Döppelgangers

If you're feeling good about them, they might be dualities. Under other circumstances, they might be labeled bipolarisms (or did I just coin that?).

And maybe I shouldn't name them before we know what they are, huh?

I've got three diptychs (another possible term) for consideration here.

Maybe they're just interesting siblings - or echoes.

While taking out the garbage a couple weeks back . . .  .  Okay, recalibrating, it was December 31 and we were up with the Baxters at their Mt. Baker cabin - and the garbage bin was 1/2 mile away or so, over entertainingly ice/slush-encrusted roads.  No Stockbridge, Mass. circumstance, this - we were on foot.  Bob and I were conscripted for the chore since other guests were imminent and the potluck gala would no doubt produce a bit of garbage.  Well, and possibly "they" just needed some time away from us.

We're not talking Alice's Restaurant quantities here, mind you.  No filled former church pews or anything like that.  But come to think of it, you can get danged near anything you want at Jean and Bob's 'stablishment.  That's if you can get them to answer the page from the front gate and let you in!  And there was that pole-dog lurking around the way-overdue-for-emptying garbage containers at the community center, but at least he was not foaming at the mouth.

But the transfer was otherwise uneventful, other than that Mr. Bob, nearly always outgoing, knows or will soon know everyone in the complex and their full life story, so the return was punctuated with repeated jovial encounters.  When we crossed paths with one whose name was Dusan, a name rare in my experience but resonant, I intruded on the exchange.   I was aware of a well-known world-class mountain-climbing Dusan from decades back.  I might have met him briefly, perhaps not, but I did a couple climbs with a fellow who knew him.  The new Dusan reminded me of what I had forgotten, that that Dusan fell to his death in the descent of a peak in BC's Fairweather Range, back in the 1970's, only a few years after my climbs with his acquaintance.  The two Dusans, my new acquaintance and the dead climber, I gather had done a good bit of skiing together.  Serious, competitive skiing, as in for national Olympic teams.  The live Dusan is now living a less risky life from what I can tell, pursuing his amazing gift for creative woodwork, on the house-scale and decorative as well.

An enjoyable coincidental encounter.  For all I know, the name "Dusan" is the "John" or "Bill" of Eastern Europe.  I would not have stuck my nose into the exchange if I thought so, and would have missed a good connection.

A significant portion of my reading comes about from irresistible book mini-reviews in my inbox (yes, I'm an easy mark). That is how I first learned of "The Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,"and myself became the initial virus-carrier for this book in my circle of relatives.  This is a great tale, set in Seattle's International District, which in the pre-WWII era apparently included at least a separate Chinatown and Japantown, and possibly other asian quarters.  To my ignorant eyes, our ID today does not feature any such demarkations, the ID now featuring a panoply of chinese, japanese, philippine, thai, and vietnamese influences most prominently - and I believe a new creole crawfish eatery.

Tellingly, my prized book copy is afloat on the sibling reading sea right now.  I was greatly taken with this tale, with the Panama Hotel, of which I was not previously aware despite my ongoing peregrinations in the area, a center of attention.  I have since tracked that building down, finding that it is nowhere near one of the googles would have it.

But it is, mercifully, not a close neighbor to the Bush Hotel.  Nor nearly as photogenic either, as the latter continues to hang out there with name emblazoned, inviting (facetious) attention.

Any fan of historical fiction might enjoy this, and NW residents, especially of a certain age, particularly so.

But then my in-box yielded "When the Emperor Was Divine," covering some of the same territory but with more focus on the internees, in this case from Berkeley, CA.  I was able to borrow this on CD from the Seattle Public on the occasion of the road trip rendezvous in snow country for New Years, and we greatly enjoyed it. This certainly resonated with Bitter and Sweet and was also very moving, tracking train travel across Nevada to eventual encampment in Utah, while the family patriarch was captive in NM.

This also gets my highly recommended rating - great listen, well-constructed and credible.

There's no way I could be the only one here who read The Road, since it is now appearing in a theater near you.  I greatly enjoyed that bleak, dark tale, somewhat invoking Cold Mountain and Lost Nation, those also terrifically gripping (as long as you don't need your reading to always be Pippie Longstocking).

I have since come upon and read World Made By Hand (James Kunstler), with a generally similar premise but fascinatingly different take on the outcome of future disaster.  Admittedly the premises in Road and World are not identical, to the limited extent they are even spelled out.

One of my current works-in-progress is Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built In Hell, her explication of the "return-to-Eden" effect that disasters sometimes have, in the way of releasing the inner angels of many victims of tragedy, leading to bottom-up people-based ad hoc systems for dealing with basic human needs that tend to crop up in the face of disasters.  This book, I confess, is much more of a slog than the fiction I mentioned back there, but rewarding and very valuable in a different way.  Solnit notes how in many cases the human response to disaster, including a wide range of chaotic circumstances under that term, natural disasters prominent but not exclusive, is far more upbeat than the standard wisdom would have it.

The powers-that-be tend to want to bring in the military and turn disaster sites into war zones, terrified of looters, crowds in panic, and any alteration in the power-structure.  The debate is elite panic over the possibility that disaster and disruption will unfurl (their imagined or ideologized) dark side of humanity, riots, looting, destruction, rape and violence versus the concept (well documented by Solnit) that real people in these events tend to turn into people we wish we were related to, organizing food-exchanges, volunteer networks, and support groups in general, i.e., finding a way to true community cooperation.  Oh does that latter sound like something the world needs now.

The common reality as Solnit has it is that the actual people involved in whatever disaster it is tend to find themselves drawn to a communalism and an authority-defying zeitgeist that evokes an earlier Paradise where perhaps we tended to care for each other and get beyond much of the tawdry stuff that poisons life these days.  Woodstock has not been mentioned in the book, but what I have heard of that epochal event certainly seems to accord with the theory.  Of course that sort of thing is a real threat to the established powers, so it rarely gets into circulation.

The "authorities" are strongly prone to throwing police powers into a disaster area on the assumption (or excuse) that people are by nature awful and will turn into criminals in the face of crisis.  That was definitely the case, for example, in the response to Katrina, with local and state authorities apparently at one point directing the police and military to forego rescue operations in the interest of "controlling" the disenfranchised and shooting any "looters."

Solnit does a great job of dealing with this "looting" thing.  It is obviously a flashpoint, as you might even admit yourself.  I was shaken by the "news" (never demonstrated with evidence) that looting was a major deal in the Crescent City.  I gather it was well-demonstrated that evidence of Afro-Americans taking materials from stores was labeled "looting" while the identical behavior by Anglo-Americans was called "requisitioning."

As Solnit points out, in the face of a crisis, and Katrina may be up there for #1 for our country, with so many people made homeless, many marginally financially stable to begin with, across large swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, "requisitioning" of food and other essentials from stores that are closed is what survival requires.  If I were lost in the woods and desperate for nutrition and came on a locked cabin, would you begrudge me breaking in and consuming what I needed?

Yet the abundant evidence is that actual people in crises like this, including Katrina, tend to suspend whatever ideologies they might have and become natural allies in finding a way to get by.

I bring this up because it is remarkable how well that dichotomy tracks for me with the different approaches of The Road and World Made By Hand.  I read the former a good while back, so my recall is not great.  But I have the sense it was infused with a dark expectation regarding the nature of our species en masse.  The latter, while certainly acknowledging the potential for evil in our species, is much more hopeful in tone, speaking to community and collaboration in the face of dire circumstances.

I would appreciate your insights, input, and critique on this.  Great books.  Do get back to me!