Frankenstein’s Creature and Blank Slate Theory

Mary Shelley was likely the first serious writer to explore the realities of prejudice, profiling and discrimination. But her love of scientific discussions may have lead her to also explore new psychological theories that influence current thought on child development. One such theory first expressed by John Locke is the theory of Tabula Rasa, or the “Blank Slate.”

Since the Creature has no name, Shelley suggests that his identity is wholly shaped by his earliest experiences. In his first day of life he suffers rejection by his creator/father, beatings by townspeople, and pursuit by an angry mob. People react to the Creature’s appearance, but the Creature reacts to violent treatment from others by undergoing a radical change from wounded child to violent killer. Locke believed what is written on the “blank slate” of a child’s consciousness determines the destiny of the child, and Mary Shelley seems to agree.

“I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. My protectors had departed and had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death. (16.12) — the Creature

All men hate the wretched; how then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.

“They are kind — they are the most excellent creatures in the world but, unfortunately, they are prejudiced against me. I have good dispositions; my life has been harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.”

(159)

Looking for the not-so-real

I went to Mississippi to escape reality.

There was no other reason.

My friend of 30 years had gotten fed up to the quitting point with a job in the human services industry. In fact, both of us had spent most of our careers in the service of others. Lately, a newly-discovered love of all things “data” had taken over the human element. Her bosses wished to know why it took so long for the ER’s only night-shift tech to complete CAT scans for all who needed them. Signing reports with the phrase, “The only tech on duty,” didn’t avail much. Meanwhile, on my watch, students sat for hours waiting for other students to complete state standardized tests. It’s a validated world, and if you aren’t rolling in the right numbers, they’ll close the house on you like a shark in Vegas.

Or wherever you find yourself.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted a do-over or if I wanted to burn my bridges Norma Ray style, but over coffee, the tech from Illinois and the teacher from Tennessee decided to go to The River. I decided I wanted to capture the Big Daddy in some way I hadn’t before.

Not that I hadn’t tried. There’s a photo of me on a river boat, the Delta Queen, when I was twelve. I have just bragged to my dad that I’ve been to the Coast of Arkansas, as if there is such a thing. I have only just touched the yellow sand on the west bank of the Mississippi at Memphis. You would think I had crossed the Jordan from the fuss I make. In the photo, the rest of the family has left to hear a band. I’m alone on the lonely side of the boat, and my dad snaps the picture. I manage a smile, but there’s something sobering about this river. You don’t come to the river lightly the way you run down the beach at Gulf Shores.

This time, I’m decades older, and I really don’t have a plan.

This time, it’s Natchez.

We pull in just on evening after driving through halls of twisting vines and Spanish moss. If you didn’t know you were on U.S. 28, you would think you had made a wrong turn into Guatemala. The dark highway spits us out on the Natchez Trace just above the point where it becomes Devereaux Street. We pass by Highway 552. I don’t tell my friend that I wrote a whole world of crime fiction back in 2010, most of which occurs on that road. The GPS voice harps that our turn is coming up. I almost believe I could tell my friend to turn around, maybe the Tharpes are home, we should maybe talk about the murder, maybe somebody made gumbo tonight. Instead we turn in the parking lot at the Natchez Grand Hotel, get checked in, and head down, like everybody else, to Silver Street.

It’s the oldest part of town, where riverboats once brought gamblers and the lawless looking to raise funds for further travel or maybe a more comfortable bed. Everyone, from Spanish missionaries to Jesse James, stayed on Silver Street at one time or another. We stop into Magnolia Grill and have to wait forty-five minutes for a table. Not for the last time, we order oysters Bienville, but I know twilight is coming, and like everyone else, I want to capture the River.

 

At first, there’s a pink pillar of cloud just over the water about mid-way. This begins a moment-by-moment change in gradation of color until the mist starts building, obscuring the view of the bridge joining Natchez to Vidalia, Louisiana. Vidalia is a little town like you’d find anywhere except with Crawfish. The shift in color continues until the atmosphere is rendered platinum, the same color as the bridge. For a while, you can’t see the bridge for the murk. When it’s almost too dark, I snap a few photos.

