is from the final lines of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which the poet ends by telling us that the centuries-old vase he has been describing serves as a reminder that, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'” Earlier the poet also says, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter … .”

The ones I can not hear, because I am a mere mortal and what I hear on Earth is all I need to know, those are the sweeter ones. O, vile mortality!

* * * *
Some experiences are almost universal: without sharing a common language, audiences will laugh at many of the same things. A person slipping on a banana peel. The fish-slapping dance. Analysis of comedy kills comedy (unless one is making fun of analyzing comedy) because laughter is more than a feeling, it is a reaction; when honestly expressed, it comes in an instant. Conversely, some experiences are unique to each one of us: all of us experience physical and/or emotional pain, but the best any of us can do is talk around it in an attempt to almost come close to describing it. Pain management specialists present their patients with a chart of a series of faces and ask the patients to circle the grimacing face that “matches” how they feel. It is simplistic, but it does something important in that it asks us to leave language, which can be misinterpreted, aside.

Language. The most vile and hateful sentiments can be expressed in sentences that might sound pretty when they are spoken. There is probably a language in which the sentence “I am going to kill you” would make me swoon just before I got shot.

* * * *
What makes me laugh might make you cry (if you were the person who slipped and fell) and what makes me cry might make you laugh. There is much ugliness in this world and someone somewhere finds harsh and violent things funny.

I find the sentence on that poster at the top, “We all have within us our own …,” which is a piece of typical Facebook inspiration-stuff, a poster that is designed to elicit a hopeful gaze or something, to be clunky and, worse, empty. Sunsets are nice and all, but why put words all over one? (I would rather the Kadampa Center had just put a picture of their temple on there.)

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To the best we can tell, birds are singing shopping lists to each other. “Seeds over here, seeds over here; nice sturdy branch I’m standing on.” The most boring and necessary stuff, but pretty to our ears, a sweet unheard melody to Keats.

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We teach each other what we find beautiful. The cartoon at right captures, without words, something of this. Artists in a class learn to depict reality, but what about the world made Egyptians in the era of the pyramids and pharaohs depict things and humans as they did? We look the same now as we did then, but the art seen in the ancient (and beautiful) monuments does not look like our twenty-first century reality. Did life in the ancient world look all that different to eyes that are biologically identical to ours?

Certainly not. The same cartoon could be drawn about art classes from other eras: the flat crowds with identical faces in Giotto’s scenes, the extraordinary gowns and suits that probably rendered most people who wore them immobile for longer than the time it took to to sit for just the start of a portrait.

* * * *
Someone might bring up the Cubists, Picasso specifically. At different points in the cultural history of art, the visual and the performing arts diverge from mass notions of “pretty.” They always seem to reconvene, usually when the mass notions of pretty start to include the works of art the masses once rejected. Rocks were thrown at the orchestra during the debut performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” because it sounded so odd. You might hear snippets of it in television ads during NFL games now.

I can tell you that for me, Picasso’s drawing line is voluptuous and his color scheme, well, beautiful. And the intellectual challenge the Cubists presented themselves and attempted to conquer: to include time and time’s passage in a static form, painting (which is why two eyes will appear on the same side of a human head—think of any photo you have taken in which someone turned away just as the camera snapped); I find the intellectual challenge and game and the attempt to meet and match it exciting and, well, here is that word again: beautiful.

Here is one of David Hockney’s “joiners,” a type of photo-collage that he explored in the 1970s and ’80s. It is made of 77 Polaroid photos of a swimming pool taken as the sunlight shifted through the day, photos taken over the period of time that it would take to make 77 Polaroid photos with one camera and one artist. Pretty as a sunset but with time added as a design element as important as color in the image. It is a Cubist sunset. It is a beautiful attempt at one.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 16 asks, “We’ve all heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Do you agree? is all beauty contingent on a subjective point of view?” The answer is a definite and thus easily questioned simultaneous yes and no.

