Eating Artichokes

The other day artichokes were on sale at King Soopers, 2 for $3.  I bought two and took them home to cook the way Mom used to cook them:  cut off the tough stems; put them in a pot with salted water to cover (although the little dudes float, so covering them is an impossible quest); add chopped garlic (Mom used garlic salt instead); and then boil them to within an inch of their lives, for around 40 minutes. Chill them in the fridge for at least a day, then eat them cold for lunch with plenty of real, salty-lemony mayonnaise (Hellman's, not that sickly sweet Miracle Whip crap).

Eating an artichoke is a unique experience.  The boiling gives them a dark army green color.  You set them on a large plate so you have room for the discarded leaves, with plenty of mayo on the side, then you add another spoonful of mayo for good measure. Peel off one leaf at a time, dip the non-pointy end in just enough mayo to make it tasty, then scrape the soft green stuff into your mouth with your lower teeth.  Artichokes have kind of a vegetably, mayonnaisy flavor (some say they are merely an excuse for eating mayo--I've been known to eat cold leftover cooked broccoli the same way).

As you remove the leaves one by one, eventually you unearth a cluster of remarkably lethal-looking leaves in the center with pointy purple ends that can actually prick you if you're not careful.  You gather these together and pull them out of the remaining artichoke heart in furry little tufts, and then you're left with what my mother called "a delicacy," the artichoke heart.  And if you've been careful with your mayonnaise you have enough left to do it justice.

Artichokes remind me of my mother, who ate them with matter-of-fact gusto as if they didn't look like small green creatures from the planet Vegeton.  Sometimes I was allowed to pack one for my school lunch.  How the mayonnaise was preserved in my un-refrigerated little lunchbox so that it didn't kill me off with salmonella by the time lunch rolled around I'm not sure.  I do know that the other kids at my grade school, their lunch trays loaded with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and mystery meat, would gaze at me with a mixture of revulsion and admiration while I ate the artichoke in the time-honored fashion--just one of many things back then that earned me and my family an eccentric reputation in a small southern Indiana town in the early 60's.

Coaching My Inner Critic

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”

― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

As I struggle to produce even the first step per Lamott (a shitty first draft), a friend advises me:  "Lose the inner critic."  My sister teaches creativity workshops in which she strongly encourages her students to "dare to suck."  I was once in an improv jam session with her in which the primary theme, sung and danced with a blues motif, was all about daring to suck.

All the self help books in the world tell you to be aware of the voice of your inner critic so you won't inadvertently censor your every move.  In fact, that's not enough.  I think you have to be acutely aware, and then write down every word verbatim for awhile, every word that nasty little bastard is whispering in your ear. 

"No sense in even starting to write that blog/novel/poem--you know it won't be any good."

"No one will read it"

"You have nothing interesting to say."

"It's a waste of time!"

Then close your eyes and perhaps imagine that a school teacher has said those things to your kid. Now do you feel your talons unsheathing, ready to fight back?

Since the inner critic is really a part of me and probably does have some useful insights, I'm wondering if I can coach him to be more constructive.  If I model the constructive approach for him, next time the negativity sets in, it might go something like this:

My inner critic:  You're just not creative enough to come up with new ideas.

Me:  You know, we need to talk.  You're not helping.

IC:  Hey, it's tough love.  Somebody has to keep you honest.

Me:  All this negative talk just shuts me down creatively and I can't even muster up the guts to suck.

IC:  Well, as I was telling another one of my clients...

Me:  Clients?!  You harangue other people this way too?

IC:  Sure--my genius is relevant everywhere.  This other client is in an African dance class.  She just loves this class and has gotten some compliments about her dancing. At the end of each session, the drummers drum wildly and a dance circle forms where one dancer at a time can prance to the center and show her best moves.  My client would just love to enter the dance circle.  So far I've protected her from making a fool out of herself by sucking. She goes home each week after class sad, but safe and sound, unembarrassed.

 Me:  But she's miserable.  Each week she regrets not having the courage to enter the circle, you bozo!

IC:  Not worth the risk.  She's not perfect, you know.  She'd just disappoint herself and everybody else and we can't have that happen.

Me:  Look, I don't know about the dancer, but I need a change.  From now on, if you can't say something constructive, don't say anything at all.  Otherwise I'm going to switch channels and stop listening to you altogether, got it?

IC:  You're a coward!  You can't take the truth. If you're that sensitive, you'll never get anywhere anyway.

Me:  There you go again!  I'm shutting you down.  Every time you say something negative I'm going to block it, and think of trees instead, since I'm quite fond of trees.  They're beautiful and they produce oxygen, essential for breathing...

IC:  Trees!  What a stupid...

Me:  ...Oak.  Pine.

If:  ...stupid...

Me:  Sycamore.  Sassafras.  Breathe.

