​by Philip Monte Verde

The protests around the killing of George Floyd have brought a lot of things into the public conversation. Though first and foremost about police brutality against black people, the wider conversation involves power, biases, and inequality. Discussions about race, long taboo especially in well-meaning white communities, are being had at an unprecedented rate.

The fact that these protests and conversations are happening in the first place speak to the upheavals in culture. Long suppressed, so-called 'minority' groups are speaking louder and louder. This is a great thing, and it has implications for social work. It drives home the point that we and our organizations need to not only recognize other cultures and power imbalances, but we must seek to change our own behavior. This is done both for reasons of social justice, and to better serve and partner with others. 

The actions a social worker can take in their partnerships with people from other cultures is known as cultural responsiveness. 

Bridging the Divide 

To understand what cultural responsiveness responds to, we should picture a canyon with two sides. On one side are the people in power: government, agencies, schools, businesses, wealth, etc. On the other side are the people out of power. Those that are oppressed and marginalized, but loaded with strengths and assets. An efficient society, one with humanity running at its best, would fill the entire canyon in with steel, removing all distance, difference, and barriers. That is the ultimate goal, but to start with a bridge must be built.

Social workers, among others, are the ones that build that bridge and run back and forth. Cultural responsiveness asks us to first acknowledge that as professionals we live primarily on the power side of the canyon. It is the world we know our way around best. The pavement between the power side and the start of the bridge is smooth and well maintained, with no barriers to access.

On the opposite side, the opposite is true. The road is loose gravel at best, pockmarked with holes. Systemic racism, segregation, redlining, and dis-empowerment have made sure of this.

What does travel through to this side are primarily service delivery ‘trucks’. Many have tried to send community development ‘vehicles’ in, but their success has been relatively limited. We all know of success stories, but these rags to riches tales are usually the exception, and often a narrative pushed in order to promote the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' fallacy.

Cultural responsiveness critiques the bridge; it is what points to the ground and says “the divide can not be repaired because the people cannot get across the bridge.”

Community Partnership

Theories of cultural responsiveness emphasize the need to demonstrate and build, communicate, and respond. To demonstrate and build, in our metaphor, would be to seek permission to set up camp on that other side of the bridge. This shows people that you do care deeply about their well-being beyond mere survival, and builds trust by validating peoples’ culture and strengths (Gay 2002). Vitally, permission to demonstrate and build must be granted by the community, rather than imposed on them.

Next comes cross-cultural communications. Social workers are carriers of messages from the power side. But these messages were historically crafted by those whose primary experiences occurred on the power side, and are not always well-received or clearly articulated. It is up to social workers as the bridge runners to adjust our communication, not the responsibility of the ‘recipients’.

Adjusting ourselves to communicate cross-culturally has an additional benefit. In the process we shift away from the expert-client relationship of telling into a more egalitarian relationship that includes listening. Cross-cultural communication does not just mean learning the words of a language, but beginning to understand a person and a community’s “ways of knowing, being, and doing” (Green, Bennett, & Betteridge, 2016, para. 7).

Demonstrating caring, building trust, perfecting cross-cultural communication, these are all ways of responding. We have crossed over to the other side of the bridge and will necessarily return to the power side changed. We return with knowledge of the culture and strengths of the people we met.

We have thought critically and reached conclusions on how the services that those on the power side would like to transport over can be delivered with efficiency. But more importantly than that, culturally responsive social work labors along side the community to fill in the pot holes, erode the barriers, and pave the way for those on the ‘other’ side to access the power side.

References
Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education. 53(2), 106-116.
Green, S., Bennett, B., Betteridge, S. (2016). Cultural responsiveness and social work – a discussion. Social Alternatives. 35(4), 66-72.
Monte Verde, P. (2020). Culturally Responsive Social Work with Refugees. (Unpublished master's thesis). Nazareth College, Rochester, New York.

by Philip Monte Verde

So much of my thinking generally is in support of I don't know. Yes, to be sure, I like to critique and note where ideas and practices fail. And no, I do not usually fill that newly created gap with new answers. Perhaps you could argue "what good are you doing then Philip? Others are out here trying, what are you adding by tearing down?"

