If you have snorkeled or scuba-dived over and through a coral reef, you have seen the myriad coral polyps that look like little anemones encased in hard, calcium-carbonate homes in crowded neighborhoods of their own construction. Corals of hundreds of species combine their “exoskeletal” homes to make reefs of “colonies” that can stretch not just for miles, but, as in the instance of the Great Barrier Reef, along the entire coast of a continent. These brainless creatures, belonging to the Phylum Cnidarians (Yeah, cn), do something on the individual species level that many people find quite remarkable: They spawn at the same time. Yes, brainless creatures cooperate for the good of the species. Such spawning has been documented repeatedly.*
 
How coral polyps know to spawn simultaneously is largely a mystery, and maybe “knowing” is the improper process. But in human terms, these brainless critters “know.” Obviously, one might conjecture, the spawning is just a matter of biochemistry. I can accept that because in my own ignorance of how the world works, I see each spring the budding of trees and flowering of cherry, pear, and apple trees, all those branches seeming to say, “Okay, let’s do this.”
 
The more germane point in the midst of a pandemic is this: Brainless corals cooperate for the good of the species. The relevant question then follows: How is it that humans with brains can’t uniformly cooperate for the good of the species?
 
You can ask that question with respect to a society as a whole or to a social segment. Of course, you can also ask it about an individual.
 
Now the obvious answer is that brains aren’t relegated to simple biochemical reactions to the environment. Brains spawn meaning in every human “polyp.” Cooperation in most matters is optional. Criminal perpetrators, for example, don’t cooperate for the good of society at large in “normal” times. Some, the murderers and especially the mass murderers, harm the colony. Even under a threat like war or famine, criminal brains choose disruption over cooperation. Where some in the colony would spawn good, they spawn evil.
 
Evolution has given the simple coral the ability to act for the good of the colony while still remaining an individual polyp. In the realm of phyla with brains, evolution has maintained some semblance of the coral cooperation for the good of the group: Fish schooling, for example. Even more complex brains reveal both predators and prey cooperating, the former working to bring down the latter in the actions of, say, lions and wolves, and the latter working to save the group as a whole in the herding of wildebeest or in the water buffalo chasing off lions that attack one of their members. And then we get to the mystery of the big brains, those that we find in humans who, for whatever “reason,” cannot cooperate for the good of the species: The madmen who would release weapons of mass destruction on a population, for example.
 
Watch as the world endures a biochemical threat to humanity. Will organisms with brains cooperate? Can humans learn a simple lesson from a simple coral?
 
 
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CleWRmrpkJE

Of many things we wanted most
Were other suns that served as host
To planets like our own, with life,
And maybe one without our strife.
 
And then not far away we saw
An exoplanet; we said, “Ah!”
Its star was bright as it could be
Its name we called, “Fom al’ haut b.”
 
We thought we’d found another place
For creatures like the human race.
And not too far away it lies
Just close enough for Hubble’s eyes.
 
But then, it changed from bright to blur,*
We had no choice but to infer,
That what we saw no longer is,
What once was hard is dusty fizz.
 
Our guess is now, the planet’s dead,
Hit by what we here now so dread,
Another body slammed it hard
So, broken, b is just a shard.
 
"It’s dust right now," observers say,
"Collision turned it to puree."
A fate that once produced our moon
Destroyed Fom al’ haut all too soon.
 
We’ll miss you now, the planet b,
You gave us hope someday we’d see
And meet a peaceful race of friends.
But now in dusty shards that ends.
 
Whatever happens here, it seems,
The strife, the sadness, broken dreams,
Is universal in its scope.
And so some say they’ve lost all hope.
 
But many suns around us glow
And closer still are those we know,
The members of the human race
With whom we share this tiny space.
 
Why look afar for things right here,
For life that lives upon our sphere?
No exoplanet we can find
Can ever match the human mind.

Why wait to meet some creatures distant
When friends are here within an instant?
Now turn away from things afar
And look to living where you are. 


 
*SciNews. Fomalhaut b Doesn’t Exist, Astronomers Say. 21 Apr 2020. Online at http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/fomalhaut-b-planetesimal-collision-08347.html     Accessed April 21, 2020

Quick survey, two questions: Have you found joy? Have you made joy?
 
In Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, a stream of consciousness novella, the narrator says on his deathbed, “One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences...I am responsible in every way.” Existential stuff, that.
 
But not a sign of the times, that is, these times when people look to blame, times when people look for scapegoats, times when victimhood has been raised to the level of an art. Pervasive irresponsibility, or lack of responsibility. By far, these are the least existential times. In victimhood, freedom dies, and personal freedom is the heart of existentialism. Joy, in times of blame, scapegoating, and victimhood, comes from the outside.
 
Yet, maybe even those who spent decades blaming others for this, that, and even for their own lives and who now face the threat death by a virus—yes, those who lie on their potential deathbeds—might, like Bolaño’s narrator, admit they had a personal responsibility. Some probably regret both words and silences, and maybe, too, for actions inimical to others’ wellbeing, words and actions that changed little if anything but that aimed to harm and in doing so, simply raised the mean spirit of elitism, condescension, and hate. And some might regret they did not live a life of joy, consistent joy, if not constant joy; and, maybe shared joy.
 
Remember reading about those existentialist philosophers who proclaimed that humans are free, but who said freedom elicits negative feelings or thoughts about life? One of those thoughts is that life can be dreadful. That it can be boring, also. Angst, Weltschmerz, ennui: All three seem to be the downside of living with personal responsibility during a finite life that is under constant threat. One can run and hide from threats, but then hiding imposes other negative thoughts that arise when contact with others is interrupted. What’s a modern existentialist to do? Certainly, the temporary distractions of modern life don’t erase an underlying ennui because it returns when the distractions are over. And certainly, the sense of confidence that defies anxiety never lasts through a dark and stormy night as winds threaten to destroy even the biggest and strongest of luxury homes. And certainly, the daily grind grinds on until it ends in some form of retirement and seeming irrelevance. All joy seems for the existentialist to be little more than a temporary distraction from life in an indifferent world. Angst, Weltschmerz, and ennui rise to the foreground of thought and feeling during those moments when people are most isolated, as in the dark of night, and, in the midst of a pandemic, in the isolation from social circles and the general public. Miss crowds nowadays? Miss hustle and bustle? Miss the rat race? Asking, “What’s next?”
 
I get the feeling that Sartre, Kierkegaard, and others within and on the periphery of the existentialism movement were not happy campers. Did these guys ever smile? Would they have laughed at the most existential of cartoonists, guys like Gary Larson? Really, had I known Kierkegaard, I might have said. “Soren, lighten up. You can’t wallow. Remember what you said about 1838, that in May that year you found ‘indescribable joy’? And then what, was life an uphill struggle before and after that month? Yes, I know you wrote parody, but wasn’t its purpose the denigration of those with whom you disagreed? Surely, that doesn’t equate to joy.”
 
Surely, even for the most brooding among us, joy can persist over days, months, and even years.
 
You can frame existentialists in another picture. No matter how much thinking one does, he or she can never reach an ultimate explanation of the process of living. Over millennia, thinkers haven’t produced an ultimate philosophy or psychology. I suppose Sartre acknowledged the inadequacy of others’ thinking. Philosophies always undergo some change, if not in contradiction or abandonment, then in subtle refinements that reiterate the thinking du jour in neologisms. And those who refine others’ thinking find themselves eventually questioning or redefining the “meaning of life” spiraling ever smaller into an infinity of mystery. No one seems to have the ultimate answer, not for others, and not ultimately for himself or herself. Of course, on can self-dupe, and possibly all dupe themselves. No one can ever know the final thought of the dying representative of a particular philosophy. Does, one might ask, the atheist really go into nonexistence thinking, “I’m going into nonexistence”? Does the believer die in total belief? Does the bored person die realizing, “Hey, some of that was actually fun”?
 
Little brings out the individual’s essence more than isolation. Questions surface about what to do next. Thoughts stream and then, like water in a fountain, run again through the pump and pipes of the mind. Isolation turns one inward, and once focused inward, turns one into a self-examiner. And in isolation, those inclined to pessimistic perspectives suffer Angst, Weltschmerz, and ennui.
 
Existential philosophies have adherents, but by adhering, by following, adherents give up the freedom existentialists claim as a basis for their thinking. Any negativity, like Angst, born of their philosophies or suffered by adherents, is just one path of understanding. Competing philosophies exist as all philosophies beget sub-philosophies, those refinements of which I wrote above. Even for those who think their philosophy will remain viable throughout life onto their deathbeds, there’s always the chance that another thought might supplant, might replace what seemed at one time a sure bet as the ultimate explanation of life.
 
