Truth isn't Truth Anymore

The sky is blue,
The grass is green...

Or maybe not?

There doesn't seem to be much that we can agree on in the year of our Lord, 2023.  Things that seem clear and self-evident to one side of the political spectrum are rejected as fake and unsubstantiated by the other.

Is there still such a thing as verifiable truth and if so, where can we find it and how can we communicate it to others in a way that is understood and accepted?

That's the challenge I'm giving myself (Information Woman to the Rescue!) this month.  I want to explore the big ideas of truth and lies and how we can tell them apart and why it's really important that we figure this out.

This might involve exploring ideas of logical fallacies, confirmation bias, truth vs belief, facts, fiction, lies, exaggeration, bias, slant, persuasion, perception, propaganda, tribalism, authoritarianism, political movements and trends.  Some questions that I might explore could include:

Is everyone really entitled to their own opinions?

If everyone lies, is the speaking the truth worth the trouble?

Why do some lies persist despite ample proof that they are false?

Can people's minds actually be changed by being presented with verifiable truth?

And...What have I gotten myself into???

A May Basket of Media Messages

 Back in my elementary school days, on May 1, my mother would help me make May baskets to deliver to the neighbors.  When you live in farm country, "neighbors" are anyone within 2 or 3 miles of your house, or a half dozen homes or so.  I don't remember many details of how the baskets were made, or what they contained, I just remember the thrill of sneaking up, hanging the basket on the doorknob, knocking, (no one had doorbells) and then skittering away so you would not be seen.  

I've been constructing a May basket of sorts today, filled with information topics that I'd like to explore this month.  For as long as I've been alive, I've been collecting information, facts and ideas that I can put together to help me understand the world around me...a pretty typical human trait for sure, but I may be a little obsessive.  

I collected enough trivia over the years to earn a spot on the TV game show Jeopardy and I made a career as a teacher, librarian and professional development trainer in information technology.  Knowing things is really important to me, and helping people find the information they need is my life's mission.

Back in the days when I was climbing the shelves in the closet that served as our country school's library to find the "hard" books to read, I had a dream.  I dreamed that someday there would be a magical library where everything I wanted to read, everything I wanted to know, everything I wanted to understand would be available in one place that even short people would be able to reach.

I grew enough to reach the high shelves, eventually I had access to bigger and bigger libraries and I took college classes to help me manage a library on my own.  Still,  that dream was unrealized, but in the 1960s, quietly, the Internet was being developed and growing, finally emerging as the World Wide Web in the early 1990's and the possibility of my magical library at my fingertips seemed totally possible.

This could only be good, I thought at first and I became a websurfer, extraordinaire.  However if you find your way to Neverland, you are going to have to deal with Captain Hook; if you slip through the wardrobe door to Narnia, there is Jardis, the White Witch waiting to spoil your fun.  

The immense potential of the Internet opened the door to lots and lots of information accompanied by lots and lots of misinformation.  Something this powerful is bound to attract powerful forces.  The dream can also be a nightmare.

Without any big hopes of turning the tide of misinformation, I'm going to be one small voice in the wilderness, trying to make a difference and help people distinguish truth from lies and facts from fallacies.  

In my next post I'm going to share my list of potential topics to cover this month--to put in my "May Basket".  I wonder where my wonderings will take me...I hope you'll join me...I'm going to need your help!

April is Poetry Month: Day 30 and the journey has reached its destination!

A Cup of Tea

Smoky amber in a cup.  

Wisps of memory rising with the steam.

Snowflakes just beyond the lacy curtain, 

Secret radiance to dispel the cold.

Such comfort was not always mine.

No lace curtains in our farmhouse--

Hardly more than a shanty.

Three rooms and an entry down, 

A slope-roofed bedroom up

Where my sisters slept with

Icicles through February.

My mother gave me green tea 

In an antique china cup. 

I was only four or five, but privileged...

Entrusted as I was with china and ritual.

