The lyrics in the songs always mentioned running away. Flight, escape, danger in its many variations. Embedded in the outlook, punctuating the very choruses was a sense of precarity. And yet these were not dirges, these were not laments. They'd long made their peace with the world as they'd found it, nay, they were comfortable even if clear-eyed about this existence.

And they watched.

Running away, heading for the hills and the rocky terrain. Running away, heading for higher ground, for those parts that only those close to these lands would know. The caverns where they could hide, holding their breath, stifling all sounds, covering the mouths of the infants.

And they waited.

Holes in the ground, the entrances disguised, dark caverns where the ancestors were said to have sought shelter from previous predators. At most a dozen could fit in the largest ones so you had to be prepared to seek out other spots, ever calculating as you ran up over the rocks how many had already made it, and if you would be able to use this particular refuge.

Oftentimes it was a gamble.

To enter the hiding places, you crouched, crawled and wriggled. The earth would envelop you, surround you with its embrace. You could expect to taste the slightly acidic crumbs as you pushed your way in, to smell the faint trace of clay. The earth would resist the touch, implacable and stern, until it would yield all of a sudden, plunging you forward into the void of the cavern.

You hoped, you wished for a soft landing.

You had to be methodical even in the heat of the moment, deliberate even as the senses were heightened by the danger. First, to dislodge the covering by pulling at the right spot, the intricate branch structure that only careful hands could pry open, and then to preserve its camouflage so that it would appear undisturbed to the raiders in pursuit. The architecture of escape, the provisional sanctuary.

And they prayed.

No matter how many times they had practiced, no matter how many warnings, no matter how many songs they had sung, no matter how much advance notice they'd garnered, they knew that there would be something lost, that there would be someone lost. It was the nature of life in those times. Something, someone would be snatched from you. Pieces of yourself dispersed, shredded away, leaving only the memories.

And they wept.

Farmers and pastoralists, they never had a standing army. Millet and maize in small fields, custodians of the northern territories, eking out enough to support the clan, to trade some guinea fowl and kola nuts, to enjoy the gifts of the earth, to husband it. This patch of land on the lower Sahel was unforgiving but it was theirs.

And they stayed.

But, at length, there had to be some edge they could wield to surprise the raiders. Running away might ensure survival for many, but more was needed. They taught the youth about all the plants and their uses. Those they ate, those they treated with as part of aromatic bitters, those with properties that were prized, their nighttime potency recounted, astringency debated, and medicinal effectiveness evaluated. And once they proved adept and facile with the identification of the flora, they would learn about what in extremis could be used in the poisoned arrows that were always reluctantly fashioned. Weary, wary, reluctant but necessary.

And so they studied.

The elements of survival were well known. Swift recall, preparation, decisiveness under threat, knowledge of topology, and luck. For the gods were capricious. Even the fleetest of foot, the strongest, and the most agile could be brought low and fall prey to the human hyena that roamed the lands. And Babatu's men were implacable and determined trackers. Tears would be for nought when in their grip. Best to fight when caught, to resist with all one's heart. But, above all, to flee when attacked, to live to see another day, to rebuild and restore when these interlopers would leave, for they would surely leave as these lands only yielded bodies to them.

And they ran away.

Taboo. A famous dirge recounted how one of the twins was unable to stay silent, a hard demand of a toddler, let alone in the darkness of the cavern. Their position having been given away, tough decisions had to be made. Father and the one would give themselves up hours later, when it became clear that this set of raiders would wait them out, they were a patient lot. Mother and the other twin would retreat further into the second chamber, deep in the dank bowels of the earth and stay for three days. It was hard to breathe, it was hard to stay silent and still, and there was only one gourd of water and the few nuts hidden in the fold of her cloth. They clanged to each other, charged with the burden of loss, of memory, of survival. Pieces of themselves lost for good. But they lived to tell the tale, to recover possession of the land.

And they survived.

Strangers have come into our land
Raiders have come for our bodies
Take heed, my brother, and run, run away
Caution, my sister, and run, run away
For we will all, someday, be turned into sand
And all that will remain is our story

Running Away, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note. (spotify version)

• Running Away by Roy Ayers
• Running Away by Bob Marley
• Kunta Kinte Dub by The Revolutionaries
• Man in the Hills by Burning Spear
• Hiding by Breakestra
• Slavery Days by Burning Spear
• Kunta Kinte by Horace Andy
• Man in the Hills (live) by Burning Spear
• Hiding (Quantic mix) by Breakestra
• Kunta Kinte by Mad Professor

Further reading:

• Raids and Refuge - The Bulsa in Babatu's Slave Wars by Franz Kröger
• Slavery, Memory and Orality by Emmanuel Saboro
• Wounds of our Past by Emmanuel Saboro

A later discovery: Beyond Elmina: The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana by Joachim Jack Agamba mined similar terrain to great effect.

