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Honest

– In which Dorn paints a self-portrait, metaphorically speaking.

ona’s self-portrait post (here) prompted me to want to try one of my own. I can’t really paint or even sketch that well, so I thought I’d try a written sketch. Maybe I could come up with a brief description of something I’d done, thought, or said that would provide a picture of me.

Earlier this week I was grocery shopping and bought a huge megapack of paper towels on sale. When I got to the parking lot, I saw the paper towels in the bottom of the cart and realized I had not paid for them. They cost like fifteen bucks, but I was in a hurry, so I loaded them in the car and left, and promised myself I would pay for them the next time I went shopping. I cut out the bar code from the package and stuffed it in my wallet.

The next shopping trip, I paid at the self-checkout. I found myself migrating toward the unit closest to the self-checkout helper station, and being a little miffed when it was closed and I had to use one further away. I realized that I had the ridiculous hope that the helper there would notice I was scanning a cut-out bar code and ask why, so I could tell them and they could admire how honest I was. I further realized that I hadn’t gone to one of the manned checkout lines because then I would have had to tell the checker why I was scanning this bar code, and it would seem like bragging. Oh vanity, thy middle name is Wendall!

* * *

So that’s my self-portrait sketch, capturing my desire to be seen as: (a) honest, and (b) humble enough not to flaunt it except if asked. I realize now that my selection of this particular vignette to write about—although the grocery checker never knew that I Did The Right Thing, you now know—also captures me in pretty much the same light.

This attitude doesn’t really set me apart from most of humanity. We all like to think of ourselves as basically honest, and—mostly—we are. According to Daniel Ariely in The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, we are all continually presented with opportunities to cheat, and how we deal with them depends on (a) whether the stakes are above a minimum amount below which our conscience doesn’t prick us (apparently that’s $15 in my case), and (b) whether we think others will witness our behavior.

This is a consequence of being social animals. In Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind (which I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, including here), he describes the unconscious “sociometer” that all humans possess, that constantly scans the social environment for indications of how one’s relational value is being measured by others. One of the functions of the sociometer is to continually recalibrate our moral compass; another is to help us maintain an optimum relationship with our community. It’s an evolutionary advantage to be seen as moral, just as it’s an advantage to be seen as powerful, attractive, smart, or not-to-be-messed-with.

The concepts of morality, and of social communication of one’s morality, manifest in more significant ways than my paper towel sketch, including religion and politics. We have a friend who sincerely believes that if you don’t believe in God, you can’t be moral. I used to think that this was just a simplistic belief that no one would be good unless they thought they’d ultimately get a reward for it. But now I think her belief might be more sophisticated, and is an expansion of the sociometer concept. She might believe, though she may not express it this way, that people’s moralities are unconsciously tempered by what their sociometers tell them others think of them, including the Other from whom believers can keep no secrets.

There’s a quote in Ariely’s book that goes a long way toward explaining why Americans are so divided about Trump’s impeachment. I think the analysis applies equally to Democrats and Republicans:

It seems that the social forces around us work in two different ways: When the cheater is part of our social group, we identify with that person and, as a consequence, feel that cheating is more socially acceptable. But when the person cheating is an outsider, it is harder to justify our misbehavior, and we become more ethical out of a desire to distance ourselves from that immoral person and from that other (much less moral) out-group.

Some day, when I feel self-assured enough about this whole blogging business to take on some controversy, I would like to post more thoughts on both religion and politics. But that will have to wait until I’m more confident about the effect such writing would have on the readings of my sociometer.

Thanks,
Dorn
10/22/2019

PS: My search for that perfect pen name (mentioned here) continues. I just heard that Mitt Romney has already taken the name “Pierre Delecto”. So I’ll have to keep looking.

Circles of Time in Self-Portraits

My brother Dorn’s recent post about the circles of time (see it here) somehow made me think of a self portrait I made back around 1980. At the time, my Dad and I were both studying portraiture at the Torpedo Factory with Danni Dawson. The self-portrait on the left is something I did back then and I remember my Dad thinking I had over-aged my twenty-something self in the painting. “Maybe in 50 years you’ll look like that!”, he said. I guess I did pass through that phase at some point. Just thinking about the time passage made me realize that now is the time to do some more self-portraits – it’s not like I’m going to look any better in another 50 years!