I don't know, and that is ok. Individual solutions don't have to be up to me nor, and this make come as a relief, up to you. It may feel like there is pressure to have an answer, but that is in your head. We are a world of nearly eight billion, if you or I do not have the solution, there are others who can take a stab at it.

This is why I believe strongly in ideas like cultural responsiveness and diversity of thought. It's not just that it is 'fair' to let other people lead fulfilling lives, but that we reap benefits when they do. Bringing in additional perspectives from other cultures has been shown time and again to lead to the answers that I or you personally do not have. It is a way to curb group think, and freshen up old ideas.

I do not know the answer to the many serious questions that exist now and those that are opened up by new critique. But someone does, or even better, a group of someones can figure them out. Rather than answer the questions, I would prefer to facilitate environments where diversity of thought can emerge.

Questionable decision making in the past has come back to haunt us in many serious ways. Those decisions were often made by a narrow body of people. Opening up to new answers and new ways of doing things is I don't know, maybe the answer?

As a young man moves into middle adulthood in the United States, his so-called prime, he tends to go down one of two paths. If his fortunes are bad, then the vigorous youthful anger crystallizes into nigh unbreakable bitterness. If fortune has smiled her crooked teeth his way, he soon buys into the cult-cum-culture of professional ambition. Charles Kane, Man of the Roaring Twenties, trades in his political dissidence for the arm of the president’s daughter.

Perhaps some man, somewhere, can carry both ambition and contentment. Indeed perhaps some man, somewhere from sea to shining sea, can be ambitious, see that ambition faceplant on the pavement, sit up criss-cross-applesauce and say “I am more than fine just where I am.” I have not met that man, I am not that man, and if you’ve followed this essay so far you know Citizen Kane is not that man.

With his public image secure, and an imminent election as governor days away, Charles decides to open the past’s crypt. In a warehouse on the other side of town are all the belongings from his childhood cabin, shipped in in wooden crates like priceless statues. Had he made it to that warehouse that day, surely he would have encountered Rosebud. Perhaps there, running his hands over rusted iron rails and chipping red paint he would have had an epiphany. He may have remembered the boy he once was, the one denied a chance to transition to adulthood. Possibly Kane may have vowed to use his forthcoming power to ensure that children everywhere were allowed to pursue their own dreams, and heed not the dictates of politicians, ad men, and financial advisers. Instead he meets his second wife.

I mean no misogyny by that last statement. Susan Alexander Kane is innocent of all crimes. Innocence, to Kane’s self-absorbed line of thought, is Susan’s primary quality. On that chance meeting in the street he is attracted to her firstly because she has never heard of him. He is relieved of the pressure to be The Man Who Acts; the pressure to be the one all faces turn to. Nostalgic for his never lived life, Susan’s youth becomes the drafting table on which he designs the life he would have lived. With Susan’s throwaway comment that she wanted to be an opera singer, but that her mother said getting a job might be better, Kane is filled with misplaced indignation. In body he is in her apartment, listening to her play the piano and sing, but in mind he has flown to Colorado.

Beyond those first few seconds on the street, Charles is never fully present with Susan. In 'liberating' her from the demands of dream-crushing adulthood, Kane imitates the mother, the father, and the banker that earlier determined his life. He builds a grand opera house for her to sing in, and the world’s stateliest birdcage to contain her. He is as deaf to her desires as he is tone deaf to her voice. For it was not motherly abandonment that ripped Susan from her dream, it was prudent motherly advice. Susan was as good at singing as boy Charlie was at sledding.

