Lending Wings to Your Stride

There was a time when I seriously feared and hated the onset of Dry Heat in Yuma, usually in March. Experience and old age have turned the experience into what could almost be called 'appreciation' and 'good humor.' It's not that I no longer feel the misery of heat; but now I can see past the temporary misery, and playfully romanticize it as noble suffering. Think of the dramatic religious procession in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal."

Besides, what fun can there be in leaving a place unless you really, really, want to leave? And it is getting like that, now.

But before I crawl out of winter's chrysalis, and stretch out my new wings of travel, let's think about what was accomplished this winter. It is 1/4 to 1/3 of the year, after all. I realize that most readers have no interest in bicycling, but they might be interested in the general principles that the cycling experience can illustrate.

Furthermore I will assume that the reader has a certain amount of sympathy with the noble quest of making outdoor exercise non-puritanical. Let's take Duty, Guilt, oppressive repetition, and drudgery out of it.  Let's look for reasons for outdoor exercise other than 'because it is good for you.' So then, no more goodie-goodie; nor do we really need to be  'bad'; but let's be a little bad-ass at least. 

When William James discussed the "moral equivalent of war," (Lecture XIV, The Value of Saintliness in "Varieties of Religious Experience") he argued that courage-with-poverty could fit the bill. My thinking runs in a different direction: towards intense outdoor sports as the moral equivalent of war.

There were supreme moments of excitement during this winter cycling season: moments when I ignored everything, including my self-consciousness; everything except half-crazy, bloodthirsty, male, tribal, hunter/warrior feelings. Sometimes this happens when the cyclist takes a noticeable step up in his athletic performance.

The feeling might be intensified by simultaneous competition and cooperation amongst the cyclists. The cyclist is most aware of the snapping heels of the cyclist ahead of him. He is also only a foot or two away from touching tires. If that happens a fairly serious injury (messed up shoulder or broken collar-bone) will usually result. Therefore the paceline of cyclists shares much of the psychology of a platoon of combat troops.

But even more, I've come to appreciate the synergy, the feeling of enlarged corporate tribal power, that comes from moving along, aggressively, with your mates.

Hill Climb on annual Tour of the Gila near Silver City, NM

By luck I found the book, "The Culture of War," by Martin van Creveld. In Chapter 6, "The Joy of Combat," he quotes a well-known historian, W.M. McNeill, on his military experiences:

Almost half a century after leaving the army, a famous American historian also recorded, not without surprise, how much he liked "strutting around" on the parade ground. "Words," he wrote, "are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in a collective ritual."

Anthropology, assuming that it is more than conjecture, is real nature, rather than the PC, bowdlerized version of nature that is presented in coffee table books. Can you think of a constructive use of human anthropology in your outdoor activities? This isn't just a rhetorical question.

The last thing you want to do is get solitary and unsociable, and start up another of those travel blogs that writes paeans to "Nature", sacred solitude, peace and harmony, and the rest of that sickly drivel.

The Indispensable Country, The Exceptional People, The Judge of the World

From a CNN article we have:

"President Obama made clear that Russia's continued violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity would negatively impact Russia's standing in the international community," according to a statement released by the White House.

Gee, aren't you happy and proud to live in a country, like the USA, which would never seriously consider violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of another country? 

One of Cinema's Greatest Moments

The local library had a DVD copy of the movie "A Room With a View." Since it had been awhile since last seeing it...

In order to fully appreciate a movie like this, you must look at the overall context of movie-making: the money problems, the tastes of the general public, and the 'Media is the Message' syndrome. There is every reason to expect successes to be rare. But they do happen.

There are hundreds of comments on IMDB or Amazon on this movie. I sighed and then quit, after reading one comment that the Puccini musical score "enhanced the movie." Enhanced, indeed. It stole the show!

Now, long-suffering readers are just going to discount this opinion as that of a Puccini fanboy. But in fact I have seen movies exploit the use of operatic scores to little avail. What I am praising here is not Puccini per se, but rather, the re-combination of his music with the right visual and situational context.

To me, the movie's plot was OK, but I don't go gaga over English accents and genteel manners. The love triangle is as cliche-ridden as they get. But it is always fun to see Mediterranean Europe (Catholic, economically backward, chaotic, sensual, and artistic) contrasted with the repressed, more affluent, orderly, drab and colorless, Protestant drudges of northern Europe. Let's call it the north/south European split, for brevity's sake.

In the movie this Split is brought into focus by a masterful combination of eye-candy and ear-candy. The photography is delicious, both in Florence and in the nearby countryside.  But what really caused an explosion of pleasure for me was Puccini's music. It is indeed true that the 'whole is greater than the sum of the parts.'

The climax was 40 minutes into the movie when the uptight English tourists went for a tour in the countryside outside Florence. Something started happening to them, something  unintentional, something that they were powerless to stop. Uptight northern drudges though they may be, they could not resist the living force of landscape and music that imposed itself on them.

