rowan rabe . ink

Month: November 2025

  • Through a lens familiarly

    A continuation, I reckon, of a re-read of Stephen Fry’s Greek myths, certainly not because Hades II had a recent full release or anything so puerile as that, though this time I’m all the way at the Odyssey.

    Telemachus, son-of-Odysseus, looks just like his old man–a “chip off the old block” as Helen-via-the relentlessly-English-Fry puts it. That is the reaction he gets when meeting anybody who knew his father — immediate, reflexive, almost awe. Telemachus at this point in the story does not remember his father, as the latter was summoned to the Trojan campaign when the former was but an infant. But, from birth, in his mother’s eyes, the ghost of his father hovers over him and everything he does.

    I was struck by how familiar this was–this was a motif in my own life.

    That was common enough when I was growing up close to the small town where he grew up, visiting often. This is a small town in a “small state”, in the sense that it is a rural state and everybody seems to know or have connection to each other who has lived there long enough. It was not a recognition I anticipated I would get ever again once I had moved out of that temporal and geographical sphere. Yet, as fate had it, one of the administrators in my department at a world-class school in a world-class city knew my father in childhood. One Christmas party I was chatting with her and my mentor when she said, seemingly out of nowhere, “You look so much like your father.” (My mentor, who knew my roots were deeply rural, was shocked–I had not told him happenstance had placed an old family friend from another world in our little department in our massive school.) It was unbidden, a burst that comes of no longer being able to hold something back, from being overwhelmed by a thought. I have spent a lot of time thinking about that encounter. I was an anachronism, a powerful anchor for nostalgia, well out of time. I wish I recall what I had been saying, or what my facial expression had been, or what I had been wearing. Something to clue me in to what, precisely, was the last straw.

    I was an adult when I first saw a photograph of my father in his youth, in his high school yearbook. Time had not yet masculinized him as much as it had when I knew him, or even saw photographs in college, and I felt I was looking at a photograph of myself. Me, a bit broader in jaw in shoulder, a bit more heavy of bone, but even dressed the same was I was for my senior photographs in black suit and tie.

    Those gasping reactions I used to get from people who knew my dad — “You look exactly like your father” — are a time-limited state of being-understood. People who see me through the lens of him will die out and should the fates favor me to live that long there will come a time when no-one on earth will see me by my resemblance to my father; or, rather, the people who knew my father before they knew me–who see me in the context of him as the primary relation–will die off. This does not feel like losing “myself” but it is a loss of a link. A loss of a function as a mirror, which can reveal things about oneself by comparison. Not all it reveals will be flattering, but it will be worth thinking about, if I have the courage to do it with an honest mind. The resemblances are not merely physical. I’ll leave it at that.

    Not all are familiar with the dynamics of rural areas — large geographical swaths with small populations, small state capitals, small universities, the same institutions in huge populated states but writ small where everyone seems to know everyone else. The offices that require geographical distribution — doctors, professors, lawyers, the sort of office where you need a baseline of X practitioners per X unit land regardless of population density–that create a small pond for some large fish. The setting of the Odyssey, a collection of city-states we now think of as “Greek” largely, would have been similar — there is room for each large personality to become well-known. I am reminded of Dunbar’s number here — that each person can remember maybe 150 people intimately, regardless of the population density in which they live, and at lower densities the odds favor somebody-knowing-somebody-who-knows-you.

    I had thought in coming to California I had forfeited any likelihood I would be evaluated through the prism of family. It is liberating. Alienation often is. But alienation is decontextualizing, and I have an inordinate respect for context, for understanding a person through their place in the matrix of relationships that created them. Maybe that is why I so like multi-generational epics.

  • The shedding of old ways of thinking

    In celebration of the honor awarded watercolor artist and author Obi Kaufmann last week, I started flipping through my copy of The State of Water and had my mind blown, linguistically:

    “From “”The State of Water” by Obi Kaufmann, pg 23: “The word [water]’shed’ implies a container, an isolated and discreet investigable unit.”