This note is part of the Things Fall Apart series. Do let me know what banner might be appropriate.

File under: slavery, Bulsa, Ghana, Africa, culture, memory, music, history, observation, perception, fear, dislocation, escape, griots, Things Fall Apart, poetry, toli

Writing log. July 24, 2022

Literature only
Life vest under your seat

Literature only
Parental advisory

Literature only, put aside your childish ways
Literature only, this is grown folks' business

Literature only reads our manifesto
We try harder, even with no bells and whistles
From spare and unadorned prose through the densely elliptical
The experience is sometimes said to be life changing and mystical

Literature only, storytelling is our mission
Your franchises and universes are mere diversions
Commerce marks the tomb of the unknown author
But the fact remains, the tales are immortal

Literature only, the issue is survival
When it hits your soul, the sensation is unrivaled

Literature only, it's a matter of perspective
All consuming and focused on the narrative
Dialog, repartee, conflict, motivation
Interplay, romance, thrills, observation

Literature only and occasionally poetic
Our brand of storytelling is the original cinematic
Perception is all, this life of ours is a mystery
Truths, secrets and lies, the rest is history

Literature only, we never stand for ceremony
We make no prescription and traffic in irony
Exploring the boundaries of the human condition
The interface between modernity and tradition

Literature only, it's beyond dispute
Caution, my friend, accept no substitutes
Bask in the glow and let the narrative unfold
The urgency of folk memory, the story simply had to be told

Literature only, plan to be a believer
A cast of thousands, all of them word scribblers
Apt to spontaneously declaim, these occasional rhymers
Mind you, the griots among them are also keen listeners

Literature only, enter the lyricists
Deep thinkers, philosophers and moralists
Villains, hacks, and, of course, the polemicists
Witness the hatchet jobs from the propagandists

Literature only, this is a serious matter
Specialists in all styles, we've got you covered
Hardboiled tropes, greed, revenge, and dense plotters
Love, hate, lust, youth and comedies of manners

Literature only, scribes and scriveners
Bask in what springs from the minds of these dreamers

Literature only, style and aesthetics
Savor the pointillist skewering from the satirists

Literature only, indelible heroes, ever dramatic
Our protagonists are always charming and charismatic
World builders, the terrain of the unknown, mining the imagination
Outrage too, a surfeit of reality that exceeds description

Literature only, we're not the usual suspects
Afflicted with the journalistic impulse, we simply have no regrets
Essayists and wordsmiths expounding on nothing and kindred subjects
Small things, the world is our oyster and practice makes perfect

Literature only, allusions and exhilaration
Literature only, excess and repetition
Literature only, even as the form varies
Literature only, filling your libraries
Literature only, as yet undefeated
Literature only, fasten seat belt while seated

Literature, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• This is my story, This is my song by Thelonious Monk
• Fairy Tales by Anita Baker
• Stories by Carleen Anderson
• I Could Write a Book by Miles Davis
• Tell me a tale by Michael Kiwanuka
• Poetry by RH Factor (ft. Q-Tip and Erykah Badu)
• I Could Write a Book by Dinah Washington
• 8 Million Stories by A Tribe Called Quest
• I Could Write a Book by Ella Fitzgerald
• Just Another Story by Jamiroquai
• Literature Beyond My Mind by Blue Moon Swing
• Imagination by Count Basie
• Poetry Man by Phoebe Snow

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried



File under: humour, literature, culture, observation, writing, craft, perception, whimsy, poetry, Observers are worried, toli

Writing log. July 24, 2022

Blame the losses incurred during the South Sea bubble
Owing to which, the great man's credibility suffered such a tumble
While mankind adopted his search for fundamental laws of heavenly bodies
(Their tangible motion was unarguable, elliptical totems of physicality)
History fully discounted his later findings on the dynamics of worry

Thus I reproduce here the lost chapter of Newton's Principia
Whose discourse moved beyond those musings on objects' inertia
The simple formulae that laid down the outline of the classical analysis
The formal statements that derived from the moral calculus of the treatise

The first law states that anxiety expands in proportion to the depth of feelings
But that the capacity for worrying will eventually approach a ceiling
The paradox of approaching this asymptote of anxiousness
Weighs heavily on the mind, leaving one in a state of uneasiness

