Once I had a job ghostwriting for some mathematicians who wanted to make their work more accessible to the general public, and especially to children.  We made up puzzles and stories that tangled with infinity, and invented playground games with mathematical strategies underneath.  We tried them out in workshops and school visits and overall had that experience of learning more from the kids than we had ever imagined.

One of the things that was fun was the way kids would engage so directly and creatively with questions like, How do you know if you should believe what someone says is true? Or,  What do you do with your mind when you are trying to figure something out?  It seems like children spend a lot of years working hard to put together a Theory of Everything and they often give esoteric questions a lot of thought.

One question I enjoyed putting to children and mathematicians alike was whether math itself is visible or invisible.

The math in my head is invisible, even if you cut it open. What about the Eiffel Tower?  Can you see the math in that?

All that math in math books is certainly visible.   If you say 2 + 2 = 4 in your mind, that’s wouldn’t be visible, but if you picture it in your mind, is it a little bit visible, more so than say, something in the 8^th dimension which you really can’t picture at all?

Or is it that all the math in math books is written-down stuff about math, but the math-math isn’t the writing, but the understanding of what the writing is all about.  That would make math completely invisible, which makes sense, because blind people can do it.

They always say math is everywhere.  But if math is invisible and everywhere, isn’t that a little creepy?

If I can look at two collections of pebbles and say one has three pebbles and the other has four, there’s something very visible about that.  Would it be most correct to say that math is a whole collection of abstractions, invisible ideas that bear a relation to the visible world?  Except when they don’t.

It ends up to be hard to say anything about math and its visibility and invisibility without first articulating what math is.  And then it turns out that in order to make sense, you might have to explain what you mean by visible and invisible as well—if you can.  Overall, I found that kids like to talk about those things for more than mathematicians do.

Here’s another mathematical tangle of visible and invisible.  I know a math professor named Larry Copes who would ask his students on the first day of calculus class to picture this: a perfect mathematical forest.  The trees have been planted in a grid, one foot apart in rows and columns that extend to infinity in every direction.  The mathematical trunks of the mathematical trees reach infinitely high, but they have no width nor depth.  The tree at the very center of the forest has been cut down, and you are standing on the stump.  When you look out through the infinite forest around you, do you see daylight?

I dunno.  Do you?  What do you think?  Can you see through the gaps between an infinite number of tree trunks that don’t have any width?

Be careful that what I’m about to tell you doesn’t turn your world black and white and make you all judgmental about it.  That could happen according to some research that Dick Teresi reports on in a book called The Undead, a compendium of facts and stories about the culture surrounding clinical, biological, and legal death. A culture where people ask questions like—How do you know someone is dead?  What are your rights just before, and then just after you are dead?

In one study, groups of subjects were asked questions on a wide range of topics.  Some groups had a couple of questions about death thrown in, or were flashed subliminal messages or images about death.  One group was interviewed in front of a funeral home.  The control group answered all the same questions without any death references thrown in.  In their responses, the members of death-reference group demonstrated a more rigid worldview than the control group and were judgmental to the point of advocating violence about it.  One theory says that this is because, much as we brag about being the only creature so smart and able to plot for the future that we understand the inevitability of our own deaths, we can’t stand the thought and keep it stuffed.  When something pokes around in the unconscious and gets it rumbling up, we get paranoid and start clinging to absolutes.  That’s one theory, anyway.

Even if a lot of people deny death, some people have to define it.  Medical technologies surrounding life support and organ donation complicate declarations of death.

Take the idea of brain death.  It’s not a particular moment, but a declaration based on a series of criteria, like no reflexes or no attempts to breathe if a respirator is turned off.  Once the declaration of brain death is made, the person is removed from life support and finishes dying.  Once declared completely dead, the body is often put back on life support to maintain the organs until they can be harvested.  No longer a person or a patient, the body is now a BHC, a beating-heart cadaver.  The ideal BHC is a young person who dies of head trauma.

Someone who dies of a heart attack or chest wound becomes a non-beating-heart-cadaver.  If those organs are to be harvested the team has to act fast, because blood will pool in them and render them unusable.  In some hospitals, particularly in Washington, DC, the patient can be prepped for organ harvest while still alive.  Also in Washington DC, organs can be “pre-harvested”.  The harvest occurs immediately after the declaration of death, but the organs aren’t made available for transplant until there’s consent, either from next of kin, or by locating a declaration by the now-dead person.