The self-portrait on the right is my recent effort. Interestingly, it is inspired by the long dead Swedish artist, Anders Zorn, whom I have somehow been following on Instagram. I’ve been wanting to try something called the Zorn palette. Back when we studied with Danni, she was always pushing us to use more color and we didn’t even have black on our palette so we could make it out of colors. Anders Zorn is just the opposite and had an amazingly simple four color palette: black, white, cadmium red and yellow ochre. That’s it! I know they say the ancients didn’t see the color blue, but how odd to leave it out. My usual palette includes not only blue, but it still has all the colors Danni taught us to use. These colors you need for portrait painting, she said, were the same colors that you would use to paint a McIntosh apple. So it was a challenge for me to approach a self-portrait using just the Zorn palette. I kept thinking I would have to cheat, but I didn’t! – even though I fell short in getting my hair as purple as I like!

Call me ‘Beau’

– in which Dorn almost breaks into the rapper industry, but has branding issues.

eaching the Third Age is all about thinking about new careers. With Kathleen’s encouragement I decided it was time to become a rapper. I had already done most of the heavy lifting for the job—everyone knows that 90% of rapper success comes from having the right name, and I had picked out mine: “Beau Tox”.

But before I started, I had to make sure that some upstart rapper hadn’t already claimed this name, so I did an exhaustive search (using both Bing and Google). And it turns out the name is already being used by a Belgian techno-rapper. At least, I think he’s a rapper. There’s little background info on his site, and his tracks seem like easy-listening electro-pop background music with inoffensive (I don’t speak Belgian, but they sound inoffensive) lyrics delivered in rap style on a few of them.

I could probably survive a co-named competitor in faraway Belgium, but I had a bigger pig jostling for space at the Beau Tox trough: a social media star already has that name. He is apparently quite famous, mostly for being a lovable dog with a somewhat disfigured face.

Not encouraging. There are also Beau-Tox cosmetic surgery salons in Palm Beach, FL, Tribeca, NY, England, Australia, and probably elsewhere. I suspected this might be the case—the name is just too apt for that type of clinic to pass up—but I didn’t think this association would be close enough to be fatal to my career. After all, they sell Ice Tea and Ice Cubes in the grocery store, and those guys did fine.

More interestingly, there’s a Dick Tracy villian, the plastic surgeon “Dr. Beau Tox”, who gives new faces to criminals No Face and Prune Hilda. A vain Tess and Dick Tracy come in for facelifts as well, and criminal hijinks ensue, as they say. The comic can be read here, or there’s a short synopsis here.

comic: "Meanwhile... 'I gotta have a new face, Doctor Tox. But I can't decide between a Salvador Dali, or...' "

But my favorite name pre-empter (or I should say pre-emptress) was Carlötta Beautox—“actress, thinktress, influenceress”—whose adventures trying to make it big in Hollywood can be followed in an apple podcast. It’s a funny, friendly little number full of pop culture references and silly running jokes (like everyone pronouncing her stage name byew-tox).

I couldn’t stand up to this kind of competition. I thought about reverting to my runner-up rapper name (and believe me, it was a distant second), “Butt Tox”. But I ran the mandatory Google due diligence on it and found that it also had been pre-empted, and not even by fashionable items like those above! There was Butt-tox the toilet seat sanitizer, and an ad for buttock botox injections that includes this enticement,

IS BUTT-TOX THE INJECTION YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEEDED? There’s lots of reasons you should be sticking Botox in your butt. And while I’ll examine a few of them here, with 100 degree days coming and WAY TOO MANY OF YOU leaving sweat stains on the subway, we’ll start here.

I know when I’m beaten. I’m giving up on the rapper business for something where the name competition is not as as cut-throat.

Maybe I’ll be a writer! Now, if I can only think of a pen name…

Thanks! Tell your friends about us if you like us!
Dorn
10/17/2019

Linda’s Garden

My friend Linda has a beautiful garden that I tried to paint twice this season. I say ‘tried’ because I think both times, I failed to capture the actual beauty that she created. Linda is the real artist here and trying to paint her work did kind of make me feel like a bumbling amateur. Both times I tried, it made me think of Plato’s denunciation of art as a copy of a form that he disliked for further removing one from the reality or truth of something. But, although I didn’t quite capture it, it seems like the counter argument to Plato is that at least the copy of the form will remain when the real form has long since withered. Also, in the process, I got to spend some pleasant hours exploring the ‘truth’ of the beautiful flowers.

Circles of time

– In which Dorn’s dreams come true.

udiobooks made it possible to commute all the way to Silver Spring and stay sane. The best of them can be engrossing, sometimes dangerously so. I was listening to A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, read by the author (or by his computer-generated voice), and at one point I got so caught up in the narrative that I ran off the road. I was on the beltway at the time, so this could have ended badly! Luckily it didn’t, and I righted myself and continued home.