    I always associated ‘shed’, in the context of ‘watershed’, with sloughing something off, shedding it like a skin. So, when I saw ‘watershed’ on a map I pictured the going-to place for water, where water sheds off mountains and hills and the like. But I always wondered why the word focused on the “shedding” aspect rather than the “holding” aspect. Because of this, I associated the term “watershed” with movement-toward, coming-together, flux–and maybe that is more accurate than the stable stagnant ‘pool’ I admit I picture when I think of a water shed. The only water I’ve seen in ‘sheds’ (as in a freestanding rough storage structure) is standing mosquito-hosting muck. Maybe my mistaken etymology was actually an insight? I think I’ll go with that.

    I am sure I (a) noticed this the first time I read it, (b) felt like I had a revelation, and (c) forgot, obviously.

    Anyway Mr. Kaufmann is one of my favorite watercolorists and naturalists and his books on California ecology are a delight. I keep them over my desk in place-of-privilege granted to books I pick up to noodle through most often.

  • Le Guin was right about everything part 58 of

    “The one I liked best was the one where Mr. Spock had to go home because he was in heat,” I said to her.

    “Except he never, you know,” she said. “They just had a fight over the girl, him and Captain Kirk, and then they left.”

    “That’s his pride,” I said, obscurely. I was thinking how Mr. Spock was never unbuttoned, never lolled, kept himself shadowy, unfulfilled; and so we loved him. And poor Captain Kirk, going from blonde to blonde, would never understand true love, would never even understand that he himself loved Mr. Spock truly, hopelessly, forever.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand, “True Love”

    Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand was just reprinted and contained several short stories I had not yet read, including this one, with a quote I have seen before online but have now encountered in context.

    Wisest writer in history. 12/10 insight. Genius.

  • “The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel.”

    I’ve been thinking about this image.

    Feng Li for Getty Images

    It’s older, from circa 2013, and shockingly difficult to find concrete information on–including the photographer, where I list the only attribution I could find. This is Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It may well no longer be an accurate picture of Beijing; I’ve found mixed reports online. But best I can tell it is a moment in time that existed. (I recall seeing it years back, before generative AI, although we seem to have collectively forgotten in the pre-genAI age we just used Photoshop to gin up fake photos.)

    This photo came up in communities or publications dedicated to the idea of dystopia, or cyberpunk, or climate, etc, either as a focus on the concrete reality of pollution itself, or as a focus on the sort of government that would demand that you pretend 2+2=5,* or as an example of the desperate self-placation humans perform in despair. Something sinister, in other words, something unsettling. Something desperate. The profound beauty the prisoner finds in the one star he can see from his cell, the ability to fixate on hope and optimism even in the most desperate conditions.

    One of these perceptions sees humans as acting out of despair, the other sees humans as adaptive, relentlessly optimistic creatures. Ultimately it is the same thing — placing a simulation of beauty where it is not — but one interpretation focuses on futility, the other on resilience and hope. “Someday we can have this sky; we just have to hang on,” that sort of thing.

    There is the discomfort with the fact that we need such desperate hope in the first place, and then there is the heart taken in realizing humans can find hope when it is needed. The question being — is it artificial hope ‘forced’ upon the people by a government trying to placate them?

    I do not know if it matters. Not when it comes to contemplating a possible future.

    By all means, criticize the governments and global systems responsible for getting us here in the first place. Burn it down. Demand accountability and restitution. But the fact that humans look for hope and beauty, itself, I do not see as damning. It is what will keep us moving forward through the ashes, through the dark reckoning times.

    Take refuge, but never stop moving forward.

    Or, as that one viral video says, “Take it easy! But, take it!”

    *I also wanted to add “a government that would demand you say you see five lights”, but something about the TNG comparison did not seem ‘true’ in the way the Orwell comparison did, even in the sense that it is a criticism somebody would make. I am thinking about why this is.

  • Nobody wants to be in the after-school program.

    It’s been A Week, I’ll tell you hwat.