 

This murky darkness with only a ball of fire for light brings everyone out of the restaurant. It’s as if we’ve all lost our minds and decided to dance in the last of the pink light. Like we’re thinking maybe the ball of fire will sink into the platinum water for the last time. The people standing on either side of me don’t speak English. One group is from Poland, another from Japan. I am native to the river but from much farther upstream. We have all come here looking for something in the gray murk. We have unspoken questions. If the River answers, we are sworn to secrecy.

 

Rapidly, I realize I’m experiencing an eclipse. The bridge is a heavenly body; the River is the Sun, and it’s fading, stealing away its own light and leaving a monochrome dream. Even the tourists are quiet now. We can’t even see each other. What sound not swallowed in mist is dwarfed by a strange river high-tide and the breeze in the poplars.

There is no way of measuring this experience, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to hear the statistics on flooding or the number of riverboats, tug boats, or barges on any given day. I don’t want even the scent of validation. I have learned in brutal ways that validation is overrated and possibly not even a real thing. Some ways you look at this River, it is an illusion. At twilight, you have to accept it on blind faith. You feel through the mist for it, like groping to get your life back.

The view from dry ground.

I forgot how much I missed the sound of rain splattering in sheets across my roof with hail pelting the gutters and the release of pent-up tension and energy through cracks of thunder that ended with rolling notes, the lowest bass notes in the universe. I forgot how much a part of my life was standing on the front porch watching the funnel cloud form, watching the trees turn their leaf-backs to the wind, feeling the forces of nature press me back against the exterior wall of the house just before the glorious outpouring.

It has been three months since we had rain, and at this writing, over 75 wildfires are burning in Tennessee. Some days, the haze of distant fires moves in. Most days, the air smells of burning hickory. Despite temperatures in the eighties (yesterday, it dropped to 77), the grass is stunted. No one has cut their grass in at least eight weeks. No need. It’s as if we all got up and moved to New Mexico. Except for that burning hickory. That smell alone tells you. It puts you in mind of a Sunday barbeque.

I’m certain a meteorologist could explain the weather patterns causing this unprecedented drought, but the view from the ground is more apocalyptic because many of us have lived some decades in this storm-torn part of the world, casting our fate to the wind as we planted our lives here despite the well-known fact that tornadoes would likely touch our lives, the risk coming not once but twice every year. Tennessee is no stranger to temperatures in the Eighties in winter, just enough to get the atmospheric juices rolling, but what we weren’t taught to expect, these endless months of low humidity, this hot, dry, desert weather, leaves us wondering if shifts in the poles, global warming, the presence of El Nino, the pollution of the oceans, or angry gods are to blame. Three months without rain is a long time. It is a season. A semester in college. The first trimester in a pregnancy. The time it takes to turn a quirk into a habit.

If there’s a color Tennessee is known for, it’s green. We have underground rivers, lakes, and seas, cave-rivers, natural springs high and low, and, up until this fall, the eternal rains. Tennesseans are weather-buffs, checking our rain gauges daily, calling into the weather stations with our reports after the deluge. We are the survivors of the Thousand-Year Flood. Some of us watched a semi float down an interstate. We watched the Cumberland River claim new real estate. The Opryland Hotel. The Schermerhorn Symphony House. We are known for our humidity, hovering near the one hundred percent range, destroying hair styles, clothes, our will to move. It’s why we invented sweet iced tea.

But now, everything looks like a scene from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? A one-dimensional cast to trees and grass and dry leaves scuttling along in the stiff breeze, blowing the hickory-smoke fires along, burning acres of our gorgeous forests.

Maybe we haven’t appreciated the true beauty of our state. Perhaps we have polluted the ground with plastic and poisons. Maybe the Native Americans weren’t wrong when they taught their children that the land remembers.