There’s always that challenge of deciding between two well-known graffiti that appear on posters and T-shirts: “To be is to do” and “To do is to be,” both thoughts attributed to various philosophers, including Plato and Socrates. In isolation like that imposed by a pandemic, pessimists define their existence by the latter; optimists, by the former. True, everyone probably bounces between the two positions, but a dominance of one over the other means the difference between relegating oneself to a life of Angst, Weltschmerz, and ennui and a life that finds joy in its essence. Whereas the ancient Greeks spoke of an innate or inherent, or even an a priori essence, Sartre and kindred philosophers argued that existence precedes essence, that in existing, we define our essence. Joy, in such thinking, has to be made, not found, just as meaning has to be made, not found.

​Where do you stand? Joy from the outside? Joy from the inside? Made joy? Discovered joy? Do you say like Bolaño’s narrator, “I am responsible in every way”?

I assume very few people like to drive through dense fog. Knowing what’s ahead is paramount to safety. That’s why weather forecasters tell us how far we can see during a fog episode. Makes sense.
 
Seeing what’s ahead is limited to the edge of the visibility horizon. Beyond that, which is ever moving as we travel, lies the unknown and possibly the hazardous conditions that jeopardize safety. Fog, however, isn’t the only phenomenon that puts a limit on visibility. In the grand scheme of the universe, there’s also a visibility horizon; it’s out there about 13.8 billion light years away. Over that horizon lies an unknown universe of galaxies whose light hasn’t traversed the intervening space. Astronomers can guess the visible universe has one to two trillion galaxies, but they can’t know what lies over that horizon, and they never will know as the universe continues to expand.
 
We play a rather passive role with respect to seeing those distant galaxies. We have to wait for their light to arrive, and there’s nothing we can do to hasten the arrival. In fact, there’s nothing we can do even in waiting. That train left the station 13.8 billion years ago. It’s not returning. But what about the other visibility horizons in our lives?
 
Forecasters can tell us what to expect on foggy nights, but only those in the fog can report the actual conditions. They lie beyond the visibility horizon; they can call out to warn. Of course, warnings work only when people heed them, the most famous of ignored warnings being the soothsayer’s statement to Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March.” Not too long ago, as Hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast as a Category III hurricane with the potential for strengthening, the Governor of Louisiana, the US President, and the Mayor of New Orleans all issued warnings, and three or four Louisiana parishes declared a mandatory evacuation. As the storm approached and strengthened, more parishes adopted the mandatory evacuation, and President Bush invoked the Stafford Act and deployed federal troops and FEMA. At the same time, the Governor issued a mandatory evacuation, and the Mayor of New Orleans echoed that mandate. You know the story. People didn’t leave. More than 1,000 died disregarding those warnings and updated information from the National Hurricane Center whose satellite imagery enabled all who wanted to, to see over the horizon.
 
And now we have another visibility horizon, not a large boundary like the edge of the visible universe nor one like the expansive ocean over which storms travel, but one as tiny as a virus. Yet, as tiny as it is, it shrouds the future. It is the fog through which we cannot presently see. We can hypothesize; we can wildly predict. Seeing past this particular visibility horizon will improve only when the fog of this pandemic dissipates. Some fogs last longer than others, and this one is trying the world’s patience till it lifts.
 
As we know from experience, whereas some drivers slow down when they enter fog, others continue to drive as though nothing obstructs their view. We’ve read about chain-reaction crashes and unnecessary injuries and deaths. Racing headlong into the visibility horizon isn’t prudent and can be dangerous. Slow down. The fog will lift. Visibility will improve, and you will see your future more clearly.

​When the government (or whoever) decided to take incandescent light bulbs off the store shelves, a number of people objected. Fluorescent bulbs effected a pasty look on people, didn’t have the same range of wavelengths as natural sunlight, and were considered an unnecessary pollutant in waste disposal and a danger if broken in the home. The new alternative at the time, LEDs, were expensive, and they, too, gave off an unfamiliar light. People wanted that old warm glow of the incandescent bulbs.
 