Kane never had that warehouse epiphany. His efforts to guide and control Susan’s musical career are a bastardization of the dreams of our childhood. One need only to watch a child alone at play to see this. A child’s life is marked by exploration and curiosity. Kids will try out and abandon this project or that. They will quite literally throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. But a child’s underdeveloped muscles are no match for the force of adulthood. We are all ripped from our playgrounds at one point or another. Rebecca Solnit tells of one family’s excursion to the Grand Canyon. At every scenic vista the family piles out. The adults look across at vast breadth, in awe of how the Colorado River has conquered the terrain. The children, by contrast, look at the “bones, pine cones, sparkly sandstone” at their feet. They are content on the ground, and will remain so until our voices telling them to look up and look out become loud enough.

Mastery and Control. The largest natural features, the tallest buildings, and the biggest personalities. This is what appears on our postage stamps. In Dubai, where little human culture existed prior to this century, Mastery and Control is that hollow grandiosity that the billionaires have imported. Our inner child may want to play, but our outer adult will accept only victory. Success, adoration, and the conquering of goals allows us to momentarily scream “I am something!” back at a universe that consistently reminds us in monotone that we are nothing.

After so many years of being his project, Susan Alexander walks out on Kane. There is a moment, as she is packing her luggage, when it appears that Kane has finally seen that she is an independent human being. Having her voice recognized being all Susan really wanted, she hesitates. Epiphany was close again, but it did not come that second for Kane. His “you can’t do this to me” is enough to solidify her decision. They were the exact words he would have said to his mother and father all those years back, had he known what was to become of his life. Seeing the back of her, he destroys her bedroom in adultish rage. Manly anger brings down the shelves, smashes the hand-crafted Persian vases, upends the finest oak side-tables. But upon finding a simple snow globe, Kane is slugged in the gut. It is in that moment, with the distraction of Susan Alexander now past, that Kane metaphorically finds his way to the warehouse. Too old now to do a thing about it, Charlie Kane approaches the borderlands between the lives we construct and the truth we miss.

As bell hooks writes: “The patriarchal manhood that was supposed to satisfy does not. And by the time this awareness emerges, most patriarchal men are isolated and alienated; they cannot go back and reclaim a past happiness or joy, nor can they go forward. To go forward they would need to repudiate the patriarchal thinking that their identity is based on.”

Charles Foster Kane does not live to repudiate anything. The idea that we men are merely reacting to forces around us is unfathomable to a culture that so prizes action. In the end Kane has only regret. He does not order his papers to publish from the Deathbed of the Editor a letter to the boys and men, and girls, women, and citizens of the world informing them that we have been doing it all wrong. He has run out of time to flesh out the thought that begins with “Rosebud.” And the media men that opened the movie, the men so much responsible for the stories we tell ourselves and one another, shrug their shoulders and declare “I guess we’ll never know.”



Referenced herein:

hooks, b. (2004). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square Press
Solnit, R. (2005). A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Viking

by Kate Caraway and Philip Monte Verde

Kate:

For a demon, he is beautiful. Framed by unnaturally large flowers at a golden dawn or dusk, he looks wistful. Perhaps mournful. Does he have a flower in his hair? In spite of his clearly delineated muscles, his sitting position is not a powerful one. He looks as if he has been bested by something; is he regrouping, resting? Plotting? Or does he have nothing left to do?

The green tint of his skin, his thick neck, and his long, steep jawbone seem to be suggestions of otherworldliness. But the emotion on his face is human. The beauty of his form is a human beauty. Nothing about him, neither himself nor his environment, hints at evil. He is not a jarring presence in the landscape; the color of his skin and the color of the sky are combined in the big flowers. He's a part of the world we see him in. It is a colorful, vibrant, living world. A warm wind blows his hair back, perhaps shifting the flowers beside him. But he is still.