It wasn’t just me, it was the book. Kathleen told me that she was listening to the same audiobook on the way to her teaching job, and she was concentrating on it so hard that she ran off the road (again, luckily, with no permanent consequences).

Stephen Hawking suggested in his book that if you allow for the possibility of imaginary time (time measured in imaginary numbers), our universe’s entire history can be described as a higher-dimension sphere with no endpoints, rather than a time “line”. (Apologies for my crude paraphrasing. His concepts are hard for me to describe or even understand, especially while navigating a car at 60 miles per hour.)

The book was mostly beyond me, but it left me with a sense of wonder at the ways of the universe and the human mind. What if time wasn’t an arrow with a beginning and an end, but a circle?

* * *

I’ve had my own direct experiences with imaginary time, and I can confirm that it can travel in a circle. Many of you, I suspect, have experienced time circles of your own, and it’s got little to do with physics or metaphysics.

I’ll describe two time circles, one with a diameter of about 40 years, and one of about 20 years.

I entered the first time circle when I was about six or seven years old, so it was 1960 or 1961. I had recently learned about how years work, and someone told me about the end of the century coming in about 40 years, when the odometer would click over from year 1999 to year 2000. I was fascinated by the idea, and I tried to imagine what that would be like. I tried to imagine what I would be like. I would be 45 or 46 years old, so a grownup, like my teacher or my parents. Maybe I’d be a parent myself. I might wear a suit and tie and have a crew cut and wear glasses. I tried to picture what I might look like, and imagine how I would feel, and “be”, as an adult. This imagination game went on for several days, until my mind was distracted by some new thought, and eventually I forgot about it.

My life progressed, in ways both predictable and suprising, and eventually I found myself in the year 2000. The memory of the young me picturing his 46-year-old self came pouring back. I pictured myself at six, and I remembered what it was like to be six, picturing me at 46.

My memory of the young me was spotty, and much of what I had imagined back then didn’t come to pass (no crew cut!). So neither old me nor young me was too spot on about what the other was like, but after 40 years I was still as much me as I was back then, despite the missed predictions and lost memories. I felt as if a vast circuit had been completed, and I had come back to where I started. I mentally smiled at my young self and wished him well on his future, as he congratulated me on my past. (Regular readers will know I can be smug. This started, apparently, at quite a young age.)

* * *

The second time circle started about 20 years ago. I was transitioning jobs, and had found what seemed like a good opportunity with the Navy out in Port Hueneme, California, when I got a call from my daughter. “Guess what Dad, I’m pregnant!” She and her husband were living in northern Virginia, so the prospect of moving anywhere away from the mid-Atlantic area immediately lost its allure. I had a daydream that was startling (for me) for its power and clarity. Some day, I imagined, I’d be leaning on the railing of the deck at my house with my 20-year-old grandson as the sun went down, and we’d be drinking some beers and yakking about the kind of stuff families yakked about–cars, girls, jobs, whatever.

Unlike the memory from my first time circle, this one stayed near the surface, and every now and then I’d take it out and savor it. Our daughter had a boy, who was bright, loving and happy. At about three years old, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. We all knew that from then on, his life would take different turns than it otherwise would have, and I quietly stored my daydream away as something that might have been.

With the love and support of his parents, he grew up a good person, mostly healthy and mostly happy, as we hope all children will be. He sees the world differently than I do, but as I watched him mature, I saw the universal human condition as he learned who he was and how he fit in the world, and in all his struggles and triumphs.

He’s about twenty now, and earlier this year he had come over to spend a few days with us and help out with some house cleaning chores. It was hard work, but the days were pleasant and the evenings watching the sunset light up the other shore of the Chesapeake Bay were magical. He had developed an intense interest in automobiles and machinery, and we were on the deck relaxing and discussing the pros and cons of new and older engine models, and my daydream came bursting into my consciousness! We were drinking sodas, not beers (had I thought about it when creating the daydream, I would have realized that even back then the drinking age was 21), but in every important way, this was the closure of that mental circuit I had created twenty years earlier. I nearly cried.

The second time circle started shortly before the first one had completed, and I like to think of them as forming two links in a time “chain” that describes my life. I like this idea because it implies that I’m now in a third time circle, and someday I will be surprised and delighted to be brought back to something from my past. I think about the future like everyone does, I guess, and I don’t have any idea which of my forward thoughts might be the basis for the next link in my time chain, but just knowing the circle might be forming around me even now makes the present a little lighter, and the future a little more worth reaching for.

Thanks for listening, from me and from younger me.

Dorn
5 October 2019, 1999, and 1960