Then, LED prices dropped with greater mass production, and with greater competition, they mimicked their predecessor incandescent bulbs in wavelengths, returning that part of the spectrum to the inside world of living rooms and home offices. Warm light. Now, one can buy LEDs that mimic even older-style incandescent bulbs, those with yellowish glows on filaments in bulbs more like upside down jars, some even hanging off wires to give an antique look.
 
And the most recent of LED lighting provides not just color changes to meet or cause moods, but also the look of gas-light or fireplace flames. Yes, we’re back to Abraham Lincoln reading by fireplace and candle and to nineteenth century street lamps flickering light over patches of cobblestone streets. Intriguing, isn’t it? We have advanced into the past in lighting technology.
 
Capturing past lighting in new ways makes me wonder whether or not there are other such “advances.” Sports “retro” uniforms come to mind. Not made from wool, the new blends of fabrics look very much like the old-time baseball or football team jerseys. Car makers have also engineered retro dashboards and interiors for some new models, somehow that retro look capturing the fancy of a class of buyers. And after decades in the mid-twentieth century of homes with central heating, the homes of the seventies and beyond incorporated more “fireplaces,” placed here in quotation marks because many were natural gas, propane, or even electric heaters, and not log-burning. We’re all the way back to pretending that we sit around the cave-dwellers’ open-hearth fires.
 
Is there a need for nostalgia? Is that what drives the antique business? Have you ever gone into a Cracker Barrel or similar restaurant to find a retro look? Obviously, the architects of the style believe the look invites customers. Amidst the clang of dishes and the noise of many conversations, one gets the feeling of eating in an old farmhouse. Restored old houses serve as similar restaurants. And now, we can look for more of those to incorporate LED lights that mimic gas flames.
 
We’ve come full cycle. The modernism of the late 1920s through the 1960s gave way to other styles that in turn sometimes reverted to that once “futuristic” architecture. Back and forth, from old to new and new to old, the art, architecture, and functional components of society waver between stark sleekness and overstuffed bulk. The wavering might derive from the desire to be different from one generation to the next, forcing the architectural and technological pendulums to swing between what was and what could be.
 
No doubt you have some style of lighting, furniture, and home you favor. You might prefer the look of fire without the actual flames, finding comfort in virtual fire, such as the hours of video of logs burning in a fireplace that you can find on YouTube. Just looking at the artificial flames allows you to have very close to the same feelings you might have with real flames, less the smoke, carbon monoxide, or ash.
 
Attempting to recapture the ambience of the past through modern tech’s devices might also indicate that we are in essence somewhat simple in our basic desires for a stable life un-beset by the coldness of concrete and steel, of wires and cubicles, and of stark functionalism. Sitting in a room lighted by LED “flames” provides the illusion that we can go back, can relive simpler times—as long as we have efficient and functional conveniences like “fires” we can start with an electric switch.

When life-styles change, people discover a little bit more about themselves, or at least, a bit more about how they respond to change. For people living in Köppen’s C and D climates—essentially temperate transition zones between the continuous warmth of the tropics and the bitter cold of boreal lands—a yearly acclimatization is a common experience.* There is no need to acclimate in a steady state. The summer clothes stay in closets during winter, and the winter clothes stay in closets during the summer. And that same principle is especially true of human “weather.” The daily small fluctuations of life are normal, and every psyche lives acclimatized during an uninterrupted season of “normality.” An adapted psyche wears the same social clothing, and there’s no need to run to the storage closet to pull out garb for a different season.
 
In the green-technology circles of Germany, some have been concerned about Dunkelflauten, what can be translated as “dark doldrums.” Electrical grid managers believe that solar cell and wind power technologies have to have backups for days on which the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. In 2020 people all over the world are experiencing their own form of Dunkelflauten as their normal activities stop. The pandemic is a period of psychological and social Dunkelflauten, and such an abruptly occurring change in human weather has forced a new kind of acclimatization on much, if not on all, of humanity.
 
The concern that the grid managers have about changing over completely to “green” energy has them scrambling to discover ways to anticipate Dunkelflauten and to adapt the electrical grid to their eventuality. They know that there are weaknesses in the electrical grid system that might be exacerbated by dark and calm days—or, in fact, by other disruptions, such as overwhelming DC current from solar flares. And they know they must incorporate alternative energy systems “just in case.”
 