The famous equation can be shown to result in quasi-equilibrium
The disorder presents as a fraught subject in the generalized version
Especially confounding, as the parameters of worry have a time component
Still, careful experiments confirmed the findings with decisive evidence

The second observation is that public concern accentuates the degree of anxiety
This finding on the stresses we incur in life has the well known corollary
At its worst, the most apprehensive symptom is unbounded depression
Net attention can thus be said to vary inversely to the bearer's perception

The quantity theory of pessimism accounts for the enduring appeal of bad news
The marginal existence of our ancestors transmitted said affinity as a virtue
Replaying the past, and its influence, enhances the effects of solitude
The reaction, opposite in direction, ends up equal in magnitude

The third lemma concerns the propensity for debilitating panic
The damage of unfocused worry is piecemeal but renders one frantic
The general dynamics that govern the fundamental paradigm
The study of how the mind might develop or alter over time

The crucial point: interaction being the key to matters of identity
The essential insight, namely that human beings live in communities
The currency of social capital, thoughts expressed in conversation
The friction of human intercourse raises simultaneous frustration

Ever since we left Eden, we've borne the weight of the certainty of death
The precarity of life, a constant, and the gravitational pull it exerts
The comfort of a touch can steady the soul and bring a body to rest
The countervailing force of passing time acts as a blanket of neglect

With nagging doubt lingering at the back of the mind
Seized with insecurity at the most inopportune time
Enter imposter syndrome and its many liabilities
Evaporating any confidence in one's abilities

All this is independent of the righteousness of one's cause
Even with the best preparation the observer effect is quite remarkable
Knowledge was our stolen gift, lifted from the gods
Who would render us naked to ignorance for our troubles

A state of uniform emotion cannot be countenanced without internal displacement
Off kilter and unbalanced, the pressure that amounts leads to much resentment
And in the reverse of the process, to settle the mind's confusion
And descend from the peaks of worry, and finally be able revel in relaxation

To the toll of mounting discomfort that external forces exert
To counter the dark impulses, how best then to allay concerns
The load one is bearing leads directly to a surfeit of unease
The constant velocity of what amounts to a social disease

The research shows that the most propitious cure is conversation
Prolonged engagement serves to relieve stress and isolation
The underlying mechanism for the diffusion of distress
The gaze of an audience helps scale the heights of nervousness

None shall escape the cardinal embrace of worry
The fundamental principle at work is its irreversibility
Because once a soul succumbs to its seductive gaze
Unease becomes part and parcel of the bearer's days

Folk remedies have been proposed by noted cultural alchemists
But when two irresistible forces meet traveling at equal velocity
The final outcome will depend on their relative acceleration
Thus the saying, observers are worried, borne of close studies of such collisions

Over time, coping mechanisms can be found for some measure of mitigation
Yet these last are only palliative, permanent relief remains a fiction
Indeed, the dynamics of worry fully hinge on these matters of cultural sensitivity
The frame of reference is everything, an early statement of the theory of relativity

Worry, a playist

A soundtrack for this note. (spotify version)

• Three Little Birds by Bob Marley
• Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing by Stevie Wonder
• (Don't Worry) If there's hell below, we're all gonna go by Curtis Mayfield
• Not to Worry by Abbey Lincoln
• Dem no worry we by Super Cat
• Don't you worry by Alice Russell
• Don't Worry be Happy by Bobby McFerrin
• Why Worry by Aaron Neville
• Worry, Worry by Buddy Guy
• Why Worry by Dire Straits
• Dem a Worry by Mighty Diamonds
• (Somebody) Ease my Troublin' Mind by Sam Cooke
• Worry Walks Beside Me by Michael Kiwanuka
• Worries by Robert Glasper Experiment (ft. Dwele)
• No Worries by Robert Glasper Trio

..

See previously in humanity's curriculum:

• The Laws of Grief
• The Economics of Whimsy
• The Physics of Shame
• Fortress of Ignorance
• The Ingredients of Catharsis

File under: worry, culture, observation, perception, life, humour, whimsy, humour, satire, poetry, Observers are worried, toli

Writing log: June 28, 2022

First, how to say the name. 

I think that the "correct" pronunciation of IKEA is "ee-kay-uh", with emphasis on the "ee" sound, similar to the way a native Swedish speaker would say it, not "eye-kee-ah" or "ai-kee-uh" with stress on the second syllable, the way most Americans say it (all the Americans I know).

What does it mean?

IKEA is an acronym for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, the names of the founder and the places where he grew up.