 

Medium for the Universe

I wrote seven words today, James Joyce said. I just don’t know what order they go in.

Yes, that is the question.

Yesterday, a senior high school student wanted me to show him a different font.

I said, No.

He asked Why?

I said Appearance means nothing.

He said he wanted that font.

I said, “I don’t care if you write it on a Sonic paper sack, if they are the right words, I’ll slap an “A” on it.”

He was not satisfied, but the class started clapping. I said, “Testify,” and the class started whooping and hollering.

That’s the difference between a writer and a non-writer.

A writer writes in the back seat of a car in the rain with someone driving her somewhere she doesn’t want to go.

On the back of the cable bill because it is oversized with questionable and despicably vague charges while pulled over in a parking lot transcribing song lyrics with an eyebrow pencil.

On the back of the professional development agenda because of the droning on and on of apologies for the ultimate failure to show the video because of technical difficulties.

In crayon on a paper sack with colored pencil on a found blank page for note-taking in the back of a pamphlet on Anemia and You in the waiting room, on printer paper while asking forgiveness from the gods of the printer budget, on long, yellow, legal-pad paper going against the grain and writing something that should be, by all that is holy, illegal.

A non-writer thinks of writing as something innocuous and pedestrian, something along the lines of setting up garden gnomes or stringing beads, or washing wheel covers.

Writing at its best is graffiti and at its worst is graffiti, and it is never pretty, only mind-altering.

When was the last time you got your mind blown by a garden gnome, or a pretty font, or a white picket-fence?

Who can say when the muses will strike, when the albatross will die, when the furies will screech and scratch their message through?

What will you take to hand, you medium of testimonies?

Oh, great, paper soul

These stone words sink

By degrees

Into

Thy fine-milled

Eternity.

The Universe is whispering. Do you hear?

The Meaning of Deadline

I love the word deadline. I love the sound it makes as it whooshes past.
– Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

There is a photographer  in Iowa, Mark Hirsch, who photographed the same tree
for  365 days. There is something very loving and methodical in such a commitment. It reminds me of a long marriage or the  way a man will go to the same dead-end job every day to feed his family or the way a woman will keep putting her kids first and do without every single thing she needs just to watch her kids grow up with what they want. More than that, watching the report on the photographer, I learned that things happen that change your perspective. He had a job and they let him go. They didn’t need any more print publication photographers, thank  you very much. Next, he had an accident. There had been this tree Hirsch had  passed on a rural road nearly every day. It had always been there. One day after  the accident, the man realized he needed that tree. He needed to stop and  photograph it. He needed to capture it.

The  Cherokee believed that a camera snatched your soul and stored it in the box. It must have  sure seemed that way to look at that great square chamber with the fire pluming out and embers burning into the air, and the image appearing under  water like something from another dimension. Poof! Another soul, gone! In the old days, developing a photo must have seemed like creation itself. There’s something to that line of thinking, that a photograph captures the essence of an object, person, or living thing, maybe even catches that thing or person showing off its true inner self with its guard down, how it really is all the time. Even when no one is looking.

I used to think of deadlines as arbitrary dates set by a boss or a blind bureaucratic
organization beyond which, if not observed or adhered to, penalties would be
assessed, heads would roll, jobs would be in jeopardy. Steps would be taken.

I now think of deadlines as points in time when something comes down out of another
dimension, snaps a picture, and serves up the truth. For me, it was a neurological illness.
I discovered that everything I  ate was either part of the problem or part of the solution.

That had been true long before I got sick, but it soon became a matter of getting better or getting worse, a choice between living and dying.

I have learned bits of nutrition wisdom in the most unlikely places. At my son’s Tang Soo
Do class, the master teacher told me about the healing powers of honey. Specifically, he said, honey attacks bacteria. A woman from a Georgia mountain community shocked her grandson’s Vanderbilt physicians when she applied a honey-cinnamon paste to the boy’s burns. The burns healed. The doctors discovered that the honey-cinnamon combination destroyed the bacteria.

