Monday, September 28 Deaths 547 (+0) Cases 32,994 (+174)
Grocery shopping day. We went to the Co-op together (bad) but we did separate once we got in. That got us in and out fairly fast. Just so you know, the frozen salmon at the Co-op is way, way cheaper than at Market of Choice. Once we’d got our stuff loaded into the car, E set out for home on foot to get her steps in. M went over to Natural Grocers to get some particular things that they’re good at. Then later E went out to the Peoria Road farm market searching for tomatoes and peppers that meet her standards. We haven’t eaten them yet, but they look pretty good. Later E had Zoom yoga and M didn’t do anything except open his box that arrived from the Walgreen’s online. On the plus side, he did manage to get through a whole day without ordering anything else.
Tuesday, September 29 Deaths 555 (+8 Cases 33,291 (+297)
It was the first day of E’s new Better Bones and Balance class. The teacher introduced each student and had each one say hello. E was a bit upset. If she had known what to expect, she would have worn a nicer tee.
Later she met a friend for a socially distanced, bring-you-own-chair meeting at MLK park. She says they had an enjoyable wide-ranging conversation, which included the topic of what dating must be like these days, compared to what it was when the two of them were starting out. While they were talking, some folks began laying out a soccer field just next to them, using a bunch of orange plastic markers that she swears looked liked little caps or beanies. E left before the game started, but not before seeing the two teams arrive, several gaggles of seven or eight-year olds and their support staff. How is that allowed these days, she wondered, soccer being a sport that does involve some close contact?
M attempted repairs to the back lawn by over-seeding some dead spots. He then provided E with salmon, steamed potatoes and green beans for dinner, which seems to have satisfied her. After dinner, we watched episode one of a British series called Bodyguard, which features the actor who play mama Durrel in the The Durrels on Corfu. This new role makes a change of pace for her for sure. The drama is a little too tense for us old folks, but whole thing is quite well-done.
Last, and maybe least, it was a red letter day in the world of garbage containers. Of our three containers, two were getting terribly shabby and broken down, so M had requested new ones. As if by magic, they appeared today. M feels so much better now. Plus, E need no longer be ashamed of her trash containers when friends come to the back yard. (Which we suspect she has plans for.)
Online shopping update:: two articles of clothing arrived
Wednesday, September 30 Deaths 559 (+4) Cases 33,509 (+218)
The Oregon COVID death rate has reached 13 per 100,000. This compares favorably to some places–New York 137, Florida 70–but not so favorably to others–Australia 3.55, Japan 1.24.
Busy day today, starting with a twenty-minute walk around town just before tertulia. At Bodi’s with R and J, we had one chocolate orange scone, one beignet and two half-caf coffees. The latter gave us more of a jolt than we’re used to, so we had to rush off and do more crazy stuff. First E went off for another walk while M went to the grocery store for emergency essentials such as party supplies and tonic water. E then spent a couple of hours in the garden, dead heading, weeding, lavender trimming and generally cleaning up to prepare for having guests on Thursday. M joined in to do edging and lawn mowing. After lunch E made gazpacho. She had to do it early so as to allow it time para reposar tres horas antes de cenar. Just before dinner she made croutons and chopped up a couple of boiled eggs for guarnición. We also finished the leftover fish, washing it down with a sort-of-local pinot noir. Beautiful!
Thursday, October 1 Deaths 560 (+1) Cases 33,862 (+353)
Hazy morning. We often get early morning fog this time of year, but now we are also getting smoke from California wildfires. There’s a weather system that is blowing the California smoke out to sea, circulating it north and then moving it back inland 450 miles from where it started. Most of the smoke seems to be up high; air quality at ground level is moderate.
M took the Porsche on a drive out, first west to Alsea, then back to Monroe via Alsea Falls. Very little traffic on that leg, three cars oncoming in 30 minutes of driving. The road is narrow and curvy and runs through thick forest. Great fun in the Boxster, but it was even more fun years ago in the Miata. The lack of visibility around the turns makes going fast a fool’s game. Instead the route rewards liveliness and lightness of foot. Whereas the Boxster is an athlete; the Miata was a dancer.
But as it happened this drive had something for everyone. After a sedate jog south on Highway 99, Porsche and driver slipped over to Harrisburg (via Lancaster) to cross the Willamette. From there we crossed over I-5 into some out-of-way farm country. First there was a miles long stretch of flat straight road. No traffic at all, perfect visibility in all directions. The Porsche liked that fine. The old Jaguar XKR would have liked it just as much if not more. The Miata would have been gasping, groaning and bored stiff. After that came a sort of miracle, a giant, sweeping S-curve on an otherwise featureless plain. The Porsche became very happy, as close to carefree as a Porsche can get. Go ahead, it was saying, go as fast as you want, I’ve got this. And even if we die, so what? That’s part of what the both of us were born for. Fortunately M knows a siren song when he hears it and sailed through just fine. Anyway, soon after the big curves the road turns north and runs through a different kind of farm country with curves, straights and rolling hills to keep things interesting. We arrived in Brownsville all too soon.
In the late afternoon E hosted a backyard gathering of the Lemon Meringue Pie Society. The pandemic has been a challenge for LMPS. They’ve tried various ideas, including meeting via Zoom, but these have not been completely satisfactory. Also, some of the members have health issues. But the LMPS spirit is strong and E’s solution–masked, distanced and at individual tables outdoors–seemed to work well. Masks came off for pie eating and for a passing photographer, but otherwise stayed mostly on.
The pie, by the way, was not lemon meringue. Instead, E got a ladder and picked some apples off the better of our two trees. She peeled, cored and dewormed them, then followed the JOC recipe exactly. The results were spectacular.
M had a bit of pie, but also made himself a haloumi pita with tomato, cucumber and cilantro. That was pretty good too.
Online shopping update: One article of clothing arrived.
Friday, October 2 Deaths 563 (+3) Cases 34,163 (+301)
Found out early this morning that Donald and Melania have tested positive for COVID. A later update put DT in the hospital. No one knows quite how to respond, at least for the record. Heather Havrilesky posted “I want to scream and drink boxed wine and eat bags of salty shit and dance.” Her accompanying graphic was The Triumph of Surrealism by Max Ernst:
E went to the eye doctor after breakfast and reports that the old air puff into the eye has been suspended for the duration. When she got home, her eyes were still dilated, but she wanted a walk in the forest anyway. M made a lunch and off we went, just for a little stroll up to the lake. Nice morning, sixty-something degrees when we left home but in the lovely low seventies when it was time for lunch. On the way up we ran across a pileated woodpecker just ten feet away, perched on the side of a tree at eye level in full sun. Yo! How often do we see that? After a few seconds it flew to a higher and more distant tree where it perched on the shady side. Here’s a not very good photograph of that view, just to lend a hint of credibility.
E noticed this pattern on the pond as we were leaving. Said it reminded her of snowshoes.
After dinner, watched the final episode of Ted Lasso. Quite satisfactory. Will there be another season?
Online shopping update: One large pantry cupboard arrived. Two boxes, 43 kilos each. Yikes! Have E and M gone mad?
Saturday, October 3 Deaths 571 (+8) Cases 34,163 (+348)
Yesterday was the 190th day of the Pandemic Diary. In the last ten days, average daily COVID fatalities in Oregon were 3.1, up from 2.8 in the previous ten-day period. Here’s a long term chart.
Despite this grim picture, E and M had chocolate croissants for breakfast again! While E went off to get them, M made coffee using beans from Cauca, Colombia. Cauca is the area around Popayán, the mountain town where we lived for three months once upon a time. We remember seeing coffee being grown there, mostly on small holdings and always growing in the shade, often under banana trees. But we had never seen any specifically Caucan beans until just a couple of weeks ago. Is it good? You bet. We could describe it as tasting like coffee with hints of more coffee. Not much banana.
In the late morning Eve did her Saturday dog walk out in the country while M started assembly of the pantry cupboard and making preparations to install it where it goes. After lunch E joined in and much progress was made. Not quite done yet, though. The cupboard is starting to take shape; it just needs its doors, shelves and anti-tipover strap.
The rest of the garage is a mess.
Online shopping update: An empty box from Tennessee. (E has to fill it and send it back.)
Sunday, October 4 Deaths 572 (+1) Cases 34,770 (+259)
E has a Zoom meeting with long-time friends S and Mrs. H from back east. We did of bit of outdoor work and M finished assembling the pantry cupboard. It’s still empty though; everything that’s supposed to fill it is sitting in various boxes in the garage. We haven’t stocked it yet because we have to prepare for two momentous events tomorrow. In the morning we have our first day of Turkish class and in the afternoon we head off to stay at the coast for a couple of days. Much to do.
One fine day, several months into the pandemic, I decided that I wanted to read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, so I ordered myself a copy. When it arrived, I started right in with the Preface and then the Introduction. The main point was something about how to properly understand what the real world really is. Apparently, a lot of people have made assertions and/or assumptions about what reality is and, according to Merleau-Ponty, they have all been mostly wrong, which is why we need phenomenology. The mistake that he most objects to is the idea that the world has some sort of real existence apart from us. Why is this a mistake? Don’t we all believe that? Or at least act like we do? And what’s the point anyway? What good does it do to say that the apple tree in my back yard somehow ceases to exist when I’m not looking at it? In the introductory materials, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t say that directly but he does say (I think) that although it is often convenient to think that the tree you are seeing and the tree you remember are equally real, in fact they are not. My memory of my apple tree in the southwest corner of my yard is a pointer to the tree just as an icon on a screen is a pointer to an app or to a file. And pointers, though convenient, are not the same as that to which they point. The connection between the memory image and the tree is perfect in its way and yet also dangerous. The danger comes from thinking, as we all do, that our memory of the tree proves that it is really there.