The actual harvesting can be a long and complex surgery, depending on the organs taken.  An anesthetist must be present with beating heart cadavers to monitor body systems and administer drugs to keep them stable.  But there’s no anesthetic.  Pain-like responses are determined to be electrochemical remnants.  Anesthesia wouldn’t be good for the organs.

Some medical ethicists say that in the era of organ transplants, the technological trappings are new, but the reality of death is unchanged.  Your ashes might go down a river.  Your decomposed flesh might feed bacteria and trees.  Or your heart might beat in somebody else’s chest.  Your cessation as a life form is always gradual, as other life forms take up the biological structures that were once you.

That’s just a thimbleful of what you could think about when you think about death, says Teresi.  If you’re going to keep thinking about death, consider yourself warned by the research findings.  You just might want to check in with yourself in a half hour or so and make sure that these few factoids haven’t made you paranoid and judgmental.

The earliest humans originated in Africa.  Some migrated west and their descendants are modern Europeans and North Americans.   Some migrated east and north, and crossed a land bridge existing between Siberia and Alaska due to lower sea levels.  Their descendants spread down through the Western Hemisphere, and were inconveniently present when that landmass was “discovered” by Europeans in the 15^th century.

I’ve heard that story so many times, I’ve never much questioned its accuracy, but there are some scholars who say, No way.  As in, No way did the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere trudge over here from Eurasia.  Some of those scholars, like the late historian Vine Deloria, are descendants of the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere.  Deloria wrote a critique of Eurocentric bias in mainstream anthropological and scientific thought entitled, Red Earth, White Lies.  In it, he says that one of the foremost arguments against the Bering land bridge migration theory is that people’s own oral histories of their origin don’t reflect it.  That’s part of his critique—that information handed down by native peoples through the generations is considered uninformed folklore and mythology, while theories invented by westerners to connect the dots among the data they have gathered are considered knowledge.

In the chapter “Low Bridge Everybody Cross,” Deloria examines the anthropological, geologic, and meterological evidence behind the land-bridge hypothesis and remains utterly unconvinced that his ancestors slipped into the hemisphere from the north some 20,000 years ago.  The hypothesis doesn’t account for human sites in the western hemisphere that some scholars date to be as old as 70,000 years.  The formation of a land bridge requires a drop in sea level as water is trapped in glaciers, but somehow those glaciers didn’t impede the migration.  Getting the two continents fully populated in time to be discovered by Europeans would have required some groups to embark on a forced march to Tierra del Fuego, says Deloria, as well as the performance of great feats of reproduction and cultural and linguistic diversification.  And what, he asks, was their motivation for a difficult migration over mountain ranges and glaciers in the first place?

Another part of Deloria’s argument is a catalog of dismissals by the academic elite of any evidence that doesn’t support the land bridge hypothesis.  The hypothesis itself, he says, is an essential part of the conceptual structure that writes the history of the human race as an evolutionary line striving since the dawn of time to culminate in Western capitalism.  That story puts humans in Europe for some half a million years, organizing themselves to be the culture destined to dominate the earth, while a mere 20,000 years ago some undeveloped throwback folks stumbled into the empty continents and remained there, more or less as placeholders, until the Europeans, who really knew how to make the most of all that land, showed up.

Deloria says we’d be better off to accept the reality that scientific evidence for any account of the origins of humans is flimsy.  The gaps are enormous and can only be filled with stories.  Stories of the arrival of humans from other planets.  Stories of the emergence of humans from clefts in the earth.  Stories of the genesis of humans in North America followed by a migration to Europe.  Stories with giants and monsters.  Stories of a god that made one group of humans superior to all the others.  Stories of how advantages of intellect and technology set one group up to dominate all the rest.

Deloria’s advice is to listen to all the stories, to keep on thinking, to keep on looking.  Because there’s a lot of unexplored mystery inside of what it means to be human.

I sure do read a lot.  Reading is such an admirable addiction.  It’s practically organic.  You can get all kinds applause for it.  No matter you take such refuge in it.  No matter you always have it on hand. No matter you always know when and where you can get some more.

If it weren’t for the library, a lot of us would be bankrupted by our habit.

My idea of a guaranteed good time is to carry as many books as I can away from the library, take them home, settle in with them spread all around me and read a few pages out of each one.  Check out how they start or end.  Read something from the middle just in case I don’t make it all the way there when I set out from page one  Each book holds some surprise.  They all have promise.