I have been on a three year journey to discover the healing properties of food, cooking my way through a year of decadent gluten-free recipes to prove to myself that it can be done. Organic food and natural oils have brought me new friends and taken me to unexpected places. My house has turned into a gathering place for women and children learning alongside me to cook with clean ingredients. At some point, we can kill ourselves with food or we can change our eating habits and make our lives richer. It comes down to simple changes, like this end-of-summer recipe for homemade clean ginger ale.

 

Ginger Ale made with Essential Oils
Sliced ginger root, 1 drop lemon oil, 1 drop lime oil, 1/4-1/2 cup raw honey, supply of sparkling water, 4 cups spring water
Combine spring water with sliced ginger root in saucepan.
Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer. Add lemon, lime, and honey to make syrup. To ice in a glass, add part ginger syrup and part sparkling water. Garnish with lemon or lime wedge.

 

Dreamless in America

A good friend of mine, Candace Moonshower,  (author of the YA novel The Legend of Zoey available via Kindle/Amazon) recently recounted a vivid dream in a forum. As dreams go, it was lucid, filled with people, some she knew and strangers as well. At the center of the dream was the erratic behavior of a particular plane and its ultimate crash. Like something out of the Twilight Zone, at the dream’s end, a child’s hand appeared, picking up the plane.

I won’t mention too many particulars, not because they are not important; rather I became most interested not in the dream itself but in the comments in reaction to my friend’s account.

One person asked what she’d had to eat.

Another suggested ambien if she were “having trouble sleeping,” as if my friend were recounting a waking hallucination rather than dreams achieved in REM sleep.

I left this forum thinking that we have lost touch with past cultures and generations who not only knew how to dream but also welcomed dreams as healthy, normal, and even the seal of an important person, someone marked by the gods as special. A prophet. A seer.

According to the biocybernaut institute, creative people dream more than so-called “normal” people. We know that dreams occur during REM sleep, as alpha waves are emitted in the brain. Alphas are the second-highest frequency of brain waves measured and are present during some intriguing periods in the daily lives of creative types, including, but not limited to:

high peak athletic performance.

meditation or prayer.

dreaming.

I left the forum thinking of all the things our ancestors embraced that modern living has eradicated as annoying, irritating, or even deviant behavior, the way some laugh at people who take longs walks or collect insects or study calligraphy.

We know that animals dream, and higher animals dream lucidly and in graphic detail. For humans, dreams are a way of working out problems or filtering the events of the day through our subconscious. Yes, whether we are in touch with our unconscious mind or not, it is there, as we sleep, a portal to our thought life, maybe even a gateway to a higher plane, a bridge to a state of high performance, but apparently most of us consider this “higher calling” a nuisance to be stamped out and eradicated with whatever prescription psychotropic drug is on the nightstand.

My friend Candace interpreted her own dream as a lesson on perspective, her unconscious mind working out a problem, revealing a different way of seeing, turning the problem on its ear.

The Bible speaks of young men having visions and old men dreaming dreams. Is it true that most people don’t dream in technicolor? I always assumed others dreamed big, colorful, sometimes even loud dreams of worlds as real as the one we actually live in. Do most never visit Poe’s “Plutonian shore” where the speaker in the Raven traveled in his grief? Or is it possible we have been duped into suffocating our creative spirit which, if released in deep meditation or dreaming, might work out our deepest worries without anxiety, fear, or paranoia? Is our country’s mental illness epidemic a result of our failure to understand that we are higher creatures prone to dream, born to meditate, pray, and possibly escape our reality to a higher perspective?