Remember that thing about if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees or hears it fall, did it really fall? How would a phenomenologist answer this question? By saying, perhaps, that the question is a good example of the confusion Merleau-Ponty is talking about. The fact that this question gives us pause–that we do not just see immediately that it is a nonsense question–points out how sloppy we can be in conflating a perceived object with the mental image of the perceived object. If you imagine a tree falling, did you really imagine it falling? Yes. If you go to the forest and see a tree that has fallen, did it really fall? Yes. Can you imagine seeing it fall? Yes. Did you really see it fall? No. Did you know that it had fallen before you saw that it had fallen? No. The real questions on this topic are all easy-peasy; only nonsense questions are hard.
Anyway, I was more or less able to follow along with the fifteen-page preface and the sixty-three page introduction. So I went on into Part I, which is called “The Body.” I found Part I to be hard going. I could see that old Maurice was really into it–forging constantly ahead and working hard. But it seemed to me that he was spending a lot of effort trying to disprove ideas that hardly anybody believes, not to mention the fact that only forty or fifty people out of eight billion even understand what they are. Is this worth the effort? It seems almost like…almost like…like it was all nothing but words. Words! Words! Words! Who know there were so many? It’s a nightmare. They just keep coming! But wait. Sakinol, as they say in the Turkish movies. Yes, words are a problem, but we need to be calm.
Eventually I found some parts that I liked. The third chapter of Part I, for example, is pretty good. The title–The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility–is not too promising, but this passage from page 136 is pretty interesting once you work through all those darn words. Here is it, followed by my study notes. The topic is what happens when we perceive something.
“…the analogy of the searchlight is inadequate, since it presupposes given objects onto which the beam plays, whereas the nuclear function1 to which we refer, before bringing objects to our sight or knowledge, makes them exist in a more intimate sense, for us. Let us therefore say rather–borrowing a term from other works2–that the life of consciousness–cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life–is subtended3 by an ‘intentional arc4’ which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather, which results in our being situated in all these respects.”
1. M-P explains the phrase “nuclear function” earlier in the section, but not in a way that I could understand. It has something to do with the first instant of perceiving an object, the part that happens before you do any thinking about the object.
2. Of the “other works” that M-P mentions, he only cites one: Zeitstruktur und Schizophrenie, 1928, by the German psychologist Franz Fischer.
3. “Subtended” is a word from mathematics that refers to angles whose rays pass through points on an arc. Here’s a Wikipedia diagram:
4. The arc of intention is a way of conceiving of our normal perceptual reality in the world. That is, if I stand and look steadily out at a scene, what I see is a kind of arc. I see that part of the world which is directly ahead of me and also some of the world to my left and right. But I can’t see directly to my right or left or anything behind me. (To visualize this, imagine that arc CD is bowed outward rather than inward and that it goes all the way around to form a circle.) So, out of the whole circle of things that may be out there, I can see–in any one gaze–only a segment of that circle. Whatever arc segment we see at a given moment, that’s our world.
There is another interesting section on page 140.
“Insofar as I have a body through which I act in the world, space and time are not, for me, a collection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number of relations synthesized by my consciousness…I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.”
And there’s more great stuff on page 142.
“(Space)…is already built into my bodily structure, and is its inseparable correlative. ‘Already motility, in its pure state, possesses the basic power of giving a meaning.’ Even if, subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body…”
The quote within the quote is from A. A. Grunbaum, Aphasie und Motorik, 1930. The word ‘motility’ refers to our ability to move. If we see a friend across the way, we can move our arm and wave a greeting. If we see a piece of pie before us, we can reach for a fork. If we are otherwise paralyzed, we can move our eyelids.
Merleau-Ponty says that it is not our ability to think that makes us sure we exist. Instead he suggests (if I’m getting this right) that it is our ability to make movements that defines the reality of the space in which we have existence. He says we could replace “I think, therefore I am” with “I can, therefore I am.” Thinking comes in later, after we already know we’re there due to a bodily sense that we can move.
So that’s all very well, but boy did I have to work through a lot chaff to get to few edible grains. This continued in Chapter 5 of Part 1,which is titled“The Body in its Sexual Being.” Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? But in fact Chapter 5 is not a happy place, eighteen pages of highly abstract generalities in which a single paragraph can go on for more than four pages. Like much of the book, it has a kind of beauty and you could almost say that it has some kind of meaning, but it is hard to read and incredibly boring. Here’s one of the juicier parts:
Understood in this way, the relation of expression to thing expressed, or of sign to meaning, is not a one-way relationship like that between original text and translation. Neither body nor existence can be regarded as the original of the human being, since they presuppose each other, and because the body is solidified or generalized existence, and existence is a perpetual incarnation.
Now I think I agree with this, and I would also say that this is language of a very high level, so high, in fact, that there’s hardly any oxygen up there. Consequently, there isn’t one living, breathing word in the whole passage. They’ve all died. So that’s enough of Part 1 of Phenomenology of Perception. Let’s go on the Part II.
On the first page of Chapter I of Part II, I rather liked this passage:
All knowledge takes is place within the horizons opened up by perception. There can be no question of describing perception itself as one of the facts thrown up in the world, since we can never fill up, in the picture of the world, that gap which we ourselves are;…perception is the ‘flaw’ in this ‘great diamond’.
Note that I did not say I understand this passage; I merely said that I like it. It has a footnote, which explains that the words in single quotes allude to a poem by Paul Valery called “Cemetery by the Sea.” The relevant lines of that poem are these:
Mes repentirs, mes doutes, mes contraintes
Sont le defaut de ton grand diamant.
My regrets, my doubts, my constraints
Are the flaw in your great diamond
I interpret this allusion to mean that Merleau-Ponty wants to point out that all explanations of the world that depend on certainty and perfection are bogus and that certainty and perfection–the flawless diamond–don’t really play much of a part in our world, no matter how much we might wish that they did. Merleau-Ponty seems to be saying that we need to always keep this in mind when we do philosophy.
He often speaks about the two main traditions of philosophy: empiricism and rationalism. He sees this dichotomy as one which has been bequeathed to him by previous philosophical inquiry. His thoughts on phenomenology are his way of entering into this long running controversy about how truth can be established. To move this along, he and his fellow phenomenologists claim to present a critique of both sides, of empiricism on the one hand and also of rationalism on the other. Put simply, empiricism is the belief that truth about the world comes from direct observation of objects and events. Truth is generally a posteriori; it will be found after the observation has been made and the results noted. If you want more truth, you should do more observations. Thus empiricism is the philosophical basis for science.
Rationalism is the belief that real truth is a priori; it comes before we do any observations. Some truths are self-evident; you don’t need to make observations, you just know what’s true by thinking about things. (See, for example, the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…”) Rationalism is quite compatible with religion, since religious doctrine reveals a number of basic a priori truths or principles. Rationalists can discover more truths by making logical inferences from the basic truths that they already have.
Empiricism and Rationalism both have long histories, and have often been in conflict. In Europe, the idea that the sun revolved around the earth was a rationalist truth. It was self-evident and it could also be logically inferred from Catholic religious doctrine. When the observations of Galileo and others revealed a different truth, conflict ensued. Since then there have been many more cases where rationalist views have had to be modified on the basis of empirical evidence. Science has become so dominant that it is tempting to think that rationalism is fading away. But that’s not true. For one thing, some rationalist a priori truths are identical to empiricist truths. For example, the principles of mathematics are considered to be truths by both sides. Also, there are many rationalist truths that are impervious to empirical testing–e.g., the idea that all events on this earth are guided by the hand of God, that everything happens for a purpose, or that love is all you need. So there is still plenty of room for conflict. During the pandemic, for example, most empiricists wear masks. For rationalists the issue is more complicated because it depends on which a priori truth system they are being guided by.
Phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty seem to take no sides in this long-standing debate; instead they criticize both as inherently insufficient to explain what it means for a human to be alive. In fact, says M-P, empiricism and rationalism (which M-P calls intellectualism) both make the same mistake; they both believe that the world exists independently of the observer. Rationalism says that individual sensory observations are unimportant, often mistaken, and certainly ephemeral; whereas truth is impersonal and eternal. Empiricism demands observation via the five senses, something only an individual human can do, and thus gives much greater importance to the observer. So why aren’t phenomenologists comfortable with empiricism? The way phenomenologists see it, almost as soon as empiricism puts an individual observer into the action, it immediately erases the significance of that individual from the action. For science, only the data matters. Observation reveals data about the external world which the scientist records. Once that is done, the scientist then uses logic to analyze the data and draw conclusions from it. That is, once the observation has been made, the empiricist proceeds in the same manner as a rationalist, processing the observed data in the same way that a rationalist processes ‘self-evident” or divinely revealed data. Both sides assume that the reality of the world is a priori in the sense that the world is something outside of us and that we can treat life as if it were a visit to a very large and superbly detailed amusement park that contains both darker and lighter experiences and where there is always something new for us to explore. We have this conception, say the phenomenologists, because of habit and because it is convenient for many practical matters.
The separateness of the observer from the world, says phenomenology, may be a handy concept, but it can’t possibly be accurate. Consider a universe with no observers. We can imagine it–kind of–but we can only imagine it by creating an imaginary observer and that’s cheating. There is no way that we even talk about its existence, let alone make any statements about what it might be like. On the other hand, consider an observer with no universe to observe. Again we can imagine it–loosely speaking–but again we’re cheating. The concept falls apart as soon as we realize that with nothing to observe, the existence of an observer is a logical impossibility.
So what does it mean to say that observer and world can’t really be separated? Does that mean that the world is all in our heads? Not exactly. For phenomenologists, the world is what happens when my body makes a connection to something outside my body. Phenomenologists call this a perception. We sometimes talk about the organs of perception: seeing, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting. But the most basic perception is the perception of space by the body. My body senses that it is capable of movement, that it is surrounded by space, and at that instant the universe comes into existence. And it turns out that the space is not empty; my body also senses light, odor, texture, flavor and sound. My perceptions tell me that there is a huge variety of stuff out there. Different kinds of light strike my eyes generating electrical impulses that travel from my eyes to my brain. Certain chemicals in the air get into my nose and cause chemical reactions that send electrical impulses to my brain. I touch the bark of a tree and nerves in my fingers send electrical signals to my brain. My brain processes all this data, in part by comparing it to previous data that it has recorded, and causes me to ‘see’ a tree, smell its blossoms, and feel the texture of its bark. Those sensations are my world. The act of perception shapes the world.
