A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability. We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth. These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.
We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.
Three years ago, over breakfast, my friend Helen handed me a novel about a quest that, unknown to both of us, would set me off on a quest of my own. The book was called The Dragon Waiting, and it was written by the late science fiction and fantasy author John M. Ford. Helen placed the mass-market paperback with its garish cover in my hands, her eyes aglow with evangelical fervor, telling me I would love it. I would soon learn that, owing to Ford’s obscurity, his fans do things like this all the time. Soon, I would become one of them.
“I felt strange as soon as the anesthesia started to wear off,” Steenburgen said. “The best way I can describe it is that it just felt like my brain was only music, and that everything anybody said to me became musical. All of my thoughts became musical. Every street sign became musical. I couldn’t get my mind into any other mode.”
Fun as that might sound in an Oliver Sacks kind of way — the late neurologist wrote about similar, potentially stroke-inspired symptoms in his book “Musicophilia” — Steenburgen wasn’t thrilled about the sudden mental shift. The next two months were tough. “I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t have acted,” she said. “I couldn’t have learned any lines. My husband [actor Ted Danson] and I were kind of frightened about it.”
Steenburgen’s son, filmmaker Charlie McDowell (“The Discovery,” “The One I Love”), also remembers it as a trying time. “If your mom comes to you after surgery and says that her head is now full of music, I think it’s totally fair to think that she’s gone crazy and has major psychological problems,” he said. “All of the sudden she was referencing these obscure indie bands and picking up random instruments — I’m not gonna lie, the accordion playing drives me nuts.” McDowell laughed. “When I say all this out loud it sounds insane. It was definitely a change.”
Troy Dillinger was having a good month. A working actor in Los Angeles, he played in June a lawyer in a Lifetime movie, a coach in a public service announcement about opioids, and a judge in Cardi B’s video “Press.”
He also slid into his best creepy smirk and sexually harassed an underling in a corporate training video.
Between 1961 and 1989 the “Antifascist Protection Rampart” served as both physical barrier and symbol of the division and conflict that gripped much of the world in the wake of World War II. Of the 54,000 concrete slabs that once made up the western side of Berlin Wall, hundreds of these segments, often in pairs or groups, have made their way to far-flung locales. Separated into its constituent pieces, divided into fragments, the wall ceases to be an impediment and instead serves as a reminder of division and reunification, of conflict and resolution, of constraint and liberty. In each case, this potent symbol when removed to a different context absorbs new meaning from its adopted surroundings.
Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.
This need is hardwired in us, since our emotions bind us to one another, and in those bonds is the key to our survival. From the moment we’re born, we realize we’re not alone. Our brains are equipped with mirroring neurons, which is why when the mother smiles, the baby smiles back. This continues into adulthood. I remember walking down the street one day and a man said to me, “Howdy.” I’m not usually someone who says “Howdy.” But I instinctively said back to him, “Howdy!” This is more than copying each other’s expressions. It’s also about the emotions underlying the expressions. The mirroring neurons enable mother and child to pick up on each other’s emotions.
“The world’s an untranslatable language.” So poet Charles Wright states in the first line of “The Ghost of Walter Benjamin Walks at Midnight.” The poem appears in Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright, a new collection from Farrar, Straus and Giroux comprised of Wright’s previously published works from some twenty books, written over the course of forty years. In the collection, the former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner invokes many ghosts: of people, places missed, memories and ephemera. As a result, Oblivion Banjo is a complex theater of images where the world — “chalk hills” and “A length of chain, a white hand” — appears strange yet cherished in Wright’s verse.
Right down to its random-seeming ending, “Christmas in Austin” is aggressively inconclusive. “A Weekend in New York” closed in the middle of a tennis rally, and one novel later, a reader senses that the Essinger family contest is still very much in play. For what is family, after all, but a conversation that never ends?