I won’t read them all.  I get started on some and find them boring or dumb, say to myself, Why am I reading this?  And snap the book shut.  I find that very empowering.  No matter who has written on the back that it’s a masterpiece that I don’t want to miss.  I used to plough all the way through to the end of everything I started, even if while I did it, I was half thinking of something else.

Sometimes I read five hundred miles an hour.  Sometimes I say to myself, Why are you reading five hundred miles an hour? 

I know how to read math books, though.  You have to read them real slow.  Or at least I do.

I like to read out loud.  I read out loud to my kids.  For hours.  Which indicates that I was reading out loud to myself as well.  There’s times you can find your way in to something you want to read by reading it aloud, letting your speaking voice find what the words on the page are trying to say.  Some things are just plain fun to read out loud.  You never know until you try.  Shouldn’t there be a fun way to read—anything?

I’ve been asked, How many books you read in a year?  Fifty? A hundred?  I don’t count.  I don’t try to count.  Maybe I don’t remember enough to count.

Sometimes I ask myself why I choose again and again to have my thoughts entrained by somebody else’s, to let my mind led by the habit of scanning, left to right, from up to down.  Why do I stir up this mental racket?  Is there something lacking in the sound of my own thoughts?  All these letters, these railroad cars, rows and rows, front-to-back, sequential.  Should I be watching more TV?

They say that when you read you take part in a great conversation.  The listening part anyway.  It’s not really a conversation where you roll tales and ideas back and forth with someone and you both laugh together at the jokes.  I guess the best reading is the kind that slows you down, gets you piping in and having the conversation with your own thoughts.   Or maybe the best reading is the reading that makes you laugh out loud.

I dunno.  I went to the library today.  I sure do read a lot.

One of the reliable miracles of my environment is the way the housekeeping situation can slip out of control in about the amount of time it takes to fall off a bicycle.

In the Church of Clean-and-Neat, where somehow I once managed to hold High Priestess rank, the Messy Person is as despicable as the Sin of Messiness itself.  The Messy Person is without civilized grace.  The Messy Person, bound for the failed social classes.  A Messy Person, too lazy to take the simple steps to….  I am standing up against all that to say it doesn’t describe me.  Even though I can get behind on a few things—the floors, the walls, the ceiling, the shelves, the countertops, the drawers, and true, sometimes a lapse might be for a decade or two, but clear surfaces and harmonious planes of color give me too much pleasure for me to qualify as Messy Through and Through.  What I lack is the right set of compulsive habits that will keep my surroundings tidy without my having to try.

I do have housekeeping habits.  Any object whose misplacement would disrupt the household—my glasses, the dog water—those objects always get set down in the same spot.  For the random rest of everything else, I unhand the things I’m finished with in the nearest place where they are unlikely to come to harm—and forget about them.  That’s why there’s a tin snips next to the breadboard, a plate on my desk, and knitting needles in my hair.  The strategy for locating a particular object requires a visual scan of all the favorite surfaces in case I see it, simultaneous with a mental scan for a memory image of myself using it, finishing with it and putting it….voila!  These kinds of habits really do work for swimming upstream in a river of stuff, but they do very little to bring about tidiness in the surroundings .

Don’t think me unschooled in the happy habits of the Clean-and-Neat:  touch each piece of paper exactly once, make cleanup a part of every meal, put away all your toys before bed. The only habit of neat people I habitually have is the one of turning grumpy when the environment silts up with clutter.  Once the situation has deteriorated to grumpiness, one must buck habits and invoke Rules.

Once the Grand Inquisitor of Clean-and-Neat settles in your ear to hiss descriptions of your sins—lazy…dismal…simplest task… the Rules say you must drop whatever you’re doing, set the timer, and give this issue 20 minutes of your life.  It’s amazing how much you can clean up in 20 minutes, but since there’s so much more to go, you must also invoke the Rule of Four:  In order to get something out, you must first put four things away.  You want a better pen?  clean underwear?  Pony up.  In a few days, the tide turns and look at you—pacing around the joint, looking for a fourth thing to put away so you can take a screwdriver out of the toolbox and chances are you’re not grumpy anymore.

The thing about good cheer.  It breeds possibility.  I could get out the sewing machine.  Or repot some plants.  Make cookies….

A few months ago I washed all the windows.  Talk about a gift that keeps on giving.  Clumping around with the unwieldy ladder, and even doing the last little ones high up.  And the next day, saying, “Trust me, you’re really going to appreciate this,” and going back to get every last streak.   How can I have a care about the immediate surroundings when out in the distance it’s such a perfect View from Planet Nancy.