    Adults and kids do not like to hang around each other all that much. I suspect this is why kids have been–forcefully, by being told to get out of the house or otherwise stay out from underfoot, a request happily complied with by the kids–self-segregating during free time for most of recorded history. I do well with kids in circumstances in which I do not have to force them to do anything arbitrary. I’m not a good ego for other people. But they’re always going to be guarded around me, an adult. My presence, no matter how benign I try to be, is a check. I feel obligated to say “Language!” to cursing, etc, when the truth is I could not care less so long as nobody is being bullied or hurt. The tension is worse when I am trying to get them to sit down and do more school after school. This sense of obligation-to-control grinds against the fundamental mismatch in energy between adults and kids, and nobody has a good time forced into proximity.

    Now we have after school care with “enrichment” and the attendant pressure to make that time not just monitored, but productive, marketable, and I get the sense nobody, adult or child, really wants to be there. Doesn’t much matter how ‘fun’ the enrichment is or how much the subject under study is independently desired by the student; it is within the context of an entire afternoon under lockdown. On days with a really rough group I wonder why we don’t just let kids and adults go their separate (desired) ways and mind their own business for a while. There would be less resentment and pushback when it *is* time to rejoin for dinner, etc. Kids want the dignity of autonomy.

    I’ll show you untrustworthy.

    I get it. The child is still looking out from within me. I’m still in the position where I have to get kids to sit down and do something they do not want to do and probably learn absolutely nothing. And I hate that. And creatures in captivity make their small rebellions where they can, for the nourishment of their own souls and the nurturing of their own dignity, even if it’s something like wielding shoes like a mace by swinging them around by the laces and trying to whack people, for absolutely no offense given I can discern. “He just wants to get sent home. He hates school.” Duh. I’m still dealing with the shoe ninja terrorizing the townspeople. Nothing excuses harming other people, no internal pressure or angst, nothing, but I see the forces pushing the rebellious instinct, somewhere deep down in the brain.

    We award adults such impunity and leeway for selfish behavior that we can afford kids no freedom. We’re creating those future adults who go wild at a taste of freedom and fight to keep it. Resentment of lost time and jealous guarding of finally-getting-yours does not make an adult likely to vote to curtail their own freedom to swing their fist because of somebody else’s face. It is no excuse, but it is a cause.

    What are the wages of self-control in this system? Nothing–you still don’t get to do what you want, but you’re not getting yelled at, and to many kids that is scant reward next to getting to do what you want.

    I’m not playing along if you don’t see me as ‘in’ on the joke.

    I see myself in the kids who give me some of the most guff.

    I’m lying when I say the police department called me to ask some third graders to help them solve a mystery? No shit, kid. You don’t see yourself as ‘in’ on the joke but as being viewed with condescension, so you’re not going to play pretend. You’re not going to roll with it. Let’s just play Clue or whatever for an hour–we’re stuck here with each other–but your dignity won’t allow it. But I’m getting paid to (1) run an hour of Clue and (2) keep you corralled for that hour, so our desires are fundamentally at odds. Neither one of us wants to be here. Might as well make the best of it. You might even learn something. We might, through banter, even have something resembling fun. But wardens and prisoners cannot forge a rapport without suspicion.

    I see myself most in the kids that just want to be left the fuck alone to do their own thing–I think of, from one of my classes, the girl in the back of the class buried in a notebook trying to get some goddamned writing (? whatever it’s her business) done and pretend she has a scrap of autonomy in choosing the course of her daily life. I check in with those kids but if they do not want to participate I leave them alone. They’re not bugging anybody, and I recall too vividly the desire for solitude. She might well have an interest in the subject matter I’m hawking, but on her own terms. Her internal world and intellectual life are taken away from her because some kids, apparently, cannot be trusted not to set the house on fire if they’re left home alone (I doubt this is as prevalent as one thinks, especially if kids are not given the desire to rebel to preserve a scrap of self-determination), or because apparently, some adults cannot be trusted not to drive like it’s fucking Mario Kart through a neighborhood (this one I believe fully). Or, more likely, because writing BTS self-insert fanfiction is not a marketable skill, not something that will get you into college or impress employers, never mind that you are creating your own soul and learning to–useless in the age of generative AI–write. The latter part at least used to be marketable, applicable. Transferable. Self-fulfillment and self-actualization are not skills you can sell as labor and in this age quality of life goes only to the (1) wealthy or (2) winners of the rat race.