So is there some kind of physical world outside of my perceptions of it? Sure there is. The input to my senses has to come from somewhere. But to describe that world as it is irrespective of our perception of it is impossible. We cannot speak of that to which we have no access, of which we have no awareness. Our world, the ‘real’ world that we have to deal with is the one which is presented to us by our brains in the act of perception.
But doesn’t that put us back into thinking that the world is only in our heads? And if that’s so, how can it be that we all seem to live in the same world? Aren’t we all different? Don’t we all have different perceptions? Well, yes and no. The fact is that in many ways we, by which I mean all the various humans who live on this earth, are not different at all. We’re all the same species and most of the parts of our bodies–livers, arms, legs, tear ducts, lungs, toes–work almost exactly the same in every human. So when we perceive, we all use the same perceptive apparatus. When I look at a thing and you look at the same thing and I see that thing as a tree, I do not, in normal circumstances, feel any need to ask you if you see a tree or not. I know you do. And that’s because I know by experience that other people’s sensors (eyes) and image processors (brains) almost always yield results that are near identical to mine–as far as I can tell. That does NOT mean, however, that there is really a tree out there. There are two trees, one is in your head, one is in my head, and neither of them is anywhere “out there.” Our two trees may be very similar, but we’ll never know exactly how similar because I can’t see yours and you can’t see mine. All we really know is that there is something out there, that light energy at particular wavelengths is reflecting off of something. But whatever those somethings are, we only know the aspects of them that we create for ourselves. The shapes, colors, textures and flavor are things that our internal systems have generated. They do not exist outside of us. All of our perceptions are like that. Space itself is like that. Time is just the name that we give to the fact that our perceptions constantly shift, each one being immediately replaced by the next.
So we can truly say, in this odd philosophical way, that all of our reality is internally generated by us, and that the world we know–including time and space–has no objective existence outside of our perceptive process. The obvious question, though, is how this can possibly matter. If we all see the same tree with green leaves and red apples, and if we can all go up and touch it and knock our heads against its trunk if we want to, doesn’t that make it real enough for all practical purposes? And with that question we at last come to the crux of the matter.
On the most basic levels of perception, things are pretty much the same for everyone. This sameness makes it almost inevitable that we will forget that there are in fact 7.8 billion worlds on this planet and start thinking that there is only one. As a practical shortcut, the only one world idea is useful and it may seem harmless. But it’s not harmless. It’s a mistake that has dangerous consequences.
And that’s because the basic sensory level is not the only place where we have to function in our lives. Trouble begins when we leave the realm of direct sensory experience–where we all agree about things because we all have the same sensory apparatus–and get into more complex thoughts and perceptions. (We don’t spend all our time standing around looking at trees–although we really should do it more.) The way our lives are, we have to spend a lot time dealing about things like freedom and responsibility, good and evil, love and hate, home decor, loan applications, how much alcohol use is too much, trying to keep teenagers from driving us crazy, how to get along with our co-workers, what we really want from life and a million other complicated matters. Our perceptions about those things have some basis in direct sensory data, but mostly they come from elsewhere. The come from our individual memories and experiences, our emotions, the things we’ve been told, the ways we’ve been treated, the things our friends do, and from all the interpretations we have had to make about all the input we have received throughout our lives. It’s truly a miracle that our brains can deal with it all. At these levels, instead of being the same as everyone else, each of us is different from everyone else. That in itself is not a bad thing. Long live the difference, as the French say.
But if we add this idea–the fact that people see many things very differently–to the previous error, the error of believing that there is only one objective world, then the inevitable result is that people are going to start arguing about what that one “real” world is “really” like. Because they think there’s only one world, they figure that there can be only one right answer. Oh dear. At that point things can go real bad real fast.
It’s not really anybody’s fault. To think that there is only one real objective world is a natural mistake. To believe that there is no world anywhere except the one we create and recreate every second in our minds, well, that’s pretty hard. It seems kind of flaky and undependable. People might be asking, “If we all live in our own fantasy worlds, then nothing would be real. We’d all be totally lost!” The phenomenalist’s answer to that is simply that the world you create in the act of perception is not a fantasy at all. It’s real. It’s the only real thing there is. And partly, it’s much like everyone else’s. In other ways, though, it is yours and yours alone. So everyone else’s world is different from yours. And yes, that means that in a sense we are all lost, we’ll never be able to agree, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. The great diamond has a vast number of flaws and we can’t fix them. The only thing that helps is for us to realize that we are lost and start taking lostness into account when we do our planning. As a practical matter, being lost and knowing you’re lost is a lot better than being lost and thinking you’re not lost.
These ideas also help you understand other people better. Suppose you’re there somewhere in your own world–which is the only place you can ever be–and you see something that seems really obvious, such as the idea that wearing a mask during an epidemic is a good idea. So you go out and get yourself a couple of masks and starting wearing one whenever you’re around other people. So far, so good. You have seen something obvious in your world and have acted accordingly. Later on, when the epidemic is over, you’ll be able to congratulate yourself for having done at least a little to help. That’s okay too. But during the epidemic you see other people who don’t wear masks. What’s wrong with them? Why can’t they see the obvious? Are they stupid or are they willfully evil? Those may seem like reasonable questions and if you want to ask them, ask away. But remember, in that other person’s world wearing a mask is not a good idea. It might be clearly and obviously a bad idea, for a host of very good reasons. Those reasons may not exist in the world that you live in, but they do in that other one. Hell, if you lived in that other world, you’d think masks were a bad idea too. That doesn’t mean that you can’t try to convince people, it just means that you might be headed down a long and rocky road.
Conversely, suppose some friend or acquaintance of yours is trying to convince you of something that you know is crap. They won’t leave you alone and they can’t believe you won’t accept something that is so obviously true. If you believe that there is only one real objective world, your only recourse is to fight back, either by whopping the person upside the head or by trying to come up with various rational or irrational arguments to convince the other person that their deeply held belief is crap. Neither of these options is good. The phenomenological response is to say. “I understand what you mean and I know you’re right. In your world, what you’re saying is absolutely true. If I lived in your world, I’d believe it too. But I don’t live in your world. I live in my world and in my world it’s actually not true. It’s not true at all. It’s not even close. I don’t know why exactly; that’s just the way it is.”
Fortunately, you don’t actually need to read phenomenology to figure this out, thank goodness.
But let’s get back to Phenomenology of Perception anyway. We’ve covered a few fragments from Part One. Now let’s move on to Part Two. The title of Part Two is “The World As Perceived” and in it, Merleau-Ponty gets even more serious. You know that matters have gotten more serious because instead of four-page paragraphs you start seeing paragraphs that are five or even six pages long. Nevertheless, it does have some interesting stuff. Here’s a passage near the beginning of Part Two Chapter 2.
Space is not the setting…in which things are arranged but the means whereby the positing of things becomes possible. This means that instead of imagining it as a sort of ether in which all things float or…as a characteristic that they have in common, we must think of it as a universal power enabling them to be connected.
This is okay, but it is vague and general and it is something that Merleau-Ponty has already said (more or less) several times before in this book. Ah, but here in Part Two Chapter 2 he also tries to provide some evidence for his ideas by citing some psychology experiments that were conducted 120 odd years ago. One series of experiments that he mentions was the work George M. Stratton, an American who studied with Wilhem Wundt in Leipzig and later became the founding director of the Experimental Psychology Lab at UC Berkeley in 1899. To investigate visual perception, Stratton devised some special glasses with unusual lenses.
The Stratton experiment that Merleau-Ponty focuses on is one in which the lenses in the glasses inverted the visual image, which is to say, the glasses turned everything upside down. Stratton made himself wear these glasses for a week. On the first day he felt nauseous and disoriented. He had trouble doing physical tasks. He says that, in general, what he saw through the glasses was that the world was upside down. The next day, his ability to perform tasks noticeably improved. He also began to have the sense that the world that was right side up, but that he himself was upside down. Yo! By the seventh day, he says, the world looked completely normal. Double yo! Then, on the eighth day, with the glasses off, the world still looked normal but for a while he had a problem with left and right. When he went to reach for something with his right hand, his left hand moved. Presumably this soon passed.
Well, you can see why Merleau-Ponty is all over this. The experiment suggests that what we perceive is a product of our brains more than of our eyes. The overriding priority of our brains is to translate nerve impulses received from the eyes into a coherent vision, a world in which we can most easily do the things that we need to do, a world, in other words, in which we can survive.
After that Merleau-Ponty goes into a long disquisition on the topic of “depth” and depth perception. He thinks that George Berkeley, an Irish philosopher who died in 1753, had some good ideas about depth, but he also got part of it wrong. What I remember most from this rather long section of Part Two Chapter 2 is the question of width versus depth. Merleau-Ponty is very concerned about people who think of depth as if it were merely width viewed from the side. Over the course of many pages he makes very good case showing that this idea is mistaken. I agree that depth is not at all like width viewed from the side. So I am quite okay with M-P when he implies that anyone who goes around saying “You know, depth is just width viewed from the side” has never really thought deeply about the matter. In fact, I believe that anyone who makes a habit of saying “Depth is just width viewed from the side” is probably out of their goddamned mind. And just think, if I hadn’t read Phenomenology of Perception, I might never have figured that out. But now, whenever anyone does say it to me, I’ll know exactly how to respond. Don’t tell me reading philosophy isn’t useful.
Monday, September 21 Deaths 529 (+3) Cases 30,995 (+194)
The little car is got cleaned and waxed today, looking good. We watched a couple of episodes of Derry Girls on Netflix. Hm.