Now practically everyone has encountered in a pandemic a sequence of unusual days when the current of life (and lifestyles) has been interrupted, even halted by a dark disease. Throughout the world psyches have to adapt; societies, too. The season has changed abruptly. An early frost has arrived in the midst of a vibrant life. And just as people shudder and shiver at the onset of autumn, so they also become aware of their bodies. The transition between seasons gives people a renewed perspective on themselves and instills in them a heightened self-awareness.  
 
The lessons of temperature acclimatization indicate that humans can periodically become more self-aware and that they can also adapt to physical change. The lessons of these pandemic Dunkelflauten indicate the need for both patience and anticipation. Waiting is difficult, as sailors found out when their ships entered the doldrums. But Earth is a dynamic planet, and even in the subtropical doldrums, winds eventually blow; ships eventually move.
 
Those who have learned to adapt to yearly fluctuations in weather know to have clothing for another season handy because another season is inevitable; its coming, ineluctable. The current of life might be interrupted by a dark calm right now. Be patient; the winds of social activity will blow and the darkness will give way to sunshine. But during these Dunkelflauten, you have an opportunity to become more self-aware.
 
*When the usual early warm days of August and early September succumb to autumn’s approach, a drop from temperatures in the 80sF to those in the 50sF makes people shiver; after a winter of cold days, a rise to the 50sF makes people cherish the “warmth.” The human body takes a while to adapt.

Sometime around the year 2000 I bought a book entitled Millennium Year by Year, an account of the previous thousand years.* When I read it, I saw one recurring event: War. For a thousand years no year was a year of peace. Somewhere on the planet a war or a battle or a violent clash occurred, leaving no year untouched by conflict. The first vignette in the book is the story of Thorvald the Viking who was killed by an arrow during a conflict with the native people of “Vinland.” And then in a series of newspaper-style reports, the book entails the annual suffering and loss of life that continues even today. After only two decades at the beginning of this millennium, the pattern shows no sign of changing. Some 1,000 years from now, if humanity survives its own brutishness, another volume called Millennium Vol. II will detail ours and our successors’ legacies of hate. Big wars, little wars, skirmishes, coups, tribal conflicts sometimes going back more than the past millennium and threatening to stretch well beyond the next one as an endless highway of death. Underlying it all is an apparent seething anger, anger that the world isn’t an Interstate built for a single car, yours, or his, or hers, or… Anyway, rage on the road of history is the norm, and it often leads to crashes in clashes.
 
As the actual roads have emptied during “sheltering” during the pandemic, a virtual road of life has become the ribbon of collision. Want some advice? Wear your psychological seatbelt if you expect to merge with a string on Twitter or in some chatroom. The crowded highway of communication built on the avenues of electronic media is littered with verbal collisions. Unaware that they traverse an emotional path that millennia of people have traveled, today’s electronic travelers continue humanity’s wreck-full tradition: Respond to one another with hate, judgment, and condemnation. That doesn’t speak well for the supposed nobility of our species. It does speak volumes about a driving force in society, however. Where did this penchant for mental and physical violence originate?  
 
I’m reminded of a statement made by Sir James Hutton, the “Father of Geology.” After his unsuccessful attempt to pinpoint the origin of rocks and natural processes, Hutton wrote, “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Where do I look for the vestige of war’s beginning? Do I go back 500 years to the massacre of Aztecs by Cortez’s conquistadors in 1520? To Thorvald’s death a millennium ago? Farther back in time? To the reported Battle of Mons Badonicus and the rise of mythical Arthur in the year 500? “Keep going,” you say.
 
We don’t have record of the conflicts perpetrated by our hominin ancestors, but we can reasonably assume that they, like us and Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees, fought their share of battles and probably left us an inbred legacy of hate, or violence, or anger.
 