He's the most precisely-painted thing in a collage-like setting, as if he's a real person sitting in front of a mosaic. The light on his body is painted smoothly, showing the specifics right down to the joints of his fingers. Different from the flowers that look assembled from scraps of paper, and different from the pixellated blur of the sky. Care has been taken with this demon, and he is weighted with cares himself. He seems elevated, sitting on a mountaintop, and yet there is a heaviness to him, an indelicacy to the scene, that is anything but carefree.

-

Philip:

It was only after encountering Seated Demon and feeling inspired to write about its artist, the Russian Mikhail Vrubel, that I made a personal connection. This whole time I have been writing about similar themes: abyss, lifeless voids, monsters we can’t quite understand. The pattern was not deliberate, rather just me writing what was on my mind. The analysis of that I will save for my therapist. The sudden tracking of this pattern, however, helped me empathize with Vrubel. 

For a decade this demon seemed to be all the artist could think about. He sketched the demon, he sculpted it, and he painted it. In his masterpiece, at the apex of his obsession, he shows the demon sitting in the sunset contemplating ultimate loss.

There is something so attractive about Russian culture. The country itself is one of Western familiarity and Siberian forest mystery. European culture laps up on St. Petersburg’s boggy edges in the west of the country. Its influence pushes in from the shores, as it does now on every continent of this earth. But as it advances it meets a different force coming from the east. It is a certain mentality that emerges from the dark woods, where dense pine canopies blot out the sun. No matter how much an outsider studies Russian history, this mentality can’t be fully comprehended; can’t be made tangible. At least I have had no luck in the pursuit.

Spend an hour reading a Tolstoy novel and you will encounter a character saying “ah, but what is to be done?” In the West, in the United States, this would be a call to action. “Ok, what’s our plan?” In Russia it is a rhetorical question. It is a phrase of acceptance. It says “yes, that is how it is, to be sure, but we can’t change that, so let’s move on.”

The demon that so obsessed Mikhail Vrubel’s mind is an illustration of the 1842 poem Demon by Mikhail Lermontov. Lermontov’s demon is an immortal being who wanders the Caucasus Mountains. He is a brutal tyrant, for immortality brings with it strength, but it also brings a curse to be alone. Heretofore unknown emotion stirs in him when he sees the beautiful Princess Tamara dancing at her wedding. Force being the only tool in the demon’s belt, he destroys the husband. Tamara (apparently forgiving him for that) falls for the demon, and sees in him not the Devil, but a tortured soul. She holds a belief that there is a human being beneath his rough exterior that just needs to be brought out. She’s right, and for a second she sees that human man. But for only a second. For this is Russia, land of few happy endings. The demon’s kiss is fire and it kills her.​

by Philip Monte Verde

​The man Laura is singing to doesn’t quite get it, and how could he? We live our lives independently, cut off irrevocably from one another since the day they snipped the umbilical cord. The most empathetic of us still don’t know one percent of what is going on in our closest loved one’s head. This is the defining struggle of human relations.

("The Beast" by Laura Marling - Spotify link, YouTube link)

What Laura has been exposed to, as we arrive on the scene, is something he does not yet understand. Something foreign to him. Flashes of it in the mirror that he thinks are just tricks of the eye. Because he has not lived through what she has, he can not comprehend the change that has come over her. His context is not her inner reality, it is his daily, normal life. The changes confound him. What comes next he is wholly unprepared for.

To be fair, she tried to prevent this. For hours in anticipation of this moment, she has been scouring her insides for something different. She has rifled through her DNA for a certain power, for the strength of her ancestors. She tried to call on the might of the goddess who predates measured time. She sunk a line for her, in hope, but that baited hook plunged so deep didn’t pull up what she was looking for. It pulled up what she got instead.

She got the Beast. She is no longer the angler in control of the situation. Laura is the one bound by the nylon string, and it is the monster that pulls her in.

by Philip Monte Verde

Picture yourself in a one seat submarine, with a lone beam shining out on the deepest ocean floor. It is 3.8 billion years ago and you, dear time traveller, are staring at a hydrothermal vent gushing out piping hot water. Miles of skull-crushing water above you an Earth you wouldn’t recognize is being peppered with meteorites and bursting with volcanoes. Neither above or below is a place to find love or hope or connection.