Tuesday, September 22 Deaths 532 (+3) Cases 31,313 (+318)
We got a take-out sandwiches from Ba’s in Albany. We finally discovered their online ordering system, which takes Apple Pay. Nice. In the early afternoon E went to a meeting of her HEPAJ group. They all took lawn chairs and treats and met outside at a park. This was a first for the group and E says it was fun. M was also outside for a while, mowing lawn and washing the remaining ash from the patio. M is on Ibuprofen today. Apparently he strained his shoulder working at the carwash.
It’s the 180th day of the Pandemic Diary database. Average daily deaths fell from 3.7 to 2.8. Here’s the chart.
Wednesday, September 23 Deaths 538 (+6) Cases 31,503 (+190)
After tertulia this morning we went back to the forest near where we used to live. What a difference two weeks makes! It was summer the last time we were there and now it’s fall, with maple leaves falling everywhere. The native maples don’t do much in the way of color; they’re mostly just brown. But we found a bit of red on this big fir, courtesy of a thriving poison oak vine.
We also passed an old maple that the forest managers decided to cut down about five years ago. It seems to be rebounding nicely from the experience.
And of course we stopped to see one of E’s favorite trees. She didn’t try to climb up onto that big limb today, but she’s been known to.
And e is not the only one…
Thursday, September 24 Deaths 539 (+1) Cases 31,865 (+362)
The Chambers siblings did a Zoom meeting today, James from Clifton Park, John from his mostly finished house at Lake George, and Eve from our new Zoom studio in Corvallis. The meeting began on time with no technical difficulties. It seems that we are all getting better at Zooming. Jim and John are both well. We got to see a bit of the interior of John’s new place, including a very old wooden icebox that John and his father rescued from a yard sale many years ago when John was just a child. He remembers the two of them working to remove many layers of white paint to reveal the wood underneath. The top was rotting, so Hoy replaced it using pine boards that he had in his shop. They then sought out and applied the period correct type of varnish. John didn’t say if it had been refinished since then, but it certainly looks lovely now. Besides talking with Jim we got to interact a little with Joanne, who is as kind and lovely as always. We debuted our new green screen, which allows any photo to be used as a background, even on devices that do not have super processors. Also a couple of umbrella lights to smooth away some of the shadows. Our background, chosen in haste but still nice, was from Cyprus, a hillside village in the spring.
After a supper of reasonably high-quality leftovers, we settled in front of the TV to check out Ted Lasso, an Apple-produced series about an American football coach who is hired to manage an British professional soccer team. We thought we’d watch just a little to see if it was any good, but we found it quite wonderful and ended up watching four half hour episodes. Just about everything about this show is excellent: complex characters, good acting, substantive situations, meaningful dialogue, and a tone that is at once naïve and highly sophisticated. The level of maturity and insight in Ted Lasso is so far above that of Cable Girls that it made us laugh for joy. (We did miss the subtitles, though, some of those Brit accents…)
Friday, September 25 Deaths 542 (+3) Cases 32,314 (+449)
We’ve been doing a crazy amount of online shopping lately. The purchases seem okay in each individual instance, but taken in total, it doesn’t look completely rational. M has ordered an electric Turkish coffee maker, which we clearly don’t need. E is buying a new fall fleece jacket and some winter socks, which are a bit more practical. M has ordered a bunch of new ice cube trays–hey, the old ones were terrible, the summer was hard on them–and together we’re getting a new pantry cupboard for the garage.
And then there is the nice new mask with lanyard that E got for $16 from Tom Bihn, a Seattle company that has donated 115,000 masks to underserved communities.
Saturday, September 26 Deaths 546 (+4) Cases 32,581 (+267)
We watched more episodes of Ted Lasso last night. Liked them a lot. This morning E fetched us croissants from Le Patissier. After that, she went out to the country again to walk her friend’s dog. M watched a movie called Soledad, which is pretty good, and worked in the garden trimming away some things whose times have passed.
Dinner was a real treat. We went to a place in Vancouver, WA called Andrea and Andy’s. Andy make an extraordinary thing out of spaghetti squash plus a wonderful fall soup made out of sweet potatoes and more other things than we can remember. E contributed a tomato and cilantro salad, an elaboration of an old recipe we got from Flo. We ate in the back yard, warmed by the late afternoon sun.
For dessert we had a brief ride in the Cadillac CTS-V, sampling the lovely seats and the “Comfort” ride setting. Also the “Sport” ride setting and the 6.2 liter supercharged V-8 with 556 hp and 551 lb-ft of torque connected to some sticky Michelins with hefty Brembos nearby in case you ever wanted to slow down. Nice car. Back at the house we had more dessert–a flan that Andy was not too proud of but which was quite delicious for the rest of us.
The statewide media today are making a big to-do about the 449 new COVID cases reported on Friday. They note, correctly, that this is the highest single day total of the pandemic. The suggestion is that things are worse than ever and we’d all better do something now, even if all we really can do is stay home and moan quietly in our living rooms. But as so often happens in this crisis, this contextless number serves more to mislead than to illuminate. Of course the discovery of 449 new cases is bad news, but how bad is it? Let’s add some context.
First, these 449 new cases were from a total of 12,385 tests, far more tests than are usually reported. That right there should make you stop and think a little. And of course you could compare this new record number with the old record number. The old record was 405 new cases, and it was set on August 15th, a day when there were a total 12,994 tests, which was also many more tests than usual. In fact, those two numbers, 12,385 and 12,994, are the two highest days of COVID testing ever done in Oregon. For comparison, on the third highest day of testing the number was just 7,337. So the two days with the highest ever number of new cases also happened to be the two days of the most extensive testing ever done. This is not news; this is just math, working as it always has. The large number of tests may deserve a headline; the number of new cases does not.
We can get somewhat more useful information by looking at the test positive rates on those two days. On August 15th the test positive rate was 3.13%. On September 25, the rate was 3.63%. Compared to other days, those two numbers are actually pretty low. People say that if we can maintain a rate under 5.00%, we’ll have chance of getting the pandemic under control. So maybe these two days did deserve headlines, not for being bad news, but for bringing such good news.
And, just for fun, let’s look at the data for two other days: September 20th and 21st. On the 20th, the new case number was 202, which sounds a lot better than 449. On September 21st the number of new cases was 194, even better. Should those two days have made us feel hopeful? As it happens, there were very few tests reported on either of those days, just 2,159 on the 20th and 1,215 on the 21st. The test positive rate for the 20th was 9.36%. For the 21st it was 15.97%. If you wanted to make a headline for these two days, would you really want to celebrate the relatively low numbers of new cases confirmed? Not if you had a clue.
The truth, of course, is that it’s impossible to know much of anything just by focusing on any one number on any one day. There is too much natural variation in the system. But possibly the worst possible number to fixate on is the number of new cases confirmed. As we all should realize by now, if you want that number to be low, all you have to do is stop testing and just let everybody die.
Sunday, September 27 Deaths 547 (+1) Cases 32,820 (+239)
Lovely weather for a quiet Sunday. Croissants again for breakfast. They were a day old, but when E rewarmed them, very briefly, in a real oven, they were delicious. Later in the morning we went for a walk on campus. We parked at the old Poultry Science building and walked east past the tennis courts and the giant artificial turf intramural sports field. We climbed up to the top of the parking structure to have a look around, then went back over toward the vet school to see some animals. We returned through the unfamiliar back lots of the College of Forestry compound. We passed by an odd new building, quite a large one. It was industrial looking, a windowless unmarked black rectangle. We paused for a bit to take a closer look. There was a huge garage type door at one end and on the other a loading bay with a glossy black hopper feeding into a heavy cart-like container, also black. The whole place was deserted and felt mildly strange. From there it was just six minutes or so back to our car. As we were about to leave, a campus security truck cruised by. We saw it turn and go down to that same black building and stop there. Had security cameras alerted headquarters to a possible threat? Unlikely. Funny coincidence though. We departed forthwith.
Monday, September 14 Deaths 511 (+0) Cases 29,484 (+141)
Meet the new day, same as the old day. M was out for a few minutes sweeping up ash from our back patio. As recommended in the poem, he spread a bit of the ash at his shrine to the dead. The rest went into a trash bag destined for the landfill. Air quality still quite bad.
While M was working, E went to look for a couple of take-out lattes. No luck. Coffee Culture is down; Starbucks is down. While she was out, she heard the announcement of a Level 3 “Go Now” evacuation order for the area in and around the town of Holley, Oregon. Holley is a little town on the Calapooia River, and is another place that M has driven through recently. It’s about 27 miles southeast of Corvallis. We know all about evacuation alerts levels now. Level 1 means get yourself prepared to evacuate. At Level 2 people are encouraged to leave; those who stay should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The system is fine if the fires give enough time for the alerts to be issued and if everyone gets the word. For a day or two there, the fires were moving faster than the alert system could deal with.
After dinner, there was a Level 2 Brownie Alert (Be ready to bake at any time) and E had to go over to Market of Choice and get a mix. When she got back, she turned around and made them.
Tuesday, September 15 Deaths 519 (+8) Cases 29,662 (+178)
The window project moves forward. A estimator from Smith’s Glass came today to finish measuring. He had planned to come last Thursday, but the area where he lives was put on Level 2 and he was occupied with preparations for the family to evacuate. E had made the brownies mostly for the purpose of giving some to him as a gesture of support. Today he reports that they are still in the house but still all set to go. There are two different fires burning near where he lives, one four miles to the south and another 14 miles to the east. The former is the fire that we mentioned yesterday, near the town of Holley.
Despite the fires still burning, our air quality improved overnight, from Hazardous all the way up to Unhealthy. M went out in the garden for half an hour or so, wearing a pretty much useless mask. He says that at first it feels wonderful just to be outside and that the air doesn’t matter. But after a while it feels distinctly unhealthy, especially if you do any exertion. Time to go in.