In the context of history, all who seek peace do so on the roads of humanity’s persistent and ubiquitous battlefield, a war ground people have paved as they have widened their geographic reach. if not dripping actual blood through copper wires and optic fibers, the new highway of injury and death is littered with intentional crashes among individuals or groups. Not being a pessimist is an ongoing and difficult task for anyone who wishes to build inroads of peace and wellbeing.
​
And here’s an example: The Surgeon General during the current pandemic is Dr. Jerome Michael Adams, an African-American (Why I need to give that qualification will become evident in a moment) anesthesiologist and Vice Admiral with B.S., B.A. MD, and MPH degrees. In addition to his studying at the U. of Maryland and U. of California, Berkeley, he studied in the Netherlands and Nigeria. Before becoming the US Surgeon General, he served as Indiana’s State Health Commissioner under two governors and as a member of a number of commissions, including the Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Commissions and wrote several academic papers and chapters. In short, Dr. Adams is an accomplished individual whose career centered on the health of not just a few patients but of millions: That “PH” in his MPH degree stands for “public health.” And then Dr. Adams, driving down a highway no one in the current generation ever personally experienced, the Pandemic Road, was involved in an unexpected crash. The background is relatively straightforward: Given that no one had any scientifically based information on the way Covid-19 spread and that there were shortages of face masks for health care workers, Dr. Adams asked American’s not to rush to buy masks. It was advice other doctors had given until the asymptomatic spread of the virus was confirmed. Adams, open to change, then changed his advice about face masks as so many other doctors had. Put that part of the controversy aside, however, and understand this one. In his attempt to reach the African-American communities hard hit by Covid-19, and with a professional career centered on public health, including anti-tobacco and anti-opioid drug overdose efforts, he used his family’s terms for “mother,” “grandmother,” and “grandfather,” after which the Internet highway crashes increased. He had simply asked people to stop smoking and using drugs and alcohol, especially during a time when some in the medical profession believed their use had deleterious effects on infected people, effects that exacerbated the disease. From one who had written a paper on the opioid crisis and who had served on a tobacco prevention commission, such a message seemed reasonable to most: It was a precaution.
 
Not so. The Surgeon General’s plea to the African-American community to avoid “alcohol, tobacco, and drugs,” for the sake, if not of oneself, for “abuela,” “big moma,” and “pop-pop,” elicited accusations that the African-American doctor was racist. Makes sense, doesn’t it? An African-American concerned about the safety of the African-American community is certainly the model white supremacist! It really doesn’t matter how well-intentioned one is to those living in egocentrism. The highway of opinion and good intention is a dangerous road to travel. Dr. Adams was driving an ambulance on roads no one had ever traveled when he encountered angry drivers at every onramp.
 
It makes me think, too, of Doctors without Borders and charitable medical staff members who have gone into danger zones to help people only to find themselves victims of hate groups. Such has occurred throughout the world. Or, take the famous story of Amy Biehl, the Caucasian-American who went to support victims of South Africa’s apartheid policies only to be killed by a black mob as she drove three friends to their homes outside Cape Town. Yes, another road covered in the blood of one dedicated to help others.
 
In spite of my belief that good intentions and actions drive many people along their life's pathways, I'm driven toward a pessimistic conclusion: History’s road is a continuous crash site. I see no vestige of the road’s origin, and I see no prospect for its end. Drive safely.
 
*Mercer, Derek, Ed., 1999, New York. DK Publishing Company.

[This April, 2020, all “unnecessary businesses” are closed and among them all those clothing stores with their spring and summer clothing lines now unavailable except by mail order. Is it time to reflect on why so many with closets filled to crush limits, actually need more clothes? Don’t many people have closets reaching critical density? What is the origin of this runaway consumerism, this need to buy more clothes?]
 
The recent discovery of fibers (fibres) wound together to make a cord attributed to some anonymous (Hey, aren’t they all anonymous?) Neanderthal who lived between 42,000 and 52,000 years ago (give or take a week), means that our “cousin species” had skills similar to our own.* Since the earliest human-made (Am I allowed to say “manmade”?) cord dates to only 19,000 years ago, is it not possible that some early human (also anonymous) learned the skill from a Neanderthal? And think what that led to: Not just the wearing of clothes, but the wearing of “fashions” from Versace, Hilfiger, Klein, Lacroix, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Armani, de Givenchy, Lanvin, Prada, de la Renta, Cardin, Lauren, Valentino, Wang, Saint Laurent, and so many more that their number almost rivals the population of politicians. What if humans inherited or learned fashion from Neanderthals, the first known weavers? Such is a mystery of our deep past. And a parallel to the mystery of cord-making’s origin is the question of whether or not Neanderthals could sing chords barbershop-style.
 