Absolute silence; the silence of the unliving.

Reach your right hand over and press the light green button on your submarine control panel. The one that places the magnifying lens atop your viewing window. Pivot your camera just to the upper left of the vent opening. Consistent lines of hydrogen sulfide wave blurrily past the screen. They’re dotted here and there by copper and zinc atoms.

Patiently hold your gaze on that spot and await your reward. There it is, suddenly in your vision: Life. After millennia of streaming out without result, the right combination of a dozen different chemicals connected in the right order and a cell was created. She is Eve, and she is the great, great, great times infinity grandmother of you and I. She is the matriarch of the trees in the forest and the fish in the sea. She is the mother of the disease and of the cure. Hello mama.

For a little while she just sits there, being present. In front of you is all of life. Everyone who has ever been and who will ever be were united and contained in a squishy little bit invisible to the naked eye. Everyone in Canada, in Cancun, in Calcutta, in your city and in mine. Every bone in every graveyard packed in like sardines. Packed in with every sardine. We were once one.

And then, tragically, Eve split in two. She begat Adam who begat Abel who begat Yasmin who begat Sophia who begat Joe, Todd, Tyler, Ahmed, and Nicole. For there was another rider in that cell alongside all of us. Hidden deep within that first string of DNA was an urge to keep going. That urge, the essence of life, decided early on that it had worked too hard to get here to exit the universe’s stage with the expiration of Eve’s flimsy body.

Earthly life has since gone out in an incalculable number of directions. It has risen out of the deep dark sea and crawled onto land, where it grips into the soil or pushes off into the air. Soon it will begin conquering other planets. It will go and it will go and it may never stop.

But an interesting thing happened not too long after the birth, life, and death of Eve. The cells had gone on splitting for many generations. They ventured further and further from the birth vent and banged against one another without thinking anything of it. Until one day a particular cell collided with another and instead of bouncing or bursting, they connected. This connection, two bodies becoming one, was as vital to our development as that moment when one body became two.

And it goes to illustrate a fundamental conflict in our hearts, our souls, our personal essences. As you sit there in your submarine, gazing at Eve, you surely can feel it. You have a deep, deep affinity for her, as you may for your own mother, your dog, your daughter, or the oak tree in your yard. You, we, desire connection. We go crazy without it. We will connect with a sexual partner in an urge to replicate that moment when we were united in Eve. But in doing so we make the same tragic mistake that pulled us so far away from original unity: we create a new life.

​

Published originally in six parts on the Tumblr

“And if thou gaze long into an abyss,
the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

Sometimes you’ll get lost in each other’s eyes. There you might stay for a week to ten days, like the common cold, or a honeymoon.

The abyss isn’t a movie, it isn’t a brand, nor a tar-pit-tourist-attraction. It is like a cave, or a hole in the ground, but not entirely. It is not by safety rope that you descend into the abyss, but in the head over heels tumble that follows a hard shove. Spinning and twisting is how you enter the darkness.

-

We all get shoved. Life, in all its survival of the fittest, can be seen as one constant shoving match. The minutiae or gargantua of anxieties, the sudden trauma, or the fearful consideration of the future all can send us spinning. Most will struggle to escape, with temporary success. What the abyss holds for them is merely put off until another day. And the abyss, now having a taste for you, will only grow hungrier and more aggressive week to month. Others believe they can control their descent, deny they are being tossed about. Folly. The abyss is pitch black, it doesn’t matter which way your toes are pointing.

​-
​

​I do not know where the abyss resides. I have seen it in my bedroom and tried to hide from it under my pillow. I have seen it while driving in my car, I have seen it while soaking in the shower. I have seen it, on occasion in the faces of others. Either side of a forced smile, it hides with the mites in wrinkles and dimples.