 The landscape was one of barley-covered hills, with trees in the background. The music was chosen carefully: the aria started off easily for an audience that presumably does not listen to much opera: it was just a peaceful solo-piano prelude. When the Fat Lady finally sang, she was restrained and soothing; and yet, the audience knew that she could shatter glass anytime she wanted. So as the aria developed, there was suspense, combined with feminine kindliness and grace.

If you have any claim to possessing a soul, you have to be affected by this scene. (grin) 

Why does this matter, especially to a Puccini non-fanboy? Choosing the right music for a movie might be a second-rate skill compared to that of Puccini himself, but 'second-rate' does not mean lowly or unimportant. It is the kind of accomplishment that many of us can understand and therefore aspire to, whereas the accomplishments of a Puccini are too hard to imagine. I can imagine doing something like the music editor did, in various arenas of life. Aren't these humble steps-forward, taken my numerous anonymous people, a big part of the advance of a civilization?  Normally we only think of the gigantic steps of the overtly famous.

Consider the basic form of the music editor's work here:

1. Deconstruction. Removal of the Bad. Identification of the Good. Normally in an opera, magnificent music gets combined with the drivel of some fool of a playwright. Hence love triangles, mistaken identity, revenge, rags-to-riches, True Love overcoming Conventional Love, etc.
2. Appreciation of new potential.
3. Reconstruction. A new combination. Opera is a good idea because instrumental music is combined with the human voice, and with human situations and visual context in the background. In this movie, the background was the Florentine landscape and the story of the North/South split. This is probably a more interesting background than the libretto of the original opera. (I'm not familiar with that of "La Rondine;" but if it was a typical libretto, it was probably idiotic.)

As a consequence of this creative new combination, millions of moviegoers were exposed to the idea that opera was a beautiful thing that they could actually enjoy.  The music-editor's success can be seen as a template-model that millions of people could use in their own lives in any number of ways; so could people who blog. 

Building a Better Winter Lifestyle

Earlier in the winter I was wondering how to improve my winter snowbird lifestyle. The term 'snowbird' only implies a change in geography. That isn't good enough. The intent was to build a lifestyle in the winter that is -- not deliberately the opposite of -- but complementary and independent of the summer lifestyle.

I'm happy to report that I think this worked: more social, no moving from place to place, and built around road bicycling with a club, rather than the summer lifestyle of nomadic and solitary public-lands-camping and mountain biking with my dog. Even my dog has adjusted to short daily walks in the desert, because she gets to romp with her fan club.

In the past I might have resented the relaxed contentment of a lifestyle with more routines, would have wanted to keep things shaking, and even looked down on plugging into a "system."  But now I happily snuggle in to the security of routines built around cycling with other people, afternoon siestas, and reading thousands of pages of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin (Master and Commander) novels.

It was a real pleasure to hit this paragraph in the book:

"Far out into the Atlantic, long tack upon long tack, every day having the same steady routine from swabbing the decks at first dawn to lights out, its unchanging succession of bells, its wholly predictable food, nothing in sight from one horizon to another but sea and sky, both growing more agreeable, and the habit of sea-life exerted its usual force; cheerfulness returned to almost its old carefree level; and as always there was the violent emotion and enthusiasm of the great-gun practice every evening at quarters..." [p. 4196 of "The Thirteen Gun Salute."]

 That pretty much sums up my lifestyle this winter in Yuma, AZ.
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People who leave the "System"  -- whether to retire early, move to a rural area, take on self-employment, kill their television sets, home school their kids, or live on boats -- take on quite a responsibility, quite a load onto their own shoulders. They might not even be consciously aware that this extra burden is digging into their shoulders. It's a burden that is well worth it. But it is still enjoyable to take a sabbatical from it, in the winter.

Progress Report on New Year's Resolutions

More than once I have warned the reader against the under-rated scourge of the Early Bedtime Syndrome. I took the Fabian approach to vanquishing it, and now have the proud and happy task of telling you that I have officially beaten it. (Note the present perfect tense of the verb.)

Postponing bedtime by a minute or two per day worked at the beginning. Then I plateau-ed at one minute every two days. I actually recorded it on a calendar. Bedtime is now beyond 2200 hours. At 2230 I'll probably back off and leave well enough alone.

It was not easy, and at times, I attacked the problem with a desperate heroism. Even if that is a silly and pretentious way to put it, it is still true that I had to imagine it so, in order to succeed. I was willing to use any technique that worked -- even going so far as doing housework when I started fading!

When you wake up in the morning and see Dawn, you can't help but feel that all is right with the world, and that your day has great potential. But the satisfaction of beating this thing goes deeper. It is a potential model and metaphor for more complex achievements with food and money. Beating the Early Bedtime Syndrome had a huge advantage: it was univariate and capable of precise measurement. 

But the same approach to food or money will run into multivariate confusion. Give the tiniest opportunity, we all tend to become crooked accountants. We fool ourselves about saving money when we are really only playing cost-shifting games. With food or money, we focus on the easily perceivable, the precisely measurable. Then we move certain categories "off budget," and pretend that they don't count. Remember what a wise man once said, "The apparent does not exhaust the real." [Weaver, in "Ideas Have Consequences."]

But if only we could condense any project with food or money down to this univariate and Fabian model. What we wouldn't accomplish!