Millions

My dental hygieneist tries to scare me into flossing better by saying “there are MILLIONS” of bacteria on your teeth. I am not impressed. All numbers are relative, and this is a little like exclaiming “that brick is chipped!” when viewing a high brick wall a mile long.

“Millions” of bacteria, after all, are not the same as “millions of harmful bacteria”. And there are just as many or more body cells dealing with them. A minor thing that we have evolved to handle.

And, in context, millions doesn’t mean all that much. After all, I have over 30 TRILLION cells, and an almost equal number of quiet or symbiotic bacteria, not even mentioning viruses. A few on my teeth – relatively well-defended against as part of my outer membrane – hardly much to worry about .

We are an alarmist culture, always looking for “news” which is naturally not “ordinary”. We take for granted how well adapted we are for “normal” life. We worry as soon as some obscure tidbit is brought to our attention. This has become a culture with very little perspective .

I know that things can go wrong. I may get sick. At some point I shall certainly die. But I’ve learned it hardly serves my sanity to be alarmed all the time, often about things of very little immediate consequence .

Like those millions of tiny creatures in my mouth .

Tao-Chi

Or Shitao – translations are imperfect and names often change with careers. A Chinese painter contemporary with Reubens and Rembrandt who could not be more different. I’ve never really enjoyed Rubens, but I adore Rembrandt as a free spirit. Shitao is much more modern and kin to John Marin .

Whatever visual art may be in its many forms naturally reflects on its culture. Much of the Renaissance work now seems pretty boring in light of cinema, photography, AI, and slick advertising. The “shocking” impressionists are easily imitated by ubiquitous computer programs. What is a painter to do ?

I’ve gone my own way. I accept my various handicaps as part of what makes me unique. I try to correct a few things, work on fluidity and spontaneousness, be creative but not lose touch with the real world as I experience it .

There’s a great satisfaction in that. It’s why I’ve always admired the “literati” tradition. Although often observed in the breach, the ideal was of gentlemen of means who made pictures in their spare time and did not need to sell them. With a bit of philosophy thrown in .

So periodically I pull out my library volumes and admire some nearly life-size color reproductions. It truly helps me relax and create on my own blank sheets of mulberry paper .

Snowstorm

In this colder than normal winter, another large snowstorm has covered the area. It gives me a chance to reflect on my luck in living when and where I do .

Aboriginal inhabitants of America are often pictured in summer, and described as inhabiting Eden. Early colonists are shown as snug in log cabins. But in fact there was illness and famine, rarely enough heat, and little to do but wait out the season and hope for spring. Even a hundred years or so back there was often no electricity .

I now inhabit paradise. I expect there to be constant warmth, light, entertainment. Too much food, always fresh fruit and vegetables. Medical aid reliably available. People think it’s a great inconvenience to be “stuck at home” for even a day .

Until ten years or so ago I had to shovel a large driveway, but now I just walk behind my machine .

It’s always good to appreciate the best times, the finest weather. But perhaps it is more appropriate to give thanks for our technology and civilization when the natural world is less kindly. This morning I certainly do so .

Medical Crazy

Evolutionary nature is cruel and capricious. The only thing that matters in evolution is reproduction. There are lots of complicated ways for a species to achieve that, including various instincts and even altruisms. But an organism that achieves too great a success will overpopulate and die off. Highly successful strategies that worked for millennia can be destroyed in an instant of bad luck as happened to the dinosaurs .

Until recently, although some humans may have dreamed of “threescore and ten”, most adults died by forty, and most children did not become adults. Old women past menopause would have lost all evolutionary reason to exist were it not for the “grandmother theory” that they promoted culture and advantage to their genetically connected tribe .

These days the pampered masses have lost all sense of gratitude for the scientific miracles surrounding them. Most children do not die before becoming adults. Most adults live past forty. Many can extend prime years to eighty and beyond .

Instead it is a litany of how awful things have become. More children with problems (instead of being dead!), more adults with pain and incapacity (ditto!). Everyone thinks they should be a vibrant perfect thirty-five years old forever .

Nature always disagreed, and still does .

Quantity Lies

We may not exactly count “one, two, three, many”, but we do lose ourselves as numbers become immense. I think most of us understand 100, but 1 million is hard, and anything higher does become “many”. We can easily visualize odds at “one in a hundred”, but “one in a million” is practical infinity .

Our vast outreach of instantaneous knowledge and awareness has jumbled that picture. Odds of winning a lottery may be “one in 372 million”, but – as my wife claims – “somebody always wins”. We hear about that somebody all the time. Hey, it could be me !

With the unusual reported more than the commonplace, our perception of odds becomes strangely distorted. If chances of anything are truly one in a million, then in a country like ours 360 people (each one interviewed in a media moment) will have it happen to them. In a planet of 8 billion, 8,000 folks will. Suddenly it seems like an awful lot of people. Translated to our own surroundings the odds suddenly appear as likely as 50 or more percent .

That’s why anecdotal “evidence” in medicine, science, or society is so damaging. An anecdote seems real, a statistic kind of nebulous. We think “oh, a person just like me was affected”. Winning, losing. Then we act stupidly .