We humans, so spatial, so organized, have mapped out the brain. The cerebellum, the hypothalamus, and all the lobes have been assigned functions. Computers are made in our image, or perhaps our idea of ourselves are made in theirs. Every inch of grey defined; no room in the skull for the incomprehensible.

-

But I have seen the incomprehensible, perhaps you have too. The abyss exists, and sometimes it comes to you. Tentacled arms reach out menacingly, demandingly. What is it it so greedily demands? Perhaps it is material goods. You fling televisions and all-inclusive vacations at it. Cheap sugar highs and empty calories, no, it demands more. You lose time and space for others, the tentacles have grabbed control of the wheel. The abyss has transformed from black nothing into a red demon. Anything can happen now: sadness, frustration, your anger turns outward. Violence works too, red blood leaving no stain on the demon’s arms.

-

How do we deal with this abyss, before it rises out and consumes us all? If the hole in the ground can’t be avoided and you fall in, or if you walk in, or even if you dive in, what then? Well, I say explore it. It is dark in there, but there is no such thing as empty. Ignore the reputation of the abyss, make room for a second impression. For it is no alien, nor any demon inside you, those tentacles are your own. I know this is difficult. You have jobs to work, children to rear, bridal and baby showers to attend. There is little time in the Age of Busyness for self-exploration and introspection. And even less so when we believe there is no meaning. But is this so?

-
​
There is a why behind everything, I think. This seemingly senseless universe, full of scattered violence, and randomly distributed luck, it must have a why. All the atoms, molecules, protons and electrons that have gathered around you and among you must have a why. The abyss can’t be read on a CT scan, so studies of it are not peer-reviewed, they are personal. Hiding in that blackness, somewhere in your mind, are the reasons for everything you do. Etched in its walls is the story of your life. The effects of every interaction you’ve had with people and nature are grooves your fingers can touch, if you just reach out.

The abyss is not a dark hole looking to consume you. It is not a bottomless pit, it is an endless gift. And to think, it has been there all along.

by Philip Monte Verde

Today's question:

Someone I'm Facebook friends with always posts about how her husband wont let her have certain friends, he won't let her get a drivers license, or let people watch their kids that HE doesn't approve of. How do I tell her this is abuse?

Intimate partner violence is far more complex and far more common than we think. There are professionals who would be far better at addressing this topic than I would. Willow for example here in Rochester, and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence nationally. Disclaimer stated, I've studied the subject a bit and have some thoughts. 

First, it is important to address your own expectations. You aren't going to "save" this person, especially as they may not want to be saved. Getting into a relationship is easy. Getting into a bad relationship is ABSURDLY easy. And once you're in, you're invested. I've always understood this best through an economics term (wait, don't close this tab yet!) called the sunk cost fallacy. In this scenario someone who has already invested heavily in a business will continue to do so long after the business starts to lose money. The rational thing in these situations would be to cut the losses and move on. But we're humans and not emotionless robots, so we continue to invest in the hope that things will turn around. We chase good money after bad, rather than admit that we wasted our money. In relationships we are afraid to admit that we wasted our time, our energy, and our emotional reserves. The fear of admitting defeat and starting over are often greater than the pain we are going through. This is especially true the less overt the abuse is.

Next, let's focus on what your friend is doing. We often use Facebook as a place to vent and receive reassuring words from friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and sometimes that creepy guy who just wanted to look at your pictures. It may not be the best use of the platform, but it's a human one. Your friend may be stuck in a life that she can't get out of, and venting just may be how she handles it. It's natural to think less of your problems once you've got them off your chest. Because, well, objects weigh less on you when they aren't sitting on your chest. Temporarily free of that burden, your friend may react harshly to you criticizing her husband. Her Facebook posts may be the entirety of the bad he does, and with that subtracted she may see only the good left in him and defend him.