Rather than give a man a fish, it is better that you to teach him how to fish.

That statement is so stupid and wrong that when I hear it, I want to spit nails.

First off, it’s one of those things people say to sum up a conversation about a bothersome topic.  Everyone nods as the sentence begins, and by the end, everyone feels wise, like they know the answer to a whole range of murky problems.  Statements like that are always dangerous.  So I’m taking this one apart.

Look at the structure. Rather than da-da-da, it’s better you da-da-da.  That kind of statement builds a fence—either this or that.  And it makes a value judgement—something is better.  You can be a contrarian, disagree, say, “No, it’s better to give them the fish.” But unless you launch into a diatribe like this one, you cop to a simplistic structure of the world that says some people have fish and some men (and maybe women, too) should be getting either charity fish or fishing lessons.

What fish?  What are you doing with it? Is it poised, juicy and inviting beneath your fork when some hungry person comes along and says, “Hey, give me some of that fish!”  Seizing the opportunity to make a difference, you say, “Just a minute while I finish eating, and then we can work on some of rudiments of fly-casting.” You could stop eating and put your fish in the fridge, but that might make them want a fridge, too.

Sometimes people tell me I’m really cynical.  That I fail to appreciate that people say the thing about the fish and the fishing lessons out of a deep trouble in the kind part of their hearts over the dilemma of the deserving rich and the deserving poor.

How come you have fish and they don’t?  You do know how to fish, don’t you?  If there’s fish around, why haven’t they figured out how to catch them?  Maybe they live in a place where salmon once ran so abundantly that the streams were literally clogged with them and all they had to do was go out and pick them up.  You’re going to have to teach them to cast all the way down the watershed and into the pool in front of the first of the dams blocking the way so they can reel the salmon up from there.  Will it be okay to give them a rod and reel, or should you teach them how to make that, too?

Maybe they do know how to catch fish but don’t catch them anymore since the trawlers raked up the ocean floor ecosystem for as far out as their primitive craft could go.  Then I guess you teach them to work on trawlers and in processing plants to get money with which they can buy their fish.  They can even get it in cans.

I know I’m supposed to know this isn’t really about fish.  It’s about how poor people got to be that way.  They have inferior technology and don’t know enough.  Not only is our knowledge and technology superior, but we have acquired them at great cost to human and planetary life. If the fruits of our outstanding ingenuity are wasted, it will mean that all that killing and destruction went for naught.  We have a moral imperative to share the things we know and can do. And it’s so gratifying to share them with poor people, the people who really need them, people unspoiled by the greedy greed of consumerism, people who, if you teach them right, won’t get caught up in destructive habits like we have and will live happy and humbly ever after.

(Excerpts from a 1997 essay, Goodbye Molly.)

The Man:  Absently, I take a newspaper from the pile next to the bus tray in the coffee shop and spread it open on the table for something to do while I sip a latte.  And there he is.  Living color.  His head a full six inches tall, skin hanging off the bones of his face.   The arch of his neck just enough to keep his chin clear of the dirt.  His eyes are neither helpless nor pathetic.  They are stunned.  They say, I cannot believe this.  This is not what I planned for myself.  The caption beneath his face says, Man dying of starvation in refugee camp in Zaire.

Am I gawking?  What do I see?

When I close the newspaper, there he is again, this face a one-inch square, one in a ribbon of images under the newspaper banner.  War in Rwanda, A4.  I toss the newspaper on the pile next to the bus tray as I leave, wondering about spirits stolen by photographs and pondering the purpose of a life.

Rats:  I pushed wheelbarrow loads of manure uphill in the July sun to my garden, huffed even farther with buckets of water for baby trees.   I read books and joined a newsgroup.  I carried boxes and buckets of produce to the summer kitchen to be canned, brought hay and water to Molly, leaning myself into her massive flank, absorbing her dense sturdy energy.  Not these, nor any of the things I did to get ready to go to Haiti could have prepared me for these rats.

I hear them at night.  They run on the roof.   I didn’t think they had a way in, but I am shocked out of sleep by a plop, then a toenail scurrying on my chest.  I cry out and the dogs start to bark.