According to several reports, the Kebara 2 hyoid belonging to some anonymous Neanderthal who left his bones lying around in an Israeli cave some 60,000 years ago indicates that the individual probably had the capacity to speak very much as we do (or very little as we do, depending on the nature of the comparison and the side of the controversy about ancient hyoids and speech). If one reads a study by Ruggero D’Anastasio and others, one can reach the conclusion that Neanderthal speech was not only possible, but also probable.* And Dan Dediu, derives a similar qualified conclusion from his study of the Neanderthal hyoid bone.**
 
Anyway, if Neanderthals would weave and speak, what would they talk about while they were weaving? A guess:
 
“Ug, watcha makin’?”
 
“Just some cord.”
 
“What you gonna use it for?”
 
“Not quite sure, but if it lasts as long as a Glad bag floating in the ocean, it’s gonna be my legacy.”
 
“Anyway, Ug, when you finish that cord, you wanna join me and my group?”
 
“What group?”
 
“We call ourselves The Neanders by the Meander.”
 
“Why ‘Meander’?”
 
“Well, we sing down by the big river bend.”
 
“Can I sing? I guess I never really tried it.”
 
“Yeah. You can. You have to try. It’s just like learning to whistle.”
 
“What’s a whistle.”
 
“A sound that I make when I purse my lips and blow air over my tongue to call my only barely domesticated wolf.”
 
“Wait, you have a wolf?”
 
“Not really a wolf. Doggone it if I know what to call it. It follows me around, brings me a stick to throw at a bird, and makes a noise when a bear approaches, but sometimes it runs off.”
 
“Hey, I got an idea. Wanna keep your wolf close? Why doncha use some of my cord? You can tie it around its neck and around a tree with knots.”

“Why does the tree have to have knots? What am I supposed to do? Tie it or not?”
 
“No, not ‘not,’ ‘knot.’ It’s a thing I make when I twirl around my cord and make some loops. I couldn’t think of a use for it until now.”
 
“Are we becoming civilized like those sapiens people? They think they are so smart. But look, we can sing, and I’ve never seen one of them make a cord. I’ll bet they’re thousands of years away from making one.”
 
“Primitives. But I have to hand it to them, they certainly can talk. In fact, that’s what they mostly do, talk, talk, talk. Good thing they can’t do it over long distances or pretty much the whole world would be enveloped by incessant talking, most of it without a purpose. And what’s with all that verse? And singing? Gosh, gimme some quiet to do some meander knitting, a stitch in my time saves me from all that rhyme. So, no, I’m not gonna join your Neanders by the Meander group.”
 
“Okay, suit yourself.”
 
“Wait, whadya just say?”

“I said, ‘Suit yourself.’”
 
“Hmmmm. Just got another idea. What if I took not just a few cords, but many and wound them together? I could make a cord suit, something to wear.”
 
“Not bad. What’s next, dyeing it?”
 
“Just got another idea. What if I made a bunch of colored cord outfits? I bet I could barter with those smarty sapiens. They’re so vain, always looking in the lake to see what they look like.”
 
“Sounds like a plan. I think you’ve got something there. Show me how to make those cords. Now that we know we can talk, we can make fun of our human customers; we can keep ourselves in stitches as we stitch.”
 
And thus, dear human, some 42 to 52 millennia after that first cord, is how you became so enamored of and addicted to fashion and why you have a closet overstuffed with clothes. From that one cord a whole industry developed with the sole purpose of adding more clothes to your closet. Want to talk about it?
 
 
Hardy, B.L., Moncel, M., Kerfant, C. et al. Direct evidence of Neanderthal fibre technology and its cognitive and behavioral implications. Sci Rep 10, 4889 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61839-w Original in PDF found online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61839-w#citeas
 
**Hogenboom, Melissa. Neanderthals could speak like humans, study suggests. BBC news. 20 Dec. 2013.

I suppose from anecdotes I’ve heard that there are still some people who in the midst of a pandemic are largely unaware of its spread. Even though I am locked down in my rural neighborhood and property, I’m still connected to the world through my TV, computer, and smart devices, so I believe I can count myself among those who are aware of the geography of this disease. Those venues of news provide updated maps of Covid-19 cases and deaths. Some are interactive maps, such as that put out by the government of Pennsylvania. With a hover of my cursor and a click, I can see county-by-county tallies, a map of Death’s movement across the Commonwealth, at first a rapid pace in the East with its dense population and now a seemingly slow walk or even a standstill in my western county and nearby counties.
 