I don't remember what she said,

I just remember Lipton's 

Was a passport to another place,

And someday I would go there.

I have a samovar from Asia.

I have a teacup from Siam.

A copper mug from Queenstown in Tasmania.

Leaves in a tin embossed with words I cannot read,

But they can read them in Taiwan.

The world is such a massive, huge, tremendous place 

And I have circumnavigated it.

It was much more difficult for Drake; 

Magellan, too.

But adventure is adventure.

Where you'll get a taste for it--

Who knows?

For me it was a rundown farmhouse on a hill,

I was only four or five...

                                                Jean Doolittle

    I'm going to close out the April poetry journey with one of the first poems I wrote that gave me a sense of why I write and maybe a small idea of why others write as well.  

    We spend a lot of our time growing up trying to figure out who we are, what motivates us and where we want to go. We wonder about our unique hopes, dreams, loves and hates.  

    In a world where coffee shops are ubiquitous and (at least during the earlier hours of the day) coffee is a social lubricant, I eschew the java and prefer tea.  I wrote this poem to explore this preference and in the process, I had an epiphany.  While creating the previous day's entry, I watched Mark Vinz talking about his process and he cited James Joyce's concept of epiphanies..."a sudden spiritual manifestation", in other words "a visionary moment of sudden insight that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world"

    So, in writing about how tea became important to me, I felt how the experience may have created in me the desire from a very young age to see all the wonders of the world.  My childhood was limited by the world you could see between morning milking and evening milking; but I knew that the world was out there.

    At this time in my life, I have been to 48 states and 45 countries.  I have lived on the shore of the South Pacific Ocean, seen the peaks of the Himalayas and slept in the Afghanistan desert.  There is still more to see, more to discover and always more poems to broaden our horizons.

April is Poetry Month: Day 29

Taylors Falls, MN May, 2019, J. Doolittle

Angler  

 

 He hadn’t been at it very long when he discovered that he was becoming addicted to something. It wasn’t the fish,which he didn’t like to handle or eat, and it wasn’t the other fishermen, which he disliked even more. He simply had to go, and the fact that he hadn’t learned to swim and was still terribly afraid of drowning did not stop him from heading into deeper and deeper water each time, even though he knew there were few fish in water of that depth. For one reason or another he filed the sharp barbs off his hooks, and sometimes he forgot to put on the bait.
    He knew someday he would use up all his line, and the thought still bothered him from time to time.  But still he fished on alone, deeper and deeper into the dark green shadows, for he also knew that no matter how much line he let out,he would never reach bottom.

                                                                            Mark Vinz (1942-)

From: Late Night Calls, Mark Vinz, New Rivers Press, 1992.

    For 39 years,  Vinz was a professor at Moorhead State College (later Moorhead State University, now Minnesota State University Moorhead). He joined the faculty in 1968, the same year I was a freshman there. I never had a class with him, but he had enough of a reputation as a poet that his name carried weight on campus, as he worked with and developed a close friendship with Tom McGrath, an already notable poet.

    The words above are structured as a prose poem, which doesn't look much like a poem to most of us...it is in the reading out loud that the poem emerges.  I like to think of myself as flexible and open-minded and yet, after living with poems daily throughout this month, looking at this and the other poems in the book, left me a little fidgety and unsettled.  What, I wondered, would it feel like if it was arranged more like a typical poem?  Could those sentences line up "properly" or would they be disobedient as most prose would be, forced into an unnatural shape? 

     It shaped up quite easily.  Did I have a right to impose my will on his words?  I think once a writer releases their work onto a page, the words take on a life of their own that interacts with the reader.  It is in that interchange that meaning is made.  My little exercise helped me bring meaning to this little story and linger in thought in those "dark green shadows" that he evokes.  I wonder what you think about my revision...

Angler

He hadn’t been at it very long when he discovered
That he was becoming addicted to something

It wasn’t the fish,
Which he didn’t like to handle oreat,
And it wasn’t the other fishermen,
Which he disliked even more.