My antidote has always been “how many people whom I actually know have had this happening?” That is quite sobering, and puts odds into much better perspective .

Vision

Each one of our senses is miraculous and far more complex than we usually give credit for. I hesitate to claim I am primarily “visual” because I truly celebrate them all, but I am often greatly aware of what I see and how I perceive it .

Anyone who gives a moment of thought is amazed at colors, and lines, making sense of the environment by constructing objects in depth. Keenly tuned to any movement. Able to instantly assemble a worldview of depth and perception when we glance around. Focusing on anything for fight, flight, or manipulation. The list is endless, and there is no need to expand the craziness by trying to explain the mechanisms of the eyes, nerves, and brain .

My vision naturally works with everything else. If I hear a noise, I automatically try to see what caused it. Before I eat I view each morsel. When I walk I use my internal visual mapping to aim my steps and avoid bumping into things.

And I am somewhat frustrated when my eyes cannot help . The wind and cold surprise me. Internal issues scare me. Other times I use eyes unconsciously as when I read and my mind ignores all the intermediate processing from printed symbols to dreamlike thought .

Incredible. Miraculous. Instantaneous. Always available. And – unfortunately – prone to errors, incapacity, and age .

Beauty

Like ” wrong”, beauty is one of those concepts that can never be simply defined. It depends not only on environmental and cultural factors but also on the mood of the observer. We can often agree, but almost as often argue with others and even with ourselves .

It’s fairly safe to say that even considering beauty requires a sense of security within the observer _ you can hardly appreciate the loveliness of a forest while being chased by a bear. . Whether something is beautiful or not occurs way down on the scale of evolutionary fight or flight. A great deal of the time, most of us hardly notice it at all .

We assume that – like other odd traits – there must be SOME biological reason we can respond to beauty. Perhaps it helps social solidarity. Perhaps it is a shortcut to relaxation. Certainly nothing obvious .

I have noticed that in my own life the idea of beautiful has evolved as I age. When young, it was primarily biological. When older, mostly cultural. And now, in an elder, much more simply appreciation of all that is and how it fits together. A miraculous and – yes – extremely beautiful universe .

At least when I am happy, secure, and not doing too much .

Light Lessons

My wife usually gets her hair “done” in a salon,. When she gets home, there are inevitable complaints that it “looks different”. Of course – the lighting is changed .

There have always been different light effects – sunset, noon, overcast. And artificial from candles, gas jet, incandescent. In the era of LED, any “temperature” of red or blue or green or yellow mixture can be served up, bright or dim .

We deal with all this amazingly well. Red usually looks red. A landscape picture resembles itself in almost all conditions. But that should indicate to us just how amazing our vision is – both raw data gathering and interpretation .

Painters always knew this. Patrons who bought things done under “Northern light exposure” in studios rarely hung their purchases under similar conditions. Poor artists’ dimly lit barns had different lighting then when the work is hung in a brightly illuminated museum. And forget trying to recreate the conditions of “plein aire” .

My lesson is that much of our life is like this. We may think things are exactly the same, but only because our brains automatically adjust to what are objectively quite different events. It’s part of our amazing ability to compose and generalize, the core of our knowledge.

Not quite obvious, and easy to ignore. Until the hair looks entirely different …

Binocular

Old Dutch Master still lifes make you think you can lift flowers or bugs off the painted surface. Modern photographs have the same effect. Yet in a very real way, they do not match the reality we inhabit .

Two eyes let us see – especially nearby – in parallax to be able to judge depth. For distant objects, of course, we have other references like size and haze and perspective, but they can be quite deceptive. In the real world it has been important to us primates to be able to focus in this weird binocular manner to better use our hands for handling fruit and tools .

That is a long prologue to today’s rant about cults – religious, secular, or political. Cults have beliefs that are strictly monocular. They have little depth and allow by definition for no other viewpoint. The strictest cult outlooks don’t even let one move one’s head to get a better or different view – that’s the definition of “heresy” .

Current culture has unfortunately devolved into a set of cults. Perhaps a saving grace is that complex humans can believe in more than one cult – often contradictory – at the same time .

Binocular vision and its philosophic implications is a gift from the universe we should always acknowledge gratefully .

Age and Tide

There are multiple ways to turn any natural observation into a metaphor for our lives. Having lived near the sea for most of my life, I am well aware of tides. Age often leaves us casting about for glimmers of cosmic understanding wherever they may occur.

The most famous metaphor is of course King Canute, ordering the tide to cease. A symbol of the uselessness of trying to prevent the inevitable. More deeply, a warning of how stupid it looks to attempt what common sense knows is impossible .

But there is also the idea of ebb and flow, high and low, translated to good times and bad. There will be in any life joy and pain, both of which usually pass one to another in a complex but inevitable rhythm .

For an older person, however, there is yet another lesson, which relates to deceptive normality. The high water mark is indicated with only minor variations day to day and season to season. But suddenly that can change in storm or tsunami, and rage well beyond what we thought we understood as limits. Leaving behind destruction and _ of course _ death .

So here we are, metaphor in hand. Is this next problem merely a usual tide or something worse?

It’s easy to become anxious when the predictable breaks the rules .