And yet, according to friends and family who have ventured out in gloves and masks to seek necessities, there really are still people who act as though little has happened: Some reportedly shopping without any protection and not even using disinfectant wipes provided by grocery stores, and others indiscriminately touching anything and everything with bare hands; even one, I’m told, observed to be pushing a similarly unprotected child in a grocery store cart seat.
 
Add to the above anecdotes to stories of partygoers “celebrating” in supposed immunity the disease in defiance not only of governmental suggestions and restrictions but also in obvious defiance of commonsense: In sum, what you get is a show of hubris and folly perpetrated by ignorance. If only more people could read a map! Although some might demonstrate general ignorance of all things practical—and we’re all a bit guilty there—in this particular time some exhibit their ignorance of cartography in its modern manifestation as geographic information systems. Strange that in the Digital Era, so few know the significance of digitizing. It’s like watching one of those B-movie tales of horror in which the audience is aware that over there in the dark shadows some monster is lurking while the unaware character backs toward those same shadows. (Maybe in the theater of my life, I won’t yell a scream of surprise, but, rather, a cough. Sorry if that seems like very dark humor over a disease that isn’t relegated to shadows) No, Covid-19 can hide in the brightly lighted aisles of a grocery store or in the air of a queue outside a Walmart. But that’s what makes mapping its presence so important. Wouldn’t it be better to know where its presence is more likely than not?
 
Now, I know that not everyone likes reading maps, what with all those symbols, shapes, and colors. And I also know from years of teaching the earth sciences that people are generally unaware of geographic relationships, many of my former students having the belief that the Mississippi River empties into the Pacific Ocean and that “north” means “up.” Many of them, also, incapable upon entering college of pointing to where they live on a map. I also know that on a planet occupied by humans for hundreds of thousands of years that there are just too many places to keep track of, especially since so many have undergone name changes: Peking/Beijing? Burma/Myanmar? Upper Volta/Burkina Faso? Constantinople/Istanbul? Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg? Or, even in my area: French Hangard/English Fort Burd/Redstone Fort/Redstone Old Fort/Brownsville? I can’t fault anyone for not keeping track.
 
But when a creeping, and at this time onrushing, threat starts in China and makes its way across the Pacific to Washington and then also hopscotches across Europe and the Atlantic to infect Americans from two directions, one might think that paying attention to maps is a matter of health—or even a matter of life. When the pandemic subsides as it will through both natural and human interventions, will geographic information systems and cartography rise to the foreground of public knowledge? Will people understand that knowing the nature of places and their relationships to one another is important from a very practical standpoint?
 
One more anecdote. Obviously, many people now associate certain places with Covid-19 cases. As one of my relatives drove west on I-70, he saw four cars with NY license plates pass him. They were headed west. Now that might be just one of those coincidences that, as so many coincidences prove to be, is meaningless, but I can’t help but think that four cars at night aren’t carrying people to Wheeling for a visit with relatives or a stopover at the local, now closed, casino hotel. In a useless gamble, I’d wager that those cars contained people fleeing a place where a concentration of cases meant a serious threat of death. The passengers in those cars probably followed a map to safety or relative safety, since West Virginia was the last among the states to record cases of the disease.
 
You might be thinking that all this is irrelevant. Why bother checking an interactive map that contains at this time more bad news than good? Isn’t that the action of a pessimist? Of a sick mind? In answer, I go back to those place name changes. The character of place changes as people change, and one change that alters the nature of a place is a plague. It alters the social ecology. Sure, the houses remain, but as in natural settings when one species exits, so in  human settlements another individual or group eventually fills the niche left empty. That will apply to the map of businesses, as well. The mental maps of many Americans—of many people around the world—will change: People will for at least a while map social distances differently from their previous mapping. People will for at least a while map places differently. New York City will not immediately return as the center of tourism it has been. Disney World will be seen as much for the dangers it presents in thousands of people gathered together as it has been seen for entertainment worth standing in shoulder-to-shoulder lines.
 
All maps are about to change temporarily, and some will change permanently. We might not rename places, but we will re-map them. Now that I think of it, because of the pandemic just about everyone will be forced to consider information that maps convey.