I know you are eager to jump on in and tell her that she is being abused. That is natural to anyone with a good heart. You may also want to suggest that she leave him, another natural impulse. But with such a sensitive topic we have to think how our words are being perceived, and how to make the best use of them. Instead of doling out one-size-fits-all advice we need to understand your friend's circumstances. This means finding out more information than comes from her Facebook posts. This means being a friend. 

​
​If there is a greater social need than to be heard and be understood I cannot name it. A genuine "how are you?" given not out of supermarket checkout line formality but with honest-to-goodness curiosity is like presenting a gift. It is also an excellent place to start with your friend, and just about the best use of Facebook Messenger. From there, using active listening skills and asking follow up questions you can build trust and rapport with your friend.

Something else you could say:
 
"I see from your posts you've been having a rough time." Simple really, note that it isn't even a question. I didn't add "are you ok?", which invites a conversation-stopping yes or no answer. Rather it is an invitation for your friend to expand on what has been troubling them. Going down this path you will hopefully find out more and more about her situation. Judging by her use of Facebook posts, she may be more than eager to share.
 
As this process continues you may face the impulse to jump in with an opinion. It's important to restrain yourself a bit. I suggest thinking about how much you enjoy when people who don't know you well tell you you are doing everything wrong and should change your lifestyle radically. Yeah, don't like that much, do you? Instead people need to come to conclusions on their own. In my personal experience this is how I've gotten the most out of therapists. I yap and yap about what is bugging me, they wait for a lull and ask a poignant question, I consider how what they've asked fits in with my line of thinking, and yap some more until I reach some breakthrough. Then I go home thinking that I solved my problem on my own and that therapy is a waste of money.

Her having a breakthrough and taking steps to regain control of her life is not going to happen immediately. Even with your best efforts it may not happen at all. But to me, a life not spent being there for others is a life wasted. So talk to your friend. Not as someone playing a Hollywood superhero, that is fiction. Nor as someone who knows what's best for everyone, that is annoying. But as a human on equal terms. You may even gain an offline friend out of it.

by Philip Monte Verde

"It is death that is spinning the globe."

Death is our common companion. The well-meaning protectors are misguided in their reasoning for removing cinematic death and violence from theater and television. They wrongly seek to preserve innocent minds as they would fine china, never letting them out into the world to acquire a few scratches. But although the rationale of the protectors is off, their ends should probably be met. For the scripted and acted deaths are miles from reality.

While I'm sure I had seen a hundred 'deaths' on television before then, those of knights, cowboys, and space-invaders, it was the deaths of my grandmothers that first exposed mortality to me. The first grandmother I saw made up artificially and surrounded by flowers in her casket. The second grandmother I saw frozen, twisted and real in her hospital bed. These are two images I will never be able to get out of my head, nor should I even try.

These are not the images we see from our living room sofas or reserved-in-advance recliner-style AMC movie theater seats. Here final words of encouragement for the living are uttered by an actor holding the wound in their chest before their head droops as if for a nap. Here the blood of the anonymous conquered is splattered upwards, and the camera pan follows to show the gnarled, dark face of the antagonist or the handsome, white-toothed face of the protagonist. The slumped actor is a minor plot point, and the death of the extra is an insignificant blink; a quickly snuffed candle. While the film crew, whether HBO or CNN, packs up to follow the fighting down the road, human beings lay moaning or silenced in open fields and shell-pocked streets. Whether they are portrayed in our fiction or our non-fiction as the good dead guys or the bad dead guys matters nil to the weeping families, the families that must mourn them if they died, or tend to their emotional and physical damage if they lived.