E has been trying to keep up with her walking regimen indoors. By alternating step aerobics with tramping around from room to room, she eventually convinces her watch to give her credit for several thousand steps.
Wednesday, September 16 Deaths 521 (+2) Cases 29,850 (+188)
E had her hair done today and got some big news there. Claire, her hairdresser, has announced her retirement at the end of the year. Inveterate traveller and very smart cookie, Claire is someone we have depended on for insights into all sorts of things. Hopefully we can keep in touch with her through this transition. Otherwise, we shall be lost.
We also did some chores today, dropping off things at both Bottle Drop and Good Will. The garage was filling up with empty seltzer bottles and donation goods. We still have two large items that we would normally donate to Habitat, but they’re been shut down for months. Bleh.
Thursday, September 17 Deaths 521 (+0) Cases 30,060 (+210)
Reasonably good COVID report today: no Oregon deaths yesterday and a daily test positive rate of just 4.84%. Wildfire news is also promising as rain is forecast for this evening and through the night. We’ve had a number of days now when rain was forecast but failed to arrive, so we shall have to see. If rain comes, most of it should fall on the western slopes of the Cascades, which is exactly where the fires are, so our fire officials are all “cautiously optimistic.” Already many of the worst fires have been partially contained in the places where they were approaching population centers.
Air quality remains in an issue. At 4:30 this morning it was in condition orange, the best we’ve seen for a long, long time. But by 6:00 A.M. it was back up to red, by early afternoon it was purple, and just now, at 4:30 in the afternoon, it is back into the dark purple Hazardous zone. We’re thinking we should have gone for an early walk.
We’re into Season Four of Cable Girls and the fearless foursome remain really busy. Carlota was framed for murder. When she was convicted, she had a kind of breakdown (which was distinctly un-Carlota-like, but the writers have no shame). Her lover couldn’t stand to see her like that and decided to save her by confessing to the crime herself. She manufactured enough evidence to convince the judge and now Carlota is free but Sara/Oscar is in prison condemned to death. No problem, though, the girls are planning a prison break and Detective Cuevas has inexplicably agreed to help them. This is, of course, ridiculous, but fortunately it all goes by fast, like the pages of a comic book in the wind, so we don’t need to resort to the fast forward button. In other news, Francisco has awakened from his year-long coma but has amnesia. Pretty much everyone knows about his miracle recovery except Alba/Lidia. Carlos, whom she has just agreed to marry, has been hiding it from her because Francisco was her first love and he and Carlos have always been rivals. Last night’s cliffhanger was Lidia coming home after a tough day of planning the prison break and running into Francisco, alive and well in her living room, dressed in a really sharp suit. Presumably we’ll see how that scene goes later tonight. Lurking in the background, Doña Carmen is out of prison and plotting again, some dastardly business having to do with once again kidnapping innocent toddler Eva. E’s friend in Spain warned us that the writing deteriorated after the first two seasons, which caused her to give up on the whole deal. We get that now, but we’re not giving up quite yet. We only have about 12 40-minute episodes to go.
Friday, September 18 Deaths 521 (+0) Cases 30,342 (+282)
So the promised rain finally came, starting about 8:00 last night. It came accompanied by lightning and thus had the potential to douse some fires while starting others. So far, however, it appears to have done mostly good. The biggest fires are not out, but all have been knocked back a little, a welcome development.
This morning, the air quality index was around 70, roughly in the middle of the yellow zone. This afternoon it is 30, roughly in the middle of the green zone. Wow. Great to be getting outside. Pandemic and wildfires aside, it was nice to finally get some rain again.
Saturday, September 19 Deaths 525 (+5) Cases 30,599 (+257)
A couple of walks today. Wonderful air. And then in the evening, Magnum Infinite Chocolate ice cream bars, one each. All is well.
Sunday, September 20 Deaths 526 (+1) Cases 30,801 (+202)
A lazy Sunday. Septembers are often lovely around here, sunny and cool with damp, misty mornings. The smoke ruined all that for days and days, but today was very fine. Waffles for breakfast, an hour or two of walks and gardening, Burgerville lunch, iced decaf on the patio at 4:00. Nice.
After dinner we tried to watch Cable Girls S5-E2, but it was just too dumb. We’re saying goodbye to the chicas. Also tried to watch Laundromat with Meryl Streep. We weren’t in the mood for that either. E wants to watch Derry Girls. After that, we might go back to Turkish things, especially as we’re getting serious about an online Turkish class taught by our friend Umut. It would start October 5th.
Thursday, September 10 Deaths 497 (+3) Cases 28,654 (+183)
After three windy days, today has been mostly dead calm. So of course it’s still smoky. Our air quality was rated as Unhealthy this morning but then deteriorated to Very Unhealthy. M finished off his outdoor painting chores while it was still relatively good. Otherwise we’ve stayed inside. But E and her Lemon Merengue Pie buddies are planning a brief meeting in the late afternoon despite the difficult conditions. H is hosting, A is the instigator, and E plays the role of perpetual guest.
Friday, September 11 Deaths 499 (+2) Cases 28,865 (+211)
Another smokey, windless day. We are back in the Very Unhealthy range, with occasional spikes into the Hazardous zone. No more orange glow or red sun poking through, just dirty gray smoke as far as you can see, which isn’t all that far. We’re so fortunate that there are no fires in the forests nearby. The closest fire to us is about 35 miles away. Much of the area between here and there is agricultural land, which does not offer much for a wildfire to chew on. That’s good since we hear that one fire last week travelled through 50 miles of forest in just a matter of hours.
We looked at an aerial video of the Talent to Phoenix corridor a hundred miles south of us. Sad to see whole neighborhoods gone. Amazing to find several places where you can see a row of houses all intact while across the street there is another row reduced to nothing but foundations.
The video showed both built up towns and semi-rural areas. It made us think of our old house in the forest. When we lived there, we used to fret about what fire officials called defensible space, a wide area free of trees and brush on all sides of a house. Looking at the aerial footage of this fire, we could see that space was only one factor. Some houses that were closely surrounded by trees and brush mysteriously survived. And though many buffered homes survived, some others were consumed. Nothing about nature is simple. Reported deaths from the Oregon fires are few at this point, but everyone is saying that it’s too soon to tell.
Saturday, September 12 Deaths 505 (+6) Cases 29,158 (+291)
It’s the 170th day of Pandemic Diary record keeping, which began in earnest way back at the end of March. The overall fatality rate in Oregon is up to 11.74 per 100,000. In the last ten days the average daily death toll was 3.7. That’s down from the previous 5.1. The current test positive rate remains less than 5%. Here’s the new chart.
Air quality today is in the Hazardous zone. It’s frustrating to be trapped inside by both pandemic and bad air. Also frustrating are the weather forecasts. In the middle of last week the prediction was that conditions would change by Friday afternoon. Didn’t happen. The next prediction was that conditions would change by Sunday. Nope. Now the prediction is for conditions to change by Tuesday. Harumph. Also, our house is looking shabby as hitherto invisible cobwebs are now covered with very visible black debris.
Ash is thick in the nooks and crannies
So it’s best to just stay in and watch Cable Girls. Unencumbered by pandemics, bad air or shabby looking houses, these four young women are really busy. Marga, for example, has had to deal with her husband’s twin brother coming to live with them. Pablo, her husband, is sweet and caring and she loves him dearly. Julio, the brother, is charming and lazily amoral. What could go wrong? Well, for one thing, she could accidentally have sex with Julio thinking he was Pablo. When she realizes it, she is horrified, especially as it was the best sex of her relatively inexperienced life. She feels terrible. Meanwhile she has been promoted out of the switchboard rooms to become a secretarial assistant for Carlos, who has just returned to the company as its new CEO. Carlos is the scion of the family who first owned the telephone company. In one of last season’s episodes he argued violently with his father, causing him to have a heart attack and die, thus leaving Carlos to manage the company under the watchful eye of his mother Doña Carmen. But just when he was getting used to that, he was aghast to find out that his mother was a repulsive manipulative monster who was trying to crush all his dreams and especially to separate him from Alba, the woman he loved, who is also one of the four cable girls and thus a good friend of Marga’s. So Carlos broke with his mother and left the telephone company to start a radio station. A new character appeared, Sr. Uribe, and he took over as telephone company CEO, eventually marrying Carlos’ sister Elisa to solidify his position. But Mr. Uribe was not sufficiently docile, so Doña Carmen had him killed and orchestrated a preposterous series of events that convinced Carlos to come back and be company manager again, catching him in a vulnerable moment because he had just broken up with Alba because he thought she was insane to keep on insisting that their baby daughter had not really died in the fire at the church but instead was being sequestered in a convent somewhere by Doña Carmen, which was of course true, but who would believe such a crazy story?
So while Marga has been having sex problems and Alba has been going crazy trying to get her baby back, what’s been going on with Ángeles and Carlotta, the other two members of the formidable foursome of cable girls? When we last checked in on Ángeles she had just rid herself of abusive husband Mario by means of an accident involving Sr. Uribe’s baseball bat, at which point she and her three friends had to figure out what to do with the body and so on. They did their best, but because of bad luck and the work of a determined–and handsome–police detective, it seemed like their efforts were futile and Ángeles was doomed to go down. But sparks were flying between Ángeles and Detective Cristóbal Cuevas and before he could really figure it all out there they were in bed together and he was smitten. But not so smitten that he did not follow up some leads that led him to finally decide that Alba was the murderer. (We said he was determined; we did not say he was bright.) So then Ángeles had to confess the truth to Cristóbal so as to save her friend. The good detective was anguished. Finally he gave her two hours to get out of town never to return. “If I ever see you again,” he told her, “I will arrest you for murder.” Off she went and stayed away for a while, but eventually she just had to come back to attend Alba’s wedding to Carlos. She came in disguise, but she was injured in the fire at the church and woke up in the hospital stripped of her disguise, and there was that handsome policeman again telling her she was under arrest. But then Cristòbal got all smitten again–or at least pretended to be–and told her that he would spare her from prison if she would agree to work undercover to help him trap a notorious underworld figure named Guzmán, offering to see to it that some schmuck already in prison would confess to having offed Mario. Ángeles was forced to agree.
