Pitch Fueled Utterances

Y cuantas veces..

Y cuantas veces, me he sentao,

A decirte lo que siento,

Y nunca me’ he’scuchao

It’s rare that one identifies a completely new emotion. The individual beaver is often surprised by emotions, this is a normal facet of life. One might be watching a television show about a river, and be taken aback by the particular beauty and scrumptiousness of a hewn piece of log. One might say, I want that. Or, a beaver might be moved to tears watching a television show where after a long struggle in a fjord, a beaver is reunited with his father and shares a touching moment before the arrival of death. These are standard emotions we experience from daily life.

But very recently I have begun to experience a new emotion. Of course these things are ethereal, but I suppose I could best describe it as a kind of befuddlement which leads to foreboding. I think this sensation results from a praxis which I have been employing for the greater part of my existence, when I first realized that I was a prig. Indeed it is how I got my nickname Sprig.

I was once bitten with the bug to travel far up the river, where the beavers were nothing like myself. Being young and solipsistic, my primary mistake was believing that all beavers were just like me. I thought that they would understand when I interrupted, took over conversations, and had better answers for everything under the sun. It turns out that I was the odd one out, as per my impetuousness, and thus I dedicated myself to the praxis of understanding.

The beavers of my clan, whom stayed in the same familial watering hole, grew in their knowledge of the technical aspects of improving the efficiency of their day to day dam building. But what they have not yet learned, and never will, is how to listen. At times my brother feigns listening, which is an improvement over his previous incarnation. Had it not been for a brief time in our youth, when he was still a complete asshole, that I introduced him to certain concepts of enlightenment- he would be intolerable to this very day. But he is prone to swims of fancy, when he becomes impassioned with his own certainty, he reverts back to the same bull-headed creature he has always been.

I have been working on a subtle path, a path that involves nuance. I am not completely without principle as a deconstructional post-modern beaver might be, but I use the tools of deconstruction to break apart ideas and look at them. I take a scientific approach, not the approach of scientific zealots like my father, but I refer to a process where I try as much as possible to separate my emotions and prejudices from ideas and examine them for their what-if’s and if-and’s. I take these what-if’s and if-and’s and imagine their effects on beaverkind, as opposed to some inversion where beaverkind becomes the beavered. What I do not do is get impassioned, raise my voice, talk over the other beavers, and round it off with an emotional manipulation tactic.

I’ve been working against these tendencies for most of my adult life. The other beavers of my clan have been advancing in other ways, but not in the sciences of empathy and listening.

This last bit of the emotional manipulation tactic seems to be a feature of their style of monommunication. One cannot call it co-mmunication. No, all of these interactions always end the same way. Namely, someone is too upset to want to talk further. Let’s change the subject, they say. Meanwhile I have barely said anything and was certainly not heard. It seems that the voracity by which they make their emotional pleas is supposed to convey to me that they care deeply about the issue which they are monommunicating.

My style is to ask questions and pose paradoxes. My father cares deeply about the environment, and he tells me with glee that Poland is planning to completely eliminate coal from their economy. Having lived in the former soviet block and having known a great many people from there, perhaps their perspective on it is not so rosy. I told him of the paradox I experienced in Germany, where every child and adult child wore a pin which read “Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!”, whilst professing with equal voracity the virtues eliminating fossil fuels. There are many what-if’s and if-and’s to be parsed from this paradox, as it touches at the heart of the matter. But proselytizers are never too interested in the paradoxes inherent in their utterances.

My father spoke of the virtue of the government forcing everyone to take the vaccine for the latest plague. “It’s the only way we’re going to end the pandemic!” He spoke passionately. I told him of a video I had watched 20 minutes of, which in its totality was more than four hours long. It was of armed service beavers talking about being forced to take this vaccine. None of them were happy about it, many of them were refusing. Those who refused were to be dishonorably discharged and will lose all of their benefits, regardless of what they had done or for how long they had served. This is the kind of thing he will never see on his nightly news broadcast.

“They should just take it, and if they don’t then they should be kicked out.” The paradox I raised is that many of them are serving because they believe in the defense of freedom. It’s the force aspect which bothers them. Freedom means the right to choose. Being forced to take a vaccine, or to essentially buy a product disguised as a vaccine, is the antithesis of what they believe they are fighting for. His defense was to reduce the entire complexity of the issue to the misnomer that we are forced to take the measles or other vaccines.