One would think this would be perfect material for big and small screens alike. Our most common form of storytelling is that of the redemptive hero. He, still rarely she, who has had defeat laid on him, brick by brick, but manages to miraculously find the strength to burst through the masonry to triumph, until the next episode. What a way to build sympathy for the hero it would be then to show the common soldier in the post-op ward reaching to scratch a phantom itch in the pocket of air his arm had once filled. Or show the aged grandmother, hunched over a wood table, a long curl of ash running from the cigarette she lit and forgot in her worry of what to do with the orphaned grandchildren obliviously playing tag in the kitchen. Show the sleepless nights that follow the trauma of wartime rape. Show the pitiful efforts of the surviving villagers to remove rubble to reopen the bakery.

What sympathy these scenes would build if, indeed, that were the goal. The sad truth of it all is an elephant that has been stomping about the room unacknowledged for centuries. Building sympathy for the redemptive hero is not and has never been the goal. Tug on the high-cheek boned face of the knight whose armor shines through mud and blood and you will find his tan-but-not-too-tan skin peels off under your fingers. Gasp when you look up and see the sweaty, disheveled beard, hideous scars and wild, black eyes staring at you. For your hero and your villain are the same man. They are both yours, and they are you.

For in the two hours that The Joker holds an entire city at his mercy, we ride shotgun and feel that power vicariously. While Popeye fumbles for a can of spinach, we project on Bluto the Rapist "our own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness or lust" and revel in the evil of it all. For fifty eight minutes in a Game of Thrones episode we indulge in the slaughter of the extras, before Jon Snow sends the baddies retreating until next week. He suppresses the evil we created in the first fifty eight, and in the final two minutes we have room to repress again our inner tendencies.

He who went outside the power structure in greed and lust (the criminal), is pushed back by he that went outside the power structure for more noble aims (the vigilante). Credits roll before we have a second to ponder how we got there. The lights come back up before we can consider how the villain was created, why we tune in every week for the slaughter, or an alternative way to fight evil beyond the violent methods that evil naturally prefers.

(quotes from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Myth of Redemptive Violence)

by Philip Monte Verde

​"How do you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" This quote from the ancient philosopher Meno appears on page four of "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but for author Rebecca Solnit it may as well have been the writing prompt at the top of each blank page on her word processor. Her book is full of self-described 'maps," attempts to demonstrate how she has navigated towards that undefined "thing." It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone at this point that incessant busyness and multitasking aren't the surest way to find that thing. That thing sneaks in in overlooked places. It takes the talent of being lost, that is making the conscious choice to be fully present.

Across the yard where I write is a 6-foot wooden fence. A spider, probably of zero consequences size-wise, has zig-zagged webs across the picket tips. This would hardly be worth breaking my book-review-narrative up had the little bug-eating bugger not then had the nerve to somehow propel its tiny body five feet off the fence and three feet down to the back of a chair in the grass. I can only pray that it is now making the scaling trek back up a wood slat, only to leap and leap again to create a web the size of which no one of its species could ever dream.

The point of that, of course, is that you have to look up sometimes. In particular you have to look up at 9:45 a.m., in late June, when the sun is breaking perfectly through the maple leaves to show off the long, thin hair of that one strand of web. Just time it right.

Looking up is a start anyways. "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark," Solnit councils. Leaving it ajar, perhaps then it is important to acknowledge the threshold exists, and proceed to walk through that opening. To truly be lost, and to find, may require getting up from the patio table, the deep sunk couch, or the ergonomically designed, highly adjustable, $949.99 Aeron desk chair by Herman Miller.

"Lose the whole world...get lost in it, and find your soul." We've been retracing the same maps. When we say 'follow in someone else's footsteps,' it is meant quite literally. It's an easy habit to get into. As an infant, we would be devoured by wolves, or their modern equivalent raccoons, if we didn't have older humans to protect us and for us to emulate. Like migrating elephants, we follow these older humans trunk to tail through the first quarter, or third, or half(!) of our lives. A midlife crisis, classically defined, can really occur at any age. It's the moment you raise your now jumbo-sized head up and see the savanna alongside the trail. To see your body has grown stronger (or weaker) and that you've made plenty of money (or not), but that your soul isn't carried on this caravan.