I sit wide-eyed in bed, but night is long and I sleep.  The next one plops and scurries beside my face on the pillow and the next thing I know I am perched, clinging to a straight-backed chair, chest heaving, long hair  falling softly on my bare shoulders would be sexy if this was the movies.  I know the guttural sounds coming out of me are no help.  How will I live through this night?  What a stupid things to say, and I am saying it.

What do I know of rats?  They chew on babies in slums, run in sewer pipes and live on ships.  Once, I killed a gopher in my garden with a pitchfork.  Mice get into the house and spend a day or two scratching behind the toaster before they end up limp and dangling from a cat’s mouth.  When friend’s daughter lets her sleek designer rodent run up one arm, behind her neck and down the other, I shudder with chills.  I’d rather caress a snake.

Rats are nocturnal.  I light a candle and sleep til morning.  How resourceful, I am told.

The Story of Molly:  Oh Molly, I said in wonder when she crouched, every rippled muscle straining to pull out log in the woods.  It was winter, but not winter enough.   We could only pull a few logs through the slush in the morning before the ground warmed to mud. The night the temperature finally dropped, Molly slipped on the ice and broke her hip.  The next day the butcher came and shot her.

Oh Molly, I said to her big brown eye, stroking the soft hairs of her face, hoping so hard she would stand up.  Oh Molly, was all that I said when what I should have said was goodbye.

I live with a big white dog named Gus and the one thing that good dog Gus knows how to do is spend the day, the whole day, every single day, being a dog.  Good ol’ Gus.  Stiff in his bones.  Sound in his sleep.  Slowing down, but with a lot of gumption left.

They said he was four years old when I got him—from a friend of a friend of a friend.  His family had moved away and he needed a new home and we’ve been together some 50-odd dog years since.  People who meet Gus always say, “What a nice dog.”

I don’t think he had ever been inside a building before he came to my house.  He still treads on strange floors as though they are hot lava and he never has learned to climb stairs.  Mostly he’s large and loyal.  Wherever I am, he manages the perimeter, and if I go away, he waits for me to come back.  Thanks to Gus, I’ve heard people describe me as “that woman with the big white dog.”

Do you know that dogs have a sensory organ way up high in the very back of the throat?  It’s called the vomeronasal organ.  Reptiles have them.  And so do elephants.  In dogs, the vomeronasal organ is a little hairy sac behind the hard palate. It’s covered with receptor sites for molecules and lined with neural connections that reach all over the brain.   Information comes in on saliva and in the mucous of their wet doggie noses.  A phantasmagoria.  Taste and smell to the nth dimension.

Dogs want to lick your face so they can sample the molecules that write the history of your day.  All the food you’ve eaten.  The quality of your burps.  Everyone you’ve hugged.  Everything that’s touched your mouth, including the end of a pen and your fingers and everywhere they’ve been.  All the microscopic matter filtered from the air by your eyebrows and mucous.

No wonder Gus is glad to see me when I come home.  One kiss and it’s like I’ve brought him the newspaper.

Living with an old dog is a primer in the fundamentals of companionship.  Presence.  Routine.  Sleep.  The way you inhabit the same days.

Gus and I used to take big walks that were all about seeing how much ground we could cover.  Up and out and over away, down and through and back around.  Now we take big walks that are about finding good places to sit and notice what rushes into our senses.  Good ol’ Gus.  Sometimes his nostrils probe the air like the handles of an invisible wand.  He doesn’t always hear the coyotes like he used to, but if he does, he still sings back.  He’s never going to learn wipe his feet.  I’m kinda surprised I’d accept that in someone.  Good ol’ Gus.  He eats the same dinner off the same plate in the same spot at the same time every day and in the quiet evenings, he snores gently from across the living room, knowing, even in his sleep that he is breathing the same air as me.

Twice in two days I’ve heard comparisons that link the number of neural connections in the brain to the number of stars in a galaxy, which has got me to imagining myself as walking around with a galaxy inside my head.

When we were kids, we used the most up-to-date scientific imagery available, and played—what if every single atom was a solar system and out there on some of the electrons are kids just like us, only really, tiny…

Well now I’ve got this galaxy in my head.  No doubt it has solar systems orbiting stars a lot like our sun and certainly there would be planets with conditions amenable to life just like on earth, so it’s not totally unlikely that on one of those planets there would be people just like me, beings with prisms and notebooks who scry my daydreams and write theories of the beginning and the end and the rules of the galaxy in my head.