And Carlota? She was a rich girl who was doing the telephone operator gig because wanted to be independent of her military father. But he didn’t go for it and dragged her home and locked her in her room for a month or two. But then she found out–via her friends who listened in to her father’s phone calls–that he was in a conspiracy to overthrow the king. In return for her silence, he had to let her go back to work, where she rapidly got involved in 1929 style feminism as well as an ongoing ménage à trois with another operator (female) and one of the company engineers (male). Her father had a change of heart, apologized for trying to suppress her natural rights, and conveniently died, leaving her very well off. Using the code name Athena, she became a well known radio personality at Carlos’s station and managed to attract so much positive attention to her cause that she was attacked and almost raped by the leadership team of a radical conservative group. Her anarchist friend Lucia convinced her to spend some of her money to hire some leftist thugs to apply some lead pipe to the guys who attacked her. This led to one of the men ending up in a coma on the edge of death, which made Carlota feel really bad at which point she tried to break off with Lucia. She also had to worry about her lover Miguel, one third of the ménage, who has slipped back into his old cocaine habit and been fired from the phone company.
Not to worry though, because at the end of Season Three everything works out. Unfortunately we cannot go into the details of how it worked out because of our editorial policy which requires us to maintain high standards of plausibility and strict historical accuracy at all times. Suffice it to say that Alba reunites with Carlos and finds her baby, Miguel gets a job in Alba’s old boyfriend’s nightclub, evil Doña Carmen gets arrested, Ángeles survives death threats from Guzmán and breaks up with the detective (who says he really loves her and in fact she likes him too, but she knows she can’t trust him), Carlota thwarts the worst of Lucia’s plans and feels a little better about herself, and Marga confesses to Pablo that she slept with his brother by mistake and sets about trying to make it up to him. Next up, Season Four.
Sunday, September 13 Deaths 511 (+5) Cases 29,337 (+181)
Another day of thick smoke and no wind. Reported air quality is still in the Hazardous zone, but hey it’s at the bottom of the Hazardous zone, which is better than the top and even more better than that time when it went past Hazardous and climbed right off the scale, well into the dreaded Zone With No Name. Okay in the house though. And in fact, at this moment, (4:00 P.M. Sunday) visibility is better that it’s been for days.
Our new neighbor across the street was out in the worst of it this morning, unmasked, using a leaf blower to clear ash from his driveway. This is, we believe, the worst possible method for cleaning up ash. (Do you have a problem with ash falling on your property? Just blow it back up into the air. You’ll be fine.) And why do it now, when the event is so clearly not over? Though he is blowing only a little of his ash our way, E is not pleased. If she wasn’t such a basically nice person, she’d shoot him.
Finally, here’s another way to think of ashes, a poem circulated by the Willamette Valley Friends of Wildlife…
Do not forget that the ashes falling from the sky are all that remains of the pine and grass and thistle and bear and coyote and deer and mouse that could not escape. Gather some up in a sacred manner. Take it to your altar. Offer prayers for these beings. Honor their death. Pray for life. Call in rain. Remind Fire that it is full, has gobbled enough, and can rest. May all beings be safe. May all beings be loved. May all beings be remembered. May all beings be mourned.
Tuesday, September 8 Deaths 486 (+4) Cases 28,355 (+165)
We woke up to an orange glow at sunrise, but that soon changed to a dirty brown. There is ash in the air, some of it clearly visible as ghostly gray flakes drifting in the wind. So now we have two reasons to wear our masks outside. The smoke is coming from the east, they say now, where there are two different fires in the Cascades.
Here’s the view from out our front door
The scene from the back yard.
High contrast view shows details of the smoke clouds / Birdbath is not very inviting.
It got even smokier here on Oak Avenue in the late afternoon. Our air quality has been designated very unhealthy, one step below hazardous, which tops the scale. The worst fires are on the western slopes of the Cascades, one east of Salem and another east of Eugene. East winds, gusting to 60 to 80 mph are pushing the fires down the mountain slopes toward the valley. Towns in the foothills are being evacuated. We’ve stayed inside.
In other breaking news, the New York Times–a great publication but a little slow on the uptake–has an article today about how dentists are reporting an epidemic of cracked teeth. The surge in dental stress fractures was first reported, of course, in the Pandemic Diary, by co-editor Eve Chambers on June 19. (We’re not sure how the NYT learned of her report or why it took them so long to follow up.)
Wednesday, September 9 Deaths 494 (+8) Cases 28,471 (+116)
News reports today say that multiple large fires in Oregon have burned more than 530,000 acres. Fire officials are focused on preserving lives and property; containment of the fires is out of the question. The winds around our house have lessened a little, but it is still very smoky and air quality remains very poor. Our housecleaner came today and we usually get out of the house at least part of the time when she is here. So we went downtown for coffee and scones then had our breakfast in the car. Although the air seems terrible, today must be a little better than yesterday because while we were out we noticed that today we could see the sun–at least we think it’s the sun. (It’s very odd to be able to look at the sun without it hurting your eyes.) The first photo is how it looked from a spot a few miles north of town where the smoke was a little thinner; the second is how it looked in Corvallis. Both images are straight from the camera–no filtering.
Monday, August 31 Deaths: 459 (+1) Cases 26,713 (+159)
Busy day, what with grocery shopping at two different stores by two different people at two different times, M going to Winco and E going to Market of Choice. Good thing they had some Vermont maple syrup with blueberry pancakes on the side to get them started. (An early version of this post accidentally omitted the maple syrup. This error was spotted by our ever-alert proofreader.) After all the shopping E worked in the garden planting asters while M worked on materials for the TESL seminar in Chile. Dinner was grilled salmon and roasted vegetables, including a crookneck squash that E picked up from a neighbor’s giveaway box.
Then there was another action packed episode of Cable Girls. The highlight was when serial abuser Mario dragged his wife Angeles and up onto a rooftop and started whaling on her. He was mad because he suspected that she had been trying to poison him, which was, of course, quite true. Three friends of Angeles saw her get dragged away and followed them up to the roof. They all jumped on Mario and tried to stop him. But Mario repulsed them and got one of them around the neck with both hands seemingly intending to strangle her to death, at which point Angeles took a big swing and hit him upside the head with something heavy and Mario passed from this world. Well, that was plucky and no one will mourn Mario, but now the four women have a whole new problem…
Tuesday, September 1 Deaths 465 (+6) Cases 26,946 (+233)
We both sent some info off to Chile today, more or less agreeing to participate in F’s TESL seminar via Zoom. E will use some mostly tried and true pronunciation activities and M will try a totally new writing thing, based on a reading that E thinks is totally impenetrable. M says that yes, it’s challenging, but hey, at least it’s not Merleau-Ponty. In the garden E did more aster planting and M did more ceanothus pruning. For lunch M went to the Taco Time drive up. They gave him the wrong bag, which he didn’t notice till he opened it up back at the house. It was only partly different from his real order, and it wasn’t bad.
Wednesday, September 2 Deaths 468 (+3), Cases 27,075 (+129)
On the 160th day of Pandemic Diary data collection, Oregon COVID fatalities have reached the level of 10.88 per 100,000 residents. The curve, as per the Pandemic Diary system, looks like this:
Thursday, September 3 Deaths 470 (+2) Cases 27,336 (+261)
Today M got a haircut and took a little drive and E went clothes shopping. M went out just for fun, but for E it was serious business. She needed some new shorts for this hot weather, nothing grand but they had to be comfortable. She called her favorite local shop to ask if they had a selection of shorts that she could try on at home. They were ready and willing to work things out. The sales clerk asked what E was interested in and offered to pick her out a group of items. All E had to do was come in and pick them up to take home. All were charged to her card, and then, when she returned the items she didn’t want, the charges for those were refunded. This required two trips to town, but E was pleased to know that there was a relatively safe way for her to shop. In the end she bought two items. Neither is quite right but she can modify them to suit her needs.
M reports that the Oregon coast is cool and beautiful but that visitors are swarming over every inch of it to take advantage. In contrast, the narrow and winding secondary roads that M took to get over there were almost deserted. That was fun, once or twice just a little too fun. Sakinol, M, sakinol.
Still to come today: Laughter Yoga, another episode of Chicas del Cable, and possibly a start at watching Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a DVD lent to us by a friend.
Over the last ten days the Oregon Health Authority has reported the results of 47,793 COVID tests, of which 2,181 were positive. For that period, the ratio of positives to the total is 4.57%.
Friday, September 4 Deaths 475 (+5) Cases 27,601 (+265) Daily test rate 4.78%
Another 5-mile hike today, but this one a lot closer to home. We went into an area of the OSU forest very near where we used to live. We started out at about 9:00. It was a lovely, cool morning. The temperature climbed slowly as we hiked, but we were always in the shade and quite comfortable. The parking lot at Peavy Arboretum was quite crowded, so we spent the first hour on a route we knew would be less traveled.
We took Road 510 almost to the end and then went up the Road 516 spur. From the 516 cul-de-sac we bushwhacked steeply up to where the Section 36 trail passes by a couple of wolf tree firs. Slow going in that stretch as we had to keep a sharp eye out for poison oak as we waded through the undergrowth in our hiking shorts. What a dumb idea! One of us should have thought to think. Needless to say, we didn’t meet anybody on that route. So that was the bright side–no masking. Anyway, we then took an older section of the 36 trail up to the top of the little mountain. The old log bench, though partly broken down these days, still serves its purpose. We sat to rest a while, remembering all the times in past years when we used to hike up to that same bench early in the morning, carrying kibble and water for Lucy’s breakfast, coffee, bread and olive oil for ours.