IC:

Me:  You know, I'll take constructive criticism...

IC:  You wouldn't know constructive criticism if it bit you in the...mmf.  Bmf.

Me:  Look, since you're part of me, we both have my best interests at heart, right?

IC:  Right, but you don't want your blog to suck, right?

Me:  True.  But right now I'm working on what Anne Lamott calls a "shitty first draft" for my blog. Just getting my ideas down in some form, knowing nobody will ever read it in this form.  It doesn't have to be perfect.  Really.  If you have something helpful to say, I might let you help me edit it later.

IC:   You know you get wordy.

Me:  I know.  We can polish it together.  Later.  Once the first draft is done.

IC:  Okay, if you ever conquer your laziness long enough to finish the boring first dr...   Mmf.  Bmf.

Me:  ....Maple.  Boab.  Eucalyptus.  Ginkgo.  Boojum.  Avoid using words like lazy and boring.

IC:  You said shitty. 

Me:  I'm allowed to call it a shitty first draft--you're not.

IC:  Looks like you've got a good start.  As soon as you finish the first draft, which I'm confident you will, I'm convinced it'll meet your shitty standards and I'll be right here, ready to help.

Me:  Better.   You can do this.  Meanwhile, go tell that other client of yours that she's a beautiful dancer who deserves her spot in the sun, and in the dance circle. 

The Wisdom of Uncertainty and "The Circle"

Happily, my recent retirement frees me to do some things I've always wanted to do, like attending last week's Conference on World Affairs (CWA) at CU in Boulder, the renowned “conference on everything conceivable.”

I was inspired by one standing room only session entitled "The Wisdom of Uncertainty."  The panelists did a great job of outlining the human dilemma in which we dislike uncertainty and take Herculean measures to avoid it, even though "not knowing" and questioning the basic assumptions we’re constantly making can be the very best path to renewed creativity, innovation, and growth.  They also pointed out that every amazing new breakthrough in science occurs when someone decides that they don’t know something, tosses out assumptions, and sets out to learn the truth.  One panelist asked the audience who had seen a sunset – and then explained that none of us had, since the sun doesn’t set, although the phenomenon that looks like the sun setting was only recently understood correctly after the "certainty" that the sun revolves around the earth was questioned.

The panelists also pointed out that there's a difference between confidence and absolute certainty.  For example, you can be confident that your efforts to write a blog will bear fruit, despite a case of writer's block from hell, even though you're not certain exactly what you'll come up with or whether the topic will remotely match your initial concept.  Uncertainty can pave the way toward new connections and ideas.

Speaking of “not knowing,” I just finished an unsettling novel by David Eggers called "The Circle" about a social media company in Silicon Valley that has absorbed all its relatively feeble predecessors (Facebook, Google) and metastasized into a behemoth organization with leaders Quite Certain that their innovations can solve all the problems of the world once they are able to “close the circle” by collecting and tying together all information and making it fully available and transparent to everyone for the greater good of humanity.  Thus, employees are encouraged and ultimately coerced where necessary to constantly share their perceptions and feelings. In fact, privacy is considered insubordinate since it robs everyone of the information and transparency needed to resolve problems and prevent wrong doing.

The novel’s protagonist is new hire Mae, a young woman the company immediately sets out to indoctrinate and who at one point is even led during a company-wide meeting to publicly utter the 1984-style maxims of The Circle:

SECRETS ARE LIES

SHARING IS CARING

PRIVACY IS THEFT

Mae is relentlessly pressured to share more and more of her most private thoughts and experiences, from intimate encounters to medical data.  At a couple of points I felt claustrophobic enough to put the book down and get a breath of fresh air, wishing Mae could do the same.

Kayaking on the bay, Mae escapes a couple of times to that most precious source of centering, solitude and peace, nature.  She paddles to an island, climbs a tree, wonders about the content of a bird’s nest and decides she cannot know this information without disturbing the nest and its inhabitants and so foregoes the knowledge. For a short while she remembers to breathe and acknowledges the value in "not knowing" what's in the nest or below her in the dark depths of the bay as she kayaks back to shore.

But she quickly gets in trouble at work for this, since being alone and not sharing information about her experience are viewed to be willful and selfish acts, unsupportive of the world view The Circle's leadership is so certain is correct.

I can recall a few times in my own career when I saw the same level of arrogant, absolute certainty from leaders, feeling both amazed and disquieted by it.  There is a wisdom in uncertainty, in seeing the world from constantly fresh perspectives and questioning self-limiting assumptions. In the end I would rather lean that way than walk around absolutely certain about life, the universe and everything. 

Also, it occurs to me that perhaps I’ve been way too lackadaisical up to this point about the question of privacy.  When carried to the extreme where it's socially unacceptable not to constantly share, the value of what is shared seems diminished--better to live with a greater degree of uncertainty.