I challenge anyone reading this to start a dream journal and begin to practice quietness. We have lost the value of quietness and fail to pursue it. Corporate entities have convinced us that we must stay consistently linked to others, networked, hooked up. We are talking endlessly, listening constantly, but the content of our lives has become trivialized to the point that we have lost our ability to imagine, to dream, and to recognize a part of ourselves, perhaps the best and highest part.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blackberry Thicket

I live in a place where blackberries grow wild in fence rows and picking them is as easy as walking out your back door. They grow in shady spots in the protection of locust trees and scrub cedars. Every day in the cool of twilight, this time of year with a breeze and a storm brewing out of the heat of the day, I go back to the thicket and listen to the wind rustling the leaves of the locusts, the tall grasses, the wild flowers, the cedar boughs. And I think how this is the full cache of summer, the deepest, most lush and beautiful height of it, and battling the June bugs and the bees and the myriad breeds of insects, I pull berries from vines drooping black and red with plump, sweet goodness.

It is this lush thicket and the continual coming out to meet life in its abundance, moving among the humming and rustling, that I will miss most when the cold comes. I will miss thinking my own thoughts while doing the brainless work of pulling ripe blackberries from vines, promising myself a cobbler or a parfait as reward for my labor. I will miss hiding in the cover of vines and willowy locusts, watching life go by, unobserved by people in a hurry.

Most memorable and important moments in life are the result of accidents. Such was the quick reaction that sent me reaching with stealth into the pocket of my cutoff jeans to retrieve my cell phone and snap the photo of this swallowtail butterfly who came to check out the blackberries, too. Another happy accident is the concoction below, recipe included, for Gluten-free blackberry parfait made with homemade whipped cream and walnuts.

   

1 to 1 1/2 cups blackberries
1/4 cup honey
1/8 cup water
1 cup crushed walnuts
1-2 cartons heavy cream
3-4 tsp white sugar
3 tsp brown sugar

Add half of honey to cream. Whip cream in a large mixing bowl until stiff peaks form. Boil blackberries in sauce pan with honey and water. Crush walnuts. Mix walnuts separately in small saucepan with brown sugar and a tablespoon of honey. Heat up for about 30 seconds on stovetop. Do not microwave. Starting with walnut mixture, spoon in layers: walnuts, blackberries, and whipped cream, repeating until filled. Top with a few walnuts.

Serve fresh

 

 

 

 

 

Souvenirs

A souvenir is a long-ago collected piece of our lives, lost and found. It is cherished, not for the price it might bring on ebay, but rather for the time, now gone, that it represents and the time travel it affords. This Mikasa china platter with sugar and creamer is but part of a large set. I picked it out at the age of eighteen. My first choice, a Japanese pattern, charcoal with a purple orchid, met with jeers from my husband at the time, my oldest son’s dad, whether because it was feminine or because it was Japanese, I’ll never know. This English pattern was my second choice. My father-in-law noticed the raised ridges and nodded with approval, calling them “sideboards.” Before my wedding day, I had over twelve full place settings. Days after the wedding, my former husband mustered in to the Air Force, and we ran off and left our china and everything else we owned, moving all over the U.S. Too many years to number have passed, seeing me through the birth of my first child, my eventual college graduation, and my divorce from my oldest son’s dad when my son was six. I lived many years rebuilding the household I had run off and left so many times, cobbling together odds and ends for dishware and the stuff of life I no longer had. Last weekend, my oldest son invited me to his new apartment. We put food together and made a meal, and he invited me to go through the boxes he had retrieved from his dad’s storage unit. There, to my shock, stood my Mikasa china down to the last tea mug. It was as if an old friend had come to visit. The joy was not in the things themselves but in remembering the time when I was eighteen and cluelessly picking out china patterns as if I had any experience or business looking at anything as refined as Mikasa ceramic ware. Each individual piece had a story, tales of his dad’s mom, no longer with us, of my mom, of my dad, now dead twenty years, yarns of horrific culinary disasters and my first apartment on the Gulf Coast beach at Biloxi, Mississippi. More than anything, I enjoyed spending time with my son and his fiancee, dividing up the insanely large number of place settings (we split it six and six), and sharing memories of his toddler-hood. He even saved his earliest sippy-cup and remembered which color was his and which cup his childhood friend Addie Baker used. Things don’t have meaning in themselves, I have learned, but are given value by the people who use them, or in my case, those who never get to use them until they finally come home to stay.