Saturday, September 5 Deaths 480 (+5) Cases 27,856 (+255) Daily test rate 5.65%
E went out to the country to help her friend by again taking her dog on a walk. A fairly cool day today, a nice time to be out walking. M stayed in and finished another of the crosswords from his book of London Sunday Times Jumbos. These are hard puzzles and M works has to work off and on for days and days to get one done. This time, when he looked in the back of the book to check his answers, he found that he had been right about every clue except one. The same thing happened the last time he did a Jumbo. Sigh.
It was Kentucky Derby day. Usually run in May in front of thousands of spectators, it was delayed four months this year and took place with only owners and staff on hand. The winner was Authentic, trained by Bob Baffert and ridden by John Velazquez. Tiz the Law, a Saratoga-based horse that E was rooting for, started the race as a heavy favorite but faded down the stretch. Thank goodness she hadn’t put her money down. Authentic is Baffert’s sixth Kentucky Derby winner. In the winner’s circle after the race, the horse bumped Baffert and knocked him down. What was that about?
Sunday, September 6 Deaths 481 (+1) Cases 28,044 (+188) Daily test rate 3.54%
The pandemic has gone on for a long time. The hot days keep coming. The ground is parched. And of course it’s not our country’s most shining hour. We’ve both been feeling in the doldrums lately.
Was that why we broke our relax on Sunday rule and worked on our house project for much of the day, despite the heat? Anyway, there we were, out in the sun, overdosing on Vitamin D. The idea was to hang shade cloth on the outside of our two big living room windows. The windows face south and the sun hits them hard this time of year. E finished making the two shades, hemming the sides and making rod pockets on top and bottom. M mounted some hooks above the windows, and while he was up there he removed about a dozen old hooks and brackets leftover from things the previous owners had done, probably to address the same problem. This left lots of holes in the siding and window frames. M filled those and also did a little scraping in places where the paint was bad. Once the hooks were up, E got on the ladder and measured where to put the mounting loops onto the shades. We are using the little-known fishing line method to enable easy mounting and dismounting. So now the shades are up, but there is still priming and painting to be done in all the areas where M made a mess. Hm. Maybe sometime next week.
Monday, August 24 Deaths: 420 (+3) Cases 25,155 (+218)
Shopping day and also coffee with R, at Susan’s garden shop café. M and R talked while E got groceries at the Co-op next door. When the shopping was done, E sat down and helped M finish his latte. R is looking much better, having mostly recovered from his back surgery and having been able to get off the pain meds.
E made pisto Manchego for dinner. Great summer fare.
Tuesday, August 25 Deaths: 427 (+7) Cases 25,391 (+236)
The Republican national convention is going on this week. Yesterday, there was a speech by Kimberly Guilfoyle, a “senior campaign advisor.” M watched a little. There seemed to be no content, just a screeching, histrionic call for obeisance to the supreme leader. Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber responded to it by mentioning a racist 90s era speech by Pat Buchanan and quoting Molly Ivins’ fabled response: “It probably sounded better in the original German.”
Today, Trump was shown welcoming immigrants, pardoning a criminal, and basking in the support of a number of black citizens. Having recently re-negotiated her pre-nuptial agreement, Melania Trump was the featured speaker. Here are a couple of points she made about the Donald. None of it strikes me as remotely true, but of course that’s not the point. “Whether you like it or not, you always know what he’s thinking. And that is because he’s an authentic person who loves this country and its people and wants to continue to make it better. He wants nothing more than for this country to prosper and he doesn’t waste time playing politics.”
Wednesday, August 26 Deaths 433 (+6) Cases 25,571(+180)
The test positive rate was quite low today: 3.79%. This continues a somewhat positive trend for that statistic in Oregon.
M and E hosted backyard tertulia today and made a coffee cake for the occasion. E was in charge of batter and M made the filling/topping. Eve got the recipe from a friend while both were living in Spain in the seventies. It still works.
Thursday, August 27 Deaths: 438 (+5) Cases 25,761 (+190)
Five new deaths, but the test positive rate was low again, 3.18%.
We talked today via WhatsApp with our friends F and I in Chile. Nice to see them. F wants us to help with a special Zoom-based seminar for students about to graduate from the TESL program where she teaches. We’ll see what we can think of that we might do. Everyone tells us that adapting activities to Zoom mediated learning is a lot of work. F, of course, says that it’s pretty easy.
As soon as Laughter Yoga comes to an end, we’re off to Sisters, Oregon to spend the night. In the morning the plan is to get breakfast from the Sisters Bakery and then hike up to Chush Falls. The trailhead is up 6 miles of gravel road, so it’ll be interesting to see how crowded it is.
Friday, August 28 Deaths: 447 (+9) Cases 26,054 (+293) (10.38 deaths per 100,000)
It was 39 degrees outside when we rolled out of our Best Western bed in Sisters at around 7:00 AM. At least that’s what our phones said. And, yes, it did seem a bit chilly when we got outside a little while later on our way to fetch breakfast. We found the Sisters Bakery up and running and as popular as ever. E got in line and M went off get gas for the Mazda. Only two “parties” of customers were allowed into the shop at any one time. When it came E’s turn to enter, she saw that the customer group in front of her included a young woman who was getting a selfie in front of the counter. She had come out for do-nuts wearing a tee shirt and hot pants. Cold? What cold? E got us a few of our favorites: one chocolate bar, one plain old-fashioned, one maple old-fashioned, and one massive apple fritter that we meant to keep and share for breakfast on Saturday. Just as E came out the door with her box, M pulled to the curb and whisked her away back to the motel room. We then used the in-room coffeemaker to create two steaming cups of half-caf complete with artificial creamer and a touch of sugar. It was a magnificent breakfast. M overdid, as he always does, downing both a the large choco-frosted bar and the normal sized plain. Eve underdid at first, eating only her maple old-fashioned. But since that wasn’t quite enough for a hiking day breakfast, she sliced off just a bit of the fritter, which made everything all right. Here’s a picture of the fritter once it had made its way back to Corvallis. When it was purchased, there was a serious irregularity of shape on the lower left. But, as mentioned, E was able to fix that right up.
Having given breakfast the time it deserved, we eventually set out for the trailhead, arriving there at about 10:30. The road was rough, but we found that it wasn’t rough enough to have prevented eight other vehicles from having arrived before us. Still, it worked out pretty well. We passed some people now and then but spent most of our time with the feeling of having the place to ourselves. There was lots of room up at the top and a surprising amount of water coming down the falls.
Still some snow on the Sisters
On the way back
The hike was 5.2 miles in all with only 400 feet of elevation gain, not too difficult though a little on the long side. M’s right hip was bothering him toward the end. E had a few difficulties at the start but often seems to get stronger as a hike goes on. She’s a tough one.
Saturday, August 29 Deaths: 454 (+7) Cases 26,293 (+239)
This morning E went out to help her friend S by taking the dog for a walk. S is a former yoga teacher who lives in a lovely spot out in the country but who now has mobility issues. Several of her friends are taking it in turn to help out in various ways. The dog is very nice mini Australian shepherd and it was a lovely morning, so E enjoyed the walk. She noticed again today that a dog of that size is a lot easier to manage than the labs she remembers from her dog owning years.
M spent the morning in the garden trimming ceanothus and spreading the last of this year’s homemade compost. The day was warm-almost-hot and cloudless, a lot like summer and also just a bit like fall. M spent the middle of the day in the garage trying to rejuvenate a 40-volt lithium ion battery that had fallen into a coma and refused to accept recharging. There is lots of advice on the internet about how to solve this problem and M tried two different methods. After both failed he ordered a new battery online and spent the next hour in the kitchen making chocolate chip cookies to console himself. E’s new garden umbrella arrived in the early afternoon. She spent some time unpacking and assembling it and found it good. But alas, not all is perfect here on Oak Avenue. While she was out there, E saw a large rat climbing down the inside of our fence and finding shelter beneath M’s monster blackberry bush. E now refers to the berries as Rat Berries and refuses to eat them.
Sunday, August 30 Deaths: 458 (+4) Cases 26,554 (+261)
E did a Zoom meeting with old friends S and Mrs H and had a nice time catching up on what’s going on back there in upstate NY. Mrs. H runs a food bank and has had the challenge of keeping it going in times of pandemic. S has plans for kayaking by moonlight two nights from now. M joined in briefly and said a few words about Merleau-Ponty and the building of philosophical castles upon sand–shifting sand. M himself is working on an essay called “What is Real?” He’s pretty sure that once it is published it will clear everything up.
Cirello’s Pizza will be providing our main entree this evening. Entertainment will be provided by Episode 8 of Cable Girls, a Spanish series about a group of women telephone operators in Madrid in the 1920s. The main themes involve romance, money, and women’s rights issues. Great stuff. There was only one killing in the first few episodes, but now we have another, a mysterious murder near the end of Episode 7. Francisco went to meet the evil blackmailer Beltran, intending to kill him. But when he got there Beltran was already flat on his back on the floor in a pool of blood. Thinking quickly, Francisco searched the room and found the incriminating photos of himself and Alba that had been the basis for the blackmail, but in the process he dropped his gold cigarette case that has his name engraved inside. And just after he left, we saw a woman’s arm pluck up the cigarette case and presumably bear it away. Francisco and Alba now believe they are safe, but for how long?
M has reached page 140 of Phenomenology of Perception. Things are heating up.
“Insofar as I have a body through which I act in the world, space and time are not, for me, a collection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number of relations synthesized by my consciousness…I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.”
Tuesday, August 18
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 397 (+9) cases 23,676 (+414)
Here’s another passage from Phenomenology of Perception, this from page 142. In it, the word ‘motility’ refers to our ability to move. If we see a friend across the way, we can move our arm and wave a greeting. If we see a piece of pie before us, we can reach for a fork. If we are otherwise paralyzed, we can move our eyeballs. The quote within the quote is from A. A. Grunbaum, Aphasie und Motorik, 1930.
