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!

Algebra, for starters— whose origins go 
       back to ancient Babylon. It's still used for

calculating basic numbers, management and financial 
       data. Democracy itself— origin, Greek dēmokratia:

exercise of government by the people, of the people,
       for the people. My (always eloquent) sister-in-law 

got placed in ESL class when she got here, not even
       having the benefit of assessment. Fluency 

is the ability to read and speak with accuracy, trade 
       jokes and puns, correctly place an Oxford comma.

Kleptocracy is another word borrowed from not-English:
       literally, it means the rule of thieves. Klepto-

mania bends the laws so the poor are punished, while
       nincompoop billionaires snicker. Oval, from

ovum and ovalis, as in the Oval Office— where much
       posturing happens these days. Fellow peons, let's be

quick to praise the beautiful work of our hands, the
       riches loaned by so many beautiful tongues. Let's 
       
sabotage the spiel that madmen know better
       than scientists and scholars. How did we wind up so   

unbelieving, undone yet on the shores of further undoing?    
       Vaccines, conservation, diversity, inclusion. Who's in your  
       
wallet, that's trying to scrub these or make them go away? 
       Xerox your sensitive information, guard it from the

yes-man, pelotero, ball-kisser, duckmäuser—
      Zasa, said the assassin before he shot the mobster. Zasa. Zasa.   

Long before those edifices of past sorrow were erected
They moved with the poetry of resistance
Disdaining the fraught burden of a label
Freedom and defiance, they owed allegiance to liberty

Naturalists by inclination, observers of the earth's promise
They found strength in conversation and community
The playfulness of the language, the meandering turns of phrases
Luminous idiolect that harkened to ancestral lands

By necessity navigating the contours of cultural interplay
Recognition in the names, a heritage weighted with history
They carried in their tongues the tales and the traditions
Fragments of identity, the métissage of their found society
The maroon creed, independence of thought, purity of faith
Sacred links, bonds forged in renewed nighttime ceremonies

To stand straight even amidst insecurity
To laugh when confronted with precarity
To flow around obstacles, resilient as a river
And always hewing to escape, shackles discarded
Sounding the alarm with conch shell at the ready
Intent, moving with purpose, their destination is history

Bearing traces of scars still lingering that speak to society's ills
Not beholden to the legacy of those days in the hills
Yet embodying by one's very existence the remembrance
Of the enduring shame of what man would do to fellow men
To strangers and neighbors alike, out of the wages of blood and sin
Charting a path then, spears burning, ever mindful of this proud legacy
Cast in this vein as living emblems of cultural memory

Maroon Creed, a playlist

A soundtrack for the Nèg Marron. Caution, take heed, behold a spear burning over yonder. (spotify version)

• Man in the hills by Burning Spear
• Spear Burning by Burning Spear
• Black Soul by Burning Spear
• Door Peep by Burning Spear
• Spear Burning (live) by Burning Spear
• Song of the Maroons by Courtney Pine
• Foi de Marron by Léon-Gontran Damas
  Listening to the premier poet of Négritude narrating his famous ode to the maroon creed is invigorating. It is easy to see the spark that he lit in Senghor, Cesaire and other contemporaries.

In memoriam Aba Cecile McHardy


See previously: Until Such Time, Traveling Light and Forgiveness and Love

File under: culture, observation, griots, maroon, perception, history, legacy, freedom, slavery, race, identity, poetry, Caribbean, Africa, Social Living, toli

Writing log: July 3, 2022