In my lifetime, I've probably put together ten items of IKEA furniture, the most recent being their simplest, cheapest bed frame called Neiden.  It was a tremendous challenge, taking me a total of two whole, taxing, exhausting days.

I didn't follow their advice that it requires two people to put Neiden together.  That was a mistake.

Their drawings are in two dimensions, but require you to think and act in three dimensions.

In the entire booklet of instructions (about ten pages), I did not see a single word (all drawings), but I did twice see this symbol:  ⓘ ("i" inside of a circle).  I think it means "this drawing provides 'information' about what you're supposed to do with these parts".  One of these ⓘs occurred in an expanded drawing that explained how to assemble the two parts of a wrench — the hard plastic handle and the metal Allen hex wrench (the one with only a single bend).  Sounds simple, right?  Wrong.

Assembling this wrench was one of the trickiest maneuvers (there were many tricky maneuvers) that had to be applied in putting the bed frame together.  The relevant drawing showed where to insert the wrench into the handle, and it even had an arrow indicating which direction to push the wrench.  But then I started to tremble, because embossed on the top surface of the black handle at one end was the numeral "4" and at the other end was the numeral "5".  There was no explanation for what "4" and "5" meant.  As I pushed this way and that, the wrench would not engage solidly with the handle.  I began to swear (aver — not yet curse) that the numerals were printed backwards and at the wrong ends of the handle.

I was just beginning, yet already I was getting very, very frustrated by this three inch two-part device.  As I twisted and turned those two small components, flipping them in different directions, suddenly the wrench clicked / locked in as solidly as if they were one piece made of two different materials. 

How did I do it???  During all of my flipping and flopping, twisting and turning, it transpired that I twisted and turned, flipped and flopped the two parts at the same time.

Triumph!!  Victory!!

Now I had a wrench firmly affixed to a handle.

And so it went for two days.

The above account of the trial of making the Allen hex wrench with handle serves as a prelude to this fugue about the making of a piece of furniture.

The Neiden bed frame came in a flat box that was about 6.5 ft. long, a foot or so wide, and four inches thick (those dimensions are all retrospective guesstimates).  The box was heavy and tightly packed, so that it must have taken quite a bit of ingenuity to determine the order in which the pieces were placed.  It was even somewhat difficult to extricate the individual pieces from their interlocking jigsaw-like assembly inside of the cardboard box.

As I pulled out the wooden parts of the bed frame, the aroma of perfectly, freshly sawn lumber from a Swedish forest filled my room.  Ahh!  Refreshing!  Invigorating!

I laid out all of the parts on the floor in neat piles, familiarizing myself with which parts were supposed to go where.

The directions are mostly accurate, but occasionally they are impenetrable and rarely they are inaccurate.  I'm told that there's a skit somewhere on the internet (maybe from SNL) that joshes people struggling to make sense of IKEA direction manuals.

All together, there were about ninety pieces big and small, mostly microscopically numbered to identify what goes where.  There were four tiny screws — the smallest items in the box — that were neither numbered nor even pictured in the manual.  That really worried me.  What was I going to do with those four tiny numberless, pictureless screws?

I set the little screws aside, fearful that they might get lost as I shuffled all the other parts around, but in the end decided there was nothing I could do beside wait and see when I finished putting all the other parts together if there were four wee holes that remained unfilled.

Like their design, IKEA instructions are minimalist.  Let us just say that you have to be good at intuiting and extrapolating to successfully put together a piece of IKEA furniture, plus you have to possess stamina and be good at filling in the gaps, and don't expect to complete the task "full fart".

Previous Language Log posts (see "Selected readings" below) have described and analyzed IKEA nomenclatural practice.  Quaint, to say the least.

No matter what the ultimate shape of your new IKEA furniture, it's almost certain to come in a flat package, in accordance with a vow of Ingvar Kamprad to make it easy for you to transport home in your car.  I live less than twenty miles from Plymouth Meeting, where the first IKEA store in America was established in 1985.  (Eight years later, they moved a few miles down the road to a town with a name I love, Conshohocken (Unami for "pleasant valley"), where they constructed a gigantic store which also houses the US corporate headquarters of IKEA.  Oft were the times when the IDEA brain taxing began with wrestling their flat (and sometimes long) package into or on your car and tying it down with twine.

People came to the IKEA store in Plymouth Meeting from as far away as New England, the Carolinas and Florida, and the Midwest.

When I lived in Sweden for a year, I quickly became familiar with the adage of their Scandinavian neighbors that the Swedes were "a nation of engineers".  They bear that reputation out from the construction and quality of their thousands of cleanly crafted and elegantly designed household furnishings.