There is a famous “Twilight Zone” episode that I am sure someone else has referenced in their response, titled “The Eye of the Beholder,” in which a world that culturally dictates notions of physical beauty sends away people that we Americans of a certain era might find beautiful. We live in neither a world of only sunsets and platitudes and easy listening music nor in one in which we force one precise, single idea of beauty on one another, and that, that in itself, is beautiful. (Sadly, this is not true in every country, not right now; in some countries, Rod Serling’s script might seem to present a pretty good idea.)

Daily Prompt: T.M.I.

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

Most of us will live somewhere around 28,000 days (75 years, give or take), and it is estimated that most Americans meet three new people every day. That comes to approximately 80,000-plus people you have met or will meet in person in your life.

(Do you say a personal hello to the person who takes your money for coffee in the morning? Count that person, or start saying hello more frequently and don’t be a Scrooge.)

I have worked as a college teacher, a reporter, and as a retail salesman, and I attend various support groups through the week, so my numbers might wind up skewed a bit higher than that, so perhaps I have already met 50,000 on my way to more than 80,000.

That is a small city, 50,000, or even 80,000. It is as if I never left Poughkeepsie, New York, my hometown, and set out to shake hands with every permanent resident there, never had any other ambitions, and never left. We would call that a weird life, a not-very fulfilling one, but that number describes most of our lives. We do not meet all that many people. It is a football stadium, and not a large one.

Going back a couple generations, when a person could live an entire life in one town, which my grandmother who lived to be 98 did, a person probably met about three people a day. Maybe two-and-a-half. One of my great-grandmothers grew up in Pinsk, traveled across Europe with a baby in her arms, came through Ellis Island, and eventually lived out her years in Poughkeepsie. She probably met three people a day. We call our lives more complicated, and claim they are growing more so, but they really are not. Not in person. I do not think that this has changed by a large quantitative margin over the generations. Most of us know, truly know, only a handful of people at any moment; many of us do not even know the names of all eight of our great-grandparents.

I have not included my online life here. Not yet. According to WordPress, this blog has received over 3600 visitors from 50 countries, from some time in late January to today, at an average visitor count of 14 per day. (Since I started publishing every day, the numbers have increased; 1300 visits have been tallied in the last seven weeks.) I have exchanged personal notes with a few readers who make me blush when I think that they know my writing almost as well as I do. I hope I am an encouraging reader for writers, as well.

Until recently, I have limited my Facebook life to friends I personally know, but I have lifted that self-imposed stipulation recently and I am happy I have. I have under 400 Twitter followers and have had perhaps a dozen lengthy personal Tweet-exchanges of some depth in my three or so years on there. In my online life, as in my in-person life, thousands of encounters to find a handful of true friends I value and hope to someday meet.

When we claim that our lives are more complicated and information-packed, we are not, not most of us, speaking of our personal lives. We are reflecting that we have given ourselves the great gift of more. There are more outlets, more ways to declare to any who will read or listen that we are living a “purpose-driven life” or some other catchphrase (sorry, Rick Warren) without actually living that life. If I am telling you I am living one kind of life or another, how do I have so much time to testify to this? (There are exceptions; sometimes the testimony is a part of walking a walk.)

And every song not only has a singer but a listener, it seems. Everything we hear and read is, in its rawest sense, “information,” but not all of it is necessary. What you prepared for dinner certainly is information, and if I send you directions to my house, that is information as well. We can and will filter out each other. I can give you a virtual thumbs-up on a nice-looking meal and forget I did while doing so. You might be amused I sent those directions that we both know you will ignore.

There is a lot of noise in this world because everyone seems to have purchased a mic and an amp and kept their utility bills up-to-date. This just means good has more ways of declaring itself and so does evil. The numbers of people wanting to be heard have not changed over the centuries, the tools to be heard have.

One hopes that most of the people that we truly know and love contribute more to the information side of our lives and less to the noise.

“… Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows …”
—”Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 15 asks, “‘Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.’—Gertrude Stein”