Monthly Archives: February 2025

What?

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Seasoned readers know mariner is old. He has been old long enough to recognize that there are new habits about every phase of life. From time to time he will recognize his new ‘old-age’ habits. There was the time when he was breaking the shell of a soft boiled egg for breakfast. Born a natural left-hander who was forced to pretend to be right-handed when learning to write, with the egg he was aware that only his left hand knew how to correctly break the shell; if he damaged his left hand, the right hand simply wouldn’t be up to the job. Probably, mariner wouldn’t eat soft boiled eggs again.

He has seen science shows that show how advanced the technology is for artificial limbs. But he wonders, do artificial hands have palsy?

This post, however, focuses on how brain habits shift because of hearing loss. On the surface, it’s all about sound waves, echos, poor speaker technology and the slippery way folks slide through their words and stop breathing when it comes to the predicate clause.

But the brain adapts to this inefficiency. Think about it: With normal hearing the brain, with no time delay whatsoever, interprets what words are spoken, compensates for echoes and other interfering noises, understands context, mood, relevancy and other implications included in the sounds of words. And at the same time applies internal judgment about the greater circumstances affected by the conversation. Simple example: Someone says “The world is flat.” In the same instant the brain hears ‘flat’ it has formed a reaction. No extra time was needed.

It is this ability of the brain to instantaneously receive, interpret and manage the circumstances of speech that disappears when hearing is affected. Mariner suspects that if someone had full hearing restored after a lengthy time of deafness, for awhile their brain would still use the altered habits that filled in for awkward reasoning processes. The brain would have to relearn the mental processes that are instantaneous with normal hearing.

The common reality for hearing deficiency is that the brain grabs and holds onto a few key words, typically the most clearly enunciated words, then tries simultaneously to add words and searches for general meaning – while the person talking continues talking. If a conversation includes talking about several comparative instances at once, or if the person excessively uses pronouns, or if any of the aforementioned external disturbances occur, the brain looses touch. Then comes the brain saying “What?”

So the biggest change that occurs with hearing loss is not the mechanics of sound waves but how the brain processes what it is hearing – which is nowhere near instantaneous comprehension; even continuity is fragile.

Ancient Mariner

Collections

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What does the reader collect? Books of fiction? perhaps many cookbooks or manuals or business notes or hobbies? Mariner’s wife is a librarian, an avid fiction reader, and has a collection of books about authors. Mariner’s life has been a knock about life jumping from job to job, from hobby to hobby, from theology to physics to Pogo comic books to collections of tapes, discs and books about TV shows and popular music.

Mariner and his wife have built a tornado shelter made of books and CDs. But it is that time. It comes for everyone: the collections gather dust; some books have vanished from memory until they are found among boxes of books kept in the attic because the bookshelves are full, many books are inherited from parents and family, many reflect hobbies and interests long past their time. But time and circumstance persist: it may be the right thing to pare the collection to a needed minimum.

This is a hard moment. Books are part of our existence. Books are full of memories just like our brain. As an experiment, pull out an old book from a certain time in your life. Leafing through its pages, you are transported to another time, another version of your life. These are meaningful memories.

Mariner’s habit of using metaphors may explain, perhaps, why one feels so protective of their collections. First, a description of the example: Telomeres are tiny hairs on the end of each chromosome. Their job is to count the number of times a chromosome can reproduce itself. Eventually, the hairs fall away and the chromosome will stop reproducing itself. The term for that is ‘aging’.

That is exactly why collectors are hesitant to give away their collections: a book is a telomere. Casting away the collection is paramount to acknowledging the end is drawing near. We are no longer producing our lives.

But the ‘chromosome’ will, at a given moment, surrender its telomeres for practical purposes – usually when having to move to another home.

Yes, like a telomere, books are part of our internal life experience. Nevertheless, time requires the transition.

Ancient Mariner

Dormancy

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One doesn’t usually think of dormancy as an active response to a situation. It is common to recognize dormancy in bears and frogs and of course in the plant world where endless species shut down to a dormant, death-like state for the winter. Even Homo can use dormancy, a dormancy with gradations.

For the last two weeks of zero temperatures, sleet, bitter winds and snow, mariner chooses to be a bear – almost. He does sleep a lot more, a privilege of being a retired bear, but he is restrained to his lair. He peers out the window of his lair to see a barren, white world. The only sound is the wind whistling against the window.

It would be nice if, like the bear, Homo could gather fat in warmer times then use it to pay for heat in the winter.

Homo has learned to use dormancy as a tool. For example, attics and basements are put in a state of dormancy on purpose. Another example is spring cleaning. Does this mean we would be a dirty bear all winter? Of course not – we borrowed this style of dormancy from the frog who hibernates in soft muck just below the frost line.

In the final analysis, though, Homos aren’t hibernators. If Homos aren’t careful about their style of dormancy, that word converts to loneliness, depression and even ill health. Homos are forced to continue to live an active life that energizes, that socializes, that sees the end of dormancy. Otherwise, we live the life of the sparrows, many of which don’t make it to greener times.

Ancient Mariner

Mother Earth’s Code of ethics

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Mariner has been reading and watching educational shows more than usual because the rife of today’s world seems beyond the pale. One is horrified when one sees how much of humanity lives life in ten square feet of bombed ruins with no water and no dependable food sources.

One thinks of the atrocities put on Native Americans, slaves and oppressed conditions even today subject to rape, physical beating and forced labor.

How did the American buffalo deal with forced extinction by humans? How do lobsters off the coast of Connecticut deal with warming water that forces them to migrate to Canadian waters? And the Coral Reefs, a sizable community of many types of plant and animal life – how do they feel about looming extinction?

Then there are the billions of years that passed before us; what did all the reptiles think when an asteroid changed the planet forever?

It seems that the core morality of Mother Earth responds to a different code of ethics than her inhabitants would like. Are humans too brash when they discount life in the same manner as Mother Earth? Have humans adopted the planet’s ethical model that allows disregard for normalcy and slower evolutionary change? It makes one think of the Holocaust where thousands of humans were disposed of without acknowledgement of the value of human life. One learns that on Planet Earth, buffalo and humans are equal in value.

Ancient Mariner

About Era shifting

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Greetings, Readers

It has been pleasant, if not rewarding, avoiding television news. Watching headlines is a lot like taking slaps to the face over and over. Mariner does keep track generally through his own news email services and a number of trustworthy magazines. Television still has its saving grace through shows like NOVA (PBS) and documentaries on Netflix.

Just the other night PBS ran a show about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two early presidents who had different perceptions about the structure and role of the emerging United States. They fought tooth and nail and were brutal politically. Honestly, there were as many dirty tricks as one witnesses with politics today. An important difference was that back then, each political battle added to the Constitution with the intent of strengthening the nation whereas today it is petty payback and disassembling the Constitution without a plan to improve it.

The general observation mariner took from the show was that moving from one era to another, whether presidents, migrating fowl or coral reefs, it is grotesquely disruptive to normal expectations. There is abuse at the individual level. New rules are yet to be known.

So it was with those early days when Europe, Russia and The United States (and indigenous natives) had several wars to determine how the new world would be split among nations.

Similarly, today a new economic future that has little to do with contemporary practices has led to a global scramble to acquire a dominant position in the ‘new world’. What frightens mariner is that the planet has its own Trumpian plan to force human life to pay for the ‘borrowing’ of too much of nature’s resources – including global warming, overpopulation and gross extinction of the planet’s biomass.

Under the circumstances, the best one can do is to love family, share with the community and be careful about insecure assets and income.

Armageddon progresses.

Ancient Mariner