He simply had to go.

And the fact that he hadn’t learned to swim
And was still terribly afraid of drowning
Did not stop him from heading into 
Deeper and deeper water each time,
Even though he knew there were few fish 
In water of that depth.

For one reason or another he filed the sharp barbs
Off his hooks,
And sometimes he forgot to put on the bait.

He knew someday he would use up all his line, 
And the thought still bothered him from time to time.
But still he fished on alone,
Deeper and deeper into the dark green shadows,
For he also knew that no matter how much line he let out,

He would never reach bottom.

                                            Mark Vinz

The Wadena County Historical Society produced this in-depth interview with Mark Vinz, sharing his poetry and his ideas on the subject.  

April is Poetry Month: Day 28

 A Blessing

BY JAMES WRIGHT (1927-1980)

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.   

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me   

And nuzzled my left hand.   

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

From: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 1975

    Another poet who died young, who understood despair and loneliness.  It's not necessary to live in pain and sadness to create art, but so often art is the phoenix that rises out of the ashes of suffering.  Would we have Sunflowers and Starry Nights if van Gogh had been a happy accountant or carefree aristocrat?  The Bloomsbury Review praised this poet-- "James Wright wasn't afraid to find out who he really was, no matter how frightening that self may have been. This is the essence of the pure, clear voice we encounter in his poems, and this is why James Wright endures."  

    I am grateful everyday that whether in joy or sorrow, there are artists around us bringing their vision and their beautiful messages to us through the works of their minds, their hearts and their hands. 

April is Poetry Month: Day 27

J.Doolittle, March 2016

 April

A bird chirped at my window this morning, 

And over the sky is drawn a light network of clouds.

Come,

Let us go out into the open,

For my heart leaps like a fish that is ready to spawn.

I will lie under the beech-trees,

Under the grey branches of the beech-trees,

In a blueness of little squills and crocuses,

I will lie among the little squills

And be discharged of this overcharge of beauty,

And that which is born shall be a joy to you

Who love me.

                            Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

From: A Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year, Edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, Batsford, 2020.

     Amy Lowell, from a rich, distinguished New England family, a spinster, an overweight, suspected lesbian, an admirer of Ezra Pound, outspoken and opinionated, recipient of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry after her early death at age 51, was a prolific poet and a proponent of the Imagist school, which promoted a return to classical values.

    Sometimes the little side trips I take into the poets' lives are as fascinating as anything they put on paper.  Who was she writing this poem to?  Was it the same person who inspired this short and lovely poem?  

Decades

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,

And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.

Now you are like morning bread,

Smooth and pleasant.

I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour

But I am completely nourished.

Below is a 3 minute video about her life.

April is Poetry Month: Day 26

 

The Owl and the Pussycat

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

   In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

   Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

   And sang to a small guitar,

“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

    What a beautiful Pussy you are,

         You are,

         You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

II

Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!

   How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

   But what shall we do for a ring?”

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

   To the land where the Bong-Tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

   With a ring at the end of his nose,

             His nose,

             His nose,

   With a ring at the end of his nose.

II

“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

   Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”

So they took it away, and were married next day

   By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

   Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

   They danced by the light of the moon,

             The moon,

             The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

                                                    Edward Lear 1812 – 1888

From: Poetry to read Out Loud, Edited by Robert Alden Rubin, Algonquin Books, 1993.

    This was such a cute book, The square shape, along with its brightly-colored dust jacket just called out..."read me, read me" but the choices made by the editor, Robert Alden Rubin,  left me a little cold.  

    Maybe I was in a bad mood.  Perhaps that's it--I found myself wondering if his mother called him ROBERT ALDEN!" when she sent him off to clean his room.  I'm not usually so churlish. But in the end, there are plenty of poems out there and he can pick his favorites and I can pick mine.  

    Perhaps if I just go eat some mince and slices of quince, everything will be fine! (Where's my runcible spoon??)