the back yard diet

So, I live in Southern Middle Tennessee on about two acres of ancient farm land divided into large lots with typical ranch-style houses and big front porches. A wet weather creek runs at an angle across the whole of our property bordered by a highway, a barbed wire fence, and a stand of Bradford pears and hickories. Lately, my fence row, dotted with ragged black locusts in various stages of growth, has transformed into an incidental orchard thanks to the birds and the bees. I am now the proud caretaker of a monster blackberry bush with smaller bushes growing in the tangle of ivy, thistle, and Queen Anne’s lace. Down on the highway end of the fence row, I found a substantial tree with silvery trunk and giant berries. For some reason, I couldn’t come up with the species, although it was obviously native, part of the life cycle of the insects around here. I looked up the berry tree on the internet and discovered I had a mulberry tree almost at full harvest, its giant berries turning from red to nearly black.

I picked two ripe mulberries, soaked them in water, gave one to my nine-year-old, and reserved one for myself. The burst of sweetness surprised and delighted us. The meaty berry flesh released a massive storehouse of sweet juice, and we wondered why store shelves, especially here in the South, weren’t loaded with containers of mulberry juice. The massive berry delivers an experience somewhere between a grape and a raspberry, but its structure mimics a cherry, with a long stem at the center. Even the flesh around the stem reminds me more of a cherry than a raspberry or strawberry. The fruit is unlike anything we had ever tried.

Mulberry is good for a number of ailments; as it turns out, the juice is an anti-oxidant. More than that, according to several sources, the Mulberry tree produces reservatrol, a substance known to lower blood sugar. The trick is to pick the leaves and the berries just as they become ripe and use them in a salad. I’m growing Romaine lettuce and green bell peppers, too, so that will make a nice mix. I’m sure you could toss leaves and berries into a blender with some Greek yogurt and create a healthy smoothie. One source I read claimed that mulberries can actually darken and condition hair. I thought of combining mulberry juice and coconut oil, which just might be the best hair conditioner known to modern woman.

But my ultimate goal for mulberries is a cobbler. Since antiquity, the peach cobbler has reigned supreme with cherry and blackberry following. But mulberries deliver the sweetness of cherries without the tough exterior that boils down to an almost candied state when baking into a cobbler or crunch consistency. I am thinking that mulberries might create the absolute most amazing cobbler ever consumed, and it is only through ignorance of our own back yard stores of food that we have forgotten the town named for the tree, Mulberry, Tennessee, from which Davy Crockett hailed, a man known for traversing the wilderness and living off the land while fighting Creeks and Brits and Spaniards.

Mulberry, the town, stands in Southern Tennessee, a gorgeous, wild place with dark, brooding forests, large farmhouses, and impromptu cemeteries dotting the highways with mostly Revolution-era vets and Confederate dead.

I celebrate my fledgling fence-row orchard with its twelve upstart blackberry bushes, its poke salad, and its single mulberry tree. After a spring of very few honey bees, I saw them the day I discovered the mulberry, buzzing and working the fence row where no chemicals destroyed the pollen they need. On a longer walk, I heard their vibrant violin music, like a thousand cellos warming up in the orchestra pit, flitting around the wild blackberries, thistles, daisies, and the start of a new mulberry, all dotting the narrow road that dead ends at the forested hill. I was amazed that the entangled, thick, wild sprawl of “weeds” could hold the keys to health, and yet these thickets are the very target of homeowners with an obsessive-compulsive need to kill everything that refuses to grow symmetrically, as if symmetry had anything to do with living. The same natural process that forms the symmetrical chambers of a sea shell also produces the intertwined, chaotic mess of sumac, wild ivies, and Spanish moss draped across old oaks, and there is a beauty, however untamed it may be. It may turn out that the most dangerous scourge of the Earth was subdivision of land, for it is the need to perpetuate the illusion of control of nature that has poisoned our land, our people, and may well endanger the bees and other fragile living things that create the diversity of plant life God designed to heal our bodies.