    The adults in your life do mean well, after a fashion. They are responding to material circumstances.

    Frogger only has trouble around cars

    To that point, the concern I do acknowledge is actually worse now is traffic. Before even touching the arms race that is consumer choice and, therefore, in a system with zero checks for public welfare, car design, people are faster, meaner, and more impatient, and in the US infrastructure favors the driver at the peril of the pedestrian or cyclist. There is a sense of danger even to the most restrained pedestrian–not helped by incidents like the one this past week in Santa Monica. Is this another example of incidents being publicized to give an outsized sense of danger, the new Adam Walsh looming in the imagination of parents? I do not much buy that there are pedophiles in trenchcoats lurking in the bushes or traffickers waiting to snatch up suburban kids with involved parents (when there is an endless supply of vulnerable kids nobody wants that will come right to them), but I did give up cycling around the city after one too many close calls. Perhaps in self-defense my basal instincts have started to more strongly object to risk as the body ages. But–I don’t on the regular see mystery vans handing out free candy, and I do hear every night drag-racing up and down the linear drag by my apartment, and into the goddamn neighborhood. And I do see roadside memorials. And I, personally, this body, have been almost hit one too many goddamned times. This is something that, had we the political will, could be fixed yesterday, but the American obsession with “freedom to” over “freedom from” again atomizes us against systemic development. (Reminded of this again helping my partner schedule an Amtrak ticket to the hometown and being utterly baffled how the richest country, materially and in military power, in the history of the world, can have such a embarrassingly anemic rail system.)

    There has always been this panic that traffickers and drug dealers target “good” suburban kids from “good” families because they are evil and that is what evil people do, for the sheer joy of wrecking a life and out of resentment for the better circumstances of others, but traffickers and drug dealers are ultimately businessmen and there is no profit to stirring up unnecessary scrutiny and trouble by targeting kids with parents who would dedicate their entire lives to fighting to get them back. This “myth” of the “value” of the virginal blonde young valedictorian girl from a Christian family catching a high price on the market of flesh just doesn’t hold water, not in the face of the economics of scale that one can leverage with the endless supply of foster and runaway kids, or kids whose own parents sold them. Parents who give one shit, you don’t need to imprison your kids. Your care and attention existing at all is safeguard enough. This one shit will not keep them from other kinds of mischief, born of material deprivation or lack of opportunity or otherwise, but it is a safeguard against the bogeyman kidnapper. (And, I acknowledge the ‘enrichment’ is a desperate attempt to stave off that lack of opportunity and class disadvantage, but that is another matter. Or is it? Anyway.)

    The mental contamination of regimented time

    I know they get a “lot” of recess time interspersed. That is good, the bare minimum. But I think of the difference between days when I have “free time” until X o’clock and when I have unlimited “free time”, or at least the timing of responsibilities is at my discretion. During the former there is always that asterisk looming at the periphery of my awareness. Doesn’t matter if I end up spending the same amount of time doing as I wish as I would on the “until X o’clock” days. The mind is clouded. There is a sense of termination, a sense of hurry. A tendency to feel it is not the “right time” after all to start on something. And so, I don’t get much of anything done. And I am further burdened by guilt and a sense of lost time. This pairs poorly with a part-time job that starts in the middle of the day.

    I look back to my own childhood during such circumstances (“you have free time until X and then we’re doing X”) and I do not recall such a mental block insofar as Getting Things Done is concerned; I would just lose myself in the task until it was time to stop and so save irritation clouding my mind until that point. So I am perhaps projecting an ‘adult’ sensibility onto these kids in that regard. I do recall the feeling of helplessness and rage, inability to set my own schedule. I do think that is the same.

    Luxury desires

    Worrying about ‘freedom’ and ‘free time’ and ‘autonomy’ are luxuries we indulge when we are higher up on Maslow’s pyramid. They are worries for one with a full belly and a roof and a lack of bombs going off about every which way. So, I realize these observations are mostly relevant to the American culture I live in, and that of other ‘advanced’, ‘safe’ cultures unbeset by warfare, but this is all that I know firsthand, so it is what I can talk about with anything resembling insight

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