The same sort of merry-go-round was performed around the subject of employers being forced by the government to vaccinate their employees, or subject them to weekly tests for the plague. “God, they should just take it, and if they don’t, then other people will take their jobs!”. I explained to him that the part he did not see on his nightly news program was that it is already tabled that all employers, regardless of the size of their company, will be forced to vaccinate their employees. This would include myself, a company of one. I have already had the plague and I am fine. I did not get so personal as to ask him if he felt I should be forced to take the vaccine, as I know he has not examined his beliefs enough to come up with any answer that would not embarrass him and fuel an emotional conclusion to my interrogation.

“And how far will it go? Will we have to carry a vaccine passport? What else will be in there? Will I have to show that I’ve had all of my vaccines, measles, polio, etc, or get them again if I can’t prove it? Will I need to prove that I got the HPV vaccine to enter the Iroquois river? What other indicators of fitness will I be forced to produce, or lose my ability to interact in society? Do you not see yet that all of this is done in increments?” He dismissed my concerns as conspiracy theory. But he doesn’t know that it is already out there, public, but not on his nightly news program.

“In the old days,” He spoke, “… There was a thing called nationalism. If the government told you to do something, you did it!” I told him that having lived in both Prague and Berlin, my take on these matters is slightly different. I couldn’t help but to notice a glint of discordance in his eyes. He is a scientist, after all.

On the issue of the plague, I didn’t bother laying out the strategy of propaganda designed to keep the general population of beavers in the dark about the plague or the treatment of it, and to force them onto a system of forced vaccinations and into a system of societal fitness. I did raise the issue of everything by its proper name, it is not a vaccine but a gene therapy. For some curious reason, it occurs to me that many of these paradoxes arise from not calling things by their proper name. This point was completely lost on him, and I was a fool to table it.

I attempted to relate it to the Atomkraft/coal paradox in Germany, and the obvious strangling of society and economy that would ensue from such a regime. But the man is a scientist, having made his hay days in the 1960’s, and working in chemistry and metallurgy up until becoming a university professor in the early 1990’s. He is straight out of a Vonnegut book. “Science” will decide what is best for society. He said so much during his monommunication. His perspective on science is wide-eyed, blind to the corruption of science by wealth, power, and institutions. And the greater question which no beaver can answer, like a beautiful piece of soft pine which never disintegrates no matter how much you chew it- to what extent can science make make life better before making it worse? I am not able to raise these issues with my father. Science, or rather his conception of it, is his religion.

I am also not exactly concerned with his ultimate solutions, because he is old and has very little influence left to exert. I am more interested in him as a subject. How often does one get such a chance to observe the genuine article? In my case it seems very often. One could imagine an improv class, where one beaver was told his motivation, and the other beaver is meant to ask him questions.

The recent emotion I have been experiencing, a combination of befuddlement and foreboding has been springing out of many such interactions recently. It seems to me to be that it is because these interactions raise more questions than they resolve. I feel like if I were to be entertained, and the questions I ask answered with wisdom and dispassion, I might be able to avoid this dread. It’s not going to happen.

My father’s wife Gladys will reduce the whole of a complexity to tropes of easily dismissable proportions. She asked me to explain how the “diet” I am on works. It involves the management of insulin through timed eating and a few minor dietary modifications. “It’s hard to get enough calcium if you don’t drink milk.” She says. Or, “You’d need to eat a lot more carbs if you were out doing manual labor.” How could one respond to such utterances? Befuddlement and foreboding…

My brother’s election event, during which he hid his urge to cry, reminded me of something between a funeral and a popularity contest. A few close friends in suits at an odd hour, in a solemn courtroom, waiting for results that did not looks good for my brother. What was the nature of this occurrence? More befuddlement and foreboding.

Perhaps I have made strides in understanding this emotion by writing about it. The more I pursue the estuaries of compassion and understanding, the farther I get from being able to relate my ideas to the others. The more forms are produced by such chewings, the more alien my thoughts become to the beavers of my clan. So I keep them to myself. When I do speak I am dismissed, because I ask questions which have little relation to their own hewings and chewings.

It seems that even though I have returned to the familial watering hole, my soul continues to swim father up the river.

11/6/2021 USA