Would those beings be the same little-little people that lived on the electrons when I was a kid?  I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.  Their point of view would be different.  I was thinking all that while I was riding my bike into a roaring headwind as the dawn ignited the rolling hills, which meant that I wasn’t going to be thinking hard enough about it to really work it out.

While I ate breakfast I read an essay by Marilynne Robinson called “Freedom of Thought” and copied down a statement she made about “tedious, fruitless controversy” in which the disagreement is not as important as what she calls “the hardening of agreement, the tacit granting on all sides of assumptions that ought not to be granted on any side.”

For months now, I’ve been reading the kinds of books that scientists write to explain their discipline and what its cutting edge ideas are in a way that the general public can understand.  The big-bang cosmos and quantum theory.  Communication, computation, the brain.   I keep reading this stuff, but bits and pieces are bugging me, like pebbles in a shoe, and I get annoyed and want to make passive-aggressive mischief at the back of the room, but that’s not polite and besides, who am I to be quibbling with PhDs, nuclear physicists, and directors of institutes who have taken the time to dumb themselves down enough to speak with me?  If you don’t quibble, you open the door for those tacit assumptions that ought not to be granted.  Which parts of the agreement are hardened when you say God doesn’t play dice, or Since we came down from the trees.  What extra things do we learn when we hear that our hips weren’t designed for walking upright, or that language is not hardwired into our brains?

Do these things matter?  I think they do.  But it can be lonely to dwell on the tacit assumptions. Nobody to talk to, hardly any words to use.  I can’t picture myself at a party, trying out a conversation opener like “How ‘bout that vocabulary of religion, the way it freights its way into descriptions of science?”  I think I would have to get a whole new set of friends to pull of something like that.  And I wouldn’t want to give up the friends I have, because they are the kind of people who might take up the discussion if I were to ask, “Do you ever feel like you’re walking around with a galaxy in your head?”

I have been reading A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War by Susan Griffin.  In chapter 2, “Denial”, she writes,

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit?  What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.  A grandmother’s name is erased.  A mother decides to pretend that her child does not drink too much.  A nation refuses to permit … immigrants to pass its borders, knowing, and and yet pretending not to know, that this will mean certain death.  The decision is made to bomb a civilian population…

Once, in the aftermath of a wedding, I was staying over at the home of one of the young bridesmaids who’d gone off to a party once her two-year-old had gone to sleep.  I’m at one end of the kitchen hubbub, wrapping up leftovers, when a thin wail coils into the room like smoke.  Grandma attends, returns with the clinging girl-child, settles with her into a kitchen chair, repeating in a tone that conjures  clowns and lollipops, “Mommy’s at the store.”

Behind those scared koala eyes, the little one is brave, looking from the safety of grandma’s lap at the black windowpanes and the kitchen table, drunken uncles slapping down cards—“sixteen-two and a pair is four”.  A cigarette stubbed into a plate, an unfinished sandwich, torn-open bags of broken chips, and Grandma’s relentless singsong, “Mommy’s at the store.”

The child is silent when she is relinquished to the high chair.  The cribbage goes on.  Soon there’s juice.  Peanut butter and crackers.  “Mommy’s at the store.”

No matter how many times I visit Haiti, no matter what I say when I am there or when I get home, no matter how many new ways I have been stunned because my exposure to such people, and such a place has moved me, in the farewell moments, with the many embraces, I don’t say, “Gotta go.  Gotta get back on my own side of history.”

Recently I downloaded a program from TUCradio.org., and listened to a scholar named Iain Boal describe the Industrial Revolution in England through the lens of an idea he calls “enclosure”.   Developments in property law at that time were bringing land that up until then was used in common by the rural peasantry into private ownership.  The land was enclosed and the people who depended on it for their livelihoods were shut out.  Meanwhile, the growing cities offered a different kind of livelihood in factories, especially textile mills. Along with it, says Boll, came  a different type of enclosure..  He calls it the incarceration of production.  To gain access to the livelihood enclosed in the factory, one must consent to the abuses that take place inside—child labor, maiming, early death.  Boll challenges people to ask how and where the labor that supports their lives is enclosed and to what degree is this labor incarcerated.  He says a person can’t be proud or relieved to live a nation that has abolished slavery, when in actuality the abolishing is merely a restructuring of production that displaces the slavery to a location that hasn’t “abolished” it.

Here is one more sentence from Susan Griffin in  A Chorus of Stones:  The Private Life of War, from the chapter called “Denial”.  Deep in the mind, we know everything and wish to have everything told, to have our images and our words reflect the truth.