“(Space)…is already built into my bodily structure, and is its inseparable correlative. ‘Already motility, in is pure state, possesses the basic power of giving a meaning.’ Even if, subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body…”
Earlier in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty has suggested that it is not our ability to think that makes us sure we exist. Instead he says (if I’m getting this right) that it is our ability to make movements that defines the reality of the space in which we find ourselves. “I think, therefore I am” is fine, but thinking actually comes later. So if we’re serious about understanding this (rather ridiculous) stuff, we’d do better to start with “I can, therefore I am” or “I move, therefore I am.”
Wednesday, August 19
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 408 (+11) cases 23,870 (+194)
The Democratic National Convention is going on this week. On Monday we heard Bernie Sanders–sharp and on point–and Michelle Obama–tough and moving though a little overlong. The highlight for many was this passage from the former first lady: “Donald Trump is…clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. (sigh) It is what it is.” On Wednesday Kamala Harris made a strong impression and Barack Obama took his turn, praising Biden and saying that the current president “hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.” Joe Biden’s speech on Thursday seems to have been generally well-received, with one Fox News commentator calling it a “home run.”
Thursday, August 20
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 412 (+4) cases 24,165(+295)
We’ve realized that we have been socializing quite a lot lately, maybe too much. We generally meet our friends outside, we have an arsenal of masks, and of course we try to be careful. Still, perhaps we are not minimizing risk as much as we ought. We heard an amusing story from another couple. It seems there was an intervention of sorts in their family, with both of their grown sons taking it in turn to tell them that they were going out far too much and urging them to act more responsibly. The parents replied “But we’re only doing what all our friends do…”
For safety in socializing, hiking seems like a good idea, but of course everyone in the world has the same idea, so the good places are jammed. For example, today we went with B and B to Silver Falls. It was nice, but it was on the crowded side and we had to wear our masks pretty much the whole time. For our next outing, we’re going to seek out some not so good place and see how that goes.
Friday, August 21
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 414 (+2) cases 24,421 (+256)
Both M and E did some watering this morning and then their paths diverged. M got down to work on the Diary while E went off to drink champagne (at 10:30 in the morning!) with her friend P who is celebrating the seventh anniversary of her arrival in Corvallis. M is thinking that maybe he should go to the kitchen and drink a glass of V-8 juice just to help maintain the overall balance of nature.
Instead he reads Chap. 5 of Part 1 of Phenomenology of Perception, which is titled “The Body in its Sexual Being.” Sounds interesting, eh? But Chapter 5 is tough sledding, eighteen pages of highly abstract generalities in which a single paragraph can go on for more than four pages. It has a kind of beauty and you could almost say that it has some kind of meaning, but it is hard to read and incredibly boring. Here’s one of the juicier parts:
Understood in this way, the relation of expression to thing expressed, or of sign to meaning, is not a one-way relationship like that between original text and translation. Neither body nor existence can be regarded as the original of the human being, since they presuppose each other, and because the body is solidified or generalized existence, and existence is a perpetual incarnation.
This is language of a very high level, way up there where there’s hardly any oxygen. Consequently, there isn’t one living, breathing word in the whole passage. They’ve all died.
Saturday, August 22
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 417 (+3) cases 24,710 (+289)
After a quiet Friday, E and M both attacked the garden this morning. E picked some delicious late raspberries and then gathered rhubarb for stewing and apples for sauce making. M picked blackberries for breakfast and later did edging and weeding on the west side of the garage, any area that receives only sporadic attention and nary a drop of watering. These August days continue warm, mostly sunny with highs in the 80’s and cool nights. The days are noticeably shorter as the weeks seem to fly away. Tonight there is a sliver of a moon.
Sunday, August 23
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 417 (+0) cases 24,937 (+227)
Time for a new Oregon pandemic curve chart. Thankfully, the sharply increasing trend that we saw in July and early August has not continued. Instead, average deaths per day have dropped by about a third, from 5.5 to 3.5.
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 357 (+1) cases 21,488 (+216)
M has penetrated a bit further into Phenomenology of Perception, where he found this:
“An object looks attractive or repulsive before it looks black or blue, circular or square.” Kurt Koffka, 1925
This an example of the kind of thing that phenomenologists think is important. Attraction and repulsion are immediate and concrete aspects of perception. Color and shape–as described by words–are abstractions that lead us out of the real experience of consciousness and into a world of systems and interpretations. Kurt Koffka is best known as one of the trio of German psychologists who developed Gestalt theory in the 1930’s. This quotation comes from earlier in his career when he was immersed in the ideas of Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology.
Tuesday, August 11
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 368 (+11) cases 21,744 (+286)
Today we planned a park tour, so as to be away from the house in the early afternoon when A. would be working. First we got a take-out lunch from the 57th Street Grill, a.k.a. Taylor Street Ovens. This consisted of a couple of sandwiches and a big chocolate chip cookie. E, who has studied these matters carefully, says that Taylor Street has the best chocolate chip cookies in town, save only for M’s, which, by the way, have not been seen in the city for months. What’s wrong with that boy?
We ate the sandwiches at home. What a treat they were! So haphazard and homey, so old-fashioned, so delicious. As for the cookie, we saved that for later. We then got in the little car and headed east through Albany and Lebanon to a tiny town we’d never seen before called Waterloo. Waterloo Park is just north of the bustling town center, which is crammed with fast food outlets, monuments and two major museums. Oh, wait. Wrong Waterloo. Waterloo Oregon looks like this
Besides the little store, there are houses nestled at random intervals in the surrounding forest, at least a dozen, maybe two. That’s about it. Waterloo, Belgium actually looks more interesting. It does have monuments and museums and also this quite tasteful McDonald’s.
But anyway, back to Waterloo Park, the one in Oregon. It’s on the south side the Santiam River about half a mile from the store . The park has a boat landing, and most of the people we saw were headed toward the water, not with boats, but rather with inflatable plastic things of all sorts. We saw more than one such group floating slowly downstream with a bunch of rafts and plastic do-nuts all lashed together and bearing crews of many ages and sizes.
We skipped the large campground and instead stopped beside the river to eat our cookie. Then we walked through the picnic area and saw some giant fir trees, one giant fir stump, and one monster tree whose species we have yet to identify.
After the monster tree we got back in the car and set off to find McKercher Park on the banks of the Calapooia. Navigating by dead reckoning, eschewing all such sissified aids as maps or GPS, it took Michael most of forever to get to the damn place. It’s nice though, very low key, a big shady wayside with a picnic area and easy river access. This time of year the water is low and the popular thing is to just take your shoes off and walk around in it. The park is really quite easy to find–especially if you are coming from anywhere other than Waterloo. It’s just a few miles east of Brownsville, Oregon, which remains proud of having been the location for the filming of Stephen King’s Stand By Me in 1986.
Wednesday, August 12
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 375 (+7) cases 22,022 (+248)
M has finished the Introduction to PofP. The main point of the Introduction seems to be about having a proper understanding of what the real world really is. Apparently, a lot of people have made assertions and/or assumptions about this topic and they have all been mostly wrong, according to Merleau-Ponty, which is why we need phenomenology. The mistake that he most objects to is the idea that the world has some sort of real existence apart from us. Next up in PofP, Part I: The Body. M just can’t wait.
Eve went out to meet with some of her buddies on AF’s farm in Kings Valley. There were kittens, ducks, chickens and llamas, and a wonderful baked zucchini dish. So a great time was had by all. When E left, however, she noticed that the gas was a little low in the CX-5. In fact, there were no bars left on the gauge and the range display read zero miles. Oops. The nearest gas station was about 20 miles away. Fortunately, she did make it that far, proving that the CX-5, like many cars, has at least a gallon in reserve that it is reluctant to tell you about.
Meanwhile there was big to-do at E&M’s house, with jackhammers and mini-loaders pounding away at our little concrete porch and front walk. It was the first day of our sidewalk replacement project, partially fulfilling E’s dream of having a non-concrete sidewalk. The destruction phase is now finished, thankfully. The building phase promises to be quieter.
Thursday, August 13
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 383 (+8) cases 222,300 (+278)
The Oregon COVID mortality rate continues to climb, with 55 deaths reported in the last ten days, an average of 5.5 per day. The overall death toll as reported by the OHA is 383. This means that there have been 8.9 deaths out every 100,000 Oregon residents. The curve chart below shows how things have considerably worsened since the end of June.
And what about phenomenology? Can we escape the endless bad news by sampling the offerings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty? Well, so far, Part I of Phenomenology of Perception has been disappointing. The section title is “The Body” and there is a great deal of talk about visual and tactile perception. In discussing the physiology of perception, the focus is on the organs of sight and touch and on the nerves that carry visual and tactile impressions. There is a lot of discussion of certain abnormal “patients” who have odd deficiencies in these areas. But what about normal people? And where is the brain in all this? It is commonly understood today that the signals traveling from any sense organ to the brain are the only the raw materials. We don’t really see with our eyes; we see with our brains. In the 1960’s, when M-P was writing, neuroscience was fairly primitive. But still. You can see that he is working on the right problem, but isn’t the brain part of the body? Still, it is early days yet and M will persevere.
Friday, August 14
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 385 (+2) cases 22,613 (313)
The walkway is finished. We need to start working on its environs.
Saturday, August 15
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 386 (+1) cases 23,018 (+405)
OHA reports more than 400 new cases today, but also reported a new daily high in the number of tests. The day’s 12,944 tests far eclipsed the old record of 8,058. The result was a surprisingly low positive test rate of just 3.2%, the lowest in Oregon since the middle of June.
Sunday, August 16
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 388 (+2) cases 23,262 (244)
Oops. A “script error” caused some distortion of the OHA test positive rates for the Saturday and Sunday reports. The actual positive rate was closer to 4.0 %. That’s still considerably lower than most days this month. Deaths have also been low for the last three days.