In Sweden, at least when I lived there, everything fit together neatly and clicked tightly in place.  They were / are engineers par excellence.

Oh, but what about those four tiny screws left lingering on my rug?  I searched high and low, backwards and forward all over my snugly joined Neiden.  Finally I spied four teeny holes that had been drilled on the inside face of four rectangular wooden blocks that served as extra supports for the legs of the bed.  As instructed by the enigmatic drawings in the inscrutable manual, I had attached the blocks to the legs with two each of the stubby, grooved dowels that came in a plastic bag.  There they were, hanging from the legs of the bed, but they didn't seem very secure.  In fact, they were kind of dangling from the legs, and I was afraid they would fall off when I moved the bed around in the slightest.

Trepidatiously, I screwed the itsy-bitsy screws into the teeny-weeny holes on the inside face of the legs hidden underneath the hard wooden slats that served as the "springs" beneath the mattress.  Miraculously, the blocks no longer wobbled!  I can sleep in peace on my new Neiden.

 

Selected readings

• "Ikea: Peppered Caca for the holidays" (10/27/14)
• "The same text but in Arabic" (8/22/20) — sign at an IKEA store
• "Anti-collision particle physics" (3/6/23)
• "All work and no play" (12/28/14)
• "Speculative semiotics of Northern European product names" (4/1/08)
• "Script quiz" (2/25/07)

It is of the nature of a conundrum, this puzzling passivity
That human beings, in the main, submit so readily to authority
Acquiescing to mass extinction events almost with alacrity
Fearful, as it were, of being accused of disturbing tranquility

A tall order, perhaps, to stick one's neck out in a fit of outrage
Exit, voice or loyalty. The perils, and limits, of moral courage
The dissonance between one's values and what one is prepared to live with
In the dark of night, realizing that our inaction makes us complicit

Inured to pain, with no trace of accountability
The routine tallies, dismaying figures as normalcy
Altogether brutish outcomes, a cheapness, a deadening
Nothing to see here, don't even count on a reckoning

Nothing to See Here, a playlist

A playlist for this intolerable time (spotify version)

• Sitting and Watching by Dennis Brown
• How Soon We Forget by Colonel Abrams
• I Can't Go for That by Hall & Oates
• I Just Don't Understand by Ann-Margaret
• Don't Know Why by Norah Jones

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time

File under: failure, coronavirus, pandemic, culture, observation, perception, despair, dislocation, Observers are worried, Buyer's Remorse, covidious, poetry, toli

Writing log. July 20, 2022

From Phys.org: How many languages can babies learn? Study shows how Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages.

Africa is a multilingual continent and many adults speak several languages fluently. An empirical study by a research team led by the Potsdam psycholinguists Prof. Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan and Paul O. Omane now shows that the roots of this multilingualism can be found in infancy: In Ghana, most babies grow up multilingually, with most of them coming into contact with two to six languages and just as many regular speakers of each language. The researchers also showed that the babies heard some languages primarily indirectly—i.e. via radio, television or background conversations—while other languages were used by their caregivers to directly communicate with them. The results of the study have now been published in the journal Cognitive Development.

The study, which examined 121 babies aged three to twelve months in Accra, the capital of Ghana, demonstrates a remarkable variety of language input in the early months of life. The children are regularly exposed to two to six languages. Strikingly, the number of caregivers the children have also ranges between two and six, and babies who have more adults in their daily lives who regularly take care of them also hear more different languages. In Ghana, families often live in so-called “compound buildings,” where many everyday interactions take place in the courtyard, where family, neighbors and other relatives play an important role in the lives of children.

“The idea that a child learns only one particular language from a single caregiver, as is often assumed in Western cultures, does not apply to these communities. Rather, children are surrounded by a rich spectrum of linguistic inputs from the very beginning,” says O. Omane, the first author of the study. […]

A key finding of the study is the distinction between direct and indirect language input. While English is primarily acquired through indirect channels such as television and official communication, children receive most of the local languages (such as Akan, Ga and Ewe) through direct contact with their caregivers. Accordingly, the proportion of direct input is higher in the local languages than in English, which is predominantly present as indirect input. […] As a result of their empirical study, the researchers call for a broader view in language research. The common assumptions do not reflect the diversity and complexity found in other cultural contexts such as Ghana. The study makes it clear that it is not only the number of languages a child hears, but also the diversity of people and the different forms of input that have a decisive influence on language acquisition.

Thanks, Bathrobe!