Monkey Business
July 23, 2013
During the summer weeks, "From the Director" will bring to you some of our favorite entries from previous years. Today's blog first appeared Aug. 24, 2012.
I hesitate to assert that my wife and I are hikers, but we certainly are avid walkers. Walking is a routine of our daily life; and it’s a highlight when we travel. Walking is the means by which we absorb the sights, sounds and smells of each locale, while faster modes of tourism pass us by.
One of my wife’s delights as we travel is to discover monkeys in the wild; so sometimes monkey sighting has been the goal of walks, for example, in Costa Rica and Panama. This has made us familiar with howler monkeys; and I’m sorry to say, it’s caused me to see parallels between howler monkeys and modern media.
The growls of the howler monkeys send messages through the treetops. One howler begins, and others forward the message for miles. I’ve been told by locals (I’m no expert) that the monkey culture doesn’t reward creativity and that there’s an expectation that the message at the end of the line is the same as it began.
Sort of like forwarding an email, photo or video; or sharing a posting on Facebook. Or like the wire services’ distribution of news through traditional media. It’s rare that anyone vets the information; and retractions or corrections are even rarer.
I read in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Lacuna that the most important thing about a story, and about a person, is what you don’t know, which gets to the heart of the weakness of much of modern media. Yes, because of the volume of information in today’s 24/7/365 “news” cycle with thousands of channels and the universal access to reporting news through social media, we’re likely to get most of the facts, eventually; but the salient and true facts are likely to be lost in the rush and the clutter.
Set at a time before television, Kingsolver’s protagonist in The Lacuna writes in 1946: “The newsmen leap on anything . . . The radio is the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can’t imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.”
However real that observation would have been then, it’s clear today that cable television, talk radio and the Internet have raised the talking-without-thinking effect to heights that would have been unimaginable in the 1940s.
Swimming Lessons
January 19, 2016
I found a place between Christmas and New Year’s Day that was out of Internet reach. For four days and three nights I spent most of the days in the water looking downward into an ocean of coral canyons surrounded by swarms of colorful fish, and much of the nights on the open deck of a catamaran looking up at a nearly full moon moving between stars and swirling clouds. Here is some of what I learned from experiences, rather than from Google, on those days.
First, flying fish really do fly, on average, about the length of a football field.
Second, sea urchins have an edible element, if the spiny critters are smoked in a fire of coconuts and palm fronds and then soaked in saltwater, and if you are either desperately marooned on some remote island or just trying to be nice to the local residents you just met who believe the urchin's slimy, salty core is a delicacy that hospitality requires be shared and graciousness demands be appreciated.
And, more relevant to the work we share that I tried unsuccessfully to tune out for these four days, I learned ...
What you see in the ocean is distorted until you put on your goggles and get beneath the surface of the water. Getting beneath the surface of things is necessary for clear vision.
What you see first is likely to be the flashy fish, while the greater significance is observed more slowly in what appears to be their inanimate habitats, which turn out to be alive with movement if you wait and watch for it. Patience is necessary for clear vision.
The wavy six-inch line of purple coral was really the lips of a large clam that actually separate a fraction of an inch every minute or so to take in the nourishment of the sea. The brown stump below it was really a sea cucumber that actually moves an inch or two a day to vacuum the ocean floor. I saw none of this until I got beneath the surface, and waited.